Alas, for all the wondrous magic of love, I still had a job to do. And almost exactly six months to the day after my arrival, I finally got the chance to do it.
I only had the barest outlines of a guess as to what Skinner's actual plan was, and if she'd been any less overconfident in her abilities, I may well have arrived too late to do anything about it. To be honest, I was pretty sure she either didn't realize she'd sent me to the same dimension she was interested in, or didn't realize I was still at large, because while her anti-scanning fields were good enough to block me from seeing inside the building, she hadn't taken the eminently reasonable step of preventing me from scanning for anti-scanning fields. If I hadn't had the back luck to start my sweep on the exact opposite side of the city, I could've been here months ago.
On the other hand, if Lisa hadn't helped me boost the range on my scanners fourfold at great cost to our house stock of ibuprofen, it would've taken me another two months to get here instead.
Regardless, I had the advantage of surprise—an advantage I was careful to maintain as I crept through the rented office she was using as a front an hour after sundown, painstakingly suborning each and every security system as I crossed its path. Skinner was definitely not getting the deposit back on this place, seeing as she'd retrofitted it into what could have been a parody of an evil villain lair if I thought she'd done it with the faintest hint of irony. She'd knocked out the center of the second floor and most of the walls, creating a sort of catwalk around the upper level and leaving the center double-height area hollow, then paneled over the carpet and drywall with enough metal and assorted greebling to draw a lawsuit from whoever made sets for James Bond movies. If you asked me, she could have saved herself a lot of renovating if she'd just started with a warehouse—but then again, I'd started with warehouses when I'd chosen where to hunt for her, so maybe there was some method in her madness after all.
This was a big building—unnecessarily so for her purposes, judging by how much of it was empty—but all the security systems fed into one place, and I wouldn't look for a control freak like Skinner anywhere else. I was almost right; Dr. Beatrice Skinner was just leaving the security office she'd made out of a corner office on the second floor to take a look around the premises herself, perhaps sensing something amiss with her security systems. She was looking the wrong way, though, so I crept from shadow to graciously-provided shadow as I closed in for the kill.
And then Nicky came through the goddamn second-floor wall.
"Don't worry, Roxy!" she bellowed. "We're coming to save…"
Nicky trailed off, the dust of her entrance having cleared enough for her to make out Skinner, currently smirking from within a force-field bubble projected by the gadget she'd pulled out of a pocket, as well as me, caught mid-creep down the catwalk with one hand on the pistol under my own coat.
She at least had the good graces to look embarrassed about foiling my ambush, especially after Akane and Lisa piled through the hole she'd left in the side of the building and saw the situation for themselves.
"Well, well, Doctor Updyke," Skinner drawled. "How nice of you to drop in. And you even brought some test subjects with you for my latest masterpiece!"
"You're a Doctor?" Nicky asked.
"Not now, Nicky," I snapped. I took the opportunity to shut down Skinner's safety bubble, but she simply tossed aside the sparking device with a shrug, secure in whatever other tricks she had up her sleeve.
"I have to admit," Skinner continued, "I thought I'd find you before you found me. But I have goals here beyond pursuing our tired old rivalry, so I hope you'll forgive me for not putting you at the top of my list."
"Really?" I asked. "Because it looks like you've done a fat lot of nothing for the last six months." I straightened from my crouch and took my hand off my gun, the better to lull her into a false sense of security. The ambush was a bust, but I'd take any information I could bluff out of her as a consolation prize, and true to form, she started monologuing.
"I don't think you've seen enough of the picture to judge, my tired little rival. Do you even know why I chose this universe, out of all the ones I could reach?"
"Nightmares," I growled. "You're trying to control nightmares."
My would-be rescuers turned deathly serious as the accusation, but Skinner burst into mocking laughter. "Oh, Doctor Updyke, you always did think so small. Why would an unparalleled genius like myself settle for the second highest thing on the food chain?"
I blinked. "Wait, you mean…"
"Magical girls. Defenders of peace and love. Soon to be defenders of my peace and my love."
I was this close to giving Skinner back her 'mocking laughter' treatment because that was the worst plan I have ever heard.
