I am Doctor Roxanne Updyke, I'm a freshly-minted Research Fellow at the Institute of Applied Transhumanism, and a few hours ago, I got isekai'd into a world where magical girls are real.

"Excuse me," I heard someone say behind me while I was buying groceries, which wasn't great for my nerves.

It was a young woman's voice, to be precise, and while it was unreasonable to assume that I would immediately run into a magical girl just because I was now in a universe where they existed, the pacifying-yet-holier-than-thou tone made me think I had. And considering that I came from a world that was considerably more 'Gothic' in its supernatural population—and that in most respects I would be counted among that population—I very much did not want to deal with (or be dealt with by) a universal embodiment of hope and positivity.

So I did what I did best: ignore the problem and hope it goes away.

Hey, at least she's probably not one of Skinner's minions.

"Excuse me," the woman repeated slightly louder, as though I had failed to hear her rather than chosen to ignore her. "Do you have a moment to talk?"

"About what?" I said instead of 'no, go away.' I don't know why. I definitely wanted to say the latter.

"About, well…"

I finally turned around, and laid eyes upon a college-aged East Asian woman. She was alarmingly pretty, and fairly tall, in a cute but mostly unremarkable sweater and long skirt in dark colors. She was also very much not the image of a magical girl. There wasn't a great deal of deliberate cross-contamination between our universes; neither side particularly wanted supernatural creatures of the other sort running lose in their backyard, for obvious reasons, so the Treaty made crossings like mine all-but illegal, and the 'all-but' was mostly because making things illegal tended to make them public knowledge.

Even so, as part of my universe's supernatural scene, I'd picked up a certain amount of the cultural background radiation surrounding the other Treaty signatories by slow and inevitable osmosis. My image of a 'magical girl' was, or should have been, fairly close to the local cultural norms: that of a teen or pre-teen girl radiating purity and clean, familial love. Not a tall, attractive, extremely curvy young woman who'd spin heads everywhere she went. So I'd dodged that bullet, at least.

"I could tell from all the way across the store that someone was having a pretty bad… day," she said at last, because it seemed every universe delighted in make me eat every somewhat optimistic thought that dared cross my mind. Unless there was an entirely separate group of empaths running around universe B-449 that somehow no one on A-510 had ever heard of, she was a magical girl. Because obviously magical girls would grow up. I was an idiot.

Crap. What would a local do in this situation? Magical girls were sort of celebrity-public-servants-slash-first-responders, I thought, but I wasn't clear on whether they were more the firefighter-type everyone loved for their selflessness or the cop-type everyone wanted to give as wide a berth as possible. Either way, I wanted nothing to do with this, and I couldn't be the only one who'd ever felt that way, so:

"I'll live," I said with as much good humor as I could be bothered to fake, then turned back to the shelves.

My shadow was undeterred. "I'd hope we could aim a little higher than 'living'," she said. "My name is Akane Sakurai. You?"

"Roxanne Updyke," I said, then cursed myself for taking a tumble in whatever politeness judo 'Akane' was a practitioner of. "Can I help you?"

"I was hoping I could help you."

"Why?"

"Because I'm a magical girl," Akane said. "Well, technically, I'm retired, but helping people is a hard habit to break, and I don't see any reason to try."

"I appreciate the thought," I lied, "but I don't think you can exactly help with my current predicament of being cut off from my social safety net and simultaneously being rendered homeless with just a quick pep talk in the bread aisle. But hey, if you really think you can manage it, I don't have anywhere else to be." Well, besides a motel room, but I wasn't exactly attached to it.

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Akane frowned and tapped her chin. "That's fair," she said. "That would be hard to fix with a pep talk."

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"How did I get here?" I asked, stir-frying some eggs and leftover rice.

"I drove you here and unlocked the door for you," Akane said, a garbage bag in one hand and some garbage in the other. "Sorry my apartment's a mess. My old roommate was more important than I thought when it came to keeping things clean. But hey, now I have a new roommate!"

