We were in the middle of a village, surrounded by houses barely tall enough to reach to my collarbone. Rather, they would have been had I been standing upright. Currently I was being dragged across the floor, putting me at eye-height with most of the gnomes who were going about their daily lives.
“G’morning,” I slurred, trailing a bit of drool. “Sorry ‘bout the commotion. Outta the way please. Magical girl, coming through.”
A bandaid appeared out of nowhere, slapping me in the face.
“Took you long enough,” I muttered, fumbling the damn thing onto my stomach wound.
Aaand you dropped it. Great.
“Hey, Akira, help me plug the hole in my abdomen please. I can’t exactly move much anymore.”
The venom had done its part to ensure that. I was now a very floppy Sam, floppy and tired.
Akira, after taking in that yes, I really had lost enough blood to coat his entire shoulder, slapped the bandaid on without much difficulty. It worked like a normal bandaid, just… more magical. Then we continued on, trailing a growing audience of onlookers.
We found Clem surrounded by some more gnomes, talking to what seemed to be an elder, or perhaps the mayor of this quaint little town. His hat was twice as tall as the average gnome’s was, giving him the appearance of a walking traffic cone.
The crowd dispersed as we got closer.
“The gnomes offer us shelter in their domain. We can buy snacks with coins if we’re feeling hungry. We’re safe here, for the time being.”
“But?”
“I screwed up,” Clem muttered. “I thought the wards would hold. I tested them, I know they can but… I screwed up. My family lived in that home for hundreds of years and now it’s torn up, broken. And it’s all—”
My fault. I know, Clem, so stop beating yourself up about it. I’ll fix this, somehow. I swear I will.
“Hey, Clem, breathe. We’re all safe, and that’s what counts,” Akira said as he moved to hug her. Cute, but also, he kinda just leaned me against a building and left me there.
Some more gnomes stopped by to watch the blonde giantess and her little meltdown over things that weren’t her fault.
“Maybe we really should have run,” she muttered. “Maybe then they would have ignored the gnomes and everything would have been alright.”
She needed to hear it, as much as I had needed to a few hours ago. “Clem, your parents value you and your safety much more than any old house.”
“But I was still wrong and you got envenomated and now you’re going to die.”
I communicated my confusion with a series of silent blinks. “What? No? Who told you that?”
“You said you had fifteen minutes left.”
“I said that… oh. I meant fifteen minutes until I can’t move at all anymore.” I tried to lift my head, but only managed half an inch before dropping back on the cobblestone road. “It’s nonlethal thanks to my stats. Should’ve clarified that. Sorry.”
Clem's face went through so many emotions. First confusion, then relief, then thoughtfulness, before finally settling on just being happy. She hobbled on over and gave me a big hug.
“I think I broke my toe,” she sniffed. “But I’m glad that I’m not losing anything else today.”
‘Me too’ was what I wanted to say, but my voice suddenly gave out.
“Me tuurghfff?”
[Advanced envenomation detected. Preliminary prognosis: Full body paralysis lasting, at minimum, (4) days, given the subject survives.]
Well, there goes the gift of speech.
I put the free points I just got into Body, just to help speed the process along. But four days stayed four days.
With the adrenaline dying down, I was only now noticing how little of my body I could actually feel. Rather, I could still feel everything; the area around the bandage on my abdomen hurt, as did my face where I’d hit the ground running and where the old cut had torn back open. I could feel the muted sensation of my surroundings beneath my gloves and the aching burn of some mimic blood that must have gotten onto the back of my neck.
I was definitely not focusing on all that to distract myself from how much I was panicking. Was I? Better check.
[Channeling emotion: Fear]
[Warning: Mixing undesirable emotions—]
Yep, definitely fear, totally fear, nothing but abject terror.
I was a person stuck in a body, a brain in a jar except that jar was connected to a remarkably accurate sensorium. If someone stepped on my toes I wouldn’t even be able to scream. If I was being eaten alive, I couldn’t have moved as much as a muscle.
I think the mimics could easily abduct people with this stuff.