"You do realize that one of the defining features of magical girls as a supernatural entity—the one that makes them so goddamn annoying to deal with that they aren't welcome almost anywhere else—is that they are incredibly resistant just about everything, right?"
"Lacking vision as always, Doctor Updyke!" Skinner gloated. "Where do they get their supernatural power?"
"Magic?!?" I answered.
"Emotions!" Skinner yelled back. "So easy to manipulate, even boring old 'conventional' science is halfway to mastery—and I'm anything but normal!"
"You've got that right, lady," Lisa said.
Skinner ignored her. "Take away their love and joy, and they're nothing more than children. Give it back under the right conditions, and they can power a city!"
"That doesn't make you an outside context problem, though," I said.
"Does it not?"
"You really ought to rot your mind a little, Doctor," I answered. "Trying to harness magical girls as batteries is so standard a mid-season villain plot it's become a cliche in the genre."
"Well, of course it won't work if you just try to cage them, but if they're willing… Girls? Kill Doctor Updyke."
Lisa swayed slightly as the recoil from resisting the mind-control mojo messed with her balance… and that was as close as Skinner got to grabbing any of us. Lisa was a magical spirit from the same well magical girls' powers came from, I had an implant to resist exactly these sorts of effects, and both Akane and Lisa were magical girls—which were, again, so damn infamous for being magical hard targets that only someone with a truly staggering level of hubris would even attempt something like that, much less hinge an entire plot on it.
Skinner was, somehow, undeterred. "Ah, well," she said. "Every failure is a step on the road to success. Once I perfect my mind-control technology…"
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"I'm going to stop you there," Akane interrupted. "My first week as a magical girl, I had to deal with a Nightmare Prince mind-controlling one of my mothers to send me to their mind-control summer camp. Less than a month later, it was mind-control music CDs. Then mind-control perfume. Mind-control earrings-"
"But-" Skinner started.
"Mind control glasses!" Akane carried on. "Mind-control paintings! Mind-control instant noodles!"
"What?" Skinner asked. "You mean… through the taste, or chem-"
"Mind-control hand lotion! Mind-control chewing gum!"
"I-"
"I haven't even covered my first year as a magical girl!" Akane yelled.
"How long-"
"Eight! Years!"
Skinner flapped her mouth like a fish for a second.
"I… may need to revise my plan," she admitted.
This time I did laugh, though I limited it to a chuckle rather than a cackle. "It's like seeing a fox break into a henhouse, only to learn it was an alligator pen instead."
"Racist," Lisa complained. Nicky dope-slapped her on the back of the head.
"Well, this plan may have had more holes than you've put in the building," Skinner concluded, "but I can always try again."
"I don't think so," Akane said.
Skinner scoffed. "Despite Doctor Updyke's foolhardy assumptions, I did do my research. I know you magical girls never kill your enemies, and I have no plans to surrender willingly. So without further ado—"
And that was the last thing she ever said before a gunshot solved the problem permanently.
"Roxy!" Nicky shouted in consternation, only to realize, belatedly, that my hands were still empty and my gun still beneath my coat.
"I," Akane growled, carefully lowering the .22 rimfire revolver that had just put a pretty little hole in Skinner's forehead, "am retired."
Ten seconds passed in dead silence.
"Not that I'm criticizing, because I absolutely would have shot her if you hadn't," I began, "but are you sure there aren't going to be any issues from having a magical girl"—
"Retired magical girl," Akane insisted.
—"having a retired magical girl cap someone in the head in cold blood?"
Akane shrugged. "Morally, we all know she only failed to commit truly unforgivable crimes through her own incompetence, and legally, magical girls are authorized to 'use any powers or abilities at our disposal to stop, contain, or eliminate supernatural threats to the populace', which a demiurge like her absolutely was. So no, I do not foresee any issues."
"Even though you're retired?"
Akane huffed. "That just means I'm not beholden to some middle manager's ideas of 'marketable' behavior and won't have to put up with passive-aggressive corporate disapproval."
"Right…" I took a deep breath, then carefully placed my hands on the railing around the giant hole in the second-story floor, where they would be in full view as I put the last chapter of this misadventure to rest. "Well… in the interest of full disclosure, you should know... I am also a demiurge."
