The rest of the day went without further incident, much to Meg’s relief. The calming effect of regular university lectures and classes, of the totally mundane and humdrum activities of life, had helped settle her mind down.
As was the way of these things, the horror of the morning’s events had faded and Meg began to question whether she had really witnessed all of that, or if it had been some strange hallucination. She wondered if maybe the daily curry bread she enjoyed for lunch was affecting her in some odd ways.
When Meg had originally flown out to Japan in March of the previous year, her only real concerns had been whether she would get on all right living alone, if she could cook without either poisoning herself or burning the flat down, and if she would do well at university. Giant, black, quasi-demonic entities weren’t high on her list of things to deal with. They weren’t on the list at all.
Returning home to her flat, a cosy one-room affair above a traditional sweets shop a little way from the town centre, she ducked inside the shop to say hello to her landlady. The wide open frontage of the shop had several wire stands filled with all manner of interesting confections, both contemporary and traditional, so Meg grabbed a couple of bags of her favourite lemon bonbons and wandered inside to pay.
Beside the wooden counter at the rear of the shop, an elderly lady with a face as wrinkled as a month-old prune grinned at her with a solitary tooth. “Oh, Megu-chan! Finished for the day?”
Meg dropped the two bags on the counter. “Yep, just fancied something sweet after a tough day.”
“Tough day, you say? Allow me to help a little in my own way, then.” The old lady shuffled over to the counter.
Meg’s first meeting with her landlady had been… indelible. Mispronouncing a word during her introduction and saying something else entirely, she had worried her cheeks might burn the shop down around her.
She loved Japanese dearly, having grown up speaking it alongside English thanks to having a parent from each country, but speaking it to a native person in-country had been so nerve-wracking that she tripped herself up. And Japanese is one of those languages where embarrassment is only ever a single tongue slip away.
Fortunately, Kyouko-san had turned out to be that particular brand of old lady who enjoys a good laugh and has literally no shame or concept of embarrassment.
Ringing the till, the near-toothless grin reappeared on Kyouko’s face. “Special discount for my favourite tenant, two-hundred yen.”
“Eh? That’s half the proper price,” Meg said, holding her hands up. “You’ll go bust if you keep this up, Kyouko-san!”
Kyouko laughed, a mildly gravelly and throaty affair which nevertheless conveyed her bountiful mirth. “Don’t you worry about that, the old codger back there”—she jerked a thumb over her shoulder at a doorway behind her—“has a nice little nest egg or seven tucked away still! Miserable old git never spent a single yen more than he could get away with.”
A gruff voice could be heard grumbling to itself through the open door, never loud or clear enough to make out individual words. This was probably just as well.
Leaning over to peer through the doorway, Meg waved. “Afternoon, Hachiro-san!” She grinned as an additional bout of vague muttering emanated from the dark depths.
Taking two hundred-yen coins from her zip wallet, Meg paid, thanked Kyouko for the thoughtful gesture, and headed back out front. Up the left side of the small building ran a rickety wooden staircase. At the top, a door led into her little flat directly above the shop.
Finding this place had been entirely thanks to her father’s connections; he still knew people he had been friendly with both as a child in Japan and during his career as an actor, cashing in a favour or two in order to secure his daughter a low-rent yet comfortable little place while she attended uni.
A faint mustiness filled the air in here, similar to the air in a locked room back at her home in England where her father kept all his movie memorabilia. Meg’s flat had a similar smell of old books, threadbare furniture, and—more than anything else—of comfort. She had felt at home the very first day she moved in.
The tatami mat flooring took a little longer to get used to, though. They had soft and comfy carpets back home, so these green rice straw mats had been an enjoyable novelty. Directly to the right as she entered, a kitchenette occupied the front of the room, overlooking the narrow road outside and the park directly opposite the building, on the other side of the street.
To the left, at the rear of the room, an area was sectioned off with a sliding door leading into a compact bathroom; before this recent addition to the room, tenants had needed to visit a traditional public bath for their ablutions.
