This Magical Girl is Mine

“See? Toldja you’d look good!” teases Bombshell.

“Bite me,” I grumble back. “I feel so constricted in this thing.”

“Girl, it’s a corset. Don’t you wear one in costume???”

“It’s not the same! It’s decorative.”

I play with the laces of the corset I’m wearing, which Bombshell—Hannah, right now—managed to force me into. I made a certain promise back in December that I’d let Hannah pick my hair, makeup, and outfit for a girls’ night. I’ve been putting it off ever since, but with Maenad’s party coming up my excuses ran out.

So I’ve been stuffed into a corset, tossed my casual jeans for a short skirt, and traded sneakers for heels—she argued for stilettos, I argued for flats, we compromised on pumps. My hair is curlier than it’s ever been thanks to a stylist visit on Hannah’s dime, but I categorically refused to let her mess with my hair color. This shade of lipstick is bad enough, no way in hell I’m going blonde to match.

Is this that forcefem thing everyone’s talking about online? Can you do that to a cis girl?

It’s not my style. I’m not meant for being put on display like a stuffed turkey and paraded about, even if that is half my job. People can see me! The tender flesh meant for Sophia’s eyes and no one else’s has been exposed to the elements! People can see my calves! My cleavage!

Cleavage which, I must admit, does actually look quite nice with the pushup effect. The glittery eye makeup isn’t half bad, either. Still, it’s my sacred right to complain.

“I look absurd. Anyone who wants to fuck me in this has taste so atrocious they’re unworthy of the act. And I still don’t trust this ‘you’re an Autumn’ business.”

“I think you look lovely,” Agatha reassures me with a pat on the shoulder and a soft giggle. Agatha’s civilian identity, Eleanor, was spared the worst of Hannah’s attentions thanks to my more vocal protests. It’s a pretty cute outfit: crop top, leather jacket, and a skirt that actually reaches her knees.

She was a little nervous at first, but she recovered quickly—perhaps due to the tameness of Hannah’s requests, but my suspicion is that it’s thanks to the continuing effects of my spell. This close to her, I can feel the flame burning bright.

Hannah, of course, picked the most extreme outfit for herself. It’s less a set of distinct articles of clothing and more a collection of straps and sheer fabric, though it just manages to cover all the essentials.

“Quit whining and get drinking already,” Hannah says. “Don’t waste free booze! Enough alcohol and nothing is too absurd.”

I roll my eyes, but I still down the glass. The impetus for our latest exchange—we’ve been having a number of them—was some dude buying me a drink from across the bar. That hasn’t happened to me for… god, I was in my first year of college and going out with a fake ID. Hannah insists he’s cute, but I’m not the kind of lesbian that can still appreciate the male form. He’s a blotch in my vision, a smudge of dudeliness that my brain refuses to sort as attractive.

Anyway, alcohol. Bar Guy bought me a fruity cocktail. Disgustingly sweet, frankly, but it burns nicely going down. Liquid courage, they call it, and I’ve got a lot of courage sloshing around my stomach after two other bars. I’ve been burning off the ethanol regularly with magic, which has been an amusing experience; the buzz comes in, the fuzzy warmth of dulled inhibition, and then cold reality cuts through it as I keep my senses sharp. I should hold on to a bit of intoxication to sell the illusion, but I’m sure there’ll be plenty more at the party.

Am I hot? I wonder. Do I care?

That’s a strange thing to think about, for me. I would say I haven’t thought about my looks for a long time, but I guess that’s not true; even setting aside the couple of times in the past few months that I dressed up for some reason or another, I was certainly aware of my appearance before then. It just didn’t matter.

Appearance is an arcane formula of genetics, confidence, and effort. Take boobs, for example. You can define a nice chest by the feel of it in your hands, by squish and jiggle and bounce, but culturally and on some primal, instinctual level—some evolutionary whatever, I failed out of Bio—we have a specific preference for larger chests. And because that’s a desirable norm, we do things to emphasize that trait. On the extreme end, you have women getting plastic surgery to enlarge their breasts. On the cheap end, pushup bras. But there’s also how you present yourself, the cut of your top, the pose you strike, all that stuff.