Oh god, they probably are.
I need to get up. I need to get up NOW.
Clem was squinting at me with something akin to worry. “Are you alright?”
I frantically tilted my head — only part of my neck wasn’t listening — down.
Clem’s brow furrowed before her face lit up. “Oh, your voicebox got paralyzed. That’s less than ideal. I… I think I can help with that. Akira, can you watch over her? The other cellar is connected to this place, I’ll brew up something quick. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”
That was a whole lot better than being stuck here for four days.
“Sure thing.” They hugged, kissed, then kissed again after a tense moment, then split back up.
I felt like a third wheel until Clem came over and gave me a hug too. Very cool of her.
“You’ll be alright,” she whispered, then whispered a bit less quietly to Akira. “If she stops breathing at any point, give her CPR.”
Oh yeah, haha, that’s a thing that could possibly maybe happen.
One of the gnomes poked my stomach. At the lack of any reaction, he sighed, and most of the crowd dispersed.
So there I was, lying in the middle of a gnome village, paralyzed to the point that forming words was all but impossible. My mouth was feeling numb as if I’d eaten a dozen bees. Moe looked worried as he clambered out of my backpack. He offered me a graham cracker. I didn’t bite for fear that I might suffocate.
A guinea pig waddled by, wheeking as it pulled a carriage full of mushrooms and topsoil. Gnome children gathered to watch me drool. I was pretty sure that they were children, even though they were practically exact copies of all the other gnomes, except only half as tall, down to the features of their faces.
One of them placed a bucket right under the corner of my mouth. A glob of Custodian drool was probably as magical as blood was.
This was weird, and not just because they were staring at me with their bulging eyes. All the gnomes looked nearly identical. But why?
Now that the panic was receding and I had a moment to rest, why not find out?
“Sysm,” I slurred, blinking to get some dirt out of my eye.
No notification popped up, no statblock, no system shop. I’d told it to not read my mind and apparently it was keeping to that promise. Voice or gesture activation only. Betrayed and forgotten by my own paranoia.
How ironic. How laughably, stupidly, entirely me. Screwing myself over again, one impulsive decision at a time.
Except my system sheet did suddenly pop open.
[Garden gnomes (Nanus Modestus) belong to the family of fungiforms. Reproduction occurs asexually via offshoots that grow on their heads resembling pointy mushroom caps. These offshoots are placed in selected locations and tended to collectively. A fully formed if smaller copy of the original gnome may emerge from the earth within three to five months, though many decide to remain sessile, forming fairy rings lined with red-capped mushrooms.]
Oh. They’re literally mushrooms. They don’t look particularly shroomy to me. Wait, how did I do that?
I didn’t use a gesture nor a voice command — ooh. The system was reacting to my blinking. Three blinks opened or closed the current sheet. Staring at a button and blinking with my left eye clicked on it, while blinking with my right eye expanded what few options it was showing.
… my face is a computer mouse.
I can use this. A blink here, a squint there and yesss, there’s the shop. While Clem’s brewing a potion, I can be productive. Actually, can I just buy an antidote like this?
[Currently, no mundane antidote for Tetrodotoxin exists.]
Oh. Well, lessee if magical bullshit has an answer.
[Frederick’s Cure-all Antidote: You got poisoned/envenomated/irradiated/toxified? Not for long. Drink this, the one and only… Frederick’s. Accept no substitutes. Price: 300 Soulcoins]
THREE HUNDRED!?
It was hilariously out of my price range. Even though I had just made a bunch of coins, it was nowhere near enough to buy it. I had 118 silver soulcoins to my name when the number stopped ticking up. It was more than double my previous high score. I ought to be a little proud of myself.
It was time to do some shopping.
Addy didn’t think I had what it takes to be a magical girl, that much was clear. And she was right. A single leaper quill was enough to take me out, and without friends to chauffeur me around, I’d be dead right about now, or worse. To be fair, I was still running around in an absolutely atrocious getup that was exposing an awful lot of belly, but that was due to poverty, not willing neglect.