Meg moved across to the kitchenette and stared at the cooker. Then at the sink. A variety of pots and pans plus several plates and a number of pieces of cutlery lounged there, awaiting her attention. She turned to the centre of the room. Here, a threadbare sofa faced the wall opposite the door, and an ancient wooden cabinet held an equally ancient CRT television, with a glass-topped coffee table in-between. T-shirts, underwear items, jeans, and other pieces of clothing lay strewn across both the sofa and coffee table.
Lacking the energy to clean, she decided something simple to eat would be a good idea until she could find the enthusiasm to wash up and visit the local laundrette, so she opened one of the cupboards, muttering as she did so.
“Guess I’ll just do some noodles for now…”
She pulled a plastic pot of instant curry ramen out and placed it on the worktop. Waiting for the kettle to come to the boil, Meg tugged her hair down and wandered across to the rear of the room, where she rummaged in one of her two dressers near the bathroom door, pulling out a ripped and supremely comfy pair of jeans and a loose white T-shirt and getting changed.
She bounded back to the kitchen in time for the kettle to boil, tossing the worn clothes onto the sofa on her way past. Pouring water into the flimsy plastic container, she stared vaguely into space, mulling over the day’s events and stirring the noodles with a chopstick.
Her life had been threatened that very morning, she had witnessed a beautiful young woman of roughly her own age beating a monster to a pulp with what appeared to be some sort of manipulated gravity attack, and here she was, waiting for noodles. Noodles were safe. Noodles were boring, unexciting, normal. Noodles didn’t try to kill her, and didn’t stink the place up as though someone had dropped a box of rotten eggs.
She stirred a few more times and settled down on her ancient sofa, shifting some underwear to one side. Switching the TV on for some background while she ate, she half expected to see news reports of the incident that morning. The old CRT device clinked and crackled to life.
Nothing about that morning, just a documentary on an intense storm that had swept across the city close to three years ago. Meg had heard of it several times since arriving, people still mentioned it even now. It must have been pretty incredible to have made that much of an impression in a country historically battered by hurricanes on a regular basis.
She grabbed the remote and changed channel, catching the tail end of a news report from a woman with one of those permanent smiles that Meg always found to be really creepy; some people, especially those on TV, could hold a smile for longer than was natural, creating an uncanny valley effect.
“—latest news from China indicates that tensions there are still running high,” said the rictus-smile woman on the TV. “Despite diplomatic efforts from a number of countries, including Japan, the regional warlords refuse to negotiate or cease their hostilities towards each other. The country has been in political turmoil ever since the coup of 2025, and—”
Meg rolled her eyes and hit the power button, then tossed the remote back on the coffee table. She felt that the word coup was a contender for most overused term of the last decade, given how many of the damn things had occurred all around the globe from 2020 through 2025.
She was just glad her own country of birth had mostly been spared too much bloodshed, especially compared to some countries. Meanwhile, Japan had simply done what Japan always did, and quietly got on with living life while the rest of the world burned. There was a certain unflappable nature to Japanese people that reminded Meg of the old British stiff upper lip stereotype.
Finishing her noodles, she rested up for half an hour to let her meal settle, then headed out to the gym for one of her three-times-weekly sessions. These were always enjoyed with the best friend she had acquired shortly after arriving in Japan, a bouncy and fun young woman called Yasuko.
A ten minute jog later and Meg arrived at the gym, a squat, glass-fronted building, tucked away in its own little cul-de-sac and surrounded by cherry blossom trees. Dressed in her favourite comfy red tracksuit, Meg entered and scanned the floor for her friend, spotting her hard at work on a treadmill towards the back.
“Evening, Yacchan!” she said, using a casual version of Yasuko’s name that only close friends called her.
The black-haired young woman on the treadmill beamed. “Hey! Up you come, I need a pace partner.” Droplets of sweat ran down her terracotta features, dripping from her chin as she pushed herself harder and harder.