Sometimes I feel like an alien when it comes to… I don’t know, human attraction. It’s not that I don’t experience it, obviously. I have the lesbian unga bunga response to pretty girls, I follow a bunch of NSFW artists, I look at women. But there’s this inexplicable gap somewhere.

I love Sophia. I want Sophia. I want to be with her, entwined in her, breathing her in. The sex is very, very good. But, somehow, the part that sticks with me most from that precious night was the way she smiled at me. It’s the smile that I remember far better than her naked breasts, as fun as those were to—well, I won’t kiss and tell.

In high school, I hadn’t yet figured out how weird I was, or maybe I just didn’t want to admit it. I tried to look more attractive, tried to dress up and wear makeup and emphasize my assets. It never felt right. It was Mordacity who convinced me I was going about it all wrong.

Mordacity was a miserable little shit in high school. She wasn’t Mordacity yet, except online, and she’d only just started going by Mallory. In the eyes of the student body, she was that weird gay boy who read fantasy novels during class and always skipped PE. Prickly, antisocial, autistic, the list went on. But there was one space where she went from pariah to superstar: the high school Dungeons & Dragons club. She was the Dungeon Master for the group, having taken over in the middle of her freshman year when the previous DM moved to another school, and by the time I joined she had thoroughly proven herself to the other club members.

Those days were special. They were transformative. I had friends before Mallory, but they were all shallow. I hadn’t figured myself out enough to have anything more than that, and neither had anyone else I knew. Mallory was different. We hated each other when we first met, but she scraped down my defenses until she saw something she liked, so she showed me inside hers, and from then we were the best of friends. Almost something more, even, but that’s a story for another time and not one I’m keen to share. Doesn’t matter.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Where I was going with this is that a lot of the kids in that club dressed up for D&D. Not a lot, mind you, ‘cause going around school in costume is a surefire way to get mocked or beaten or worse. So those of us who participated brought the kinds of items that could easily be stuffed in backpacks before returning to the halls beyond our sacred space.

Mallory liked to talk about masks. She would say that we all wore one mask in the club and different masks outside it, and that you could make anything into a mask if you were using it to convey your identity. A cheerleader uniform is a mask that signals belonging to a clique, especially if you wear it outside of practice, and the same goes for any sports uniform. Someone who goes around wearing suspenders and a bowtie is wearing a mask as much as someone in a short skirt and pink lipgloss.

Very Psych 101, I guess, but it was the first time most of us had really thought about the idea of social performance as something intentional and not instinctual. Leave it to the autistic girl to point out, right? Mallory’s mask was her wizard hat, which she was already wearing back then, though only during D&D.

It was a weekend, late in the evening, Mallory having snuck into my room without my parents knowing, when she told me that I’d been borrowing the wrong mask. It wasn’t about insincerity, to her; it didn’t matter whether I was pretending to be some kind of person or really was that kind of person. It was about whether the role itself was desirable, real or fake.

I experimented a lot, after that. Ran the spectrum of goth, emo, and scene, tried to get into sports, computers, and theater. Got way, way too into anime, and it was in my weeb nerd phase that I hit burnout in college and stopped experimenting.

When you’re a depressed piece of shit, you don’t have a lot of spoons for swimming upriver. I stopped buying new clothes except when I needed to replace something, and I stopped trying new things except for gacha games. I wore the remnants of the life I’d been building before I burned, the most comfortable scraps of the last experiment, and that calcified into the new me.

And now… now I don’t know. Something’s cracked and everything comfortable feels like a prison. Is this who I am? Is this who I’m going to be when I return to my Sophia and we live our life together?

