I got back on the couch after I finished my smoke, dropping my butt into a tiny metal pot full of ash on the balcony.

I had no clue why Pinky had one. I decided that it didn’t matter and got rid of my cigarette without spreading a bunch of ash on her balcony.

With that out of the way, I slunk back into Pinky's house. At some point, Pinky grabbed a blanket and snuggled inside it like a dumpling or perhaps an egg.

I pressed my back in and looked over at Pinky, and gave her a give em here motion.

“Pass the blanket,” I asked her, adding, “Please,” because manners was my middle name.

She pouted at me from within her cocoon, not wanting to be rid of the pervasive warmth.

“Come on, my hands are cold,” I pleaded.

She looked at me and unwrapped a layer for me to cover myself, but as I reached for it she withdrew it.

“I’ll share my blanket with you, but I need reassurance. Tell me what magic do you bring to the table, who do I share the snuggle blanket with?”

I looked at her and said, “My magic? I cast a gun. I don’t really have anything.”

She looked at me like she didn’t believe it but still passed the blanket, and I draped it over myself, even if I needed to get closer to Pink.

“That shouldn’t be right, though,” she said. “As far as I can figure it, you're specialized, just like me, right? You should have something.”

“Oh, you mean like that. No. As far as I know, I don’t have anything in particular. My oracle is a prototype; she has something, but she can’t even tell me what she has.”

“What's the security level you need?” She asked.

“I don’t,” I started, only for Lilly to pipe up, “Five.”

“Five,” I told Pinky, which got her to whistle.

“That’s too high for me to help with. I only have one, and if you don’t have a finished soul gem, you would probably be a zero.”

“What’s a five then?” I asked her.

“Well… if a zero is a fresh recruit, and a ten is the top brass… Probably like a trusted leader? I don’t know what you would need to do to get it, my oracle won’t tell me how to get beyond two.”

“No, Pinky, I mean, what kind of thing would be a five?”

“Honestly… I have no clue. I don’t know any secrets. Maybe… Nah, I got nothing.”

Well, that was incredibly disappointing. Before it left my mouth, I packed down my words, from sarcastic but unintentionally insulting to just sarcastic. Just because nothing came of it didn’t mean I needed to be rude. After all, Pinky wasn’t one of the gulls, being rude to her was just me being rude.

“Thank you for the attempt, oh wise Pinky.”

“It's no problem. So, do you want to do anything else tonight? I could give you that palm reading if you want.”

I almost turned it down for now. Pinky still had more shows with more characters fighting different manners of monsters and saying stuff that gave me third-hand embarrassment.

“I could think of few things. Honestly, that’s an understatement; I have more questions than I have know-how. I don’t understand how any of this works, not really,” I told her.

“How any of what works? It’s a palm reading, not a dissertation,” Pinky told me, rotating in her egg.

“Not the palm reading, the, you know,” I told her, gesturing to me and her.

“Oh, you're talking about our inevitable friendship? Yeah, I was thinking-”

“Not that you dufus,” I nearly spat out, “I mean the whole… Legionnaire thing.”

I looked at her, and she was smiling.

“What?”

“You didn’t deny the friendship,” she said, grinning, “and you’re blushing.”

I looked at her, and then I kneed her under the blanket, which did little while sitting.

“I’m not blushing, you’re blushing,” I told her cattily, “and you’re sandbagging.”

She looked smugly at me but answered, “I am blushing, but I’ll tell you whatever you want to talk about, besty.”

She put emphasis on besty and made it sound like something dirty but good. I stared at her, but she didn’t stop smiling.

We stared at each other awkwardly for about twenty seconds before I said, “Well, go on.”

“Sure thing besty. So… what can I help you with, what's confusing you?”

I looked at her and simply said, “Everything.”

She looked at me and said, “One moment, I’ve always wanted to do this,” before she got up, the full-size blanket falling away from her as she got up and ran over to one of the other rooms.

She ran over to the far door, pulled it open to reveal a dark room that quickly became pink, spent two seconds making noises inside and came back over with two sheets of paper and two pencils, the door to the pink room closing behind her.

She slapped them down on the coffee table, which I supposed wasn’t for coffee, but the tea table sounded wrong and pointed at the one in front of me.

“Pinky, what am I looking at?”

“Can’t you tell? It’s fairly obvious.”

“Pinky, I am a mercenary. The only paperwork I’m familiar with is the one I hand in to my boss when he asks so he can file taxes. What is this?”

“It’s a character sheet, dummy. As far as I can tell, this is everything you need to know about your shard as it comes to the benefits intrinsic to the shards, right here, in one place.”

“Pinky, that’s… That makes no sense; it's just a bunch of empty boxes and a few calculations.”

“I know, right? But the fact is that they don’t do much beyond what they give you here. Each has a passive effect, which is what these are here, and they each give you an ability, something you can do, which you have to put here.”

“Pinky, what's with this thing here? In the margin.”

“That’s one of my doodles.”

“Yeah, I can see it, but what is the doodle?”

“It’s… It’s me, but opening a pickle jar, can't you tell?”

“It looks like you… why is it for the war form?”

