Magical Girl Heart To Heart

It’s Saturday, and Saki & I managed to drag Mai and Sunao out to Shibuya with us, but Mai has refused to say a word to Nao since yesterday.

“I-I won’t let any more of my friends put themselves in danger. S-saki and Sora have both gotten so hurt in such a short amount of time. I’m not letting you do the same.”

That was what Sunao had declared as she refused to make any more safe doses of the magical girl serum. To be frank, I agreed with what she was saying. I wasn’t given a choice, and Saki made hers in a moment of desperation, but Mai and Nao had the option to not put themselves in harm's way. I was quite relieved when Nao said she wouldn’t make anymore.

Of course, I would never say that to Mai, who was utterly fuming at Nao for unilaterally deciding that neither of them would be becoming magical girls without asking for her input. Some choice words were exchanged (“coward” and “reckless idiot” among them), and now the two were hardly acknowledging one another’s existence. Which didn’t exactly make things easy for me or Saki.

“C’mon, girls, can’t you put this behind us for now? We’ve had a stressful couple of days and we wanna blow off some steam, but we don’t want you two to be miserable the whole time.” Saki’s voice was tinged with exasperation, as she had been trying all morning to get the two to make up.

“Maybe if Little Miss Chemist here wasn’t so desperate to trample on my aspirations, we’d be able to have a little more fun.”

“Why, so you can run off and get yourself hurt without a second thought?”

“Gah, you’re unbelievable! Do you think I’m some sort of violent Neanderthal or something?”

“If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…”

I wish I could say ‘at least they’re talking to each other,’ but honestly it was better when they were in silence.

Saki and I met each other’s eye, and I once again seemed to gain an insight into her mind. She and I had practised a little on the way home from school yesterday, and before long were more or less able to converse with our minds. We couldn’t exactly ‘hear’ one another’s thoughts, we just simply became aware of them. Like an image that randomly pops up in your mind.

‘This isn’t working. We need to try a new approach’  is what she was thinking.

‘They won’t calm down while they’re still together. I’ll take Mai around the underground mall and pick her brain a little. Reckon you could go somewhere else with Nao and do the same?’

‘Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.’

Confirming that we were on the same page, Saki and I gave each other a nod of confirmation before I turned to address Mai.

“Hey, Mai? You’re a big fan of that fighting game series, Iron Fist, right? I heard the arcade in the underground mall has a brand new Iron Fist 8 machine, wanna go give it a try?” I tried to keep my tone neutral so the girls wouldn’t realise what we were up to.

“Huh? Uh, yeah, sure, I guess.” The usually energetic Mai seemed completely down on her spirits, and also somewhat confused at the sudden change in topic, but she agreed to go with me either way.

“Me and Nao are gonna go for ice cream in that new place on central street. Meet up back here later?” It seemed like Saki had had success with her part of the plan too.

“Sure thing, I’ll call you when we’re done.”

“Likewise. See you guys later!” Saki headed off with Sunao traipsing along behind her, while Mai and I slowly made our way to the underground mall’s arcade.

I hadn’t known the girls all that long. I think this month was my fifth or sixth at my current school and living with my current identity. Still, in that half a year or so I thought I had come to know Amai pretty well. I had seen her happy, I had seen her sad, I had seen her angry, bored, frustrated, but I had never seen… this.

Mai was a girl who tended to lack motivation in life. She wasn’t stupid or inept. Far from it, she consistently scored well on tests despite showing no effort at school, and when she really put her mind to something she was able to pull off some pretty incredible things. But she rarely seemed to feel any motivation to do those incredible things.

I wondered if what I was seeing in that moment was the result of her losing the last of the motivation she truly had. In my short time knowing her, nothing had quite kicked her mind into gear like her magical girl obsession, and it seemed that had only grown since their betrayal. Perhaps this mixture of hollow and bitterness on her face was the result of that one true passion she had being taken away from her by one of her friends.

One thing I knew for certain was that I wouldn’t get the whole picture through speculation. Once she had cooled off a little, I would ask her about it.

We got to the arcade to find the Iron Fist 8 machine free, and I instantly pulled Mai over to it and locked us in a game before she could voice any complaints.

With my old main Steel Emperor not on the roster, I picked in as the similar Emperor instead, while Mai mindlessly picked a robot girl called Elisa.

In our first few games, I could tell her heart wasn’t in it, but I know Mai well enough to know what makes her tick. I deliberately kept our games really close, several times getting down to the wire with both of us on low health, before winning out the round at the last minute.

Sure enough, her competitive spirit was stoked and she started getting more and more into it, until eventually she was fully absorbed in the game (and was absolutely kicking my ass).

It was nice to see her smile slowly come back to her. I had come to learn that video games were on of the few things that could spark genuine joy in her, so I silently praised myself for using that knowledge well to drag her out of her bad mood.

After several games in a row of Mai utterly trouncing me, we both started to grow a little bored of playing the same game over and over again. Not to mention…

“Man, it’s so hot, I’m sweating my eyes out. Wanna go grab a drink and cool off a little?” Mai asked, and I fully concurred. It was already a hot day, but the poor air conditioning of the stuffy underground mall did not help whatsoever.

