"When I told Akane she'd get along fine without me," Veronica said, "I didn't realize I was consigning some poor bystander to the task of 'live-in maid'."

"I'm really more of a 'live-in reminder that this space is supposed to be live-able'," I replied. "Akane doesn't make me do all the cleaning, and even if she did, it'd be far from the worst job I've worked in either duties or pay."

Akane had offhandedly mentioned during her frantic cleaning that her ex-roommate was a fellow magical girl, and despite her own flaunting of magical girl stereotypes, I'd still had certain expectations for what said roommate would be like. It was six in the evening on Saturday, and Veronica Vega, the ex-roommate in question, had walked in the door five minutes ago and promptly shattered every on of those expectations. She looked even less like the archetypical magical girl than Akane did, for some of the same reasons: Veronica would have looked more at home in a universe of superheroes as the Supergirl Knockoff—specifically, one drawn by a fanartist who liked big muscles, bigger tits, and albinism. In fact, I'd go so far as to say she was one of the least 'magical girl'-looking women I'd seen in my entire life, which made the fact that she was not only Akane's former 'peer' but, unlike Akane, still actively practicing (or whatever the term was)… incongruous, to say the least.

"I hope this isn't terribly insensitive to say," I ventured, "but neither of you fit the image of 'magical girl' I had in my head."

"With the same sentiment," Veronica replied, "that's little better than a roundabout way of saying you're ignorant about 'magical girls' in general."

I shrugged, unperturbed. "I was hoping I was being subtle about it but… yeah, I really don't know much of anything about magical girls beyond the blindingly obvious." Living with Akane hadn't taught me much. I wasn't sure if it was because she was retired, because she was subtle, or just because I'd been here for barely three days, but thus far it wasn't much different from rooming with someone with above-average emotional intelligence. (And given the emotional intelligence of the average person, that wasn't even a particularly impressive bar to clear. I used to have a telepathy implant—which I'd long since gotten rid of because I hadn't had any use for it—so I had a pretty accurate frame of reference for such things.)

Which was not to say that Akane was a 'normal' roommate: she was, without a doubt, the most physically affectionate person I'd ever cohabitated with. I suspected her magical empathy had assessed me as being touch-starved, but I wasn't going to attribute her frequent (and if I was being honest, more than welcome) hugs to her being a magical girl when it was possible she was just 'like that'.

"Beyond the media darlings, you mean," Veronica said.

"To be honest, not even those."

"Really?" She frowned as she looked me up and down. "I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense…"

"Dare I ask?"

"At the risk of poking personal details you'd rather I pretended not to know, you neither read nor dress like a person who revels in optimism and the joy of living a vibrant life, which is most of what the modern magical girl 'brand' deals in."

I was tempted to ask what I did read like, but I was—barely, and with great effort and greater scars—someone with 'more than average emotional intelligence', so I wisely did not ask a near-total stranger to recite my trauma to me and instead focused on literally any other part of that sentence.

"What's wrong with the way I dress?" I was wearing a perfectly normal button-down shirt and jeans under… a trenchcoat. Okay, she was still being unfair, but it was unfairness founded in social biases against practical clothing choices rather than being completely out of left field. "Actually, don't answer that." I reached for a topic less critical of my lifestyle choices and found: "What do magical girls do all day?"

Akane was retired from the scene and currently in graduate school, so living with her hadn't answered that question, either. Obviously, I could have asked, but I'd never found a good time to raise the topic, and my lack of knowledge meant I also didn't know how likely those sorts of questions were to hit a very insistently retired magical girl's sore spots. Veronica, on the other hand, was still working as a magical girl and someone I was unlikely to see on a regular basis and thus mildly safer to pester.

"It depends on what king of duties the magical girl chooses to take on. Myself, I spend good days sitting in a tiny little rented office waiting for an emergency that never appears, and bad days dealing with emergencies that do appear."

"And by 'emergencies', you mean…"

"Nightmares, mostly," Veronica said. "These muscles aren't entirely for show."

"What about Akane?" I asked. "When she was an active magical girl?"

"Akane is a lot closer to the media's 'ideal' magical girl," Veronica said with a hint of scorn towards the latter. "She's more focused on prevention and outreach: intervening before people's problems can grow bad enough to summon a Nightmare in the first place."

"The 'ideal' magical girl…?"

"Idols," Veronica said dismissively. "These days, it's all idols. Violence is out of favor; now it's all, peace and love!" She threw out a bitingly sarcastic victory sign. "These fads tend to last thirty to forty years or so, so we'll be dealing with this for a while yet. I admit I do, in fact, like having the privileges associated with being a magical girl in good standing with the media circus and all it entails, but I do not like the line I have to toe for it. Regardless, Akane is—or was—a lot more into the 'community outreach' and 'crisis intervention' parts of magical girl-ing than I ever was. Stopping to bother people in the supermarket about their problems is entirely in character for her."

