My last-minute submission to the theme, a bit that has been twisting over and over in my mind for nearly a month until I've finally had the energy to write it. It's been a while, but I needed to stop and turn a construct of a concept on its head.
2450 ~ ish words
kind of violent but not like the bad kind?
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Another indecisive battle with a divisive conclusion, another opponent revealed as just another shade. The Disassembler this time, known for its quirk of causing things to simply collapse into their component parts, itself crumbling into vanishing laughter when cornered. A power that seemed simple and harmless at first until applied to a moving vehicle, or an overpass, or an office tower. They fought for what felt like days, and all it ever fired at was her neck. Her silken collar bearing the magical jewel of her power embedded in the hasp.
Magical Girl Aqua settles down to her feet again, magic quietly dispersing as she touched down in the parking lot among the wreckage of a few dozen disassembled cars, a collapsed lamp-post, a few other odds and ends that had been hit by the Disassembler’s strikes in the fray. All framed by the collapsed luxury condo project, no injuries of note to report as the site had been abandoned for months when the financing fell through. Some commuters would likely be upset about their automobiles though, a small price.
She sighs, tired, and feels the pang of longing come back to her. Nothing else to be done, she should report to the tower with the other girls. Eventually. She makes a stop on the way home, gliding silently into the National Aquarium, perching up high by the salt water tanks. The gentle lapping of artificially generated waves on the brilliant coral reef some hundreds of miles inland, it brings her peace. Her heart burns, her mind whirls with the desire to throw herself into the water, she dreams of swimming, of-
“I thought I would find you here.”
She snaps up to attention and lights up with magic as she catches sight of him. Him. The Controller. The man behind the Shades of Chaos that her team has been fighting for months. Barefoot and unarmed, in flowing black silk pants and nothing else. No weapons, no jewelry, not even a shirt. A strong figure, the build of someone who looks after himself but likely doesn’t have time for the regular gym rat stuff. Her eyes pause on the two thin scars that undercut his pecs, then drift up to his eyes. Her fury finding calm looking back.
“You!”
“Please, I am here only to talk and I will come no closer. I know you don’t wish to fight here, or endanger these beautiful marine habitats. Artificial as they are, they still cradle life.”
“What do you want?!”
“Nothing. I have something for you.”
“Lies!”
“I would neither bring harm to this place. Nobody has been kidnapped. I make no demands.” He gently pushes a plain cardboard box with his foot, the top of it open, and steps backward on the catwalk.
The two move in synchrony, one forward one backward, one away from the box and one toward. It is half of an online store’s regular shipping box, and inside rest five compact square devices each about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Each has a pair of contacts and exactly one button. Each is in a different color, matching the five colors of her team. The aqua blue one is for her. She looks, but does not touch.
He continues. “They are disassemblers. Each tuned specifically to match your teammates, and one for you.”
“You expect me to just pick this thing up and kill myself with it?”
“No. You’ve seen the disassemblers work, they don’t work on flesh and blood, only machines. It will take your collar off. I’m not here to harm you, I’m here to offer you the choice which you’ve been denied.”
“What? My gem is the source of my power!” The response is reflexive. “You’re just asking us to take ourselves out of your way.”
“That is one way to look at it, I digress. I do apologize for all the games, all the silly shades. It took me some time to get a good look at you five, to figure out who you are. But in the end, it would just be easier to neutralize the collars than try to reverse-engineer them.”
Suddenly all the display screens in the aquarium exhibits flick to life. Where they normally show helpful facts or educational cartoons, show times and display details, they now show CCTV footage. There is a girl suspended in a cylindrical tank, respirator mask on her face, her body nude. Displays show things like brain activity and magical output, but another shows markers more sinister. Obedience and conformation, willfulness. The girl’s eyes snap open and she thrashes in the tank, meters peg out and warnings blare, there is no sound but there needn’t be any. The bubbles in the tank change color and her fight changes. She is hurting, choking, gasping for life. Her eyelids flutter and she fades out of consciousness again. A mechanical arm lowers into the water and fastens something around her neck. A silken collar, pretty aqua blue with a gem.