When Mallory told me I’d been wearing the wrong mask, I realized that everything I was doing to appear more attractive was only sending signals about my body… when what I really wanted was a partner who would like me because I was funny. I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit and thought I had to be Jessica because that’s what you do when puberty hits early and everyone starts looking at you, but really, deep down, I wanted to be the goddamn rabbit.

I wanted to make a girl laugh. I wanted to feel seen. Only two people in my life have ever truly seen me, and now one of them is doing something that the other is going to kill her for.

Hannah nudges me. “Hey, Rachel Reigns, you still there?”

I blink. “What did you just call me?”

She laughs. “You were lost in dreamland. Wake up, we’re heading out.”

I follow her out of the bar with a frown. That’s not like me. I’m not the introspective type, really. I don’t get lost in my own thoughts, especially not in a live social situation.

Am I compromised? The hole inside my chest aches dully, its sensory presence having slowly intensified over the past week.

Venus stole my heart and Mordacity walks in my dreams. That’s two potential culprits who could be messing with my thoughts, and who knows who else has the means and motive. My lovemaking with Sophia warded me against whatever Venus had planned, but those protections have bled away with each subsequent night we’ve spent apart, one claim waxing while the other wanes. The Morrigan didn’t believe Mordacity’s web of dreams could be used to manipulate us while awake, but she admitted that the spell was beyond her full understanding.

If I am compromised, it’s not absolute. The question is what anyone would gain by nudging my thoughts in this strange, contemplative direction.

There are other people out wandering the evening streets of Forks. Some of them look at us—look at me, in my unusually skin-baring outfit, and I take the discomfort I feel and grab it by the neck. The natural conclusion of my prior reminiscing would be a rejection of the attention I’m receiving, but that is not how Venus would act. The rising goddess of love, beauty, and the adoration of the masses does not care where that adoration comes from and she does not hide her beauty.

The nameless humans staring at me in the night don’t know me and they certainly don’t see me like I want to be seen by a partner, but they’re looking at my body and that is good. The chemical ping of animal attraction—the shallow desire of meat perceiving meat—is the kind of worship I’m meant to receive as the holder of the seat I’ve claimed.

The goddess Venus. The goddess Archon. The goddess Rachel.

Fine then. Let the mortals look.

I stop hiding. I shake out all the little pieces of expression and body language that show my discomfort and I strut the street proudly, answering gazes with a smug smile. Look at me. Want me. Worship me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Agatha sneaking a glance, perhaps drawn by my change in posture. She’s not wearing her glasses right now, so she could be seeing anything in my threads. Is that what she’s looking for?

She’s been sneaking glances at me all night, since we first got dressed up and went out on the town. I wonder what I am to her, now, and what’s going on in her head thanks to my spell. Sophia was concerned about the potential for changes to cascade, but Agatha’s seemed fine. Confidence is a good thing, right?

Agatha and I are conspirators and coworkers, but she also let my grubby fingers paint over her soul. The first prayer I answered; the first supplicant to be marked by my holy flame. There’s something strangely intimate about that, which makes me wonder if she could have developed feelings for me, but she made her sexuality very clear. If my spell could rewrite someone’s orientation, that would have terrifying implications for what I’m really capable of.

Maybe I’m just a role model to her, now, and she’s watching me to learn. Certainly, some of what she’s expressed in the past could be read as jealousy for how easily I slipped into the mask that Visage demanded of me, and demands of her.

Once we best Venus, I should remove the spell. There won’t be any need for Agatha and I to maintain our charade of flirtation. I’d remove it now, even, but that would mean weakening my claim. That’s why I haven’t removed my binds to Phoebe or Pandora, either, despite the unknown risks they present.

In an alley with no one around, the three of us transform—our costumes as mages taking on aspects of what we were wearing by a twist of intent—and fly off toward the Spire. We’ve all been invited to Maenad’s party, along with all of Visage and a fair few outsiders. Tonight is the eve of Valentine’s, and by Sophia’s reckoning, the stroke of midnight is when the goddess will make her move.

Tonight is the final crucible. Tonight we kill a god.