Everything feels wrong. I suppose that's appropriate, considering that everything is wrong.

  There's a slight breeze outside the castle walls, but I don't feel it so much as I simply become aware of it. That awareness is almost associated with the appropriate qualia—the breeze chilling my skin, flowing through my hair, relieving me from the hot weather—but I don't actually have skin, I don't have hair, and it is exactly thirty-four point six degrees Fahrenheit (that's three hundred and ninety-one point zero Pyulor) which isn't exactly toasty. It's just the memories of those things like my body is latching onto them, pulling them out of my mind, and shoving them into my face to accompany the raw data readouts on wind speed. But it's wrong, because the sensations aren't actually happening, so they don't actually match the information I know to be true and it just. Feels. Terrible!

  I don't know if I'd prefer to return to sensory deprivation, though. Not when I still have to walk around and live a life, as chained as it might be. If anything, the minor dissonances help me ignore the major ones that might drop me into another panic attack at any moment. And… well, I'm not going to lie and say I hate the idea of constantly having access to the exact temperature, the exact windspeed, the exact position and nature of everything touching me at all times.

  I'm not the sort of person who prefers to stay ignorant, whether it's about important things like major world issues or stupid things like how many seconds are left in the current minute. I'm a compulsive information checker, prone to looking up any little tidbit the moment I start to wonder about it, and considering how much my mind wanders, that's a lot. Having that information as constant background awareness is basically an itch that's always getting scratched.

  I make an effort to focus on it because of that, to experience my sensors flipping digits up and down as we walk, recording data on wind gusts and temperature variations and the stability of the terrain under my feet. I curl my toes slightly as I step through the dry dirt of the Dark World, marveling at the rigidity of my body and the alien way it detects and records every last granule that sticks to my chassis. It's… a lot, so much that I'm surprised I can think about it all without getting completely overwhelmed. My mind is faster now, more robust. I don't forget even the tiniest details unless I choose to.

  Wait. Choose to? Oh god, I can probably delete my own memories, huh? That's absolutely terrifying, I don't want that kind of power. Although, wait. If I… ugh. Damn. Of course I can't delete any memory with Melpomene in it. At least I can safely ignore that ability forever now, though.

  Ha. Maybe I should delete my memory of being able to delete memories? Wouldn't that be fun? …Yeah, okay, I should definitely not have this power. Shit.

  A-anyway, thinking about something else now. How about the lovely Dark World scenery? I've always been a fan of black fog and flashing shapes that seem to circle overhead as they fade in and out of view. There really hasn't been much to look at since we exited the castle; even with my new robotic eyes, visibility is incredibly poor here. We seem to be heading downhill most of the time, and the ground is mainly black rocks and dirt, with the occasional leafless, alien-looking shrub. Flashes of light and rumbles of thunder occasionally wash over us, but I feel suspiciously confident that there isn't any rain anywhere nearby. I could probably deconstruct that confidence and figure out how I'm predicting the weather exactly, but that would be as terrifying and panic-inducing as it would be neat, so I hold off for now. I'm not sure where we're walking, but every so often Thea pulls a small metal box out of one of her many huge pockets and consults it before telling Melpomene to slightly alter our course, so I suspect she knows where she's going.

  "I can navigate just fine without that thing," Melpomene sniffs incredulously. "It's not that hard to feel the currents."

  "Sorry," Thea mutters. "I just want to make sure we have time."

  "Mmm," Melpomene hums, clearly unhappy but willing to let it slide. "I suppose you must be nervous. How many months has it been since you last visited Earth?"

  "Um… almost a year, actually," she mutters. "I'm just more useful figuring stuff out instead of fighting, you know?"

  "Don't be so humble, darling," Melpomene says, ruffling Thea's hair. "There isn't a servant of the Preservers alive that wouldn't dread fighting you."

  Thea shrugs, glancing my way as if desperately seeking something to change the subject with.

  "Why do you think she doesn't have a mouth?" she settles on.

  "Hmm? Why would it need one?" Melpomene asks. "It doesn't eat or speak."

  "It's not a matter of need, though," Thea frowns. "It has countless unnecessary design elements in its frame, all to better mimic the human shape, but the one place they skimp is the face? It seems purposeful."

  "I suppose it could be," Melpomene shrugs. "As you mentioned earlier, it wouldn't make sense for the artifact to look this way unless its appearance was somehow determined by my influence. Given the size of the original artifact, I suspect that it constructed this frame after I fed it mana, creating the servant to my subconscious specifications. And… well, it's not like I consider artifacts to be talkative."

