"I'm confused," I said. "Didn't you originally suggest we start sharing a bed in order to let Nicky move back into the apartment?"

"That was how I couched the suggestion, yes," Akane said.

"And I agreed," I said.

"Provisionally, with some self-flagellating misgivings," Akane said.

"So why," I asked, "did you go out and purchase a whole-ass four-bedroom house a week later?"

"I promised to take things slow," Akane said, "and that means making sure you have your own space to retreat to whenever you need it."

I couldn't protest too much; having a house like this one, whose yard was currently host to something not unlike a particularly quiet housewarming party, would solve a lot of problems Akane didn't even know I had. I'd already laid claim to the basement—and the fact that it had a basement was a lucky break, given that we were in Austin—so I'd have enough space to start tinkering on projects larger than what I could fit in my pockets, and sneaking out at night to get to work would be a lot easier without having to slip out of a shared bed. Because as lovely as my careful exploration of a relationship with Akane was, I still had a job to do: hunting down the dangerous sociopath who'd tossed me into this universe in the first place.

"While we're on the topic of relationships," Akane added, "I wouldn't mind getting Nicky into bed with us, if you're okay with that."

"I'm right here," Nicky said.

"That's why I said it now," Akane said. "It's rude to talk about people behind their backs, after all."

"...That's distressingly difficult to dispute."

"Nice alliteration."

"Thank you."

I wasn't sure how much Akane meant what she was saying and how much was just her needling an old friend, but I was still way too new to this whole 'maybe not always pushing people away' business to deal with this conversation and thus preferred to ignore it entirely. Also, we were (nominally) in a public setting, even if our 'housewarming party' was only the three of us and one guest.

"You like alliterating," I commented neutrally.

"I find wordplay pleasing, and people profess to prefer palatal patterns to puns," Nicky rattled off smugly, going so far as to emphasize the p in 'wordplay'.

"You did not just come up with that off the top of your head."

"Did so."

I turned to Akane. "Do your magical girl powers let you detect lies?"

"I don't need magic for this one," she said. "She's probably telling the truth. That wasn't even that impressive by Nicky's standards."

"I see, I see," I said. "Okay, I've worked up the nerve to shoot the elephant in the room: why is there a housecat flipping burgers on the George Foreman?"

"That's actually a Traeger grill," Nicky said.

"Excellent work, Detective, you've identified the salient part of my question," I said.

"And he's grilling steaks, not burgers," Akane added.

"Please stop correcting my question and answer it."

"My name," the cat said, in a voice that sounded like it belonged to an ordinary adult human man, "is Silas Marinyakis. I am the Familiar who awoke Veronica's power as a Magical Girl. And now, I'm grilling, because I would much rather be grilling than trying to get ten year olds to follow directions."

"It's like herding cats, isn't it?" I asked.

"Oh, cat puns, wonderful." Silas complained. "You'll get along with Veronica fabulously. If you are going to mock me, would you at least put some thought into it? 'Herding cats' is on the level of 'How's the weather up there?' for unoriginality."

"I apologize purr-fusely."

"Do you not want to learn the recipe for my barbeque sauce? Because I am this close to keeping my secrets to myself."

"Noooo," Akane whined. "Roxy, be good! You need to learn this!"

"What am I, your personal chef?" I asked.

"Is that worse than being her personal maid?" Nicky asked.

"I—okay, I walked into that one."

Rather than further irritate the cook, we spent the rest of the wait for lunch talking about magical girl depictions in games—or rather, Akane and I spent it listening to Nicky complain about 'her' recent release to the popular magical girl gacha game de jour.

"—bad enough that they only gave me A rank in Attack—I deserve an S rating, but I'm not 'popular enough with the kids' to pull at higher than 'uncommon', so I cap out at A—but they shrunk my muscles!"

"I'm surprised they didn't shrink your boobs," I muttered, having called up a promotional image on my phone. Without a physique befitting a full-time gymrat behind it, Gacha-Veronica's bust was even more out of scale than real-Veronica's. Some real 'cross-demographic appeal', that.