“Because it makes you a little stronger,” Pinky told me seriously.

“Pinky, I can open a pickle jar, it's not that hard. It's literally made to be opened.”

“I… That’s not the point, so what you do is put what level of shard you have next to each of these and…”

Pinky went through each of the shard things. Shards having levels threw me for a moment, but as it turned out, it was something I was already familiar with. I was specialized. Lilly called it having an archetype, which was confusing, but for Pinky's calculation, you just added that as one level. That left me with a lot of zeros, a one and a two for levels.

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

Then you took those numbers and just made some basic additions, and as I did, she explained.

“Ok, so the peacekeeper form is all about soft power, right? It gives you increased perception and better control over your face and body language, so you can use that soft power. The base peacekeeper gives you a kind of attractive aura that you can turn up to 11 to enthrall others.”

“Enthrall?” I asked.

“Basically. I mean, how well can you think when you're giving someone bedroom eyes and constantly thinking they’re hot, you know?”

“Gotcha,” I told her, writing that down in one of the boxes.

“The war form is all about walking up to whatever needs to die and making it dead. It makes you passively harder to kill and tougher, but not like you don’t twist your ankle. It's more like you can be thrown bodily into a wall and walk away like it was stubbing your toe. You're strong enough to run through concrete walls, at least in war form. The base war form lets you burn energy into any attack to make it hit like ten tonnes of high explosives.

“Fuck off attack, got it, sounds nice,” I told her, scribbling that down in another box.

“Ohhh yeh. When you need it, you need it. The next one is a bit different… Within you are two wolves: one is you, one is your oracle, and together, you make one whole-ass magical girl. The anima connects you to the world and to others; it passively lets you connect to more items and reach out to aid others; the base gives you the ability to feel where your friends are and how hurt they are. The Animus is all about power and your own strength; it gives you access to those spells that require active use, and the base shard lets you power your body to enhance your physical stuff, like running faster or hitting harder in general.”

“Got it, so awareness and… Steroids?” I asked her.

“Basically, only they don’t make your boobs tiny,” she said seriously.

“Maybe I should use steroids,” I said with a huff, “I hate the size of my rack in peacekeeper form.”

“Weak. With a great rack must come great back pain; how would the tiny chest get by in a world with big bosoms otherwise?”

“I don’t hate it for back pain… They just feel wrong and get in the way.”

“Oh? That’s… well, I don’t hear that a lot. But hey, that’s probably because you lack the self, or rather the shard that controls it. It gives you more items, and you also need it to swap around the abilities you have beyond the ones you get in one form when you eventually get more than one ability. Base, the shard just lets you use any ability and gives you will, so you can swap them around, even if they’re not necessarily as strong as they would be in a transformed state.”

“Why wouldn’t they be as strong?” I asked her, curious.

“They amplify what's already there; the peacekeeper makes you hot, so it's more effective at making people think you're super hot; the warform makes you bulkier and tougher, so you can take more damage, or charge more with the spell it comes with, without killing yourself,” she told me chipperly.

I squinted, “Wait… But what do you mean will? I have plenty of will as is.”

“The self doesn’t have simple things, it is you. It keeps you together. The shards and the extra stuff are all part of you, right? It's all in there somewhere, even if it’s a small part. You have a physical half, a social half, a female and male half, and so on. Each extra part is smaller and smaller and more specific. Each shard kind of drags you towards it, all of them except the self. It centers you and gives you better control over all the bits of yourself, it makes you more you, instead of more a part of you.”

“That’s… that’s getting into fuzzy detail Pinky, what do all these numbers mean? You have like eight rings and a sword, but your sheet only has three items on it,” I pointed out, “also nice doodle of yourself there,”

“I was getting there, I’m getting there. Also thanks. The fact is that I have eight rings, but only two kinds of rings. I have these plutonium rings, and I can use all of them in one slot. It's different items, different slots. I have the pink rings, a comm ring, a flying sword, and my transformation amulet, four items, four slots. You have three slots, so you can use three kinds of items. It’s a little more complex than that, but we would need to talk about items, and you look like your head is going to implode.”

I felt like my head was fine, but I asked, “Comm ring? Amulet?”

“Yeah, they’re standard; mine came with it; see here, it’s a ring you can use to communicate with people apparently, and then the amulet is for transforming, obviously.”

I stared at her and tried to pretend like I had a transformation amulet, but then I recognized the ring.

Reaching into a pocket, I pulled out the artifact ring I had gotten, the ring that came with the chit that got me on the throne in the first place. It was a dead match for the one on Pinky’s finger. It was a dead match, except for a pink colour to it that, at first sight, made it look similar to her other rings.

“Yeah, see you have them. Go ahead and use it,”

“How do I?”

“Just put it on your finger and connect to it, dummy.”

I shut up and put it on my finger.

“Now connect to it,” she told me.

“I’ll connect you, it doesn’t even drain a point of energy.”

I felt a tiny zip from my core shoot up to my finger before fading into the background. It didn’t seem to change anything but the colour of the ring, which changed to an amber orange like my hair. There was an orangey flicker in my vision, but it passed so quickly I couldn’t even see it right.

