6. Letting Loose

“So you can’t talk, huh?” Anath asks, her tail flicking back and forth behind her with what I’m pretty sure is excitement. “That’s cool. Most people talk too much.”

I glance back at her, trying to convey my best impression of ‘are you fucking serious?’ despite my completely immobile face. She doesn’t seem to notice or care, but I get the impression that might have been the case even if I could have glared at her. She’s playing with the strap of the bulky yet nearly empty backpack she’s wearing, something I’m also wearing since our ‘supply run’ naturally involves bringing a lot of things from Earth back to the castle.

Wishing I could sigh, I look away again and push open the doors to the castle, licks of black mist rushing into the entryway as I slip out. Anath follows me, taking a deep breath of the darkness and letting it out with satisfied slowness.

“Aw, this is great. I’m so fuckin’ smart for thinking of this. We’re gonna have an awesome time on Earth, you just wait. What time is it over there?”

I try to shrug, find that I am still restricted to just nodding or shaking my head, and decide that instead of answering I should just follow her orders and get this over with. I grab Anath’s hand and start pulling her into the fog.

“Oh!” she chuckles. “Okay, cool, alright. Let’s roll!”

And so we roll, figuratively speaking, following my readings as I track the vector of fog swirling around us, matching it with the mana density readings I used as well. Anath hums a song I don’t recognize as we walk, swaying back and forth slightly as I drag her along. Soon enough, though, we find it: the thick wall of fully opaque fog that seems to separate Earth from the Dark World. It flutters slightly towards us, the wisps of blackness waving in our direction like the Dark World itself is inhaling while we stand in its throat.

“Oh shit, we’re really here!” Anath perks up. “Damn, how do you and Mel do that? I never figured out how to find these things after the miasma got too thick to see though.”

That’s not a yes or no question, so instead of answering I just go ahead and pull her through. Anath looks up and grins at the sky, her fur rippling as it briefly stands up on needle points on a bit of her at a time, moving from her head down to the tip of her tail.

“Man, the liminal spaces are always so quiet. I love ’em. Come on, let’s get to Earth proper.”

If you like the quiet so much, how come you aren’t shutting up? Also: Earth proper? Does this place not count as Earth? It certainly looks like Earth, what with the brick buildings and two-lane roads and general ‘this is a city in America’ aesthetic. I couldn’t tell you which city, but that hardly means much; I haven’t explored most of the area I live in, let alone most cities in general. Though the more I look around, the more something nags at me.

This… is a city, right?

Yes, my mind insists, it is. Obviously. There’s certainly nothing about it that indicates it could be anything other than a city. Specifically, it reminds me of those deep spots in a city, the connecting roads between major thoroughfares where the buildings hide their ugly, unadorned sides, only interested in putting on a pretty face for the main streets. You can get lost so easily in places like this, nothing but brick, concrete, and asphalt, a maze of alleyways and dumpsters broken only by featureless doors that lead to god knows where. It feels, I realize, fundamentally like the part of a city that could be any city at all.

Maybe it actually is.

“What’s up, bot?” Anath says, shoving me lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t know where to go from here? No worries, I can lead now. Come on!”

She scampers off, literally getting down on all fours and leaping across the ground like a squirrel. I am of course forced to follow and keep pace with her, my heavy footsteps thunking against the ground with a concerning amount of force. Is… is this the first time I’ve ran since becoming a robot? I think it is, outside of a couple quick movements during my fight.

…Oh, right. My fight. My power reserves tick up a few fractions of a percentage as I remember how I am now an obligate child abuser. It’s a really cool thing that I love having permanently burned into my fancy new crystalline memory core forever. Oh also can we talk about how I don’t have a brain anymore? Oh, right. No we can’t. Because I can’t talk.

I clench my fists a little harder as I run after Anath, thankful that I can at least do that much now. I already feel like I’m settling into my new reality a bit, the shock and horror of all the fucked up and impossible things that happened to me over the past twenty-four hours kinda evening out inside my mind. It’s just like… oh, is this my new normal now? Alright, noted. I’m sure I probably deserve it or whatever, now let’s get on with the standardized doses of depression.

