Magical Girl Overtime [Second Arc Complete!]

July 2008

“A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,

Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;

And as with age his body uglier grows,

So his mind cankers. I will plague them all

Even to roaring.”

Maria took a deep breath and lowered the script after her recital, with her teacher and the other students watching her. As she stood in the spotlight, and they watched from the audience’s seats, she couldn’t make out their expressions, and thus what they thought of her performance just now.

After a few suffocating moments, they clapped for her, while her teacher got up and walked up to her.

“Very good, Hattori. I have a few minor critiques here and there, but with some time and adjustments, you should be able to play the part of Prospero to perfection,” she spoke with an encouraging smile, and Maria bowed her head a little.

“I like Caliban more, but I’ll gladly play Prospero as well.”

“Oh? Caliban? Why is that?”

“I feel a little sorry for him. I think he is the real victim here, and Prospero is wrong. People aren’t born evil,” she spoke while giving her teacher an awkward smile.

“An admirable point of view, but an actress needs to be able to put herself in the shoes of her characters, so I’d like you to entertain Prospero’s point of view, at least a little bit. You don’t have to agree with it for real, of course, but you should build an understanding where he is coming from with what he’s saying.”

Maria nodded, and just at that moment, the doors to the small theater opened. Maria smiled as she recognized the man who entered. A man in a business suit, sharply dressed and attractive – this could be none other than her father, the CEO of Hattori Fashion, her biggest supporter alongside her mother.

“Well, looks like time is up,” her teacher spoke, dismissing Maria with a little gesture. She clapped her hands and called the next person up on stage. Maria would have loved to watch them, but she had a feeling that if her father was early like this, it was something important, so she immediately grabbed her things and joined him.

Something was wrong; she could tell that much from the awkward silence between them as they walked to the car. It persisted throughout the first five minutes of their drive home and only broke as Maria grabbed her phone to text her mother about her rehearsal.

“Maria… your mother, she…”

Maria put the phone down again, looking at her father. Tears ran down his cheeks as he clenched his jaw, then he gave up holding back what he was about to say.

“There was a car accident. She’s gone… I’m so sorry, Maria…”

***

June 2009

Maria and her father swore to support each other to get through these hard times after her mother’s loss, but soon something was utterly wrong with him. He refused to sleep, complaining about nightmares, and shortly after, he started drinking. The once attractive man who had to stop advances from other women, citing his marriage, gained weight and appeared unshaven in public, in stained days-old clothing. People started to avoid him, and he in turn avoided people.

Worst of all, Maria could feel some strange resentment towards herself coming from him. Her father went from an adoring parent to an alcoholic abuser.

“You’ve been taking acting classes again, haven’t you?” he asked, having cornered her in the living room. His breath reeked of booze, and Maria had to turn her head away to stop herself from retching.

“I told you to quit that school! You’re not going to be an actress! You’re my only child, and you’ve got to take over the business when I die…!” he slurred his words, before he suddenly smashed a bottle on the wall next to her.

“Don’t you fucking look at me that way, Maria!” he shouted.

“It’s your acting classes’ fault! Your mother put so much of herself into trying to make that shit work for you, and for what? It exhausted her! It’s probably why she got into that accident in the first place! She fell asleep on the wheel!”

Another bottle smashed against the wall. Their neighbor knocked on the door and yelled at her father to keep it down, but he didn’t react. All he could think about was to keep chastising Maria.

“You killed her! You’re going to take responsibility! You’ll learn the craft! You’ll take over! And if you can’t do it, I’ll marry you off to someone who can!”

Maria couldn’t argue back. It would only enrage him further. She took the abuse. She took the occasional beatings from his belt, only finding brief comfort in books about acting she hid away, and a few flowerpots with foxgloves which her late mother left behind, that she watered in her memory.

Until the day she decided to poison her father with these plants, she simply thought that the shock of losing her mother made him turn out like this. And she would live with that assumption for many more years.