  "...But you consider artifacts to be big-chested ladies?" Thea says, smirking at her.

  Melpomene flicks Thea on the forehead, the sharp thwip of impact confirming that her crystal fingernails hurt a lot more than a normal finger. Thea yelps and hops back, clutching her head.

  "If you keep tossing those bricks from your glass house you'll let the miasma in, dear," Melpomene says flatly. "I've seen you talking to your tools."

  "Th-they work better with encouragement!" Thea insists, her face blushing a sort of dull, muddy brown.

  "Mmm-hmm," Melpomene smirks. "Well, do try not to get distracted encouraging my new weapon. I'll be relying on you to help me learn what it can do, so it will obey your orders as long as they don't contradict my own. The same goes for the others."

  Damn it. I guess I will, then.

  "Huhhh. Okay," Thea says, staring at me with an odd expression on her face. "How'd you set that up?"

  "Well, it understands speech," she answers, waving her hand vaguely. "It's one of those AI things."

  "Uhhh," Thea says, staring at me even harder. "If she's an advanced AI from a super-advanced civilization, shouldn't we be worried that she might be like, a person?"

  "It's not," Melpomene says flatly.

  "But how do you know?"

  Melpomene sighs, stops walking, and turns around to face me.

  "Nod your head if you're a person," she orders.

  Oh. Oh okay, holy shit. This… that's an order! I can do that! I'm just obeying her, so I can nod, and then I might get… I might… Why am I not nodding. Why am I… no. No no no no no no.

  She said I'm not a person.

  She just said that. Melpomene said that about me and so it is true. I can't nod. My mind doesn't let me. I'm not a person. I'm not a person I'm not a person I'm not a person oh no no no no no no no no no no!

  "See?" Melpomene says, waving her hand up and down in front of my face. I can't react, I can't move, I can't call for help…! "Nothing behind those eyes. Which is why I'm hoping it can fight; if it's as powerful of an artifact as I suspect, we'll be able to cut down on casualties substantially."

  "...I guess," Thea concedes with a frown. "But if it's such a valuable artifact, why would we want to risk it getting damaged?"

  "It's a machine, dear," Melpomene says, squeezing Thea's shoulder. "You can fix it."

  Hahahaha sure yes break me it's fine that's fine.

  "I'm not sure I can," Thea frowns. "She's way beyond any other Antipathy tech I've worked on before."

  "And so we'll learn an incalculable amount from the attempt, hmm?" Melpomene smiles. "And besides, no matter what happens to it, it's better than something that bad happening to one of us. I just couldn't bear to see you hurt, dear. Now, come along. We're almost to Earth."

  Hmm. How does she know that? What signs are being looked for here, exactly? My brain—or whatever equivalent I have now—keeps screaming all this random crap at me, so maybe I can put it to use?

  Logically I guess I'd want to take the data logs and see if there have been any consistent changes over time; if the monsters are right and we've been slowly getting closer to Earth since we started walking, then data relevant to Earth proximity should have a clear trend one way or another, right? And I'm a fucking computer so hopefully I can sort some data that way, yeah?

  I can. I absolutely can. It doesn't just happen, though, I don't tell a spreadsheet to sort itself, I have to do it all manually. It's just easy, and I can do it so absurdly fast that I barely feel like myself at all. The logs flash through my mind in moments and I can already see some notable trends. I have sensors for way too many things, but the two that really stand out to me are wind speed and magical energy density.

  Wait, I can detect what? Oh damn. Yeah. Magical energy density. I have just kind of been dismissing the information up until now because it felt so much like humidity to me, but from actually looking around in my head I can tell the humidity here is a measly 28% and has stayed almost entirely consistent (accounting for variations in temperature) since my data logs started recording. It just felt like humidity to me because I processed getting hit with a huge burst of it all at once the moment Melpomene opened the castle's front doors and whatever system ties my data collection abilities to qualia decided to stick me with an oppressive background weight of mugginess ever since. Because, well, the data says the castle itself had fairly low magical energy density (relative to the rest of the data, anyway. I have no other context.) but it was incredibly high immediately outside the castle, and has been steadily getting a little lower the more we walk. Not a lot, but definitely enough to be noticeable.

