James didn’t know if he could sleep… but he had to. He had to work tomorrow and… figure out how to get the car out of his house. Today was… overwhelming. Too much… way too much! He groaned in his pillow trying to forget the image of that other magical girl…
That purple haired monster… who seemed to be using her power to… remove people. Erase them… as if they never existed. Yes they were criminals… low lives… and perhaps they should be in prison but…
…he felt saddened about it, more so given that he was probably among the few, if any that could know of it happening… and maybe put a stop to it.
Him? Be a hero? No.. he couldn’t. His magical girl form seemed pretty strong, given she survived that car crash but… she had not yet worked out how to use her own powers much less ‘fight’ someone who was so far ahead of her own abilities.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to work in an anime!” He groaned lying back on his bed. The strange pendent still nestled on his neck. He took it off and looked at it… “I should get rid of it.” But he couldn’t… he wouldn’t. It was part of him… she was part of him. He couldn’t hurt her- but why was she tyring to take away who he was!
“… is she?” He tried to close his eyes, listening to her thoughts… but he didn’t hear anything. Nothing that wasn’t in his own mind anyway. He had work tomorrow anyway and should probably just… leave this for now.
He closed his eyes… setting the pendent on his bedside. “Forget it..”
As James slept, suddenly the pendant on his bed side glowed, his body once again shifted into the form of that green haired elf girl. She breathed slowly, perhaps unaware of the transformation… her small breasts delicately pressed on the covers, covered by a simple white bra. She was wearing a simple night dress of soft white…
…and she began to have a dream…
“So… you’ve come for me.” The girl quietly turned around. “Lady Nishi…”
Lady Nishi stood there with her in the grassy fields, a large wild area. Flowers were blossoming in a field, pink lilacs around a small tree… a gentle breeze with a gentle setting sun. “We are simply fulfilling the end of this mission,” the woman whispered back. Dark brown hair, she seemed to be in her forties… though didn’t have many wrinkles. “It took me a long time to understand this… the truth…” though her lips curled neutrally she seemed angry.
“Truth?” The girl asked gently.
“You… You are the real monster… it’s because you exist ‘they’ come… disturbing the natural order of things… and a thing like you, must not exist.”
The two stared at the other. Time passed as the sun gently set into night.
The girl’s shoulder length hair changed colour from red to pink, almost reminiscent of the flowers nearby… a very gentle perhaps saddened expression. She turned around to look again as the sky turned to night, as if looking for a particular star. Whatever she saw… made her feel relief. She skipped her feet sightly, almost as if doing a quick dance.
“Do you deny it?” Nishi demanded.
The girl seemed… so young. Though Nishi was not distracted at all by that. She knew ‘exactly’ what she was.
“… I cannot help what I am you know.” She replied. “I don’t think anyone can… not you... not me... not them… the ones you trained…”
Nishi looked at her angrily. “I did what I had to do. How many people have you hurt… a parasite existing in the minds of mortals… making them believe ‘anything’ you want then to… worming its way through the world. I am the true defender of this world…”
“… I gave them happy memories.” She replied calmly. “There was never any harm done… I don’t have a past like you, I just exist in the present.”
“…Indeed. Every time you are destroyed… you return. Not quite the same.. yet the same… somehow” Nishi quietly muttered. “I am aware you know… that you can reincarnate… or- whatever it is you do. I don’t quite understand… it exactly, but I am aware. You don’t fear death.”
“…I am…not mortal….” She had a thoughtful expression. “All who thought of magic eventually think of someone like me.”
“Indeed…” Nishi sighed. “Well, I have the weapon that will remove you from existence completely!” She pulled out a very familiar sword of purple energy, seemingly out of a portal. Magic coursed through her like lightning on the pommel. “Your existence ends here… Yumi!”
skin cracked… rippled… as a beam of pure light suddenly just ‘exploded’ and scattered itself…
“Maya…”
“AHH!” James cried out- a dream… wait? She was in Maya’s body again. “Oh, for goodness sakes… why do I keep transforming when I don’t mean to!” She groaned as she quickly grabbed the pendant and changed herself back…
It seemed to be getting easier to switch between the two forms.
