Chapter One - Crystal’s Strange Afternoon

Crystal was having a strange afternoon.

Strange afternoons were normal for magical girls though. It was just one of those things that happened so often that even the weird stuff seemed less weird over time.

She could vividly recall some of the early days, when she was still finding her footing as a magical girl and she had to deal with tentacle-y monsters pretending to be teachers at her high school, or magical talking animals.

It had seemed very strange at first, but eventually even a godzilla-look-alike showing up in her home city didn’t phase her.

Today was a whole new sort of strange though.

She had woken up while falling. Or maybe it was while being thrown? It was hard to tell the difference, but either way, the ground was rushing towards her too quickly and she had kicked on her reflexive magic. That resulted in a whole lot of crystals being formed out of nothing so that she could bounce off of those at a less jarring angle.

That ended up with her crashing through a sparse forest on the edge of a small mountain range. She tore through a few trees, then dug a trench through some rocks before she finally came to a stop.

Crystal sat in the little crater she’d made and just thought things through.

Usually, when she was tossed around like this, something big was going on. Alien invasion, cross-dimensional invasions, some sort of ancient hidden sect summoning daemons (who were actually just aliens from another dimension) or something like that. She couldn’t remember what was going on though.

Reaching up to her hair, Crystal plucked a small hairpin out and looked it over. The pin had several little diamonds encircling thin magical filigree that her friend and fellow magical girl Rending Nightmare had created. She squinted at the hairpin. The diamonds on it were steaming a little, some faint smoke pouring off of them.

Rending Nightmare had created a bunch of similar devices for all of the girls that would glow brightly if something tried to take over their minds, subjugate their personality, possess them, or otherwise play with their memories. They all wore the pins on visible parts of their costumes. That way they could tell at a glance if a friend wasn’t being herself.

There had been far too many moments where ghosts took over one magical girl, or another ate some sort of magical thing which lowered their inhibitions.

Rending Nightmare had made the devices after Fractured Time confessed her undying love to Gravity’s Heartbeat in a very public display that was entirely unlike the usually reserved girl. That had been the last straw, really.

But no, Crystal wasn’t under any mental effects. She was just confused.

The hairpins had another feature; the ability to teleport them to someone specific in case of an emergency. They’d go off if the girl wearing them was knocked out. Hers should have sent her right on towards Rending Nightmare, in fact, but a glance around revealed no dark-skinned, blue-outfitted girls anywhere.

Shaking her head, Crystal stood up and brushed down the poofy skirt of her pale blue costume. The last thing she remembered was her friends working on some very, very powerful magic on the moon.

“Oh, right!” she said, a fist smacking into her open palm. They’d accidentally destroyed Earth.

She looked around. The place where she crashed wasn’t super high up, but it was on the side of a mountain which afforded her a good view of the surroundings. She could see rolling hills below, and an open plain to her right which stretched out so far she could make out the planet’s curve. There were mountains that way, and to her right and off in the distance was the shimmering blue of a huge body of water. It was probably the morning, she guessed from the position of the sun.

A small town lay at the base of the mountain, maybe a twenty minute drive away. She wouldn’t have noticed it if it wasn’t for the smoke coming out of some of the homes and the roads leading to it cutting across the countryside.

Frowning, she patted herself down to check for injuries, but found nothing amiss. Not even a bruise. Though to be fair her little crash landing hadn’t been that impressive. She had slowed down some before hitting the trees.

One of those was toppled nearby, a trunk bigger around than she was ripped apart three-quarters of the way up. There were a few splinters of it caught on her pantyhose which she picked off.

“Alright,” she said before concentrating.

Magical Girls could communicate with each other if they wanted to. It was very long range telepathy that... well, she hadn’t paid too much attention to the explanation that Hypertense Breakpoint had given her, but she knew that it always worked unless the magical girl on the other end didn’t want it to.

That was handy, because having a group conversation while cramming for end-of-year exams was terribly distracting.