The belly is a human weak spot. Major blood vessels are hidden behind an awfully thin stomach wall, and the pressure of the digestive organs means that if the wall is cut open, usually the guts are too. An open gut causes internal hemorrhaging and a lot of bacteria in your blood, which means that even if you survive the blood loss, the infection that follows is likely to be the worst and last of your life.
Ergo, my stomach needed protection. My chest did too since getting stabbed in the lung or heart had to be just as bad, if not worse. The shop concurred, given the sheer variety of body armor, but the more I looked the more I realised what the armor was really for.
[Novice Caster Vest: Assists with casting multiple spells concurrently and provides up to 5% increased ECC efficiency…]
[Zoom Cloak: Increases top flight speed in a straight line, 15% increase…]
[Franceska’s Dress of Charming: Looks cute! Swishes with every twirl! Charm enchantment attracts enemies! Annihilate them when they clump up below you…]
Lots of frills, but not a lot of protection.
After a bit of searching the archives, I quickly learned why.
[Novice Custodians rarely move alone. The average custodian is expected to have multiple layers of defense against low-level attacks. The average custodian is expected to use flight to their advantage.]
[Median level for Novice-teams entering their first convergence event: LvL 37.]
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Great. Apparently I was supposed to be thirty levels higher, and able to fly. But even if I had a spell that could make me hover, where would I get the energy from? I was a tenth of a mage as compared to the average magical girl. The only emotions I could reasonably use to fuel the spell would be fear since that was twice as effective as my joy. But how long until the fear of falling was replaced by the awe of flight?
No flying for this spider. Not today. Maybe not ever.
If I could have sighed, I would have.
I blinked the info away and got back to my shopping list.
Essences were right out. They started at around three hundred silver soulcoins for common ones, and many were traded in ivory, which, after looking it up, turned out to be some sort of premium currency for completing important missions. So yeah, no new essence either.
Time bandaids were proving to be a must-have, so I put another one of those on the list, even though it cost thirty coins. In case I got stabbed again, I could probably slap it on before the poison spread.
I needed some armor too. Magical gear was super expensive, so I vowed to look for the best item mundane physics could conjure up.
There were police vests, pink vests, military vests, ultra-light gothic-style knight armor, things made of metal and plastics and polymer and some organic material as well.
My final choice was advertised as an ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene vest for ten coins. It came in black and was very obviously made for police or military use. The description specified that it was lighter than kevlar and protected against stabs, cuts, and blunt force quite well, something my gloves and tights didn’t. They were only good against slashing attacks and while they were woven finely, I had no doubt that the leaper’s spikes could weasel their way in between the mesh of fibers.
Uncuttable did not mean invincible.
Another thirty coins went into what was advertised as high-impact skateboarding protection, including but not limited to shin & arm guards, elbow & knee pads, and a helmet which I couldn’t afford. But the rest had good coverage, good reviews, and obviously was supposed to be used in case of an extraterrestrial mimic attack instead of skateboarding. Obviously.
The mix of polycarbons and graphene composites would probably crack after a couple hard spike hits, but that was preferable to me getting stabbed. At five points per limb, the armor was affordable. Also, they had an option for matte black, which was kind of what my whole vibe was gearing towards.
Sam, the black widow magical girl, ready to shoot ‘em up.
I cringed, but it was a happy cringe. The purchases were starting to line up nicely, so I tentatively opened my channel to charge my only spell.
[Channeling: Joy]
Hell yeah, joy achieved! Now, how much money did I have left?
[Soulcoins: 48]
Dang. It wasn't nothing, but when I knew what I wanted, seventy coins disappeared in a snap. And I still wanted a new weapon. Obviously I did, what else was I supposed to get? The Toothpick was great, but it was more of a persistence weapon. Once I had enough batteries stockpiled I could shoot it nearly forever, but batteries were expensive and I was waiting to get a second Toothpick the moment I felt comfortable coordinating two shooting arms at once.
I could do it if my spell was active. Maybe. I leveled twice; dang, I really had a lot of Body now. But that would mean cutting through my freshly depleted supply even quicker. Instead I looked for something new.