Y’know, come to think of it, my brain kinda sucked ass. A real uncooperative piece of shit. Do I actually have a good reason to be upset about losing it? I mean sure, there’s like, the existential dread of continuity of consciousness and whatnot, but also Thea and the others pretty much outright said that souls are real and I have one, so that might not even be an issue. Hmm. Something to think about later, I think.

The sky is getting slightly brighter, and as it does I start to understand more of why Anath calls this a ‘liminal space.’ It’s not the Dark World, not in any real way, but it can’t be Earth either, simply because no Earth city is this… uniform. These unmarked buildings seem to continue forever in every direction, the streets devoid of cars and the sidewalks devoid of people. Every so often I’ll barely spot a monster as it scampers away from us, presumably hiding from Anath, and even more rarely we’ll pass by a corpse, most of which have long since been picked to bones. As it becomes easier to see I spot the occasional bird as well, and even a single raccoon, but they act erratic and twitchy, almost like they’re sick.

And eventually, a few blocks in front of us, I start to see something actually recognizable. This impossible platonic concept of a city street we’ve been running down finally transitions into a real street, with cars abandoned during the evacuation and storefronts with actual names of real businesses on them. The threshold between the two isn’t visible or crowded with fog like the threshold between the liminal space and the Dark World, so it’s a little difficult to tell where exactly it is, but my sensors understand the moment I step through that I am Somewhere Else now.

The background mana levels plummet from ‘dramatically below Dark World levels’ to ‘basically nil’ while the radio communication bands go from ‘little tickles in the back of my head’ to ‘everything, everywhere, all of the time.’ I spasm, loud rushes of data burrowing into my brain and demanding investigation despite the fact that I can’t understand any of it. My mind runs through every transmission protocol and decryption key it has available to it, the vast majority of them failing to match any of the signals I’m receiving. The main exception are the radio waves that can be comprehensibly converted directly to sound, which of course floods my mind with halting and restarting threads of music and advertisements and talk shows and endless useless garbage drowning out my thoughts—

Why am I panicking? I am built to have solutions to these problems. Increasing base clock speed in response to larger priority thread count. Offloading decryption and data interpretation efforts to secondary processors. Designating public radio channels as minimal priority barring keyword detection: Anath, Dark World, Magic, Magical Girl, Melpomene, Monster, Nanaya, Thea. Increasing base emotional siphon to compensate for power expenditure.

—but then it thankfully starts to fade away as I reallocate my mental resources more appropriately. The entire experience only takes about a second, though come to think of it I’m not sure how exactly I know how long a second is. I’ll need to find a clock and record a reference so I can make sure I’m keeping Earth time properly.

“You okay, roboto?” Anath blinks at me, having stopped when she heard me seize up and nearly trip. I give her a nod and she grins, rubbing her hands together. “Awesome! Alright, let’s find a gas station or something to loot.”

She leaps onto the wall of a nearby building and scrambles straight up it, her crystalline claws easily finding divots in the brickwork to act as sufficient holds. A quick calculation confirms I’d only cause property damage if I try to repeat the trick, so I deploy my ventral limb thrusters and just leap clean onto the roof, calculating the thrust so I clear the top of the building right at the exact apex of the jump, stepping up onto it rather than falling down on top of it and risking damage to my landing zone.

A flutter of something like awe or pride kindles inside me for a moment, left to linger unexpectedly long since I’m poorly configured to burn positivity. That was… kinda cool. I looked up, felt the math click into my head, and acted. My usual lack of self-confidence was removed from the equation, because I knew what would happen the moment I locked in the numbers. Hard numbers, numbers I could go back and check again to confirm the calculations if I wanted to, but why bother? I was the one who did the math in the first place. It was as easy as wiggling my toes.

“Yooo, you have rocket boosters? That’s fuckin’ sick,” Anath says, finishing her run up to the roof next to me. “Alright, lessee here…”

She looks out in the distance, but I’ve already spotted a couple gas stations so I point at the closest one for her.