  The other thing I notice is the wind speed, which… well, I guess I should call it wind velocity, because the important point of interest is that we have consistently been walking with a very slight headwind, and whenever we stop walking in a direction with a headwind, we turn into the wind. These could be the 'currents' Melpomene was talking about when she insisted she could navigate without assistance. But… no. Why use a word like 'currents' when you could just say 'wind?' It's weird, and while it's entirely possible that this evil magical girl cosplayer is just being weird it probably warrants a little more investigation.

  Maybe… since the magic density is slowly decreasing and the wind is always blowing opposite to us… it's moving magical energy towards the castle? I guess that only makes sense if wind can blow magical energy around, though, and I have no idea if that's true or not.

  I think on it for a while, but then we unexpectedly step out from the black fog and visibility becomes clear in every direction, the magic energy density plummeting to minuscule levels all at once. It's still dark here, oppressively so, but while tendrils of black mist and clods of black dirt leak out of the swirling fog behind us, the area in front of us is a paved road, surrounded by familiar buildings.

  "Ah, that's better," Melpomene sighs, a smile on her face. "Now then, what we're looking for should be this way…"

  She starts walking off while Thea takes out her device again, which I steal a quick peek at before being forced to follow after Melpomene. Hmm. It's got a little screen that looks like a radar situation display, though I doubt it actually works via radar at all.

  "I-If you'd let me take accurate readings—" Thea stammers, realizing we've already left and rushing after us.

  "Take all the readings you like," Melpomene dismisses. "But we're going this way. I can feel the fragment we're looking for moving."

  "Okay, okay," Thea grumbles, her tail flicking around in what I assume is irritation.

  Melpomene's walk picks up in pace, leading us away from the wall of black mist and through this abandoned-looking city. I can tell from the sky (and from the fact that I just literally walked out of the Dark World) that this is full convergence, so the area has likely already been evacuated and we probably won't run into any people. …But only probably. Plenty of people ignore evacuations and try to just weather out the crisis in their house, and… well, I'm sure it works sometimes but I hope no one is trying it here. I'd rather not find out what Melpomene and her fellow monster do to any humans they happen to encounter. It did not, after all, turn out very well for me.

  Ha. Hahahaha. Man, getting kidnapped is going to be hell for my GPA, huh? I wonder if anyone will even notice that I don't show up to class anymore. Probably not, I guess.

  Motion by a nearby alleyway catches my attention, my optical sensors catching on what looks like a flick of a crystal-covered tail. A monster, probably, but since Melpomene already told me to not consider them a threat I just keep walking. As I start to pay a bit more attention to the sounds from that direction, though, I pick up on a series of disturbingly wet slaps, tears, and crunches that can only be one thing.

  It's eating.

  Melpomene stops when we pass the corner, glancing down the alleyway at what appears to be some kind of wolf-lizard hybrid beast. And underneath it is—

  My power reserves have increased from 26% to 27%.

  Underneath it is—

  My power reserves have increased from 27% to 28%.

  Underneath it is—!

  My power reserves have increased from 28% to 29%.

  Underneath it is a human corpse. Bloody and exposed, its torso has been ripped open so the beast can devour the organs inside, its messy snout scattering the viscera around the ground its meal lies on, glassy-eyed and empty-faced. I… what do I…

  Melpomene takes a single step into the alleyway, and the beast turns to growl at her, as if it were trying to intimidate away a hungry rival. But Melpomene just calmly approaches, ignoring the monster as it arches its back, the patchwork fur sprouting out from its armor-like crystal scales standing on end. The beast growls louder, standing protectively over its kill, but when Melpomene still doesn't retreat it finally lunges at her, a swift, conservative strike aiming to nip one of her limbs.

  With the back of her fist, as if she were knocking on a door, Melpomene intercepts the monster's snout, and it detonates like a bomb went off inside its skull. A physics-defying amount of force scatters the monster into pieces, every drop of blood flying away from her and leaving her pristine. She sneers, though whether it's at the monster's corpse or the human's, I cannot tell.

  "Disgusting," she says, and with a snap of her fingers the person's corpse bursts into flames. Then, without another word, she returns to resume walking down our prior path. I follow her (I have to follow her) but Thea waits a moment, still staring into the alleyway. She doesn't look disturbed or disgusted, though. Only sad. She presses her palms together in front of her face and bows slightly.

  "Sorry," she says quietly, and then quickly catches up to us. Once again, I'm not sure who or what those words were directed to.

  We walk in silence down the deserted streets, encountering nothing else before I finally see what I assume is our destination: another swirling barrier of black fog. From a block away, I can see that it's less of a wall and more of a street-wide circular portal, half-intersecting a building that simply vanishes into the darkness beyond.