There were too many options. Thousands and thousands of weapon types popped up the moment I hit the ‘fits my budget’ category. Apparently, the people who enjoyed tinkering up technologically improbable and straight-up magical guns enjoyed variety, which wasn’t doing any favors for the individual prices.
[Piranha pistol: Shoots homing, flesh-eating copies of an internal reservoir of carnivorous fish. Requires a small amount of anger to acquire lock-on. Piranhas are ecologically sourced and must be fed regularly. Price: 40 Soulcoins]
[Lightning stick: A one-use stick that shoots 2 meters of lightning for 67 minutes when you pop the cap off. Haven’t discovered a way to make it stop shooting. Product reviews containing constructive criticism are welcome (unless you have evidently not read the product description, in which case, politely fuck off) Price: 20 Soulcoins]
[Goop Gun: Antimonic acid gun, six shots per vial. Combines three separate chemicals in a trifurcated chamber into a glob of acid with a PH level of -7. Acid sticks to anything it can’t dissolve, and dissolves anything it can’t stick to; estimated effective range of 50 meters. If you fire this in melee for the love of god I hope you have a Body stat of at least 200 and a chemical shower on hand. The price is, idk, message me or sth. - D.]
That initial, D. was what caught my eye. It popped up every now and then in between wands of joyful deathlasers and weapons made by mad scientists. His profile said he was Korean, and suggested that he had an interest in odd and rare weapons. He was a reseller, or maybe a collector. Probably a bit of both. Some of the items he was selling went for nearly ten thousand soulcoins.
Curiously, he never sold any given item twice. Maybe that was to drive up prices through artificial scarcity. Or maybe his Bow of El Cid really was the real thing that had gone missing hundreds of years ago.
I needed something practical as opposed to some maybe-stolen historical artifact. So, I messaged him for the Goop Gun and immediately got an answer.
<
<
<<40 silver. payment immediate>>
In spite of autocorrect and the existence of usable text-to-speech, he managed to not capitalize a single word.
Really though, forty silver is kind of… expensive.
I told him as much. The response came within seconds.
<<30 silver. Silver knife included as a bonus>>
“Oh? Why silver?”
<
<
<
<<*guarantee>>
His sentences were growing less coherent by the second. Maybe he was using an old voice to text system. Maybe he was just lazy. Maybe this was a scam, but would a scam really be this obviously unprofessional? Usually scammers either tried to appear fully professional, or were professional with idiosyncratic slip ups. This didn’t strike me as either. Since I couldn’t find an issue with the guarantee after reading through the end consumer license agreement (yes I had that much time) I decided to risk the purchase.
The weapon appeared in mid air. Internally, I shrieked as the vials of green, red, and blue acid components slammed into the ground, gnomes scattering as… they didn’t shatter?
Moe, bravest of the gnomes, took a step forward and gingerly prodded a vial. It was squishy, apparently, like soft plastic. The collection of colorful liquids kind of reminded me of a tide pod. They sloshed around, waiting to unleash their havoc.
Moe dutifully gathered the containers and stowed them away before putting on gnome-sized chemical gloves, taking a sponge on a stick and some TidyBlank out of my backpack. He turned to look at me, ready to give the gun a good cleaning.
What an industrious lil’ fellah.
I had all the time in the world to admire the gun’s design as he scrubbed it.
The gun appeared biological, downright alien in design. The main body was a web of metal and elastomers that looked like it grew around the vial once slotted in. As Moe was trying to learn how to reload it, he found a depression that, when pressed, activated a simple mechanical spring. The spring in turn popped the vial out the back with enough force to send an empty one flying a safe distance away.
I definitely should empty them to the last shot before tossing them about. Littering my home town, any town, with vials filled with colorful superacid seems wildly irresponsible. How much was a ph of minus seven even? I thought that scale only went to 0.
After connecting my brain to Clem’s wifi, I looked up some videos on youtube and found that yes, this kind of acid did act within seconds. A dispassionate streamer with a German accent was pouring a couple drops of it on a chicken leg. The skin immediately contracted like a scrunched up tissue, blackening and showing holes before the acid continued on into and through the meat.