He frowned a little at that… not quite sure where that other girl started, and he existed. That weird… dream. “Parasite?” Maybe it was just his fears… yes that could be it. Still.. that was a surreal dream.
Maybe he felt guilty. He ‘should’ have taken this magic stuff more seriously. He should have probably gone hunting for these other… magical things in the world but- well- no he couldn’t. He wasn’t some high school student- actually even if he was, he would have been too busy studying. How was one supposed to do any stuff like this when they had an entire life to do! He had… his own things to deal with.
James yawned a little as he looked to the mirror, he had to clean and shave, then sort himself out for work but… something seemed different about his house. He looked around not quite sure what to make of it. There were lots of ‘little’ things that seemed incorrect. However, he couldn’t quite place it… He glanced at his landline. The phone was now a push-button style. “Huh…”
He walked around the house. Little things, mostly the technology had ‘regressed’. “Weird…”
In a panic he glanced to his car.
“… well at least my car is still parked where I last saw it,” He thought idly checking up on it with an annoyed rub of his forehead. Though it too seemed to have regressed to an earlier model… which helped given it was now a bit smaller. There was barely enough room to open the door and get inside… not that there was any point. He sighed as this very ‘unique’ problem made him wonder on how to fix it. Magic got it inside, only magic could get it out.. which would mean changing into his magical girl form. Though it was a problem he could figure out later…
“What the heck is going on…”
James wasn’t sure why he was panicking. The entire world seemed different… he had to use a bus to get to work which took ages. As he looked outside though it was as if the world had gone back in time. Had he… gone back in time? Finally he entered the office.
“You’re late,” Terry said. “You okay?”
James stared at Terry almost relieved that he was there. Everything in the office was also different… there were less computers that he could see… and there was a shelf full of floppy disks. He glanced in alarm at the sound of a fax-machine… “Technology… has… gone away…” He whispered.
“What do you mean?” Terry asked in confusion. “We got all the latest twenty first tech here!” He chuckled.
James was breathing heavily now. Nothing was right here… he looked at his desk seeing it had no computer at all.. just some paperwork. It looked like his writing was on it but… what the heck was going on?! “21st century…” it was the right year… but what happened to all the machines? The computers?
‘The sword erases people from history… they never existed…’
If that was the case… James had a bad feeling. “Terry, what’s the current population of Earth?”
“Huh? I dunno…” He shrugged. “I think it’s about Four billon?”
Four… Billion? “Half the population is … gone…” James raised his eyes as he suddenly realised something… “Paper… I need… I need some paper.” Half the population was now gone?!
Terry blinked as he handed his friend some paper.
James started to write some weird mathematical equations… “Assume… exponential growth of a population… association value of ten, growing also exponentially over a 50 year period… He closed his eyes. “Time factor… about 12 hours…”
Terry looked at the strange math. “Wow… had no idea you could… uh- what are you doing?”
“…trying to work out the value of one person in the world.” James explained. “How would you quantify it?”
Terry shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s whatever we’re paid.”
“No!” James almost growled at that. “There’s more value to a person then just their economic output. If reality is like a jigsaw... and we remove that part… the jigsaw has to reform somehow… but without that piece…” He gulped. “Terry if you played a jigsaw and there was a piece that didn’t fit, what do you do with it?”
“…I’d keep it in the box I guess?” Terry said a little bemused. “-Or assume its from a different Jigsaw.”
James drew a radial circle, then a smaller circle… “If ten people are removed… each person is associated strongly with another ten people…” He wrote down his assumptions and plugged them into an equation.
Terry started to boil an old kettle. “Dude, you are way to stressed. Have some coffee.” He smiled. “What’s got into you?”
James stared at the numbers. There was no denying it… removing people has caused the entire Earth to regress. Each person was remembered by someone... and those people had to be removed... and so it went along the chain until it finally hit someone who wasn’t remembered all that well. That meant they were on a trajectory to lose about 100 years of history… probably by tomorrow.
“… if I don’t fix this… we’re probably going to head into the 19th century… Terry can you ask the boss if I can take the day off-“
Terry just… vanished.
“Terry? CRAP!”