***

April 2016

Maria’s office was filled with the squeals and moans of a young woman. A model, or an aspiring one, at the very least. Hopeful, with a sparkle in her eyes, ready to reach for her dreams with both hands.

Until she came into Maria’s office today, that was. Maria hated those who were able to pursue their dreams like this. Her own was shattered, and in his effort to dissuade Maria from pursuing acting any further, her father had her withdraw from the acting school she attended, making it sound to the teachers like she only ever tried it out on a whim. Now that he was dead, his phantom still lingered; other prestigious schools, those that would accept an adult, had one look at her history, being a shameful dropout from a prestigious school for the youth, and sent her home with an insincere ‘we’ll get back to you’.

She had no other choice but to do what her old man had planned for her and took over the company, but it didn’t mean that she couldn’t at least have some fun while she was doing it.

Said fun was lying bent over her work desk, taking deep breaths while Maria already got herself properly dressed again.

“Well, that wasn’t half bad,” she commented, and the girl grimaced.

“Does that mean you’ll… consider me for the job?”

Maria looked at the pretty thing, considering her words. The moment that girl came in here, she wanted to shatter her dream. Her blabbering about her love for modeling, her wish to do it for Hattori Fashion in particular, it all enraged Maria.

Having dreams is useless. I was taught that painfully often. Who are you to come in here and rub it in my face? After I was beaten for daring to dream?

She declined and wanted to send the girl packing, and from there things escalated to where they were now. ‘I’ll do anything,’ the girl said, or at least that’s what Maria took away from her pleading, and she wanted to test the girl on this, leading to their dubious sexual encounter.

“Maybe not for modeling,” Maria commented, giving the girl a slap on her still presented butt. Said girl tried her best not to let out a yelp before she looked at the ground, defeated.

“Then what for? Your mistress or something?”

“Not quite. You didn’t lie about your age on your resume, did you?”

“No.”

“Then you might do well in AVs.”

The suggestion shocked the girl, who swallowed audibly, before she looked Maria in the eyes.

“You can’t be serious…”

“Oh, I am very serious. It won’t be glamorous, but you have the looks, and you have the… talent.”

“You’re a truly rotten woman, aren’t you?” The girl spoke quietly, getting up and getting herself dressed again before she walked out, though she stopped at the door.

“I’ll… think about it. I’m still ready to do anything to make you acknowledge me.”

“Good girl,” Maria responded – she grinned as she saw a little blush on the young woman’s face before she left, slamming the door to make her disapproval thoroughly known.

Rotten. That’s one way to put it.

She turned around and faced a framed portrait of the late CEO – her father – and gritted her teeth.

He was a devil. Why wouldn’t I be as well? It is in my nature, as his spawn.

Maria truly believed herself to be a born monster. Until that creature called Fames revealed to her in a dark cell that her and her dark brood of cousins were behind it all, to nurture her into the resentful woman she turned out to be.

Father Winter’s Embrace, 6310

Seika and the annoying idols had left, leaving Maria alone with the monster in front of her. Her visage was that of a predator being all too sure that she had her prey cornered; an expression which Maria knew all too well, having made it under her mask many times.

“Do you really think you can beat me? My kind gave you those powers!” Fames shouted her way. More of those dark tendrils shot Maria’s way, who used her wings to nimbly fly aside and slash the tracking appendages with her scythe.

She was painfully aware that her power in this confrontation was severely limited. Fames confronted her alone, with no elven guards to be found anywhere, and thus she wouldn’t have her dream shapes at her beck and call to assist her, though she doubted their efficiency in this fight in the first place.

She barely dodged another tendril that shot her way, and it grazed her. She felt a distinct pang deep in her stomach after withdrawing from it.

Hunger’s cruel grip.

Her superhuman physiology kept her from succumbing to the feeling, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant, either. She flew in a zigzag pattern, slashing and hacking away at the many tendrils, as Fames’ shrill laughter filled the theater.

“Oh, how I longed to be able to do this! To kill this useless pawn with my own hands! Every one of your failures set us back months, or even years, and finally, you will pay the price!”