Anything I hit with this dies a slow but painful death. Got it.
Pointedly, a few drops only had enough reactive mass to burn a few holes past the skin. The 1.5 and 3kg models were definitely small enough that even a quick squirt would cripple or kill them, maybe even just from the splash of a near-miss. The gun’s description mentioned a splash zone, so maybe I only needed to hit close by?
This definitely warrants some testing.
… I’m moving further away from the platonic magical girl ideal every single hour. I’d honestly feel kind of bad using this against anything that isn’t a body-snatching, people-strangling mimic.
Time passed. It took nearly three hours before Clem returned, smelling like cut grass and brimstone. She had a couple of potions in a small rack with her; tiny glass bottles with tiny screw-on caps. Her foot was heavily bandaged.
“Sam-Sam! Sorry it took so long,” she said with a cough. Her face was full of soot. Did some of the potions blow up in her face? “Are you still alright? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
“She was manifesting merchandise for the first hour, but she stopped now,” Akira commented. “I think she’s buying things to de-stress herself.”
Am not!
Clem helped me into a sitting position before rubbing a goopy hand up and down my neck. Briefly, I felt my control over it returning, but she hadn’t rubbed it over my voice box.
“Alright, now you can swallow without choking. Here comes the primer.”
She lifted a bottle to my mouth. I swallowed it dutifully. Smooth. Tasted like cough syrup. Also like alcohol. Like woah, that was a lot of buzz.
Then she gave me another one. And another one.
By the fifth small potion my heart was beating insanely fast. I was vibrating, alive with energy. Something was certainly coursing through my veins, but it didn’t feel like the post-workout glow that putting a point into Body did. It felt more like my body was a jet engine being refueled, and Clem had just found the button for the afterburner.
“There, the primer has settled. I think the effect should have worked. Can you try lifting your hand?”
The moment I uttered the thought, my hand practically snapped up.
“Woah.” I marveled at my hand, then massaged my throat. “You cured me? I thought antidotes were, like, super expensive.”
“Technically your body is still full of poison preventing electrical signals from traveling up and down your nervous system. But then I had a thought: If the lovers potion allows for two-way telepathy because the active compound is concentrated in the brain, then maybe if I lower the transmission distance to within a few cell lengths and distribute it across your entire body to piggyback off of your existing nervous system, your cells will instinctively use it to communicate with their neighbors in a way they are already familiar with. I had to increase the alcohol content to dissolve all the necessary reagents, but I’m sure you’ve built up a tolerance after your college escapades.”
That sounded like a bunch of bio-magical horseshit, but it worked. Clem was a genius. Honestly, it was working a bit too well. I just wanted to get up and run a marathon right now, then go wrestle a bear and afterwards eat an entire hog.
“My cells are telepathic now?” I asked, doing a handstand in the town square. It was a lot easier with four arms than two.
“Internally. You, as an individual, don’t have telepathy at all.”
I squinted at her with all my telepathic might. “You are thinking about eating my brownies.”
“What? No!” Clem said, scandalized.
“You are. I saw you eat some of the weed ones. You have to be suffering from terrible munchies now.”
“That’s not important I — Akira, Sam is bullying me!” she whined, hiding behind her boyfriend.
Akira just sighed. “Let’s get back to the issue of us being stuck in here while the monsters are out there. Clem, how long does this last?”
“A few hours, half a day maybe, and only that because I gave Sam a bunch of stabilizing potions. We call them onesies. You can only drink them once every year or two. Residual reactive elements mean that if you take it a second time before your body has had a chance to fully filter it out, the potion’s effect is multiplied so much it usually just kills you.” She looked me dead in the eye before hugging me with a smile. “But you’re kickass now. Your body is in high-power mode. You’ll need a looong nap after this, and about twenty thousand calories, but until then you can go out and kick mimic ass until the house is entirely clean. And then I can figure out the damage, retool the wards to fit only a few rooms. Yes. Yes, that’ll work.”
