40. Suboptimal

Though I arguably don’t strictly have to, I wait until Melpomene and Minerva have entirely left the Dark World before I speak. I don’t really want either of them to hear me, though each for different reasons.

“Well,” I comment, Thea and Nanaya still standing beside me, each lost in their own thoughts. “That was a shitshow.”

Nanaya glances at me, and then snorts.

“Mmm. Frankly, that went far better than I expected,” she says.

“Merely a shitshow is still a shitshow,” I counter. “Better doesn’t mean good.”

“True enough,” she agrees.

“W-wait, what’s wrong?” Thea asks. “I… this is everything we could have reasonably asked for, right? We can go to Earth again!”

“We were already going to Earth for just about everything we truly needed from there,” Nanaya says. “I doubt this will change much. It is not as though we could go buy a house. We still have to live here.”

“What?” Thea asks. “Why?”

“Because everywhere we go on Earth will be surveilled,” Nanaya answers. “Even if the truce holds, they will not trust us. If we set up our base there, they will investigate it, and then the truce will end. The Dark World is still the only place we can safely keep artifacts or Antipathy cultural records. Given you spend nearly all of your time with artifacts, we will need to remain.”

“Oh. Right,” Thea says, drooping a little. “B-but being able to head to Earth to relax in the sun or something is still nice!”

Slowly, Nanaya nods.

“…It is nice,” she agrees. “Mmm. I should go deal with Anath. Thank you again for the forewarning, Luna.”

“Keep your radio on!” I answer back. “We’re lucky Melpomene happened to still have hers in her room.”

“Very well,” Nanaya sighs, looking way more put upon than the situation really calls for. I’m lucky that the radios Thea made for everyone a while ago still work and I managed to give the team a heads-up before bringing a stray home. Anath probably would have blurted my name first thing and put me in a really nasty scenario if I hadn’t. I’m just starting to enjoy my life as normal human mute girl Luna Clio Babbage. Getting discovered this early would just be sad.

Speaking of, I guess I’m sticking around here for a few hours. There’s a good chance the magical girls will be watching our portal like a hawk and I’ll need to be careful if I want to safely leave. I need better ways of sneaking in and out. Maybe some kind of invisibility spell…? No, that might actually make it easier to find me. Casting spells is intrinsically less than subtle. My best advantage in stealth is the ability to cut off my magical signature altogether.

“So, um… I take it the gun broke, then?” Thea asks. “W-which is totally fine! It was just a prototype, that stuff happens.”

Hmm? Oh!

“Ah, no, I still have it,” I answer. “Here, one sec.”

I call on the Antipathy magic I used to hide the gun away and pull it back into reality, letting it materialize in my hand. I flip it around, catch it by the barrel, and hand it to Thea.

“You were right,” I say. “It’s a little underpowered, but it works. Making it crystal-powered was smart, but monster crystals don’t actually hold that much charge and wouldn’t be very safe for humans to try and recover in the field.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, that’s a bit of an intrinsic material issue,” Thea blinks, accepting the gun. “I might be able to increase the total storable charge by making more of the structure out of crystal instead of metal, but that would cut down on durability obvi… wait wait wait, how did you do that?”

“Antipathy magic!” I answer cheerfully. “Under certain preset conditions I can activate some pretty neat spells. That one was ‘Sketisoh,’ which means ‘put away.’ I’ve also got ‘Kagchtsoh,’ which means ‘repair,’ along with a good chunk of nameless incantations that manage the general function of my body.”

“Yeah, like the cooling spells and stuff, I noticed that,” Thea nods. “That’s so cool! Wait, but what conditions unlocked a spell that let you repair yourself? Did you get hurt?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I answer with indistinguishably forced cheer. “The point is, your gun did pretty good overall. I think more stopping power and better ammo capacity is fairly important for it to be a useful firearm for unpowered troops, but it absolutely works. Excellent proof-of-concept.”

“Well that’s great news!” she brightens up momentarily, though her tail only gets in a couple wags before she starts considering the problem. “…Stopping power and ammo capacity both have the same issue, though. For more damage, the gun needs to use more power per shot, but that would obviously lower the ammo capacity. Power storage is by far the biggest limiting factor… hmm. I guess I might need to figure out how to make those injector thingies after all. Can I disassemble your LCI intake port?”

“Sure, as long as you put it back together again,” I agree.

“I mean, if you can do it yourself I’d love to watch you do it yourself,” she says, bouncing a little on her toes. “That repair spell seems pretty cool!”

“Eh… I don’t want to use it any more than I need to,” I say. “It functions by returning me to my original schematics, so it might ‘repair’ whatever you did that lets me actually talk to people.”