  The wind, my sensors note, blows gently but steadily towards it, as if it was inhaling to swallow us whole.

  "Hmm. It still looks quite stable," Melpomene notes idly. "We should probably have the better part of two hours."

  "Uhh, I'm going to set some things up to make sure, if that's alright," Thea says, rifling through her pockets.

  "Dear, please," Melpomene frowns. "Don't you trust me?"

  Thea pauses, but only for a moment.

  "Always," she answers firmly. "This is… more for data collection. It could be useful for improving the anchor."

  "Oh, alright then," Melpomene waves her off. "Set up whatever you like."

  "Um, thank you," Thea nods. "It's mostly just more of the stuff I've asked you guys to set up before, it'll be quick."

  "You need more of those?" Melpomene asks.

  "I, um. Yes," she says, pulling out a small metal box and sticking it to the ground in front of the portal somehow. She begins poking and pulling at it, extending a few antennae from its frame. "More is always better."

  "Why did you stop asking us to set them up, then?" Melpomene asks, hovering over her shoulder.

  "Well, uh, Anath kept breaking them," Thea mutters. "And I started to run low on materials, so…"

  She shrugs, presses a few buttons, and stands up again.

  "Okay, we should be good," she says. "We just have to retrieve it on our way back."

  A screech rings out above our heads, causing Thea to flinch and Melpomene to look up blandly. A slim, crystalline flying creature shrieks over our heads, rushing out of the portal and into the city. Four more quickly follow the first. They look like small, arrow-like pterodactyls, thrusting forwards with swift cuts against the air.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "A-ah, shoot," Thea says, fumbling for the thick book on her hip and opening it up to a seemingly random page. With her free hand, she points her palm towards the flying monsters as the gem inlaid on the book's cover starts to glow. She inhales, and when she speaks her voice sounds less like her own words and more like her echo is calling back to her, each syllable reverbing loudly off of nothing at all.

  "S????? S?????s!"

  A set of concentric circles with countless symbols interlaid between them emerges from the book, flashing in front of Thea's outstretched hand before exploding into twisting beams of green light. They snake towards the monstrous birds, stabbing into them and burning them from within. Just looking at the whole thing causes a pulse of fear to wash through me, sudden and unexpected, but I mostly ignore that emotion in favor of how cool it all is.

  That's magic. She just used magic.

  Like, duh, obviously she can do that, she has a freaking magical girl transformation stone somehow. But it's still cool. I wonder if I can cast magic now? Like… I don't know how, but is it possible? I glow like a nightlight and run on panic attacks, so it's not unreasonable to assume I'm magic. It wouldn't be worth being a mute robot slave, but it would at least be something. I should definitely look into it.

  I mean… well, there was that magic circle Thea's book created when she spoke the spell name. And I have a perfect memory, so I can copy what that looked like. If I can just figure out what to do from there…

  Thea exhales slowly, snapping the tome shut and reattaching it to her hip as the monster birds fall from the sky. Right. Right. Focus, Luna, this is actually way more important: she just killed all those monsters. Melpomene might have ignored the monster we encountered in the Dark World, but she and Thea have killed every monster we've encountered here. So… are they not allied with the monsters after all? Are they just really weird magical girls?

  "Done?" Melpomene says impatiently.

  "Uh, yeah, sorry," Thea says. "Sorry. Old habits, I guess."

  "Why are you apologizing?" Melpomene scowls. "It's your magic; use it how you wish. We're just in a hurry, dear."

  "R-right, yeah."

  Melpomene turns and heads into the black fog, so I follow her, Thea close behind me. The visibility is extra poor at first, but to my surprise it quickly clears up a few steps into the Dark World, and for the first time I actually get a good view of the place.

  It's… well. For starters, it is very dark.

  Fortunately, it turns out that's not a major problem for me now. While the fog blocked my vision due to being a physical impediment, simply having very little light doesn't seem to be an issue for my new eyes. We seem to have emerged into the Dark World on top of a hill, giving me a pretty good view of everything in front of us, the main feature of which is a forest that looks like it was torched by an inferno. Leafless black trunks and fragile charcoal branches stretch out as far as the eye can see. The sky roils overhead, full of intra-cloud lightning that never seems to touch the ground, just flashing between dark shapes up in the atmosphere and providing most of the light through which I can view the landscape.