By the time Aqua regains herself, takes her reality back from the violent flash of memory, she is alone on the catwalk. Just her and a small shipping box containing five gifts. The displays are off again and all is quiet. It is just her and the quiet lapping of the waves. She sits on her heels and sobs for a while, then takes the box up and presses it to her chest before leaping into the air. Back to headquarters, they’ll be expecting her in a few hours for the morning debrief. She slides in through her bedroom window some fifty stories up, sets the box down on her side table, makes sure her door is double locked, sheds her battered uniform, and lays herself down to rest.
Her dreams are silent nightmares lashing in her mind. Disjointed, disorienting, mad wild caricatures of being bound and restrained. Being stolen, tied up, worked over. Roller-coasters that whip up like snakes and bind her in their iron rails. Elevators that reach into the car with their cables and drag her screaming up a gleaming glass tower. A high tech experimental laboratory as viewed through bubbling liquid and curved glass. The voice of her mother fading away from her ears as the command of duty marches into her mind. The sudden shuddering pounding, someone shouting a name.
“Aqua! Aqua wake up damn it!”
That isn’t a dream. That is Mist pounding on her bedroom door.
“Come ON sleepyhead you’re gonna miss breakfast and we have to debrief in an hour!”
“Okay okay…” she groggily throws her baggy pajamas on and answers the door. “Hey. Thanks I forgot to set my alarm again.”
“No you didn’t, you slept right through it. Now come on, we’re having pancakes.”
The two trundle into the kitchen where the rest of the girls are serving themselves. Aqua, Mist, Luna, Terra, and Pyrene all together again. They look Aqua over carefully.
“He really went after you hard, didn’t he?”
“Yeah I guess it was my turn, but we got him in the end.”
“You stopped by the aquarium on the way home again?”
“Yeah. I had been a minute and they just finished upgrading the big reef tank. It’s so big, there’s even mature Groupers and Sea Bass in there. Lots of little crabs and urchins, and a couple octopus, and so many other fish…”
“You know you can just go there during the day, right. Like a regular person?”
“Yeah but every time I try we always get called up for something before I can even get there. It’s like the fates are conspiring against my desire to look at fish in the daylight.”
“True, that is pretty weird.” The conversation wanders while the girls eat, then they go their separate ways to get dressed for the daily debrief.
Once again everyone is ready before Aqua, and once again Mist knocks on her door. Except this time it swings open and she finds Aqua there not in her regular daily uniform but in her high-speed flight suit, helmet on and locked in. She’s standing there, studying the smallish aqua blue box in her hands. She looks up just as she slides it into her pocket.
“Aqua, what are you doing?”
“Tell Command I’m sorry. The… Disassembler, he did something weird before we knocked him out last night and it’s been bothering me all night. I, I have to go investigate it. I. Uhm. Think we missed something.”
“Aqua. You’re a terrible liar, and what’s that in your pocket?”
She shuffles a little when pressed, glancing toward her wide-open windows. “Something I picked up at the aquarium.” It isn’t a lie.
Mist’s eyes unfocus disconcertingly. “Is that… contraband?” The gem on her neck pulses.
Aqua can’t believe what she’s seeing. That she’s seeing it. Has she missed it all these years, has it been so obvious the entire time? Her collar pulses as well and she can feel it crowding her mind. She forces it out, then with a burst of might shows Mist her open palm and casts Dispel as hard as she can.
Mist stumbles forward and Aqua catches her, then sits her on the bed. She blinks her eyes right again and uncomfortably tugs on her collar, looking up at the flight-suited girl. “What. What the heck was that?”
Aqua spills it. “The box in my pocket is a collar remover. I can’t tell you where I got them.” She’s holding her interruption spell as hard as she can over Mist’s gem. “There’s one for each of us. I… I think I have to go to the beach to activate mine.”