Maria dodged yet another group of tendrils, piercing one with the tip of her scythe and accelerating towards the dark goddess below while ripping it open lengthwise.

“You sure love the sound of your irritating voice too much!” she screamed, ripping her scythe out of the dying tendril to take a swing at the goddesses’ neck. She was almost certain that this would be a lethal strike, until she heard the clang of her obsidian blade hitting steel, and saw the goddess parrying the strike with her dagger.

Fames growled, pushing against Maria’s scythe with all her might, and she felt herself being pushed back.

This spindly bitch is much stronger than she looks.

Maria pulled her scythe back and struck Fames against the temple with the weapon’s grip before she brought some distance between the two of them. The dark goddess looked more offended than anything else, hissing as she held her dagger pointed towards Maria.

“You still don’t know your place, little pawn. And if you weren’t so incompetent, none of this would have ever happened. If you had struck true to kill the mother of the abomination, then you could have gone back to fulfilling your perverse desires with the loose women you’re so fond of, until the moment we smash the worlds together!”

Maria’s eye twitched, though she didn’t fall for the provocation, keeping a cautious distance and an eye out for any further ‘tendrils’ that might come her way. And as she expected, the cursed tendrils were sprouting from the dark goddesses’ back, and would have surely struck her if she had jumped back in.

“Oh my, getting cautious, are we?” the villainess mocked her, and Maria grimaced in return. She wanted to rip this woman’s throat out. She wanted to hack her into tiny pieces, and she wanted to make her suffering slow, to let her fully feel the pain of the past sixteen years her and her ilk have inflicted upon her.

“My ruined dreams… having me enslaved for months…! I will get my revenge for all of those!” she barked, but the goddess only let out a shrill laugh.

“You can’t ever touch me, little pawn! And to prove it to you…”

She smirked and gestured for something. The doors to the theater opened, and a dozen elf soldiers ran inside, surrounding Maria, pointing their spears at her.

“Go on. Use the full extent of your borrowed powers! I’ll show you the futility of your struggle before I let you die screaming!”

Maria scoffed, taking a look at the surrounding elves before she suddenly spread her wings, scattering her feathers and trapping the soldiers in dream bubbles. Heroic figures emerged from them, clad in decorated, gilded steel and wielding swords. Their heroic dreams were laughably similar to the elves in the forest, fetched from the childhood fantasy they had ever since hearing a heroic saga that was particularly popular with all elves.

These weren’t the phantoms that could trap a victim in a dream bubble; Maria knew that those would be a futile effort against this goddess in front of her, even more so after Athena explosively freed herself from one. Instead, she opted for the powerful versions that didn’t propagate.

The dark goddess laughed and rushed Maria, whose little army stood in formation in front of her. The spindly woman danced around sword strikes and slashed through two of them in a single strike with her dagger, before her tendrils grabbed three more and crushed them.

Maria waited for her. She raised her scythe, as more of her soldiers emerged from the dream bubbles surrounding them and clenched her jaw as she waited for an opportunity to strike at the distracted goddess.

A moment later she got just the opportunity she was waiting for: Fames’ back was turned as she deflected the strike of another ghost and grabbed it by the throat, making it shrivel up before vanishing. Maria didn’t hesitate to seize the moment and strike at her with a wide, arcing swing.

The dark goddess, anticipating that move, jumped out of the way and laughed again, throwing her arms wide as she filled the theater with her shrill voice.

“Witness the power of a goddess and despair, you foolish mortal!”

A sphere expanded from her, tinting everything seen through it in a monochrome rendition of reality. Maria hissed a curse under her breath and made her powerful wings flap as hard and fast as she could, retreating to the loge above as the sphere engulfed the entirety of the stage.

The phantoms, drained of energy, simply vanished, and the masked elves inside the dream bubbles writhed and moaned before the magic constructs simply fizzled out of existence, letting the dried-out husks of its former occupants drop on the ground. Maria clenched her fist as she witnessed this perverse power, and her stomach twisted into a knot.