"So dragging me off to be her roommate is magical girl business," I said.

Veronica paused, a small grimace on her face.

"I did not mean to imply that you were a charity case. There are a great many ways to alleviate someone's issues that do not involve hassling them until they move in with you. Akane must have seen something in you that she liked."

"And you don't."

She grimaced again.

"Do you know what the worst part of the soul-reading magical girls get is?"

"Always knowing exactly who's just sucking up to you for their own ends?" I guessed.

"Just so," Veronica said. "I don't know how much Akane has told you about me, but I've cultivated an 'aloof' personality because I cannot bear the indignity of treating scheming parasites like valued friends, and with the need to maintain a consistent affect between interviews and public appearances, I'm afraid it has become a habit. Don't take it as a personal judgment."

"We did just meet," I noted. "Akane's relentless friendliness has been… startling, and a little alarming. This is almost refreshing."

Veronica looked skeptical, but she didn't challenge the assertion.

"So," I said, "what was 'in' with magical girls before this 'idol' stuff?"

"From the 70s through the 90s, it was all 'nature' and 'flowers'," she answered. "Then, sometime in the noughts, corporate interests told the whole environmental angle to sit down and shut up, which eventually morphed and stabilized into this… dross."

As someone from a universe where corporations remained blessedly unaware of (and thus uninvolved in) the supernatural, the question of how corporate interests would corrupt the 'institution' of 'girls what do magic' was simultaneously dreadful and dull. Dreadful because there were few, if any, limits to what corporations would sink to in their pursuit of the almighty dollar and still fewer limits to what weird supernatural powers could do with the right incentives, and dull because the world was still here and more or less as it was back home, so whatever they'd done hadn't rocked the boat much.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Maybe I would care more if I knew what the 'institution' in question was. How did a girl become a magical girl? Were there magical boys? Precisely how much gender essentialism was present in this world's conception of magic?

Questions for later, because I was, in fact, capable of having a normal, mostly-linear conversation when I put my mind to it. "You'd rather the environmentalist stuff stuck around?" I guessed.

"No, that's not for me, either. Not to be one of those 'I was born in the wrong era' girls, but I think I would have fit in a lot better a couple eras earlier, when a big chunk of magical girl-ing was antifascist praxis. Some people are as big a problem as any Nightmare—bigger, even, now that it's no longer acceptable to punch them until they stop spreading harm."

It was really unfortunate that I was undercover as 'random bystander Akane adopted with no noteworthy red flags', because I had a lot to say regarding the contrasting pleasures and tribulations of punching shitty people in the face for great justice and my brain absolutely wanted to share all of goddamn it why does my ADHD show up in the stupidest ways?

"You certainly look the part," I said. It kind of slipped out while I was distracted by not blurting out anything compromising, and also did I mention the absurd muscles on this woman's arms? And the rest of her, but she was wearing a t-shirt that made the arms an extremely accessible exhibit on the topic, especially after my comment caused her to pose like one of those old Rosie the Riveter posters, or whatever equivalent this world had had.

"Akane said something similar," Veronica said as she inspected her own (quite impressive) muscles.

"What did I say?" Akane came in from the kitchen as though summoned by her True Name, arms loaded with milkshakes for the three of us. The one she handed Veronica proved capable of melting the latter's frosty exterior despite itself being taxonomically a 'frozen treat'; I ended up having to explain the conversation on my own, as Veronica spent the time entirely devoted to her shake.

"Ah, yes," Akane said. "I remember telling her I thought she'd seen a few too many of those old wartime propaganda posters."

"And then set out to get ripped?" I asked.

"Not 'set out' so much as… how much do you know about magical girls?"

"Nothing I haven't learned from being your roommate," I answered, "which amounts to little more than 'having a magical girl for a roommate isn't much different from any other roommate.'" Other than them being absurdly trusting, I didn't add.

Akane nodded and launched into an explanation. "Well, you see, one of the perks of becoming a magical girl is that we heal really, really well. Not every magical girl goes out and fights Nightmares as a full-time job—there's a lot more to spreading hope and joy than fighting antithetical manifestations—but all of us need to be ready and able to do so in an emergency."

"By 'well', do you mean 'really fast', or…?"

"Speed is a big part of it," Akane agreed, "but we also never scar, can grow back fingers, and things like that."

"Perfect healing," I summarized.

Veronica surfaced from her milkshake to add, "Better than perfect, according to some."

I had a hunch as to what she was implying, but I decided to play along and ask the expected question. "What's better than perfect?"

"One prevailing theory for the mechanism in question," Akane explained, "which I was getting to, is that we don't merely heal back to our 'normal' state but all the way to our 'ideal' state. Of course, 'ideal' is highly subjective. One of my friends is doing her postgrad study on the effects of magical girl media saturation on magical girls. She thinks overexposure to magical girl celebrities at a young age will effect later generations of—"

"Akane," Veronica chided her. Akane flushed red and did her best to hide behind the straw in her milkshake, which worked not at all.