“Pinky has sent you a friend request over proximity chat. I’ve accepted it for you.”

“There you go, it's super easy to use.”

“He, yeah,” I lied. My lie didn’t go unseen, which got me a weird look from her, but that was about it, as she seemed to misinterpret my words.

“Now you can call me up on it if you want to,” she said happily.

“MMhm,” I said, giving her a fake smile that got her to shrug.

So I went and started to fill in the sheet, even if I didn’t think it would work all that well. The information on it was good, but the rest of the form was less so. I looked under one of the sections only to ask, “Why is my blood type here? Why is there an area for my sexual preferences on here?”

“Oh, that’s because this was a normal character sheet; I just added the extra bits for magical girls. Feel free to add those bits if you want, but the point of the character sheet, you can take it with you and update it as you want; you can fill it in and use it to plan stuff out.”

I nodded. I had the feeling she wasn’t telling the truth, though. I couldn’t read her right, but it might have been just her being too subtle about copying it all the way to interest, and I wouldn’t be able to tell on her.

I put “ambidextrous” under sexual orientation, but it didn’t get a reaction out of her.

“I can’t exactly keep this on me at every moment, and I don’t know if it will help, but thanks for the character sheet, pinky.”

She deflated a little like she was a popped tire, air whizzing out until she sagged a little, “Aww, man. I thought it was amazing; I use mine all the time.”

“I’m not saying it's bad; I just don’t think I’ll forget-” My stomach gurgled, interrupting me.

I looked down at it and then tried to ignore it, only for Pinky’s stomach to agree.

I looked at Pinky, and she looked at me.

“I’ll go make a second dinner,” she said a bit awkwardly.

“Cool, I’m going to go for a second break then,” I told her, and we headed our separate ways.

It took everything I had to keep my thoughts in my head before I got outside, but once I did and the door thing was closed, I got to talking.

“Lilly, what the fuck is the difference here?” I whisper hissed to her.

“I require context Jacalyn, the fuck do you mean by difference?”

“I mean, there’s a bunch of things that pink can do that I can’t do, and I can do that pinky can't. For one, I don’t think she can heal herself if what she said earlier is anything to go by. I had just about taken it for granted that we would just be able to heal, but I don’t think that’s normal. I can’t connect to items, I’m doing it through you thats another. I got the ring, but I got it from the people who found the key to your facility; why wasn’t it with you? Is there a transformation amulet out there, or are you going to need to transform me forever? How much of that is you. What about those… things, the thing that I ate, those things, is that a me thing? Or can I talk about that?” I hissed, pulling out another cigarette.

I smoked for the second time in an hour. It was the kind of thing I only did while waiting or stressing, and I did not take it as a good sign that I reached for my smokes.

“Well, I can’t quite tell you much about the artifacts. I don’t know where a transmutation amulet is, but it's important to note that you only need an amulet, not a specific amulet. We could even fabricate one if we get a fabricator. As to why they weren’t there… I don’t know why they weren’t there when you woke up, but they weren’t. Perahpsss it was because I was a prototype. I don’t think I was ever expected to be used. You’ll be able to interact with items once you unlock yourself; you just need to be able to connect with the anima shard; I can control it because I’m tacked onto it,” she told me before stopping.

“If you're thinking about how you can’t tell me what you do, then try and answer me with what I can do. I understand you might literally be incapable of something, and I’m not here to judge that.” I told her.

“I can’t tell you what I can do, that is true,” she said, “but… The healing and The… eating the talents of your enemy’s, is probably somewhat unique to you. Someone would need to be able to manipulate your entire body on a genetic level, or better, to do something like that, and that’s likely uncommon. Semi-Unique to you, though I can't tell you why,” she said.

I did not understand what that meant other than imparting that she was able to manipulate my body on a level I couldn’t comprehend.

“Thanks, Lilly. Seriously, this is starting to wig me out. I’m just going to say that I can do the holes thing, open up space or something if I need to.”

“That would make sense, and sorry once again for not being able to give you everything you need to succeed.”

“You're doing everything you can; the most anyone should ever ask is your best.”

“Thank you, Jacalyn.”

“Thank you for doing your best; now I’m going to head back in and try and get Pinky to explain the funky stuff,” I told her, putting out my cigarette.

Lilly didn’t respond, but I got the feeling she was thinking, so I headed back inside.

Pinky was making quite a lot of noise in the kitchen, so I headed in to check on her, only to catch her trying to open a jar of pickles.

She looked at me like a deer in the headlights, and I blinked back at her. She was frozen, not blinking, utterly shocked.

I reached a handout and gently removed the jar from her hands. In one swift and simple motion, I cracked the jar and handed it back to her.

“You didn’t see anything,” she said.

“You weren’t lying about the jar thing, I can see your strength at work, oh pinky.”

“I’m not going to let you have any just for that.”

I got some off her plate about twenty minutes later when she was trying to explain the funky, confusing bit. It turned out neither of us understood it very well, which led to the two of us confusingly arguing for twenty minutes and getting a beer, from which I also stole a few sips.