Dani watched the snow fall out of the sky. The night was dark and the only light around was the weak, yellow glow from the bulb above the agency dorm’s back door, so she couldn’t see very far above herself. The snowflakes seemed to materialize all at once from within the black void overhead.
Tonight was the first real snowfall of the season. Some flurries had passed through before the new year, but nothing that stuck to the ground. This was real snow, with heavy flakes that had already started to clump together by the time they fell onto Dani’s hair. By the time she woke up tomorrow, the whole world would look different. The sidewalk in front of the Fifty Flip office would be hidden under a layer of snow, as would the cars that lined the street. They’d be buried beneath the white, in the same way a coffin was covered by shovelfuls of dirt.
At least, they would until the snow melted away. Then they’d come back.
Sammy, the tiny girl who went by Hyperia Flip, would wind up buried in the same way if she wasn’t careful. She was standing in the agency’s small backyard, taking pictures of the falling snow and of herself, and the snow already reached halfway up her shins. Hopefully her fans were ready for their timelines to be flooded by her photos. There wouldn’t be any room for anyone else once she started posting.
The third member of their team had returned indoors to make them all cups of hot cocoa. For some reason, Dani preferred to call her Elegia rather than Helena. That was strange. She wasn’t even comfortable calling herself Dystopia, and Sammy was just Sammy, so why was it different for this woman?
Whatever. It didn’t matter.
Sammy and Elegia were a weird pair, but Dani knew she was the real outcast of this team.
That role wasn’t anything new for her. She’d been floating between places she didn’t fit in for most of her life. Actually, she actively tried not to fit in them. They were homes that weren’t hers. Families that were strangers.
The Cruelties had forced her to be alone, and she refused to forget that. She’d be alone until she fulfilled her responsibility to her family.
It would be sixteen years this May. Sixteen years ago, she had a mother, a father, and an older brother who ruffled her hair even though he knew it pissed her off. Then she lost them, and after sixteen years, they were still gone.
Dani had been eight at the time. Old enough to understand what had happened, but young enough to cling to the hope that she might wake up one morning and have her family back.
She went between a few foster homes after the Cruelty attack, none of which could handle her. It wasn’t that she caused trouble, she just never let herself fit in. These families weren’t hers, and she refused to play the role of their daughter. She refused, even more vehemently, to play the role of some orphan they’d saved. She wasn’t interested learning about them. She didn’t care what time their family ate dinner, how they celebrated the holidays, or what it would be like to be one of them. She had her own habits and traditions—the ones her family had given her—and she intended to hold onto them.
Maybe that feeling came out as disobedience from time to time, but Dani was only disobedient of their rules and expectations. Still, that was enough defiance for one home to pass her to the next. Those foster parents never looked sad to see her go, she had noticed. They never looked like they were losing a member of their family.
Once Dani was old enough to live on her own, she wasted a lot of time. She had gotten so used to not playing along with the people around her, to avoiding everything she was expected to do. Now that she was free to do as she pleased, she’d lost sight of what mattered. She neglected her responsibility, and found herself wandering again.
The good part about wandering around was that she had lots of time to think. When you’re alone all the time, you get to know yourself fairly well. So, it was only a matter of time before Dani remembered what she was supposed to do—what she owed her family.
She auditioned at every magical girl agency she could find, only to be rejected from all of them. Of course they rejected her. She’d spent her whole life not fitting in, and now she wanted to be part of a team? What a joke.
She kept auditioning anyway, though. There wasn’t anything else for her to do. She had to become a magical girl. She had to kill Cruelties. Anything else was just wasting time.
She had a responsibility.
One day, Dani walked into another audition and saw the strangest pair of magical girls: a pipsqueak with a chew toy for a voice and a woman Dani could only assume was her mother. Come to find out, they were even stranger than she had originally thought.
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Sammy took a liking to Dani right away, which more or less guaranteed Elegia would as well. With the two of them on board, it was simple enough to convince Asumi, their producer and manger, to hire Dani. Asumi was more like a fangirl than a manager. She must have been born rich or won the lottery, and chose to live out some fantasy of running a magical girl agency. Really, she just wanted to obsess over a team of girls she could call her own. If her girls were happy, so was she.
That was a convenient arrangement for Dani.
As for why Sammy took such a liking to Dani, that only become apparent later on. Once Dani started going on missions with the girl, and they started eliminating Cruelties, she started to understand.
Sammy should have had nothing in common with Dani. She liked cute things and loud noises, loved to talk and pose in front of cameras, and was always willing to show off the brightest smile she could muster if she thought someone would praise her for it. All of that made Dani want to vomit.