"So," I said, drawing out the word as I considered the implications of this exposition session, "you're saying you two look like you do because you consciously or unconsciously want to look that way?"

"I was exposed to way too much anime as a kid," Akane admitted, then sent a prompting glance at Veronica.

"I'm basically the opposite of everything my mom wanted me to be," Veronica said.

I raised an eyebrow. "Dare I ask?"

"Are you aware of child pageants?"

"Sadly."

"Yeah." She let out a grumbling sigh. "I grew up being poked, prodded, and plastered into the perfect, petite little plush pet—"

"Nice alliteration."

"Thank you. Now I'm six feet of muscle with a chest no one would ever mistake for a child's. I might have gone a little overboard, but no one has ever accused me of being subtle."

"And the albinism?" I asked before I could think better of it.

Rather than taking offense, Veronica seemed a little proud as she declared, "I refused to let society take this from me."

"Our healing won't fix anything we don't consider a problem," Akane said. "I've worked with deaf magical girls, ameliac magical girls—"

"'Amelia' is the medical term for the condition of being born missing part or all of a limb," Veronica cut in, not knowing that I knew that. "We can heal conditions we're born with, there are countless examples of it, but very few magical girls keep acquired injuries or disabilities, so…"

"So most 'kept' conditions are congenital, the way you chose to keep your albinism," I said.

She so-so'd with the hand not holding her near-empty milkshake. "It's not a conscious choice. What matters is that I never disliked my coloration. I disliked the sun sensitivity and poor vision, so those are history, but why should I change how I look?"

"She told me the first thing her mother asked when Veronica became a magical girl was, 'Does this mean you can fix your skin?'" Akane recalled.

"That almost certainly contributed to it," Veronica said. "I am nothing if not contrary and petty when threatened."

"I see." I did not see, not really—I'd done a lot of work on my body, but it was, by definition, work I had done, with design and intent. Given how long I'd spent as an unknowing, self-closeted trans woman, I found the idea of a body just changing itself for you in ways you wanted but without your conscious input strange and more than a little uncomfortable.

I did, however, know that family issues were a thorny topic I saw no reason to dwell on and so endeavored to move the topic along to pretty much anything else. I'd finished my milkshake, so I set the empty glass on the nearby table and signed, «Do you know American Sign Language?»

Both women nodded. "Not just for dealing with other magical girls," Akane added, signing the same message as a demonstration. "A magical girl needs to be able to communicate with people in an emergency, especially if those wouldn't be able to easily communicate with other first responders or bystanders for one reason or another."

"It's why I know Spanish, Korean, and Quebecois French," Veronica chimed in. "Why did you learn ASL?"

"Family."

"Oh."

Once again eager to change the topic, I carried on, "So Akane mentioned you moved out because you were leaving Austin…"

"That was the plan," Veronica confirmed. "I wanted to see the world a bit before I picked somewhere to settle down and take permanent residence, and with magic and the unreasonable piles of money I make from merchandising, traveling is pretty easy. Unfortunately, there's been some weirdness here over the last week or so, and since I'm a ten-year veteran magical girl who already knows the area, I was the obvious choice to deal with it."

"...What kind of 'weirdness'?" I asked, doing my best to appear only-usually-nervous about 'weird supernatural bullshit'.

Veronica shrugged. "If I knew that, my job would be half done. Given the feeling I've gotten, my best guess is an unlicensed interdimensional transferal, since a Nightmare Gate would be impossible to miss."

"Interdimensional travel and connections to the Nightmare Realm are nearly the same phenomena," Akane added, "just pointing in different directions."

I filed away the fact that there was apparently an entire Nightmare Realm—a fact which every resource on the internet carefully omitted—and then pretended I'd missed what appeared to be a breach of The Masquerade and/or OPSEC in favor of another, simultaneously 'more innocent' and 'more critical' bit of information.

"How dangerous are interdimensional travelers?" I asked, subtly.

Veronica shrugged again. "Depends where they're from and why they're here. Interdimensional smuggling is typically a white-collar crime, but there are other universes with their own supernatural predators, and some of them are nasty."

Which was why interdimensional travel was so heavily regulated as to be functionally banned just about everywhere. The sad thing was, the Treaty was as much about keeping magical girls from dealing with other universes' 'supernatural predator' infestations as it was about keeping vampires and such from becoming a problem here. Politics, natch.

Akane noticed my poor mood (and hopefully misattributed the cause) and changed the subject. "So you're sticking around?" she asked Veronica. "You're back in Austin?"

"For a few months, at least," Veronica confirmed. "I actually dropped by to ask for my room back, but…"

And now I was the elephant in the room.