Part I: The Fool

The Fool Arc

Everything begins somewhere. Whether that beginning is known, or only becomes clear once it's over, is the only question. Sometimes, the beginning is easy. A declaration, a starting bell. Other times, it's much harder to see any one moment being the cause. Once the motion begins, can the results be changed, or will it all be inevitable?

A girl inspired by desire. Another, tired of regret. And a third figure, hunched over and enraged by words flashing on a screen.

Three people who could not be more different. Three moments in time. Three decisions made. And those choices would shape the battles to come, in ways even the greatest fortune tellers of history could not have predicted.

Would they, knowing what was coming, have changed their choices?

There would be blood, and death, before the end. That, too, was inevitable.

*            *            *

Years ago...

"Magical Girl Blossom Spring is here!" The girl in the bright yellow skirt, covered in orange bows and ribbons, poses in anticipation of victory. She extends one hand in a "Gotcha!" motion, while the other rests on her hip. A sunshine smile to match her name graces her face as she looks down from her rooftop perch, towards the group of monstrous beings. The monsters look like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Sharp spikes line their backs as they show snarling glee at the screams of their hostages. Their intentions are clear even without the weapons that are held in their huge fists, and aimed at a group of schoolchildren.

"And I will... punish... you!" With a wink to an imagined audience, she jumps into the air and spins in place, the threatened children cheering as she appears in a flurry of motion and confetti right when all hope seemed lost.

The villains stare in shock, surprised by this superpowered do-gooder. Before they can mount a defence, the Magical Girl lands with a punch, a kick, and a slam with both fists. One of the villains goes for an overhead swing, and Blossom Spring ducks under it, whacking the underside of the arm with a flat palm before slamming her knee hard into his stomach. As a group, the villains reel back from her in fear, clutching their wounds and trying to stagger away. The Magical Girl closes her hands together, summoning a beautiful wand of ornate gold and diamonds that balloons out into the shape of a flower.

"Magical..." The word causes a glowing orb to appear in the base of the wand, like a tennis ball balancing on the flower.
"Suun..." The tennis ball swells to a bowling ball, dwarfing the racket in size as it swirls in power.
"BEEEAM!" The ball fires off, converting into a huge beam of energy as the Magical Girl unleashes her devastating super attack, hitting the three villains and destroying them in a single, glorious,  explosion.

A little girl stares at the screen wide-eyed as the cheerful credits music plays, signaling the end of yet another fantastic episode of Magical Girl Blossom, the hit anime for kids five to thirteen. The girl turns to her father sitting behind her with a big grin.
"Daddy, daddy! I wanna be a Magical Girl too!"

*            *            *

Weeks ago...

Reality so rarely lives up to what you see on the TV screen. On the TV, cops are all impassioned servants of justice in shootouts with the mob every week. Doctors solve the unsolvable in an hour with a wry joke and a pill addiction. On the TV, the bad guys are caught before they can harm the heroes, and the good guys win every time. Deaths are dramatic, and every moment of the day is a battle of good and evil.

I turn over in my bed, feeling the sheets against me. They'd started to become warm from my skin, and yet I was still awake. Still thinking.

In that shining world of television, where good always wins, Magical Girls are always ready and eager. Fearless and good. The perfect warriors of light, love, hope, and laughter. They're always learning and growing together, working for the good of their hometown.

I stare at a forum full of sightings on my phone screen, people talking animatedly about close encounters and discussing naming conventions. My eyes are getting blurry. They talk about the purity, the kindness, the love that's evident in every selfless action and every caring deed.

Maybe it's like that for some of us. Maybe it was like that for me, once. But I've been in this game a long time, long enough to know that those powered by hope and idealism burn out in the long term, or get replaced by the same jaded and cynical malaise that drags us all down.

Someone once told me, "When the game is done, the king and pawn go in the same box." Whether jaded or honest, royalty or pawn, we're all the same in the end. Maybe I took that too much to heart. I look over the forum posts again, rub my eyes, and sigh.

It's a tough job. And I need to sleep. I set my phone aside, stare at the family photo on my bedside, and drift off to a hopefully dreamless sleep.

*            *            *

Today.

There's a man sitting in a musty apartment. It's cold, unforgiving, and dark. He shoves a hand into an open bag of potato chips and crams a fistful into his mouth, and snorts, grunting at another frustrating forum post about a "Magical Girl Sighting" near Shibuya, pages of scrolling comments on the pink and white blur that saved a puppy from being hit by a car. Drivel. Nonsense. A few years ago, it had been Youkai that these forums would rave about, and now it was this.

Magical Girls are no more than an urban legend, a staple of children’s television. Magical girls embody kindness, self-sacrifice, beauty through moral purity, and magic that empowers them to let their true selves shine.

“Oh my god, you still watch Magical Girl stuff? Isn’t that kinda childish?”

…They can’t be real.

This world doesn’t allow for kindness, there’s no space for beauty, and there’s no place for magic. That’s what we learn as we grow up. From a young age, we learn it’s all make-believe. Fairytales. Childish nonsense. The harsh truth of reality is cold and unfeeling, we’re lost in an endless void, stuck in dark cycles of revenge and retribution.

“Logically, there’s no way ‘magic’ could even exist. It’s unscientific.”

A being of that purity, an existence that runs counter to logic and knowledge of the amassed thoughts of humanity. Such a thing can’t be real. Can't be. Can't be. It’s foolish to acknowledge these ideals as anything more than naivety. The man clucks his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to distract himself with another browser tab. But soon he finds himself drifting back to those original forum posts, muttering darkly to himself.

In corners of the net, urban legends mix with reality in unexpected and startling ways. Websites catalogue images, videos, photos- blurred but present. News aggregators present tied together stories of each of these mysterious figures. They've become the modern Bigfoot, people make up their own names, backstories, and headcanons of each girl they see.

“Did you see what @xk_magiholic wrote? Most legit story yet!”

“I heard a livestreamer caught one in public-”

“Isn’t @starfinder the one who also said they saw a tsuchinoko?”

“Do you people really believe in this, or is it just, like, ironic?”

The man reaches into the packet of chips and shoves a fistful in his mouth, crunching loudly with irritation, his teeth mashing up his angry thoughts. In a world that denies the very possibility of such an existence, where kindness is looked upon with cynicism, there is no one foolish enough that, when confronted with harsh reality, would choose to give themselves for strangers. No one is that desperate. That honest. That loving. That pathetic.

...Right?

Somewhere in the darkness, the man stares as his screen goes dark. He grunts in annoyance, muttering under his breath. It must be a virus, or an overheat, or just a freeze. He'd been too distracted and hadn't noticed it download a bad file, or something similar.

He reaches over to the power, about to reset the whole machine, when something appears on his screen. A single sentence.

Truly, do you hate this world?