She would be lying if she said that she particularly cared about what happened to these elves, but she still couldn’t deny that the actions of Fames were utterly unforgivable - and the Magical Girls she temporarily allied herself with would be driven into a frenzy by this demonstration, for sure.

“Do you understand now, puppet?! You are nothing before the cataclysmic force of hunger! You mortals, who burn so much energy every waking moment of your lives! It only takes a week of no access to food to make all your imagined greatness crumble to dust! Whole nations delude themselves into seeing gold and swords as true power, when in reality, they are nothing but beasts who can starve after one bad harvest!”

Maria didn’t care much for the goddesses’ lecture, but she had to admit that she was out of options, save for her most extreme ones. The monochrome area around Fames subsided and she stood there, under the natural spotlight of the theater ceiling’s iris mechanism, with her arms open wide as if to welcome Maria.

“If you’ve seen how useless your struggle is, then come and embrace death! I might even make it quick!”

Hatred filled Maria’s heart again. Insatiable hatred, directed towards this one insufferable being. The situation wasn’t in her favor in the slightest, but she just knew that before things ended, she’d have to bring her down.

She spread her wings and approached Fames with incredible speed. The goddess grinned and readied her dagger, but it wasn’t her scythe which Maria intended to use right now. She raised a hand in front of her face and let the darkness of her nightmares swallow her and the goddess both.

She was back home. The apartment, the TV with all the empty containers of alcohol, and a stalking, shadowy creature. She pitied him now, she realized. He wasn’t a monster; he was driven to madness by the combined effort of multiple of these dark gods, who worsened his health and invaded his dreams. His refusal to sleep in the beginning was him trying to avoid the dreams that painted his daughter as at fault for his wife’s death, but a human can’t continue without sleep, so he inevitably succumbed to the terrible visions.

It was no excuse for abusing his daughter, of course, but the share of the blame he carried was severely lessened by Maria’s newfound knowledge of his circumstances. Maybe she even regretted poisoning him – it was hard to tell. But right here, right now, he had a role to fulfill, and that role was to be the monster that would crush her opponent.

Fames was trapped with Maria in the body of a small, helpless girl. It almost worked against Athena, who only realized at the final moment that it was not her who was in this dangerous situation, but a fragment of Maria, trapped in an endless nightmare. She counted on Fames to not possess the same empathic awareness.

“…all your fault!” the monster that was once her father roared, and their shared form ran away from it as it whipped them with its elongated fingers. Maria watched, from inside and afar at once, even as the terror of those days filled her mind anew.

Panic made her eyes water, and her heart felt like it might explode out of her chest, but it was all worth it. Once the creature cornered their shared dream self and beat it into submission, she could claim victory over an exhausted and mentally scarred Fraus. She could…

“Just kidding!”

The dark goddesses’ words cut through the terror like it was paper and replaced it with new, much more abhorrent terror instead. The dream collapsed, and Maria found herself standing right in front of Fames, on the stage – and then she felt a sharp pain in her midsection as the goddess stabbed her with her cursed dagger.

“You really thought a dream like that would trick me? When it was us who gave you those experiences in the first place?”

Maria grimaced and clenched her right hand around her scythe. She attempted to bring it up into a swing through Fames’ neck, but the goddess restrained her wrist immediately, showing her a wild grin.

“It’s the end of the line for you, pawn!”

The pain in her midsection faded as her superhuman physiology masked it, and she chose the next best action. Her left hand rushed forward, grabbing Fraus’ face in hopes of plunging her into a dream.

A moment passed, then another, then the pain in Maria’s midsection returned, sharp and unbearable. Her eyes went wide and she stumbled away from the goddess, who let out a shrill laugh at her expense, more so as Maria tried to spread her wings and fly away to safety, all while suppressing the urge to scream in pain.

She no longer had wings.

“It’s about time you returned the power you borrowed and failed to use. Now you’ll die as a pathetic little human worm, unable to do anything while we bring our grand plan to fruition!”

Maria fell to her knees, fighting the excruciating pain in her abdomen.

Not like this! Come on, get on your feet! You need just one good hit on her!