“Oh,” Thea grimaces. “Right. You’re so cool I sometimes forget you’re probably intended as a torture device.”

“Such charming fellows, the Antipathy were,” I nod in agreement.

Thea is about to respond, but at that moment Melpomene walks back into the castle, loudly shoving open the massive doors and grumbling to herself as she heads back up the stairs towards us.

“Hey boss,” I greet her. “Didn’t get into any fights, I hope?”

I will find some way to make your life miserable if you managed to hurt one of my three non-monster maybe-friends in the five minutes I was forced to leave the two of you alone. I guess Eliza is my maybeist of maybe-friends; I don’t really have a good read on the girl. But Chloe cares about her a lot and I think I’ve made a pretty good impression on her, so she’s at the very least a friend of a friend. Probably. I’m really not very good at making friends, I have no idea what I’m doing.

“The child is fine,” Melpomene huffs. “And she will continue to be fine as long as she stays out of our business in the future.”

“I guess that’s the best I can ask for,” I grumble. “I’ve been hanging out with her in our respective human disguises and I gotta say, she’s a complete overwhelming mess. Watching what she was like after Nanaya beat up her team was genuinely depressing, but the more I get to know her the more I suspect she’s just always like that.”

“Mmm. The Preservers use us up as tools and toss us into the grave when they’re done with us,” Nanaya comments, stepping back into the room with Anath behind her, the girl’s tail bunched up tight against the back of her legs.

“Yeah, I can really see that now,” I agree, nodding a greeting to them both. “It’s sad and it’s not her fault. I don’t want us to be more of a problem for her than we have to be.”

The Dark Rebellion shifts uncomfortably.

“…I don’t like her,” Thea admits. “I don’t like her at all. I know she’s brainwashed or whatever but she still tried to kill me. She wouldn’t even let me explain myself. And then her team destroyed all that data, all those cultural records that just… ugh. I don’t know if I can ever forgive her for that. The Antipathy might be dead but it feels like they got genocided again.”

“She is less stubborn than many Earth Guardians I know,” Nanaya says, “but that is a low bar indeed.”

“I think we would all prefer to not be in conflict with the Earth Guardians, but that simply isn’t feasible,” Melpomene agrees. “It would be like trying to topple a despotic regime without harming the country’s military. At the end of the day, the men and women that signed up to defend a monster are complicit, and conflict with them is unavoidable.”

“…Okay, but like, you can topple despotic regimes without involving militaries,” I point out. “It usually doesn’t happen, but by the same token outright war doesn’t tend to erupt without a lot of other strategies being employed first. There are a lot of ways to weaken regimes outside of just killing the people who support them. And by allowing us to go to Earth again, they’ve inadvertently opened up a lot of powerful avenues of indirect attack.”

Melpomene, who has spent most of the conversation being condescendingly dismissive as always, finally turns her full attention towards me, as do the others.

“Like what?” Nanaya asks.

“Can you seriously not think of anything?” I ask. “Isn’t one of our big goals getting the general populace to turn against the Preservers? This is a perfect opportunity for improving our PR!”

“Our what?” Thea asks, and then I remember that these women have no education, no internet access, and no common sense. They’re a found family of child soldiers that barely manages to function almost exclusively off of Nanaya’s sheer pragmatism. She might have a Costco membership and deep relationships with the local black market, but she’s certainly never read the Wikipedia article on reputation laundering.

“It benefits us if humanity in general likes us more than they like the Preservers,” I say. “Yeah? Yeah. Right now, though, humanity in general barely knows we exist. People are vaguely aware of Nanaya given her history, and the locals know Anath as ‘that property damage menace,’ but both of those reputations are bad and they’re pretty much all anyone has ever heard of any of us.”

“…Sorry,” Anath mumbles.

“There’s no need to apologize further,” Nanaya says in about as gentle a manner as Nanaya gets. “Ultimately, we did get a win here. We can go to Earth so long as we do not commit crimes.”

“Well, uh, what is a crime, really? In the, um, philosophical sense,” Anath tries.

“It is a violation of local government law via action or omission of action,” Nanaya answers.

“Oh. Yeah,” Anath squirms.

“I know you like Earth, and we will talk about taking trips there with appropriate supervision,” Nanaya says. “It will be good for you to socialize more. You’ve always been less comfortable spending time alone than the rest of us.”

“…Yeah,” Anath agrees. “I’m sorry. I did something stupid again today.”

“I would not call your actions wise,” Nanaya hedges, “but I am more angry that you went back on your word than your actions themselves. You did not hurt anyone. You did not hurt yourself. That is… an improvement.”