“Oh, good eye, yeah!” Anath says, wiggling up and down a bit. “Let’s go before any humans loot it!”

I nod and hop off the roof, landing on the asphalt of the road since it can handle the impact of me falling two stories a lot better than the concrete of the sidewalk. Yeah, sure, let’s go out-loot those dastardly humans or whatever. I have to do this no matter what, so I may as well go with the flow.

Though it got noticeably brighter outside now that we are no longer in the Dark World (who would have guessed, right?) it’s not due to the sun, but rather the moon, the stars, and most noticeably the street lights, which for some reason I only just now realize were absent from the liminal space. There’s the tiniest glow to the east, indicating the eventual incoming of sunrise, but for now it is still firmly nighttime here on Earth.

Anath leaps down next to me and once again starts scampering off, leading the way to our destination. As it happens, though, we aren’t the first to get there: once the gas station enters our line of sight, I can see that the glass doors have been shattered and there are two human men inside the station, presumably trying to rapidly clear the place of anything valuable. Even if Anath hadn’t mentioned looters, I wouldn’t be super surprised; police don’t respond to automated alarms in evacuation zones—why would they, when it’s far more likely to be a swarm of monsters than anything that they’re actually qualified to handle—and this close to an entry point to the Dark World would absolutely be an evacuation zone. Still, looting seems like a pretty fucking risky occupation: you might not run into the law, but that’s only because you’re likely to run into the things that make the area lawless.

“Hey, fuckers! What are you doin’ with my future stuff!?”

Case in point.

Anath bursts into a sprint and I rush after her as best I can, wanting to keep pace in hopes that I can stop her from murdering anyone. The men look up in confusion at first, since a humanoid voice isn’t exactly an ‘oh shit run’ situation in an evacuation zone, but they quickly revise that assessment once they spot Anath and me sprinting straight at them. Unfortunately, I doubt it’s physically possible for the poor humans to escape us, so I deploy and burn my rearward thrusters a little to beat Anath to them, crashing through the window and sliding to a stop just close enough to snatch the collar of one guy’s shirt and cutting off the escape of the other.

“Fuck yeah, botbutt! Nice catch!” Anath says, hopping into the building through the hole I made in the side, glass continuing to tinkle to the ground around us. “Gimmie all your crap, losers! Gimmie gimmie!”

She claps her hands together and then holds her palms out like she’s trying to get a dog to come to her, but the men mostly stare in terror so I just steal the bag they were stuffing things into and toss it to Anath, who gladly accepts it. She pulls the cash out, stuffs it into her backpack, and then discards the rest of the bag, shuffling towards a rack of Jalapeño Cheetos and dumping the entire thing in after them before making her way towards the Gatorade.

“You!” she says, pointing at the dude I’m not holding without looking at him. “Tell me your phone password and give it to me. Bring it here.”

The man doesn’t move, just staring at her in terror.

“I said GIVE IT!” Anath roars, and my mana sensors blare a warning in my head for a moment before everything suddenly gets heavier—my body, the man I’m holding, even the food on the shelves starts crunching down and deforming under the sudden pressure. My body handles it easily, and I quickly adjust my grip on the man I’m holding, carefully setting him down without letting him hurt himself. The other man, however, is violently forced to his knees. He cries out in pain, but I don’t see or hear any sign of his bones breaking, and after a brief struggle he manages to get a shaky hand into his pocket to grab his phone, holding it out towards Anath.

The pressure in the room returns to normal, Anath’s grin blooming back on her face as she snatches the phone from his hands. He tells her the PIN, and after successfully unlocking it she smiles even wider and starts wandering towards the exit to the gas station, poking away at the phone. I guess that’s our cue to leave, so I let the guy I was holding go and follow after her.

If I still had a heart, it would be beating a mile a minute right now. I definitely mark terrorizing a pair of looters as way, way less fucked up than beating up a trio of children, but I still don’t exactly feel like the good guy here.