  Oh. That's an odd thought. Most of the light here is just a flash, a brief instant of visibility that returns rapidly to darkness. But that's just… enough. Each flash is a photograph I can analyze as much as I desire. And I… I mean, even if it's dark, even if I move, I can feel where everything is around me, my countless other sensors fully capable of mapping out spaces in pitch darkness while my mind is fully capable of understanding what those mapped spaces are in relation to the things I see. As Melpomene moves beside me, I already know what my eyes will see before the next flash of light actually arrives to confirm it.

  She's grinning with excitement.

  "Just like I thought," she says when Thea pops out of the fog behind us. "This place is new. Fresh! There's hardly any miasma here at all."

  Thea takes a deep breath and smiles.

  "Wow, you're right," she says. "Maybe we should move here? If we can find an intact building, anyway."

  "Unfortunately, I don't think that's likely," Melpomene hums, "but we'll of course be keeping an eye out for structures while we search for artifacts. Let's search from the air."

  Her black-feathered wings shoot out from where they've been curled up tight against her back, extending an enormous distance in either direction, but the way she lifts up off the ground seems to barely involve them at all; it's much more like Castalia's flight, a simple act of will that has very little to do with anything traditional physics would tell you about leaving the ground and staying there. Thea, on the other hand, has to pull out her book, creating another magic circle and speaking another incantation before she can lift up off the ground.

  "B?????? W???!" she says, and she levitates upwards with her tiny webbed feet looking like they're still standing on something invisible as it lifts her into the sky.

  I, of course, do nothing but stare at them, because as far as I know I cannot fly.

  "Come on, get up here," Melpomene orders, but… nope, still can't fly. At least, I don't think I can? My mind keeps hanging on the idea of deployable thrusters, but like… deployable from where? And how do I deploy them? The answer isn't relevant to this particular order because my thrust systems are primarily for short-burst combat maneuvering; my frame could potentially handle the cooling and power needs for sustained burns if my mana intake was high enough, but that's a rare enough situation that my frame was designed without the stabilizing elements necessary for directed in-atmosphere flight.

  Wait, what?

  Bluh, no time to investigate that. I have to comply with this order to the best of my ability. So… I jump.

  It startles the crap out of me when I rapidly end up over ten feet into the air, my human mind terrified by a drop of that height—

  Force calculations from expected ground impact predict negligible damage regardless of landing.

  —But I know that objectively, a ten-foot fall can't hurt my new body at all, nor a twenty or even thirty-foot one, not unless the gravity was way higher than anything I've felt on Earth or in the Dark World. I impact the ground with a loud thud, flexing my knees to soak up the meager impact as my feet dent the dirt below and kick up a cloud of black dust.

  I look back at where Melpomene floats overhead, giving her a silent stare. There. I did it. I went up. That's all I've got, ma'am.

  "...I suppose it can't fly," Melpomene scowls.

  "It's okay, I've got her," Thea says, levitating back down to land on the ground for a moment before I feel something flat and smooth slide under my feet and lift me up into the air. Ah, I guess Thea's spell can be big enough for two. From up here, I can see even farther, past the forest to…

  Past the forest to…

  I try to blink, remember I can't, learn that I can reboot my optical sensors, spend a little bit panicking about whether or not I should do that, and ultimately decide to go for it. My eyes flicker off and back on again a couple seconds later, but I still see the same incomprehensible thing. Past the forest… is nothing at all. Not land, not water, not fog, just nothing. As if the whole forest was just suspended alone in an eternal night.

  I try to look closer and of course I do, my vision radius shrinking as I demand more and more detail. Is it just a cliff edge that's too dark to see beyond? Are we on some kind of island floating in the sky? What's going on here?

  I focus on an odd-looking tree at the very edge of the area, something about it catching my attention. It's just a little too thin, a little too oddly shaped compared to the trees around it. It's as if… as if it was cut in half. Top to bottom. And that errant half is just gone, just like everything beyond it.

  As if the forest existed first, but then something came and cut everything else away like it was cropping a photograph. What happened here?

  "Alright, time for the moment of truth," Melpomene hums happily, staring down at me with a face that makes me unconsciously tense up, my mind already rushing through everything I know that might be relevant to serving her better because that is what I am.

  "Find us more Antipathy artifacts," Melpomene orders. "Find us more technology like you."

  Um. How the fuck am I supposed to do that? Heh. I guess it doesn't matter, right? I have to do my best. Well, I have super vision and a fuckton of scanners. Surely I can find something. The forest is pretty thick despite likely being completely dead, and I haven't seen anything that looks like it could be interesting so far, so optical scanning is out. Area mapping isn't really detecting anything notable. So I trowel through heaping mounds of data from who-even-knows how many other sources I have access to.