It was the other side of Sammy’s personality that attracted her to Dani.
The girl’s hatred toward Cruelties wasn’t a feeling she had any reason to bear. She hadn’t lost anyone in the way Dani had. Sammy knew, as any average person did, the damage the monsters had done in the past, but she hadn’t lived through it in the same way. Hell, the attack that sent Dani down this path had been one of the last major casualty events in this war, and Sammy had only been two years old at the time. Her whole life had been during this era of relative peace.
Yet, Sammy had been conditioned to feel the same way Dani did.
That vile side of her—the side that allowed her to crush Cruelties to a sludgy pulp even if they looked like puppies—had been given to her. This world had gifted it to her.
It wasn’t a quirk of her personality. She wasn’t “just like that.”
It was only possible for a girl as otherwise innocent and single-minded as Sammy to feel that kind of hatred because she’d been told to feel that way. The fact that Cruelties hurt humans and the fact that they needed to be destroyed at any cost—that had made Sammy this way.
That idea was a drop of poison that had dyed the girl’s heart.
The way Sammy had explained herself to Heartbreak—that the cutest magical girl would be the one who killed the most Cruelties—that made Dani feel even sicker than the other side of her personality.
It was one thing for Dani to feel that way, but Sammy should have been spared. She should have been able to dance and sing and take obnoxious photos as much as she wanted. That should have been her path toward expressing herself. If she wanted to be cute, then let her be cute. Instead, someone had pointed her in the wrong direction. To live the life she wanted, she planned to turn herself into a weapon.
It was Dani’s responsibility to make sure no one else had to feel that way.
As she watched Sammy, bundled up in a puffy down-stuffed coat and a bright pink scarf, Dani suddenly heard her name.
Just then, Elegia had cracked open the door to the backyard and called for Dani. She handed off one mug of cocoa to Dani, then emerged a moment later with two more for herself and Sammy. She set Sammy’s down at the top of the steps leading to the yard, then took a seat beside Dani. Instead of a coat, she kept herself warm with a thick knitted blanket she had thrown around her shoulders, and now she swept it over Dani’s shoulders as well.
Most nights, Elegia would have returned to her own apartment, but Sammy had wanted the three of them to enjoy this first snowstorm together. The weather could have made traveling home difficult, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea anyway. Dani had offered the woman her bed while she slept on the agency lobby’s couch, but Elegia refused. Maybe she wasn’t old enough for her back to start hurting yet.
“It’s been an exciting week, hasn’t it?” Elegia asked. Her eyes followed Sammy as she spoke.
“That’s one word for it,” Dani said.
First, there had been Heartbreak’s carnival, or whatever she wanted to call it. Dani had known going into it that Fifty Flip was the least popular team of all the magic users in attendance, so she’d expected to fade into the background rather quickly. That hadn’t happened at all. There was something weird about Heartbreak’s fans. They had all taken an interest in Dani and her teammates, even though half of them had never heard of her beforehand. It was like because Heartbreak had vouched for Dani’s team, all those people were on a mission to figure out why.
Their interest hadn’t been totally shallow, either. Sammy had woken Dani up the morning after the carnival by screaming in her ear about how their follower counts had exploded overnight, and how they were a fingernail away from unlocking their weapons. In other words, they’d nearly doubled their FP levels. It didn’t make any sense.
What made even less sense was what happened a few days after that. Heartbreak had done something to cut the head off the Department of Magic instantaneously. That dumbass Secretary quit, and Heartbreak installed her puppet, or whoever that woman was, in his spot the same week. That girl—the one who had said she was doing all this just because she thought she’d be good at it—must have been hiding something.
Either that, or she was right. She was good at this.
Dani wanted to ask her what the hell she’d been doing all those years before now, but she supposed Heartbreak could ask the same of her.
“Do you feel that the world is beginning to change?” Elegia asked again.
“For better or worse?” Dani replied.
Elegia giggled, which she usually only did when she was thinking about something twisted, and said, “When the world changes, it’s up for grabs.”
“What does that mean?”
“The world is a big place, with many people living in it,” Elegia explained. “It’s too much for any one person to take control of. So, when it begins to change, anyone can play a part in changing it.”
Dani brought the cup of cocoa to her lips and took a sip. The liquid burnt her tongue as soon as it touched, but she swallowed it down anyway. She opened her mouth after and took a slow breath of the cold night air. That soothed the burn a little. It made her want to smoke, too, but she held off. Tonight seemed like a night that would be better off without the smoke. She’d let something other than her ashes stain the snow.
“I guess it’s changing then,” Dani said.
For better or worse.