Magical Girl Mercenary for Hire – Chapter Six

Magical Girl Mercenary for Hire – Chapter Six

>> 2041
>> Continent: North America
>> Country: Old New York
>> City: Mega City New New York
>> 2:22am

Class was going to end in twenty-minutes and I couldn’t wait.

It wasn’t everyone that went to an in-person school. Actually, I was pretty sure that they were kind of an upper-middle class sort of thing. In any case, my high school was pretty big. It took up the entire floor of the mega building it was in. It had labs, classrooms, washrooms, even a gym. No roof-access though, which was a real shame. So many cool magical girl things happened on the rooftop.

It felt like the lack was robbing me of some opportunities to do magical girl things, but I could live with it.

Also, the uniforms kinda sucked.

We didn’t even have pleated skirts. Instead we all wore these sorta formless jumpsuits with a few logos stitched onto the front and back. They were sorta neat, in a ‘sci-fi’ way, but it was like, old sci-fi, from the early 00s, not the cool current sci-fi, with actual aliens and Samurai and stuff.

Anyway! I was sitting in my class (one row from the back, in the space furthest from the door. We didn’t have windows, which was another shame), and only mostly paying attention to the screen at the front of the class.

The android teacher was standing at attention behind its desk, scanning the students to make sure we all met our screen-time quota on the big screen where a blackboard might have been in one of those really old schools.

“Isn’t this boring?” I asked the girl sitting next to me.

Patricia (though everyone called her Trisha) glanced at me, then back at the board. “We need to pay attention,” she said.

I shrugged. Chys has done some things that were probably not very legal to the android a while ago, and to all of the listening devices in the classrooms I had too. I wasn’t a public magical girl, of course. Quantum Pixel AuroraBeam Neon Nightshade Enchantress was my secret identity. No one could know that I was actually just Beatrice Smith in my day-to-day.

Blinking, I reached into my backpack and pulled out my secret notebook. Flipping across a few dozen pages covered in doodles and sketches with potential costume ideas, I paused on one page with a list of names and added my latest one to the list. It wasn’t bad. I liked the AuroraBeam part. Maybe I could do more with compound words?

“Pst,” Patricia said. I glanced up at her only to notice that she was pointing towards the board. “You haven’t looked in a while,” she hissed.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Thanks.”

Class went on for what felt like way too long. Near the end, a quiz was sent to our tablets and I yawned my way through it, scoring an acceptable seventy-one which put me quite firmly in the bottom percentile of the class.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t smart! It was that the quizzes were boring. The classes were boring too. Actually, school was mostly boring.

When the bell finally rang, there was an almost synchronised sigh of relief from the others. Everyone quickly packed their things and started filing out.

“Hey, Trisha,” I said, trying for a casual tone as I packed up my things. “Did you catch the latest episode of ‘Starlight Galaxy’? It was insane!”

She paused for a moment, giving me a sidelong glance. “It’s Patricia,” she said. She didn’t answer my question.

“Oh, right. Sorry,” I said while mentally kicking myself. “I just thought, you know, since we sit next to each other and all, we could chat a bit?”

Patricia sighed. “Beatrice, I’m here to study, not make friends. You should do the same.” She gestured to the front of the class where our rankings, and those of everyone in our year taking this class, were written in a leaderboard. I was waaay at the bottom. Patricia was in the top third.

“Right. Got it. Anyway, see you around,” I mumbled.

She didn’t even nod before picking up her stuff and slipping away.

I made a quick exit, only pausing by my locker for a second to pick up Chys. I hugged my fluff AI companion close, not really caring if anyone stared. Not that anyone did.

Stolen story; please report.

I could have gone home, but no one was going to be waiting for me there. So instead, I went to work!

Getting there was a little tricky. I had to change cars on one of the metro lines. At the first stop, I slipped into a public washroom, had Chys disable the cameras, then slipped out of it as Sparkle Girl SkylineBurst Twilight Cosmic Sprite!