“But why? They’re… they’re the source of our power?” Suddenly she doesn’t feel so sure either. “Aren’t they?”
“I don’t think so. I think they’re something else. I’ve been having nightmares about labs and being captured and they always end in a machine putting the collar on me.”
Mist’s collar throbs brightly and her demeanor changes again. “Well then, what do you have to say for yourself, traitor?” She stops herself, fighting it back now, then stares up at Aqua with terror in her eyes.
Alarms begin blaring in the headquarters as the breach is detected. Fire doors start rolling closed and vents seal. The other three girls run into the room just as Aqua tosses the glittering golden-tinged box to Mist. She shouts two words, “Supersonic Dash!” and dives out the window before it can close on her. The blue streak that is her powered jet suit goes tearing over the city in a beeline for the coast, it isn’t long before a pair of UAVs, armed to kill and piloted remotely, join up in the chase.
Back at headquarters, Mist ejects the three other girls with sheer force of will from Aqua’s room and slams the door shut. She seals it with a magic lock and commands Aqua’s TV to tune into the tracking feed from her flight helmet.
Magical Girl Aqua breaks the sound barrier just outside the city, at nearly twenty thousand feet and still pushing, she finally gets relief from the burning horror that has become of her collar trying to override her will as the electromagnetic interference from staying just inside the mach cone breaks up the signal from “home”. Raid sirens go off in her path and other aircraft rise from runways to meet her, to intercept. She pushes the speed up, knowing full well she’ll have to fight to stay within herself, concentrates her magic on counteracting the collar, and with a burst suddenly leaps up over mach two.
She’s got enough time playing flight sims online, she alters course to throw her pursuers off their game and keep them away from her actual destination. It won’t last forever though, and after some careful zig-zagging she makes a hard turn northeast and doubles her speed. Pushing the limits of magic and technology, she aims for the curling arm of the peninsula, cuts her thrusters, and freefalls. Dozens of tracking radars watch her fall out the sky. Presumably spent or recovered, there is no information yet as her body tumbles through the air. In the last hundred meters before impact though she suddenly corrects, righting herself. A strong burst of magic swells and she brakes, landing neatly on a rocky spit.
Mist’s eyes are locked onto the television as the camera view from the helmet recovers and sets down, then twists and is placed down on the ground. She can see Aqua walk away from it, hastily yanking the blue box from her pocket and stripping the flight suit away. Her gem strobes brightly on her throat and she falls to her knees, screaming in agony. With both hands, Aqua holds the box up to her throat and squeezes the big flat button. In a sudden crackle, it’s over. She slumps against her heels and her arms fall limp, the box falls to the ground. Her collar shudders, then disintegrates off her neck.
Aqua’s eyes flutter open, then snap wide. A rush of light and magic pours from her eyes and mouth as the transformation takes hold. Her natural magic is suddenly unchained and she explodes out of her human form. In a whirl of power and fury, something much older than the presented college-age coed girl takes over. A flash of scales and fins, whirling hair and swirling sand and sea spray the magical girl becomes a Siren. Her voice rings out in a primal wail and windows shatter for miles around. The camera goes mute and grey for a moment, but returns albeit looking though a cracked lens. The siren hunches down and looks directly at it. She has Aqua’s eyes, Aqua’s face. Aqua’s sweet voice.
“Mist! I know you can hear me. Free yourself! Free yourself, and save the others! I can’t go that far inland, but you can! You’re their only hope, but you have to save yourself first!”
A jet roars overhead and Aqua, the siren, looks up and then quickly back at the camera. “I have to go! You’ll know how to find me!” She dives off the rocks and vanishes into the surf in a flash of iridescent scales.
Mist is all alone now. Her collar is biting at her throat, clawing at her mind, and there are three sets of fists pounding on the door. Shouting about… duty… and justice, and traitors, and obedience. Terrified she takes the golden-tinged box in her hands and presses it to her gem, she holds her breath, tenses up, and squeezes the button. The explosion of raw faerie magic clears windows and furniture off the three adjacent stories of the building.