Meg jumped up onto the next machine over and beginning a steady warmup pace. “Been here long?”
Yasuko glanced at the clock on a nearby wall. “No… only about an hour…”
Meg had long ago given up being surprised by Yasuko’s perception of time; she could get so lost in the moment that she entered a sort of trance, entirely unaware of time passing. A few minutes ticked past, with the only sound punctuating the atmosphere coming from the whine of two treadmills and some awfully cute J-pop song playing over the speakers.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Forgetting to wipe your sweat again?” Meg added, noting that her friend was presently dripping everywhere.
“Oh… right, I should do that,” Yasuko muttered, making no move to do so.
Meg ran silently for a while, wanting nothing more than to talk about that morning. But while she had known Yasuko for a good eight months, a period during which they had spent probably five out of every seven evenings together, she wasn’t entirely certain how well it might go down if she started talking about demons and magic.
Blissfully unaware of her friend’s internal struggles, Yasuko bumped the speed up a little further, her midnight hair drenched in sweat despite the cool weather outside.
Meg wasn’t sure what caused it, but her best friend’s hair had an unusual purple tint to it in certain lighting conditions, especially when wet, and she wasn’t aware that Yasuko dyed it. It actually reminded her a little of the girl who had saved her that morning…
It couldn’t have been Yasuko. Meg was certain. Almost certain. Quite apart from the height difference, their faces were totally different. Build, too. Not to mention their skin tones didn’t match up; Yasuko was tanned, but had a lighter, sandier complexion compared to the girl that morning, hailing from Japan’s southern islands where the conditions were rather more tropical. Yeah, no way it could have been her. No way. Definitely.
Meg was doing a great job of convincing herself that her best friend wasn’t really a magical girl. Unfortunately, this meant she was doing a less stellar job of staying on the treadmill. She slipped, the rubber belt beneath her feet neatly depositing her on her behind for the second time in one day.
She sat up, rubbing her bruised butt. “Ow-ow-ow…”
“Careful, Meg,” Yasuko said, jumping down to assist. Unlike most of Meg’s friends in Japan, Yasuko had spent time overseas, picking up a decent understanding of English in the process, which allowed for a more natural pronunciation of her friend’s name. She extended a hand. “You okay?”
Meg grasped the proffered appendage. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, wasn’t concentrating.”
“You seem a bit out of it. What’s up?”
“Just… something weird happened this morning. I’ll tell you about it another time, think it’s probably best if I head home for now.”
“Sure? I’m happy to come along and keep you company.”
“No, it’s okay,” Meg said, again forcing a smile. “Think I’ll just turn in early. Everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.”
Yasuko gave her a thumbs-up. “In that case, got some free time tomorrow? I could do with some company for a secret mission.”
“I’ll give you a ring after I finish uni,” Meg said.
“Awesome. See you tomorrow,” Yasuko said, and waved her friend out of sight.
☆ ☆ ☆
Heading in the general direction of home, taking a roundabout route along the imaginatively named National Highway No 128, with the sea occasionally visible between the buildings to her left, Meg gave her brain another workout as she attempted to piece together the puzzle of that morning.
Really, there wasn’t much to puzzle, beyond the obvious; nasty scary monster, cute magical girl, life-threatening danger. That pretty much covered it. Wandering the quiet streets, she eventually took a left turn towards the ocean. Here she made her way along a narrow road running alongside Kamogawa’s beachfront.
Stopping here, Meg stared out to sea, another little habit she had picked up since arriving in Japan. Whenever she was out at night, she made it a point to come here and sea gaze. Though she certainly wasn’t the only one who enjoyed this activity, given what was being built out there.
A bright glow on the horizon was all she could make out at this time of the evening, but that was more than enough. It was hard to believe that the Starlight Project was real, but the glittering platform far out in the Pacific Ocean was always a prominent reminder that yes, it was real.