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She focused and got a lot of nothing.

No one was on?

That was beyond strange. There was always at least someone out there listening.

Crystal pouted and glanced around again. Had she ended up in another dimension by accident? A mirror world? Dream world? This didn’t look like hell and her magic seemed to be responding normally, so she dismissed a few possibilities.

“Well, whatever,” she said. There were other ways to communicate with her friends. She just needed to find a city.

After picking out the last of the wooden shrapnel from her pantyhose, she straightened her back and started down the hill.

She headed more or less in the direction of the town by the base of the mountainside. She could fly, of course, but it wasn’t really her strong suit. Actually, her flying was more... flinging herself through the air and hoping for the best. Flight under gravity was complicated. She didn’t weigh much, and all the ways she had to create thrust were a bit too potent. She always ended up way too high.

One day she’d figure it out, or maybe enough practice would allow her to fly as well as some of her friends. Burning Ultranova could rocket around with ease, and Phantom Mist was as light as a feather when she wanted to be, so she really just jumped and kicked her way across the sky by dancing and playing with her weight and momentum. Some of the others could teleport, which was a neat shortcut.

She had crystals and lasers, neither of which were great for flying so she would have to walk for a while.

It wasn’t all that bad. It had been a long time since she enjoyed the great outdoors, and longer still since she spent some time all on her own.

An hour into her walk, after bridging a gap across a ravine with a crystalline bridge, she found herself entirely bored.

Nature was fun in documentaries. Less so in the real world.

Flies were buzzing around her curiously, only to be swatted out of the sky by stray lasers, and at some point she walked around a tree only to come within a metre of a big buzzing hive hanging from a low branch.

She screamed and darted deeper into the woods.

Sure, whatever sort of yellowjacket was in there couldn’t hurt her, but they were still scary!

Her run was cut short as she stumbled into an open clearing and tripped over some roots which sent her flying bum over teakettle into a prickly bush. The bush, or its nettles, weren’t the problem. The problem was the large boar which jumped to its feet and turned to face her. It had been laying on its side on a flat rock, soaking in the morning sunlight and minding its own business.

Crystal stared at the boar and it stared back. “Uh, hello, mister pig,” she said.

The boar snorted, then pawed the ground.

“Okay bye!” She leaped back and out of the bush, ignoring the way it tried to keep hold of her. Her costume was more than tough enough to tug itself free from the grasp of a few thorns.

The boar didn’t stop at just pawing the ground, with a deep huff it started to charge and Crystal eeped before she started running in the opposite direction.

The magical girl and the boar ran a circuitous route through the underbrush, crashing through bushes and leaping over fallen trees. After rounding a rocky outcrop Crystal noticed a camp, just an ancient, ratty tent perched under a willow with a long-dead campfire and a few odds and ends left behind. “Help!” she screamed.

The boar snorted behind her, giving her the incentive she needed to speed up a little.

She stumbled through the tent, the old tarp wrapping around her middle and clinging to her like a wet net before she sputtered and nearly managed to free herself from it.

That was about when she reached the end of a cliff she never saw coming.

Her foot came down, expecting to meet solid dirt, and landed on nothing at all instead.

She fell, screaming all the way down a steep hill where jutting rocks poked at her kidneys and bonked her on the head and where thorn-covered bushes were the only thing to slow her down, but not without trying to rip her costume apart first.

After a few seconds of falling she remembered her magic and started to summon small crystalline plates which flashed into being just in time to negate some of the damage she would have eaten with her body instead.

The roll, at long last, ended at the bottom of a hill.

Her head spun for a couple of seconds while the disorientation faded.

“At least I got away from the pig,” she muttered. Then she noticed that she was quite surrounded, and not by pigs, but people. Crystal groaned. People could be so much worse. There was a reason she wasn’t the face of her friend group when they had to deal with people!

Still, all she had to do was keep her wits about her and talk things out, and nothing would go wrong!

***