Oh, huh, the splash image had a recognizable portrait of Silas in the background. Not sure why that surprised me. Maybe I wasn't expecting 'which familiar worked with which magical girl' to be common knowledge?

Speaking of Silas, he'd made himself scarce the moment he finished his grilling duties. I'd assumed familiars could teleport or something, but no, Nicky called him a taxi. Because people just did that here. I'd been here for just over a week by this point, so seeing the supernatural just 'out and about' in public was still surreal.

On the upside, Akane managed to wheedle Silas' mustard barbeque sauce recipe out of him while he was waiting for the cab, so I now had a free ticket to her heart through her stomach. If I ever had time to spend all day barbequing, anyway, but it wasn't like I had a job I could be late to…

…unless Skinner managed to conquer the world while I was dragging my feet, that is, but God willing, I wouldn't cut it close enough for a day barbequing to make a difference.

"...but as funny as it would be to leak the results of my physical to argue for a buff—and it would be funny—appealing to reality isn't going to change was what a marketing decision to begin with," Nicky concluded around a mouthful of steak. "What are you doing, Akane?"

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Akane, I now noticed, had picked up her plate and was in the middle of wandering out to where the yard gave way to the woods abutting the property. There was no fence, as the woods were a perfectly good border marker for the yard, weren't much easier for a trespasser to defeat than the illusory security of a standard fence, and wouldn't prevent us from enjoying the fact that our yard bordered a nice, not-archetypally-Texan patch of greenery.

Which is exactly what Akane seemed to be doing.

I glanced at Nicky, who answered my unspoken question with a shrug and, "I'd be shocked if there's anything in those woods more dangerous than Akane." So I sat back and watched as Akane stepped a dozen feet or so into the woods and coaxed a random fox into her lap with her leftover steak.

"Oh for fuck's sake," I grumbled. "Akane! I know you're fond of picking up strays"—and yes, I know that was a self own, the point stood—"but I'm pretty sure cooked and seasoned meat isn't good for wild animals!" To say nothing of the parasites they carried and the like, but for all I knew magical girl powers came with answers for that kind of thing so they could have their Disney Princess Wildlife Moments.

"This isn't a wild fox!" Akane called back, picking up the fox—which still had most of a steak in its mouth—and holding it up to show it off. "It's a familiar!"

The fox raised a paw and waved at us exactly like a person might.

"Is it here for Roxy?" Nicky called back.

"Wait, what?" I yelped. "Why would it be 'here for me'?"

"To turn you into a magical girl, of course."

"Oh hell no."

"I think she's a little old for that," Akane said as she arrived back at the table, fox tucked happily under one arm. "Which does beg the question of why she is here, but how about we exchange names first?" She put the fox down on the table and continued, "I'm Akane, and this is Nicky and Roxy."

The fox swallowed the chunk of steak—a stunt that would have choked a non-magical creature its size—then introduced herself. "I'm Lisa Fox."

"Your last name is Fox?" Nicky asked. "Just Fox? No playful pun or anything, just straight up Fox."

"The pun is in her first name," I explained. "You're missing half the obnoxiousness: 'Lisa' isn't just a normal human name, it's also the Russian word for fox."

"See?" Lisa exclaimed. "She gets it!"

Nicky let out the first of many long-suffering sighs in our presence. "Okay. Lisa Fox it is. I hope you don't mind if I ask why a familiar was hanging out in the woods behind our house?"

"Oh, I'm not a familiar anymore," Lisa said. "I quit!"

Somehow, I was the least shocked of the three of us by this declaration.

"You… quit?" Akane said, sounding for all the world like she'd never heard those words used together in that way.

"Why?" Nicky followed up.

Lisa had gone back to annihilating the leftover steak, so we had to wait for her to surface before we got an answer.

"Protest, mostly," Lisa said. "I deserve thumbs, and I'm not going to cooperate until the universe gives in to my demands."

"Your demands… for thumbs."

"And arms, hands, et cetera. I have a human's intelligence; I ought to have a human's ability to interact with the world. At the very least, I'd like to be able to use a knife and fork rather than stuffing my muzzle into a dish like an animal."