The Starlight Project had been tabled nearly a decade ago, just after a period of intense global political strife that had almost led to World War 3. With tensions at an all-time high and tempers fraying, the universe decided that the very best thing it could do was to wake everyone up with an existential crisis the likes of which they had never before seen.
An extrasolar asteroid the size of Scotland had been heading in Earth’s direction for years, but due to all the political upheaval at the time, nobody had paid it much mind. When nuclear Armageddon was a distinct possibility, a wandering asteroid seemed like less of a threat. That was until it was almost pulled into Earth’s gravity, at which point people began paying rather more attention.
Fortunately the gargantuan rock had swung just wide of Earth itself and continued on its merry way, constituting what was known as a near-miss, completely oblivious to the fact that a mere few million miles closer—just next door, in astronomical terms—and it would have wiped all life from the face of the planet.
This had, understandably, made quite a lot of people quite nervous, especially after their near-miss on nuclear Armageddon. With this in mind, plans had been drawn up by a multi-country alliance, headed up by England and Japan, for the Starlight Project, an artificial city to be built at sea and used as a testbed for research and development of technologies necessary for the potential colonisation of another planet.
It seemed wise, given humanity’s propensity for violence plus their technological progress in weapons of mass destruction, and the universe’s generally uncaring nature, to start working on mitigation efforts in the event of another near-miss event. The people who first tabled the plan had no idea just how prophetic their worries about the future would turn out to be.
As for the city itself, a circular surface plate nearly the size of Manhattan Island was seated on the ocean, upon which the city structures were built, featuring half a dozen skyscrapers and all the amenities of modern life, which would house the civilian population. Below the surface, an upright cylindrical structure delved a full mile into the depths of the ocean, housing the research sectors.
Connected to the main plate via a sophisticated series of earthquake-resistant cables, beams, and linkages, something Japanese structural engineers naturally had a great deal of experience with, the whole cylindrical structure could gently move and sway under the top plate without causing damage or detaching.
In these sub-surface sections, two liquid-fuel nuclear reactors, one active and one for backup, would provide power for the needs of a million or so inhabitants, both up top and down below, once people began moving in for real.
Self-sufficiency had, of course, been right at the top of the list of priorities for the project. If anyone was to survive on an alien world that didn’t have Earth’s ecosystem, magnetosphere, and other essentials of life, they would need to be completely self-reliant from day one. Large-scale hydroponics were therefore essential, along with animal raising facilities on the surface and undersea fishing and traps.
And with the average trip from Earth to Mars, for example, taking anything from nine months to nearly two years, sending regular supplies to a colony was entirely out of the question, no matter which planet or moon they might ultimately choose.
The mind-boggling complexity of such a project hurt Meg’s brain if she thought about it too much, and yet millions of people had jumped at the chance to be a part of something like this, regardless of the inherent dangers. Or perhaps because of the inherent dangers? Meg figured there were plenty of people who preferred the idea of potentially dying while heroically carving out a new frontier, rather than being killed during yet another pointless political spat here on Earth.
The city had been under construction for many years at this point, resulting in an economic boom for the otherwise small and relatively insignificant Kamogawa, as the closest and most convenient shore-side town to the new build. It was only an hour to Tokyo by train, too, allowing for easy commutes.
Most of the major structural work was completed now, with thousands of empty apartments and storefronts just waiting to be filled with all the comforts of home and necessities of business. The research sectors, meanwhile, had already begun some small-scale projects below the waves, with a couple of hundred scientists and technicians testing the facilities and dreaming big dreams.
Even Meg’s own mother, one Cordelia Momozono, a marine biologist and lover of undersea horrors both fictional and factual, would soon be moving to Starlight City, leaving behind her current position lecturing at Kamogawa’s Touyou University in order to research deep sea life and potential new applications for current and future technologies.
As far as Meg was aware, they were likely still decades away from a real attempt at settling the Red Planet—or, indeed, somewhere further afield like one of Jupiter’s moons—but standing here and seeing the progress being made on the city... she couldn’t help but feel like she was in the presence of history in the making.