Akane and Nicky exchanged a confused glance.
"Uh, yeah, we know," Akane said.
"What."
"You weren't exactly subtle about it," Nicky said.
"How was I not?" I protested.
"You run weird errands at all hours," Lisa said.
"You filled the basement with nonsensical tools," Akane added.
"You turned Lisa into a fox-girl," Nicky continued.
I sputtered. "I—the—she said that wouldn't be suspicious!"
"I lied!" Lisa crowed, sporting the world's largest shit-eating grin.
Nicky grinned and leaned over to ruffle Lisa's hair. "Yeah, I'm going to be honest with you, Roxy: I didn't realize you thought you being a demiurge was a secret."
"Then why didn't you ever mention it?" I asked.
"I could tell you didn't want to talk about it," Nicky said with a shrug. "I figured you didn't like talking about work when you're off the clock."
"Work–?" I sputtered. "What even did you think my job was?"
"Some kind of private eye thing, given the hours you keep and your whole… you know." She waved a hand at my aesthetic.
"You leave my trenchcoat out of this."
----------------------------------------
"Anyone else want to try?" Akane asked as the video came to a close.
The four of us were down in the mad science basement under the house, cuddled on a couch Lisa had helped Akane drag down from the family room for the demonstration of the latter's recently completed mad science toy. Akane was in the hot seat, cuddled on all sides, with myself on her left and Lisa on her right.
"Oh, me! Me!" Lisa said. "What if… Akane was a magical girl?"
"We just did that one," I said. "And Futurama already did the 'but I wanna watch it again' joke with their What If machine—and on that note: Akane, for subjecting me to half an hour of deepfaked real-person fanfic, you are banned from reproducing fictional gizmos for a month."
"Awww," Akane whined.
"What if Roxy wasn't such a killjoy?" Lisa asked the badly adulterated old CRT TV.
"No," I insisted.
"You know," Nicky observed from her spot draped across our laps, "I can't help but notice that Magical Girl Akane had a way easier time getting us all into bed. She got Roxy in under a week!"
"Yeah, well"—I poked her in the forehead—"A, our magical girl universe counterparts don't have a mentor-student power dynamic making things complicated; B, you hypothesized a universe in which the fundamental nature of magic promotes good mental health; and, C, shut up."
"Well now I have to ask if we have magical girl universe counterparts," Nicky said, rubbing the spot I'd poked. "How accurate is this thing, exactly?"
"A scanner capable of producing accurate, useful oracular answers to hypothetical questions would be a masterwork worthy of a true legend in the field of Scanners," I answered. "Unless Akane has jumped several levels straight up while I wasn't looking, this is a mad-science version of one of those fiction-writing neural networks, probably trained on pop culture and Akane's own memories. Is that about right?"
"More or less," Akane agreed. "The biggest 'mad science' component to the device is that it seeds its generation with a non-invasive, surface-level scan of the expectations the audience forms in reaction to the spoken prompt to better cater to the viewership."
"Nifty."
"That explains the plot holes," Lisa said.
"Pardon?" Akane asked.
"The early narration spent a full minute on the mindless destructivity of Nightmares only for magical-girl-you to bring up their royalty during the climax. Conflicting ideas of 'magical girl enemies', right? Sailor Moon versus… whatever other people were thinking of."
"You were thinking of Sailor Moon, huh?" Nicky asked. "That explains where all the in-context mind control came from…"
"Maybe the existence of more intelligent Nightmares is a secret?" Akane suggested. "Part of the whole 'information control' thing? Hypothetical-Roxy noted that there was no public mention their 'Nightmare Realm'."
"Maybe," Lisa replied, "but you know that sounds just like a fan trying to paper over shoddy writing with 'but it was on purpose', right?"
Akane pouted. "Everyone's a critic."
"On the bright side," I said, wrapping an arm around her, "attracting art criticism implies the thing being criticized is 'art'."
"Yay."
"It's still a very fun toy," Nicky reassured her.
"Oh, speaking of the narration," Lisa continued, "if this thing scans our brains, then does that mean-"
I cut her off before she could finish the accusation.
"My internal narration is nothing like that!"