She was talking to herself mostly. I mean, I sure wasn’t going to not try and mash these mimics into a pulp. But the plan had more holes than a sieve.
Akira went over to hold her, brushing through his non-existent hair. “Clem, I know your parents entrusted you with this place, but we need to leave. It’s not safe.”
“Sam can make it safe, right?” she asked, looking at me. “After that, I don’t see why we couldn’t stay.”
“Because even before they broke your magical shield-thingies and shattered your windows, they could just climb up through your plumbing, Clem,” Akira said evenly. “If Sam hadn’t been here, they could have come inside at any time. They would have killed us in our sleep. And they might still do it if we overlook one single shapeshifted little fucker.”
Clem worked her jaw, looking over at me. “You’ll do it for me, right?”
I gave her my most apologetic look. “I can’t reliably detect what is and what isn’t a mimic. Sorry.”
The only magic I had was for making my arms stop moving by themselves, which they were now doing at a frankly unacceptable level. I felt terrible telling her how I wasn’t useful enough to be counted as a real magical girl. Maybe with some bullshit detection-magic I could figure them out, but as it stood Akira was right. One overlooked mimic was all it took for the average human, or the average witch.
“My bike’s in the garage,” Akira said. “If we can get there I can get at least one other person out with me.”
“Take Clem.”
He blinked at me. “You do realize what I’m asking here, don’t you?”
“For me to stay behind? Don’t worry, I’m not dying yet. I feel great.” To demonstrate, I picked Clem up in a four-armed grip, then tossed her way over my head. She shrieked as I caught her again. Wow, that had to be like, the equivalent of fifty extra points in Body, maybe more.
“See?” I said, as if tossing light women was a skill that guaranteed victory against alien invaders. But I was wielding two other weapons, akimbo-style: facts, and logic. “It’s a good bet. The mimics probably won’t care too much about two normal people escaping if they can dig their claws into a real Custodian. And the attack was way too coordinated. An elite is nearby; this is a chance for me to take it out and disrupt the whole thing.”
Even though Addy explicitly told me not to. Sorry Addy. But a girl’s gotta level.
“But…”
“Clem. I’m a Custodian-ish spider girl. I… I have extra lives.”
“Like a cat?” Clem asked.
“Exactly like a cat.” Except I didn’t have them right now, I was on my last life, and if Clem knew that, she would never let me go. She needed reassurance. I needed to give her that, give her the impression that I was someone much cooler than who I really was.
I shot her a thumbs up and a toothy smile. “Don’t worry; I’ve got lasers and acid guns and a gnome now too. I’m basically immortal.”
She didn’t buy it, not completely. But it was either run away or sit here and slowly wait for the apocalypse to drive on by. There wasn’t much to prepare; while Akira did have his protective biking gear, it was in the living room. No use going for that when there were bigger threats than driving without a helmet. Heck, they probably wouldn’t even have the time to get their shoes.
I checked my Toothpick and loaded my Goop Gun, the latter of which snapped open forwards with a satisfying ca-clunk. It was time to test this baby for real, though better to do it outside of this place. Wouldn’t want to give the peaceful gnomes a heart attack.
“Will the gnomes be all right?” I asked, anxiously hopping from foot to foot thanks to the deluge of potion effects.
“They’ve been here before the house was even built,” Clem said as she stared at me. She probably thought I was nervous. “If they don’t want to be found they won’t be found.”
I nodded my thanks to them and put on my new armor, feeling much, much safer now that I had my outer chitin, er, protection back. Moe hopped back into my backpack as I picked it up.
“You’re along for the long ride as well?” I asked.
“Mo!”
“True. I still need to get you stitched up. Well, looks like we’re partners then.” I gave him a friendly handshake and whispered over my shoulder. “I’ve already got the start of a plan. So, here’s how it’ll go…”
TIDE POD GUN, TIDE POD GUN,
GET YOUR TIDE POD GUN HERE. ONLY MILDLY SCREWS WITH PHYSICS .