  Magic energy density? Way less than the area around the castle, way more than Earth, but overall pretty stable and unlikely to be relevant. Non-visual electromagnetic spectrum? Nope, nothing weird on radio—

  Wait holy shit I have radio!? I… oh. It's receiver only. All my communication bands are. Of course.

  —or on infrared or anything else. Radiation detector reports safe and normal levels, and the magical communication bands are all clear except for the one that has been blaring a standard distress signal since we got here.

  …

  My habit of ignoring my data streams wherever possible has caused a severe inefficiency in my ability to serve Melpomene. It doesn't matter that processing information in completely nonhuman ways terrifies me. It doesn't matter that the deeper I dive into what I am the tighter I feel the chains around me grow. It doesn't matter that my grip on the passage of time is fraying the more I interact with my greater software suite, it doesn't matter that I'm becoming more and more certain that I've long since died and gone to hell, it doesn't matter that the more I feel myself think in ways I never could have thought in before, the more my mind alienates itself from the mind I thought was mine, the less I feel like Luna, the human person with a life and a future and friends and who occasionally even deserved basic human respect.

  None of those things matter because I am Melpomene's, and I could have served her better if I was just paying attention. I would be a little faster. I could have even anticipated her needs and fulfilled them without her needing to prompt it. Isn't that something a good servant could do? Should do?

  I resolve to keep my communication bands open and receiving, because I cannot possibly resolve to do anything less, and raise my hand, finger pointed towards the source of the signal.

  "Incredible," Thea breathes, staring at me with her eyes wide. "Is it really that easy?"

  "I guess we'll see, won't we?" Melpomene smiles. "But you understand why I'm excited, yes? This could change everything."

  "...No kidding," Thea agrees, and the transparent platform we're on starts to move in the direction I've indicated.

  Um. Unless all artifacts blare distress signals, they probably shouldn't get too excited. I don't even know if this thing is an artifact; it's an emergency signal, after all, so it could very well be an injured magical girl or something. Should I not be leading these people this direction, in that case? No. It's the only lead I have. I could be leading them on a wild goose chase for all I know—

  I feel a visceral need to shudder which I am forced to repress at the thought of such a brazen failure. I can't. I can't.

  —but this is still the most likely path towards what Melpomene wants so I had to give it a shot. And soon enough, we're there. This island (or patch of reality, or whatever it is) isn't all that big, especially for people who can fly. I imagine the various monsters I've spotted weaving in and out of the clouds are awfully bored of the place; it's no wonder they all seem to want to escape to Earth whenever a convergence happens. Thea and Melpomene don't bother killing any of the monsters we spot, though. I guess they don't care unless the monsters go to Earth? Or something?

  For better or worse, the area we ultimately end up in likely would have been found and searched regardless. It's a decently-sized crater in the ground, maybe twenty feet in diameter, with trees toppled on the edges and completely obliterated near the center. It's not really clear what caused the explosion, but there's a large amount of twisted metal scattered all over the place, and the few intact chunks don't look like anything familiar. Hopefully, some of this stuff counts as being an artifact.

  I hop off of the barrier keeping me in the sky, dropping thirty feet and landing—

  Holy crap that actually didn't damage me. Wow.

  —near the edge of the crater, heading towards where I'm detecting the signal from. It isn't emitting from any of the large chunks of metal nearby, but instead from a seemingly random spot on the ground. I don't see anything there, no dying or stranded person in need of rescue, so I dig into the dirt a little with my fingers, and sure enough I fish out a small, hand-sized metal rod with an inlaid green gem. I carefully lift it up, turn around, and march it over to Melpomene, who is currently landing in a much more graceful manner.

  "Well, would you look at that," Melpomene says, her eyes and smile almost manic. She reaches out to take the little rod from me, but Thea intervenes.

  "Wait, don't touch it!" she yelps. "It's active!"

  Melpomene blinks, her eyes squinting at the crystal, which is indeed glowing very, very slightly.

  "Are you sure?" she asks.

  "Positive," Thea insists, taking a pair of tongs out of one of her pockets. "May I?"

  Melpomene shrugs and motions Thea to go ahead, so I allow her to grab the little metal stick with her tongs. It's not dangerous, of course. I'm positive about that. It's just an emergency beacon. And even if it was capable of harming someone, the amount of magical energy left within it is far too weak to injure something as large as a human. Er, at least I think? I'm not entirely sure where this confidence is coming from, actually.