As she and I left the mall and sat down for cold drinks on a public bench, I decided that now would be the best time to broach the question I had been meaning to ask this whole time. I momentarily hesitated, not wanting to ruin the good mood that she’d finally returned to, but I knew things would never move forward if I didn’t take this step.

“Hey, Mai?”

“Hmm? What’s up?”

“Why… why are you so desperate to become a magical girl?”

For a moment, Mai doesn’t answer. Instead, she looks at the ground, her expression changing into a sad smile.

“Have I ever told you how I got into the Gifted Girls academy?” She asked, finally breaking the deafening silence.

“Uhh… no, I don’t think you have.” In fact, it was a subject she actively dodged any time it was brought.

“They actually reached out directly to me. Apparently they found out about my IQ test.”

“IQ test? It’s rare for them to bring someone on for something like that. What’d you score?”

“A hundred eighty seven.”

“A hundre-?!” If memory served me correctly, I recalled that only about 1 in every 120 million people had an IQ of over 185.

I always thought Mai was bright, but she was far more than that. She was a genius. A genius the likes of which there were only a double-digit number of people on the planet.

“Since the day I was born, I’ve felt empty of purpose. School isn’t a challenge to me. I don’t have any special interests like Nao or Saki. I even found it hard to make friends until Saki dragged me into her group kicking and screaming. Everything just always felt so… dull. Sure, on paper I was doing amazing, but it felt… empty. Meaningless.”

Though there was still somewhat of a smile on her face, her eyes looked devoid of emotion. I had heard of this phenomenon before. Truly brilliant minds being driven to madness by their own intelligence. Without a direction or purpose in like, things like education were too trivial to keep them occupied.

“It was when the first reports of magical girls came about that I first thought I may have found a purpose for life. Brave heroes who fight the good fight and protect the people. I had thought people like that only existed in comic books, but there they were, in the flesh. I grew obsessed, more obsessed than I had ever been in my life. It didn’t matter what boundaries I violated or what methods I used, I had to find their secret. And then it all came crashing down.” It was obvious what she was talking about, and it wasn’t Sunao.

“The betrayal.”

“Yeah. The ‘heroes’ I looked up to turned out to be evil, awful people, and my dream was shattered. But then I thought that I had a new goal in life. Something only the four of us could do. To fight back against the injustice those bastards were committing, and to avenge my dream that they had crushed. I was… desperate to see that new dream through. I still am.”

The pieces clicked into place in my head. The reason she had such a negative reaction to Sunao refusing to give her magical girl powers wasn’t just because she wanted power, or even just because she wanted to fight back. She was just desperate for a purpose in life.

“Y’know, you can help us in ways that don’t put you in such a dangerous position. You’ve already proved your skill at information gathering. And… I’d really prefer to not see you get yourself hurt.” Selfish though it was, I still had serious reservations about the girls putting themselves in danger. Despite only knowing them for half a year, they truly meant the world to me.

“You’re so sweet to me, Sora. Marry me when this is all over.” She wrapped her arms around me tight and pulled me into a hug, a big grin on her face. Normally I’d have chided her about personal space, but I was just happy to see her smiling again.

After sufficiently violating my boundaries, she let go of my body and started speaking again, regaining some of that prior melancholy.

“I think the reason I’m so desperate to join you as a magical girl is because I hate the idea of other people fighting for me. Even if I can do other stuff like information gathering, in a fight I’ll always be useless as long as I’m a regular person. You saw what it was like yesterday, that girl almost killed Nao and there was nothing she nor I could do about it. I’ve decided to make this my fight, and I don’t want to be a burden to the ones fighting it. So, when Nao says she won’t help me become a magical girl, it’s like she’s telling me to keep being a burden. And I just… can’t stand for that.”

Honestly speaking, I couldn’t deny what she said. If we were choosing our battles, it would be a non-issue, but we had been ambushed three times already. Protecting non-combatants in situations like that was less than ideal, to say the least.

“Still, I was needlessly cruel to her. Calling her a coward when all she was doing was trying to stop me from getting hurt. I was way out of line.”

“In that case, you wanna find the girls and apologise?”

“Yeah, let’s get going. I’m sure Saki’s done with her half of the plan too by now.”

“Yeah, proba- wait, what?”

“Hmm? Your plan to get me and Nao talking again by separating us and talking things through one-to-one. You don’t think I’m dumb enough to not realise that that’s what you were doing, right?”

Busted. I guess I should have expected her to see right through us like that.

“…hey, Sora?”

“Yeah?”

“…thanks. For everything today. For trying to get me to make up with Nao, and for hearing out what I had to say. It made me feel a lot better to know that there was an ear listening to my problems. And I’m really glad it was your ear, too.” A slight blush seemed to creep onto her cheeks as she said this. It was incredibly cute.

“I’m here anytime you need me. You just gotta ask.”

“Hehe. Thank you, Sora. Let’s get going to our meeting sp-,”

Mai was cutoff by a sudden ruckus come from central street. A large group of people had all come running our direction.

“Cult attack! Cult attack in central street!” Yelled a man who was guiding the crowd our way. Mai and I looked at each other, wide eyed.

“The girls!” We shouted in unison, as we jumped up from our chairs and tried to make our way past the escaping crowd.