"Wait a second," I said. "If familiars can't grasp objects like humans can, how does Silas work a grill?"

Nicky shrugged. "You know, I never asked."

"So why were you in the woods here?" Akane asked Lisa.

"Because I quit," Lisa repeated, as though it should be obvious. "Bailed on my responsibilities, changed my name, and went off to live in the woods."

"You changed your name to Lisa Fox," Nicky said.

"You have a problem with that?"

"You should introduce yourself as Lisa K. Fox," I suggested. "Then claim the 'K' stands for Kitsune."

"I wish I was a kitsune," Lisa grumbled. "They can turn human."

I groaned. "This question is probably going to sound stupid whatever the answer is, but are there real kitsune, or are you speaking hypothetically?"

Akane and Nicky exchanged a glance. "Not that I know of," Akane answered.

"There are magical girls who can turn into animals, including foxes," Lisa said, "which is probably where those kinds of legends come from, but as far as I know, things like kitsune, werewolves, and the like are just myths on this plane."

"And familiars are generally the experts when it comes to magic," Akane added. "That's kind of their role in things."

"Magical girls are the muscle and we're the brains," Lisa said.

"You're the reference manual," Nicky said snippishly, then returned to the interrogation. "Did you have a plan for what to do after quitting beyond 'rough it in the woods at the edge of town'?"

"I thought if normal foxes can manage it, then I, a much smarter fox, should be fine, right?"

"And how did that work out for you?" Nicky asked.

Lisa's ears drooped. "I missed cooked food more than I expected. And heating. And people. And I might have been a little too proud to admit it until I was offered barbeque."

"This is grilled steak, actually," I said. "Barbequing takes a lot longer."

Lisa turned to Akane to ask, "Is everyone here this pedantic?"

"Yes," all three of us said.

"Perfect," she said, then turned a pleading face towards Nicky, the clear holdout in the 'adopt a talking fox' discussion.

"Akane," Nicky said warningly.

"There's more than enough space in my house," Akane said.

"We already have one roommate who doesn't pay rent."

"I make enough merchandising money from lunchboxes alone to cover Roxy's hypothetical rent."

"Wait," I said. "I can own my very own Akane Sakurai lunchbox?"

"Are you planning to use it as the basis for 'eating out' jokes?" Akane asked.

"I am now," I said.

"Then you specifically are forbidden from owning your very own Akane Sakurai lunch box on the basis that the picture on the lunchbox is me at thirteen years old."

"Yech," I said, having failed to consider the obvious issue of linear time. "Point well made… wait, hang on. Either I'm wildly overestimating how many magical girls there are in the world because I live with two of them, or something weird is going on—who the fuck is buying that much decade-old merchandise of you?"

"Both, I'd think," Akane said. "First off, you're living with one magical girl—of only four active magical girls in the entire greater Austin area—and one retired magical girl. Second, it isn't how much stuff people are buying but how much they're willing to pay for it. Collectors love out-of-production products, and I 'generously' took possession of all the spare inventory when I aged out of popularity. I've been trickling my old merch out ever since."

"Why doesn't everyone do that?" I asked.

"Everyone does do it because it works."

"Everyone who got popular enough for it to be worth it and who can be bothered to manage a massive pile of plastic crap does it," Nicky corrected her, "which is fewer people than you might think."

"I'm the mascot for a local storage unit rental company for a reason," Akane said.

"Reminds me of a guy who had a little mini-warehouse in his crawlspace, full of glass klein bottles, and a custom-built remote-control forklift to fetch them for him," I remarked. "It's a very different situation, but you did remind me of it."

"I think you might just have ADHD," Nicky said.

"She might not be the only one," Lisa said, who had begun helping herself to Nicky's steak while we were all distracted.

"Oh, for the love of—fine!" Nicky grumbled, throwing up her hands. "Help yourself, Lisa Fox."

"Lisa K Fox," Lisa corrected her.

"This is your fault," Nicky informed me.