Anath squirms even more, at least self-aware enough to know how pathetically low a bar that really is. But that is the bar Nanaya is trying to help her clear, and the only safe way to climb a ladder is one rung at a time.

“Do you think we can be friends?” Anath asks. “Me and Fulgora?”

Nanaya blinks, turning to me for some reason. I guess I’m the only one who has ever hung out with her in a friend-adjacent capacity rather than a fight to the death, but that only started a bit over a week ago!

“Honestly, Anath?” I say. “I don’t think she likes you that much.”

“I know…” Anath agrees miserably. “But she could! We’d be really good friends if she was honest with herself!”

I emulate a mildly annoyed huff.

“Anath,” I tell her. “Are you saying Fulgora likes fighting the same way you do?”

“She does!” Anath insists. “She’s like me. It’s the only thing she’s good at. The only thing she understands. She’d be soooo much happier if she just accepted it and let loose a little!”

“Maybe you’re right,” I say. “Maybe she does like fighting. But that doesn’t mean she’ll automatically like throwing away her reasons to fight, and it certainly doesn’t mean she’ll enjoy being your rival if you keep endangering the people she cares about. You keep going after her brother. She’s terrified you’ll hurt him.”

“I would never!” Anath gasps. “Jim is so nice! And he smells good. Animals love him and so do I!”

“Even if you don’t want to hurt him on purpose, can you honestly say you’ll never hurt him on accident?” I ask. “When a fight starts, do you actually pay attention to him anymore? He’s human. He could die from a stray chunk of rubble to the head from a completely unrelated attack.”

Anath sags with sadness, clearly not surprised by my argument. She knows I’m right. It almost happened the one time I was there!

“Be careful, please,” I say. “I’ll be really mad if you go to Earth and end up hurting any of my friends. If Fulgora doesn’t want to fight you, don’t make her. Otherwise, she’ll never like you.”

“Okay…” Anath agrees miserably. And, well, that’s probably the best we’re getting for now. Nanaya gives me a thankful nod.

“Actually, on the subject of Earth, I’ve been curious,” Thea says. “What’s up with your human body, Luna?”

“My body?” I ask, tilting my head. “I don’t know.”

“What? What do you mean you don’t know?” Thea asks. “Have you not gone to see it?”

“Well… no?” I admit. “I mean, I never really liked that body, and they’re not me anymore, so… why bother?”

“How do you know they aren’t you?” Nanaya asks.

“Well, they aren’t using any of my social media profiles and they haven’t talked to any of my friends,” I answer, not bothering to clarify that I have exactly one social media profile and exactly one friend. “There’s absolutely no way I’d ghost everyone I cared about for months. So… they aren’t me.”

“Wait, doesn’t that make this more concerning?” Thea asks. “Shouldn’t we find out who’s in your body? It could be an Antipathy! It could be a Preserver!”

“Could it be?” I ask. “Is that how souls work? Can you just stick someone’s soul into someone else and have them take over?”

“Well… yes, obviously,” Melpomene frowns. “That’s what your soul is doing.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I’m not sure it is,” I admit. “My soul is in here, but so is a complete digital recreation of my brain. Which one is me? What happens if I had one, but not the other?”

Melpomene frowns deeper.

“…I don’t know,” she admits.

“If anything, that is more of a reason to investigate the other you,” Nanaya says. “Or the other not-you, as the case may be.”

“Sure, I guess,” I admit. “I was kinda under the impression you guys already did that, though? If not I guess you’re welcome to. Go nuts.”

Everyone else starts glancing at each other, sharing various looks of concern. Oh boy.

“Do you… not want to know what’s going on with your body?” Thea asks.

“Honestly?” I say. “I’m doing my absolute best not to think about it. No option is good and no option is something I want to be involved with. They’re either some fucked up version of me that doesn’t care about her friends anymore, some evil alien hanging out with my parents for shits and giggles—solid evil alien behavior, I’m sure they’d get along—or they’re a messed up soul of an alien in a messed up brain of a human resulting in a final product of who knows what. All of these options kind of scare the shit out of me, if I’m being real. I don’t want to know!”

“So you’ve just been… ignoring it?” Nanaya frowns.

“Did you not expect me to?” I answer incredulously. “What, did you think I’d walk up to my parents’ house in full fleshsuit regalia, ring the doorbell, and say ‘hey, I’m looking for my earthly physical form, is she in her room?’ I can’t tell anyone I used to be that meatsack and I don’t have any other reason to randomly show up at my old house in my new identity. Even if I did, I can only imagine that doing so would be hell.”

“Wait, why would it be hell?” Thea asks.