"You can't be serious," I said. "Maybe I wasn't clear earlier, but I don't have money for rent. Or a job to get money. Or marketable skills to get a job." At least, not a job I'd ever tell a crusader for love and justice about.

"I don't need help with rent," Akane said, still bustling about as she tried to make the living space look less like the inside of a particularly spacious dumpster. "I need someone to keep me accountable for my mess. Or at least, embarrassed about letting the place turn into… uh, this."

"You wouldn't happen to be a college student, would you?"

"As of a few months ago, no. Not an undergrad, anyway."

That might as well have been a 'yes', as far as I was concerned. "Isn't it a little unreasonable to trust some random person you picked up at HEB with the keys to your home?"

"Retiring as a magical girl is about giving up the responsibilities," Akane explained, "not the perks. I wouldn't have approached you if you were evil or dangerous. You're grumpy and prickly, but you're not going to hurt anyone if you can help it."

I had a bad feeling the Mad Science gadgets 'demiurges' like myself used could spoof Akane's magical girl-granted empathy powers' emotional scanning, which was a really bad sign considering I was here to kill another, significantly more malicious and dangerous demiurge. Unfortunately for her, I couldn't exactly correct her without outing myself. Also unfortunately for her, I wasn't above taking advantage of someone's well-meaning pity if the alternative was theft and/or homelessness.

I'd just have to assume Skinner was blending in equally well while she went about whatever sinister plan she had in mind. Things would be a lot easier for me if I knew what that plan was, but all I could really be sure of was that she had chosen to visit this universe for a reason; she hadn't had time to reconfigure her portal gun before she'd shot me through. So: what was special about this universe in particular? It was 'common knowledge' in my home universe—inasmuch as anything about parallel universes was 'commonly known'—that magical girls were more or less impossible to compromise or otherwise suborn (which was one of the reasons so many supernatural entities wanted nothing to do with them), so presumably Skinner was after something from their metaphysical opposites, the manifestations known as 'Nightmares'.

I knew a great deal less about the so-called Nightmares than I suspected a native to this universe ought to, even after spending much of the day researching the topic on the internet through my brain-computer-interface implant. The consistency of information across every site I found smacked of information control in a way that made me suspect the authorities didn't want people to know too much. Maybe there was a good reason for it, and maybe there wasn't, but I wasn't going to learn it online.

What little I did know was the few bits that every site repeated: Nightmares were physical manifestations of negative human emotions like hatred, anger, and despair given form to spread suffering. I wasn't clear how much of that was metaphorical and how much was literal, but we were talking about magic, so the answer might well be 'yes'.

Akane bustled off to clean another part of the apartment, and I returned my outward attention to lunch while I though things through further. Nightmares are made when someone feels a negative emotion strongly enough. As a mind controller, I can make that happen repeatably in a controlled environment, as could Skinner. Therefore, we can make Nightmares...

...but of course, now my train of thought has to stop at the station of 'But What's The Point Of That?' because I have absolutely no idea what someone would do with a Nightmare once they'd created it. Even assuming Skinner could control it—after all, just because it was spawned from negative emotions doesn't mean it had a psyche she could actually grab hold of—there remained the question of what she'd actually do with the goddamn thing. Skinner might be the poster-child for public perception of dangerous sociopathy, but the grievous harm she did to people was always incidental to some other (admittedly, usually equally evil) goal, whereas—as far as I could learn online—'mindlessly spreading misery' was pretty much the only thing Nightmares were any good at.

Naturally, it would perfectly explain the kind of information control I was inferring if there were Things People Can Do With Nightmares that no one wanted anyone to try. But even if that were the case, it was going to take days, or more likely, weeks of digging to uncover anything of the sort, and that was only the first step in trying to track Skinner down to put a long-overdue bullet somewhere a bit more permanent than her knee. So I was going to be here for a while, and there were a lot worse places to stay than in a recent college graduate's spare bedroom.

Akane seemed to sense my decision, because she paused and sent an expectant look across the kitchen.

"Well," I said as I removed the pan from the heat and started portioning the food out, "far be it for me to talk myself out of a free bed."