“Good girl, Buttbot!” Anath says, awkwardly smacking the back of my head. “You’re kinda awesome!”

Please stop calling me Buttbot.

“Oooh! We’re not too far!” Anath beams, staring at what appears to be Google Maps. “Heck yeah! I hope Jim is there! I haven’t seen him in forever!”

Anath takes a moment to dump everything in her backpack into my backpack before sprinting off, heading further away from the Dark World and towards whatever place she plugged into the map app. We run a while, but soon enough we pass the cheap little roadblock fences that mark off the edge of the evacuation zone. Dark World pockets are always moving, so it tends to be a bit of a scramble marking off and getting people out of dangerous areas, but the pockets themselves generally aren’t very large, usually hovering close to a mile in diameter. About sixty percent of the pockets don’t disgorge monsters at all, around thirty-five percent of them only vomit up a couple, around four percent send swarms at us, and then of course we have the one percent that barfs up a kaiju.

The smartest, safest thing to do would probably be to evacuate everyone for miles in every direction whenever we start to notice a Dark World portal opening up, and for a while we did. But these monster attacks have been happening for over a decade and a half now, and while the government likes to puff itself up about efficient, effective safety measures, the reality of the situation is that frequent major evacuations for unknown time periods just aren’t economically and logistically viable. The rich people don’t like losing so many labor hours over something as measly as safety, and the poor people don’t like getting kicked out of their homes and finding themselves with nowhere else to go, so evacuation zones have been continually minimized in size and scope.

So yeah. Dark World pockets (or maybe liminal space pockets are more accurate, I guess I need to look into that) are barely a mile across, evacuations happen there and another half-mile to a mile in every direction, and that’s about it. Do people on the edge of the evacuation zone risk getting attacked by monsters? Yes, absolutely. A small town is usually not going to have any local magical girls; a big city probably caps out at six or seven. The magical girls will go to where the convergences are, but they can’t (and don’t) catch everything before it gets into civilian areas. Still, as the sunrise draws ever closer and the town wakes up around us, we start to see people up and about, starting their day despite being barely a couple miles away from a monster-spawning pit of extradimensional poison.

Of course, they see us as easily as we see them, and they’re at least all smart enough to run the heck away. It’s… uncanny, and a bit disturbing. My processor speeds up just the slightest bit whenever I see someone new, taking a moment in seemingly slowed time to record the person in my memory, assess threat levels, judge optimal outcomes, and plan the fastest way to subdue or kill them if necessary.

There’s a woman on her morning jog, wearing a sports bra and yoga pants. In an instant, I know her body’s average surface temperature (ninety-four point six degrees Fahrenheit, which is obviously also four hundred and thirty-eight point four degrees Pyulor), her velocity and momentum (five point six miles per hour, fourteen degrees clockwise relative to my velocity; I know a few weird alien velocity units too but I’m really only using Pyulor for spite), her current mana production (comically low but still well within sapient ranges; she is legally a person), her current magical-cardinal orientation (east-southeast; by my data gathering so far this is mostly fear with a tinge of something adjacent to it, or what the monster crew would call ‘green mana’) and her body’s estimated force tolerances (I could rip her open like a wet tissue, but breaking her neck would be more efficient and much less messy). All of this data and much, much more is saved to an automatically-created human information table so as to better determine whereabouts these values can be expected to fall for the average human in order to reduce processing time and improve estimation reliability when encountering a new individual of the species.

It’s frightening, in part because it feels like I’ve already done it a thousand times. Like everything in my new body, the experience is alien but I’m still the one doing it. The only part of it that feels like something taking over and doing something without my direct input is the part of my mind that pings me to say ‘hey, this is possible!’ It’s still me that goes ‘yeah, okay, I’ll do that then.’ Because why wouldn’t I? Having a spreadsheet with ease-of-murdering data is pretty creepy, I’ll admit, but there’s literally no other reason to not record the data, and having it on hand could potentially be helpful someday. It’s weird shit to know, sure, but it’s always better to know something than to not know something, no matter how uncomfortable.