“Oh my. You look like you just got reminded how fragile you human beings are. There are so many blood vessels all over, and if the right one is nicked, you bleed out in mere minutes. Nothing compared to the splendor of us Deogemma, the children of the origin of the Universe!”

Fames stepped into view, and Maria looked up at her. The goddess showed her the cruelest smile imaginable, then she reached out and put her hand under Maria’s chin, lifting her head.

“You know what happens to mortals who defy the gods?”

Maria gave no answer, only pained grunts as she pushed a hand to her stomach in a futile effort to keep her blood inside her body.

“We don’t imprison or kill them. No, we give them… ironic punishments. Do you know the story of King Erysichthon?”

“Do I look like I care?” Maria spat out, straining as the unbearable pain flooded through her gut.

“You will, soon enough,” Fames spoke, touching Maria’s cheek, and as she did, something even more horrifying than the pain of the stab wound filled Maria’s stomach. She recognized the pangs of hunger. Terrible, all-consuming hunger, while Fames took a step back to admire her work.

“Erysichthon was not a very pious man. One day he went to a sacred grove of Ceres, the sister of the High King himself, and cut down its trees for wood so that he could expand his house with a feast hall! In his zeal he killed a dryad, a nature spirit residing in the most sacred oak of the goddess, despite many warnings. And in the end, Ceres came to me.”

Maria groaned, falling over and barely keeping herself on all fours on the floor as the hunger kept growing inside her.

“You see, before the High King started interfering with our plan to be one with Chaos again, he and his ilk gladly used our services to do their dirty work. And his sister, in this case, made me curse Erysichthon with insatiable hunger. He sold all of his possessions to feed himself, and he sold his own daughter into slavery. Then one day… all he had to eat, was himself.”

Maria saw red. She rolled on her back and admired the bounty of meat that was on her right arm, and before she knew it, her mouth filled with the iron taste of her own blood as her teeth sank deep into her own flesh and she moved her head, trying to rip a satisfying chunk out of it.

Fames looked down on her, grinning wide.

“I doubt you will last as long as he did with your wound, but what a show it would be…” she spoke with a little sigh, turning her back to the wounded villainess.

“He tore his own stomach open and started to feast, until his body gave out!” she shouted into the empty theater with a loud cackle.

There was only a small fraction holding on to sanity within Maria’s addled mind. Enough to hear a little ‘thunk’ of something hitting the floor of the theater stage after it fell out of her pocket. An apple. A juicy, delicious-looking apple. She reached out and grabbed it, taking a greedy bite out of it.

***

The cracking sound of someone biting into an apple caught the attention of the dark goddess. She stopped in her tracks, then she turned around, slowly. Her eyes went wide as the blade of the obsidian scythe that mutilated the sky itself was plunged through her chest by a furious Maria, whose eyes were bloodshot with rage and pain.

She felt energized like she had never been before, like she could go on and live a full life without ever eating another bite, if it weren’t for the accumulating blood loss. The corpse tree’s curse proved itself to be true as it gave her the power for one final push to punish those who wronged her, or at least the one she could reach.

“What the… how…!” Fames spoke, with cracks forming on her skin and bleeding white light. Surprise made way for anger, and she reached out to grab Maria by the throat.

“No! No, you cannot kill me! We Deogemma never die! You will bleed out, and all your efforts will be for nothing! You hear me?! They will find me! They will restore me!”

Maria struggled for a moment, but she showed the goddess a thin smile.

“I don’t need you to be dead. No, I want you to witness everything that will follow,” she growled, and now she could see something new on Fames’ face: fear.

“You will be shattered. You will be powerless, as you have no choice but to watch how that annoying, foolish Magical Girl ruins all of your plans! And I will wait for you in hell, laughing at you!”

She could tell that Fames wanted to protest once more, but she was sick of that bitch’s voice by now. She yanked the scythe to the side, tearing a large hole into Fames’ humanoid form, and the goddess shattered, into tiny pieces on the ground surrounding a larger, irreversibly damaged crystal.