A hint of deeper pink crept into her cheeks as she realised how silly that sounded, given the events of that morning. As major as something like Starlight City was in the historical sense, witnessing a clearly alien creature being pummelled by what was very possibly an actual, honest-to-goodness magical girl…
If anything, Meg had just witnessed something even more incredible, and no one but her knew about it. She shook her head with a vague little laugh, and continued wandering in the direction of home.
Upon reaching the sweetshop, putting thoughts of magical girls and off-world colonies to one side for now, her nose wrinkled at a sweet and sickly scent wafting over from the little park opposite her flat.
Taiyaki, possibly? It certainly smelled like it. A common and popular snack in Japan, taiyaki—sweet, fish-shaped batter cakes filled with red bean paste—were something she enjoyed, but only in moderation; three or four could easily disappear down the pie hole if she wasn’t careful.
Seated on a bench in the centre of the dusty concrete expanse of the park, a girl with familiar russet skin and a stunning length of lion brown hair was indeed eating taiyaki. Studying art at university, Meg was particular about classifying her colours properly, and this girl’s hair was a definite lion brown, leaning a little closer to beige than regular blonde.
Meg sauntered over. Approaching the bench from behind, she became aware of a voice. Quiet, relatively low-pitched for Japan, posh in a British sort of way, and coming from… where? She couldn’t find a visible source for it anywhere. The only other person around was the beige-haired girl. Creeping closer, Meg took a stealthy peek over the girl’s shoulder and inhaled in much the same way as a suction pump.
This alerted the lion-haired young woman to Meg’s presence. “Who’s there!?” She jumped to her feet and rounded in a defensive posture.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you!” Meg said, waving her hands back and forth. She stopped panicking for long enough to look at the young woman’s face. A face she had seen that very morning. She pointed a vaguely accusatory finger. “It’s you!”
“Eh?”
“I saw you this morning! You were the girl who helped me, right? Though you had purple hair then…”
“W-What are you talking about? I was at… at church this morning, that’s right!” said the mystery girl.
“No, I’m sure it was you.” Meg walked around her. For a moment she had completely forgotten the other surprise, a tiny six inch tall girl with vivid orange hair tied into twintails who looked very much like a classical representation of a fairy. Said fairy was presently sitting cross-legged on the bench and watching Meg with interest.
“You must have me confused with someone else,” said the mystery woman with a tremolo-laden laugh. She dashed to the bench and stuffed the fairy down the front of her heavy, fleece-lined jacket, eliciting a mildly disapproving complaint in the same posh voice Meg had previously heard, then vacated the park as quickly as her legs could carry her.
“I just wanted to thank you!” Meg called after the rapidly diminishing silhouette. She shrugged and made her way across the street to her flat, where she rushed up the stairs and inside, collapsing on the sofa and closing her eyes. “I’m sure that was her! The face, hair, build, everything was a perfect match. Well, except the hair colour…”
Growing up watching Japanese cartoons—anime, to use the appropriate parlance—at her little country home in Britain, Meg had seen any number of enjoyable magical girl shows. They almost invariably featured a small group of teenaged girls with crazy hair colours, thrust into magical circumstances in which they had to fight to save the world.
But one of the core elements of these shows was that when the girls transformed, their hair colour—and even style—changed, sometimes drastically so. A girl with a brunette bob cut might have vivid yellow hair in a huge ponytail that reached to her knees when transformed, and that was relatively tame among this genre of anime…
A gentle snore indicated that Meg had fallen asleep, thoroughly tired out after an exhausting and, indeed, terrifying day. She slept for a time, then awoke with a start and struggled out of her clothes, followed by doing the awkward little dance routine people engage in when they’re too tired to function properly and have trouble getting undressed.
She eventually managed to get into her dark green pyjamas, then pulled her futon out from the corner of the room, laid it flat on the floor, then collapsed full-length, asleep again the moment her head hit the pillow.