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

Knowing stuff is good and cool. Give me uncomfortable truths over blissful ignorance any day. I might regret that temporarily when the uncomfortable truths in question rear their ugly heads, but that’s okay. Discomfort passes, yet knowledge stays.

Well, we’ve terrified everyone around us and likely had multiple emergency hotlines called on our asses, but nothing has tried to stop us so it isn’t long before Anath’s stolen phone chirps out “your destination is on the right.” Hmmm. If I figure out how to decrypt all this radio traffic, I wonder if I could just browse the internet with my mind? On one hand that would be pretty sick, though on the other hand I’d be permanently distracted by random bullshit from now until the end of time. Though… on the other other hand, my brain is a supercomputer so I can probably be ‘distracted’ by like twenty things and still be able to function. Oh my god I have ultra-omega ADHD. I’m like the goddess of Adderall.

Man, eating my own sadness for power sure helps me stay in a decent mood, huh?

Anyway, the store we ultimately arrive at now that the sun has crested the horizon is a place called Fuzzy Friends Forever, which I can only assume is a pet store. Sure enough, as we get close enough to see through the windows I spot multiple pens, cages, and enclosures for everything from cats to dogs to birds to lizards. There’s also a twenty-something-year-old guy in a colorful uniform walking around and feeding all of them, one by one.

Anath tries the door, finds that it is locked, and unlocks it permanently.

“Jim!” she shouts excitedly. “Hey!”

“Wh—oh god it’s you.”

“IT’S MEEEEE!!!”

Anath raises her arms up into the air and runs excitedly into the store as the employee guy—Jim, presumably—freezes like a deer in front of an oncoming train: well aware that he needs to run yet completely unable to move his legs. Anath hops right up to him, grabs the bars of the cage he’s standing closest to, and rips them clean off their hinges.

“Kehehehe! Be free, little ones!” Anath cackles. “Hi Jim! How have you been? I haven’t seen you in forever!”

The poor man, whose name tag does indeed read ‘Jim,’ starts glancing all over the place in a terror not unlike that of the cat Anath just freed.

“U-uh, y’know, just… doing my job. Or trying to?”

“Haha! Yeah!” Anath agrees, ripping apart another cat cage and shattering the glass of a lizard enclosure. “I’m back on Earth!”

“I… y-yeah, you sure are,” Jim agrees. “You seem, uh…”

“Energetic!?” Anath grins widely, stepping into the puppy pen and tossing the fencing away. “I super am!!! Don’t worry, I’m not high, Nanaya’s a big meanie and won’t let me have fun weed, she only lets me eat the stuff that puts me to sleep.”

“Oh, uh. Okay.”

It is at this point that I decide to step forward and grab Jim, gently pulling him away from Anath’s current rampage so he’s less likely to get hurt. He stiffens like a statue but largely takes it in stride, as if being manhandled by a robot is an expected outcome of this visit. I guess the two of them know each other already, though it seems somewhat unwilling in Jim’s case.

“Freedom! Freedom!!! Ahahahaha! They will never cage you again!”

Jim stares at all the little animals scampering desperately away from her with the indisputable knowledge that he is going to have to personally catch and cage them all again.

“…Um, A-Anath, right?” Jim says, clearing his throat.

“You remembered!” Anath gasps excitedly, her slitted eyes zeroing in on him and making him flinch.

“Yeah. Uh. Are you alright?”

“Aww!” Anath coos. “You care! You’re my second-favorite human, Jimmy! And… yeah, I’m fine.”

She pauses her rampage, seeming to stare at nothing for a moment before giggling to herself.

“Just havin’ a manic day, I guess,” she grins at him. “I guess I don’t normally smash… quite as much stuff. Sorry, but also kinda not sorry! Regretting things is for tomorrow. Hey, can you make Fulgora show up? You can, right? You’re her boyfriend or something?”

“Uh.”

“You’re not? Well, whatever, she always shows up when I mess with you. I’m gonna beat her up.”