Maria caught her breath for a moment, letting her scythe drop to the ground with a loud clatter.

Finally. I got my revenge.

Her mouth curled into a bitter smile.

Only part of it. Too many of these bastards are still out there. I guess I’ll have to entrust the rest to that annoying woman.

She felt her consciousness fading. Slowly, but surely, like the soft embrace of sleep. Maybe it was this fading of her consciousness that made her sentimental during these final moments.

“Thank you, Taenya.”

A strange rushing sound filled her ears. She couldn’t tell if she could hear what little blood remained in her body being pumped violently enough to be audible to her ear, or if there was suddenly a crowd applauding.

She chose to believe in the latter possibility, and right there, standing in a pool of her own blood, she bowed to her phantasmal audience, lowering the curtain on the performance of her life. At least she died as a human, instead of whatever these creatures turned her into.

???

The applause continued as the lights went on in the theater. Maria sat in one of the thoroughly comfortable VIP seats at the very top of the theater as the crowd below gave her a standing ovation.

She was a little disoriented. She saw herself on the silver screen, a tragic villainess, born as a pure girl with a love for theater and movies, abused into a cruel woman who would share the pain she endured with the rest of the world. Movies like that resonated strangely well with global audiences, making this piece an immediate box office hit.

Wait, this isn’t right. I should be…

“Dying. You are, don’t you worry,” a voice spoke next to her, and Maria turned her head.

Right there, in the seat next to her, munching on the final pieces of popcorn that he scrounged from the bottom of his bag, was Morpheus. The same deity who gave her the power to rule over dreams. The man who turned her father from a loving model parent into a wreck who feared to fall asleep, and then a cruel alcoholic.

By all rights, Maria should be furious and try to kill him right here and now, but she neither had the will left, nor did she fool herself into thinking that she would be able to do anything against this man inside what was most likely another of his dream realms.

“Sleep and dreams are often called the little death, and it’s not that far off. Realizing that it will soon cease to be, the human brain will fire everything it has left, causing hallucinatory, or even dreamlike states as your consciousness drifts into oblivion. You are currently in your final dream before death comes to claim you. A long, final moment, which can span weeks or even years in the few seconds it takes the body to die,” Morpheus explained and Maria looked ahead.

“Have you come to avenge her, then? Will my final dream before I die be some kind of eternal torture? To make me experience thousands of years of anguish in the span of a second?” Maria asked with a resigned voice. She felt a tear running down her cheek as she did.

She had no right to complain about anything that would happen to her in here, not after everything she did while she was these creatures’ pawn. But still, a large part of her wanted to scream at the injustice of her life being forcefully led down this path, and then to be punished for it.

“Don’t be foolish. This is a reward,” the man spoke while putting away his bag of popcorn, patting crumbs and dropped kernels off his suit as he got up. This took Maria entirely by surprise, and she looked at him inquisitively.

“I hated that one. Fames. Seeing her broken like that is… exhilarating! I will take great pleasure in tormenting her, after all the abuse she hurled my way,” the man spoke with a wide grin.

“So, you may enjoy a few weeks, or maybe a year, in this beautiful dream conjured by a dying mind. Enjoy your life as a widely celebrated actress before the lights go out and you will dissolve into nothingness. I, on the other hand, will take back my kin and that scythe you wielded. Farewell, Maria Hattori. You were an amusing pawn to watch.”

Morpheus vanished into thin air and Maria was left staring at the screen in front of her. The credits were rolling, and slowly, the crowd left the theater. A young woman approached Maria, with figurative stars sparkling in her eyes.

“Miss… Hattori! It’s such an honor to talk to an actress like yourself! I’ve watched all your movies, which inspired me to get into acting, and I’d love to talk to you about how you became the actress you are! If you… don’t mind?”

The young starlet was obviously having a crush on her. Maria almost scoffed at the blatant wish fulfillment her dying brain came up with, but for now, she decided that she might as well indulge in this strange fantasy that gave her everything her mortal life denied her.

She would take all she could before the last light went out.