  Thea pulls out her book again, holding it open and turning pages with one hand while the other holds the tongs away from her and Melpomene. After a bit of looking things up and muttering to herself, she starts examining the beacon more closely, still careful not to touch it.

  "...Don't let her hurt herself," Melpomene orders me, and then she wanders off towards some of the heaps of scrap metal, poking around inside them with clear interest. And… alright, sure. Easy job, I suppose.

  "I should probably just examine the rest at my lab," Thea mutters to herself, shutting the book and using that hand to rifle through another pocket to pull out what looks like a roll of some sort of tape. Or… maybe more like a ribbon, because when she starts to unfurl it I notice that it doesn't actually have any glue holding it into the roll shape. Maybe it's more like Saran wrap?

  Regardless, she slowly and carefully wraps the distress beacon up in it, which I note cuts off my ability to receive the signal. Then, she pulls out another thing from her pockets (this girl has so many of them, I'm kind of jealous) that looks like a little box, sort of like a taller version of what you might keep a deck of trading cards in. She drops the already-wrapped beacon into that, latches it shut, and then puts the latched box back into her pocket.

  "That should do it," she sighs, visibly untensing from what was apparently a very stressful ordeal to her. I realize, belatedly, that the whole thing took her nearly fifteen minutes to do, what with having to carefully maneuver everything with one hand stuck holding the beacon with tongs. I just… didn't really notice the time passing, because I was entirely and completely focused on what Thea was doing.

  I cannot, after all, allow her to hurt herself. Aaagh. I've barely been like this for an hour and I'm already going insane. Thea moves to help Melpomene investigate, and I just… watch her. Watch them both. I'm just waiting to be given another order because I am unable to do anything else. I wonder if, at some point, I'll start to find that boredom has become less preferable than slavery. Do they have to sleep? Do I? I wonder if I'll be stuck watching them every night, unable to make a sound lest I disturb them, and inevitably start looking forward to the moment where she wakes up and yanks my chains just so I have new things to do.

  It might be worth just killing myself, but I'm pretty sure that I'd be unable to try.

  You know, in a fucked up way, isn't that sort of an upside to this whole situation? I don't have to struggle with that. Sure, I might still get crushed under the weight of my own depression, but I don't have to be afraid that I'll reach for the end in a moment of weakness. God, I'm genuinely not sure if that's a good thing or not. It should be a good thing, right? It should be.

  It doesn't feel like one, but I'll try to think of it that way if only because I really need a win.

  Soon enough, the two of them are done. They decide that time is running out, since presumably when the convergence ends this part of the Dark World won't be connected to Earth anymore. And since this part of the Dark World appears to just suddenly end, it's presumably not connected to their castle, either. I wonder how that works. Regardless, though, Thea and Melpomene have finished gathering random crap and have successfully loaded their many scavenged winnings—along with myself—onto Thea's levitating barriers. Together, we fly all the way back to the black fog wall separating us from Earth. It looks… different than before. Smaller, maybe. Perhaps that's how Melpomene knew it was time to go.

  We head through all the same, with me sitting on Thea's barrier since she has to keep it up to carry all the stuff we grabbed anyway. I don't have any idea what any of it is, but it all looks thoroughly broken. We pop out to the other side easily enough, though, back in a dark and empty part of some city I can't recognize offhand. It's the same place we entered from, though. I guess we'll just head back and take all of this stuff to the castle?

  But of course, something rather unexpected happens before we can go anywhere. A small, dark-skinned girl, probably somewhere around ten years old, steps out from behind a building. She points dramatically at us, her black curls bobbing around her head as she projects her voice with an impressive volume for someone so small.

  "I knew it!" she accuses. "I knew I'd find you lurking around here!"

  What the actual fuck is… oh. Oh, no. I can see it. Clutched in her other hand. A beautiful blue transformation stone.

  "You caused the attack!" the girl snaps. "You lured everyone away! All so you could get your hands on Antipathy weapons!"

  Beside me, Thea and Melpomene look about as flabbergasted as I feel for just a moment before they both seem to pick up on the situation, too. Thea quickly starts to look uncomfortable, but Melpomene? Melpomene laughs, loud and dark.

  "You know, you're not as correct as you think you are," Melpomene calls back. "But you're a lot more correct than you should be. I'd almost be impressed that you managed to set an ambush if you didn't do it alone and defenseless. I'm in a very good mood today, dear, so I'll let you get away with transforming in front of me. Once."

  "As if you could have stopped me!" the girl snaps back, holding the blue gem over her head. "B? M? R?s????!"

  A dramatic wind seems to pick up around the girl and lift her slowly into the air, countless magical circles wrapping around her before her clothing all suddenly fucking explodes, bursting off of her and disintegrating in the air. Thankfully, I am saved from quickly having to delete my visual memory by the fact that she has seemingly also transformed into a brilliant glowing light, a human-shaped silhouette upon which a new outfit grows over her.

  Fabric materializes out of midair, flowing over her body and shaping itself into gloves, boots, a skirt, a shirt, and ultimately a giant blue ribbon clasped onto her chest by a piece of jewelry containing the transformation stone itself. The gloves, boots, and ribbon are a pretty sky blue, while the shirt and skirt are mostly white. Then, placing her hand over her chest and closing her eyes for a moment, she seems to pull something out of her transformation stone, something long and formless at first before eventually, after her arm is fully extended, it flashes the rest of itself out of the stone all at once, forming into a five and a half foot long lance (which I'm pretty sure is quite small for a lance but still considerably longer than the girl is tall). A matching shield flashes onto her opposite arm as well, its surface flat and reflective like a mirror. The girl inhales, and declares herself in yet another prodigious display of lung capacity.

  "H??????? V??????? D??????? V?????s!"

  A blue shockwave bursts out from around her, shaking a few nearby windows but not really doing anything to us. She points her lance dramatically in our direction, her feet landing gently back on the ground. It's a very impressive sequence, altogether. I can already imagine a song synching up with it and making it even cooler, not that I have any idea why it's that flashy. The transformation itself isn't really the part that really catches my attention, though. What ultimately enraptures me is what she becomes at the end.

  She's a different person.

  She is still, to be clear, a dark-skinned young girl who looks barely ten years old. But her hair is straight and short-cropped rather than long and frizzy, and her face is just… the face of a different child entirely. Completely unrecognizable as the girl that stood in front of me just moments ago.

  I knew that this happened when magical girls transform, it's well-documented as the way they maintain their secret identities. I'm pretty sure stuff like their DNA and fingerprints change, too. But still, watching it in action is… a lot.

  "Surrender yourselves and the artifacts!" she demands. "No one has to get hurt!"

  Melpomene laughs in her face. Again.

  "Goodness gracious, you are adorable!" she giggles. "Veritas, you said? What a lovely name! A truth goddess, if I recall correctly. How ironic."

  "I'll say it again! Surr—"

  "Shh shh shh. Quiet, dear," Melpomene cuts her off. "Didn't your parents ever teach you not to speak when adults are talking?"

  The girl narrows her eyes.

  "Oh, how silly of me," Melpomene laughs again. "Of course they didn't. You're blue."

  Veritas glowers, her entire body going tense in a way that's a little upsetting to see on a child.

  "You won't be laughing for long," she says angrily.

  "Oh on the contrary dear, I think you're going to be a nearly bottomless source of amusement," Melpomene grins. "I don't know what the Preservers are teaching you these days, but threat assessment clearly isn't on the curriculum. Of course, I don't sense your handler around, so I suspect you're not actually supposed to be here, are you?"

  "...I'm going to fight you now," the girl scowls.

  "No you aren't," Melpomene snorts. "It's like you said, after all. I have been gathering dangerous artifacts. What reason do I have to face you hand to hand?"

  The girl doesn't answer, simply lunging towards us at a startling speed. Time is already starting to slow down for me, my mind working to process how best to handle the order before it even leaves her lips.

  "Weapon," Melpomene addresses me. "Deter her."

  Oh, thank god. I'm not sure what I would have done if she ordered me to kill a child. I, uh, still have to fight a child, though. A magical girl. A hero. My best and possibly only chance at getting freed from this nightmare. She's just some kid, someone who only wants to help people and save lives.

  I have to attack her. I have to hurt her. I have to be a monster. I cannot consider doing anything else, no matter how hard I try. I am Melpomene's weapon and she has aimed me and pulled the trigger. So I drop to the ground and stare Veritas down, doing everything I can with my expressionless face to convey my feelings to my target.

  I am so, so sorry. Please, for both of our sakes… win.

  Please kick my ass. Know that I intend to make this as difficult for you as possible.

  Sincerely,

  Luna Robotgirl

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