Twilight Heartbreak

  FP: 201

  Reach: 3554

  August

  13,000 / 95,000 CR

  Grace finished writing out the numbers at the top of a whiteboard in the agency’s back office. She had always kept this board up to date with the FP and social media reach of every girl at Spotlight Sunbright, but had recently added a monthly budget tracker underneath Adah’s section.

  The 95,000 Credits was roughly what the agency would need to cover a month’s expenses. Grace had suggested dividing that number up, since the other girls at the agency would also bring in money, but Adah insisted on setting the entire budget as her goal. She wanted to push herself as far as she could go, not settle for the bare minimum to get by.

  She didn’t want to feel satisfied with earning 13,000 Credits in a week—certainly not when 3,000 of that came from three F-Rank missions pulling in a measly grand each. That kind of income wouldn’t even cover her own living expenses. This was all part of why she’d wanted to push for a D-Rank mission. By leapfrogging E-Rank, she could bring home ten times the bounty. That was the pace she needed to keep.

  “Looks like this new identity is working out for you,” Grace said as she capped a marker and sat back down in a chair in front of the board.

  Adah looked up at the numbers, though she had already burned them into her brain by staring at her phone all of the night prior. The exhaustion she’d felt after fighting the whale Cruelty had vanished when the dopamine of her FP and follower gains hit, and she’d struggled to fall asleep in her excitement. Staring at a phone screen in an otherwise dark room probably didn’t help either.

  “So far,” she said. “But I need to find a way of promoting myself other than screaming in public.”

  “If it works, it works,” Michel said. He was sitting atop a desk at the far end of the room, looking like either he’d just woken up or he’d never slept. “Some actors have to put up with being typecast until they get enough clout and connections to break into new roles.”

  “Is that what you did?” Adah asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “I had other methods of making connections.”

  “He means he hooked up with actresses and producers until enough of them found out they weren’t his only ‘muse’ and kicked him to the curb,” Grace explained.

  “If it works, it works,” he said again. “Although this is different. Magical girls aren’t actors, they’re the characters. You can cast yourself in whatever role you want—you just need to create a compelling enough story that Twilight Heartbreak comes to life. Something with ups and downs that makes them want to see you come out on top. You want fans to start sharing your journey, not random photos of you. Unless you’re really cute, it’s easier for people to get invested in your story than in you.”

  He made a fair point, if Adah ignored the implications of his last sentence. The comments on yesterday’s video even reflected what Michel had said. The most positive of them had focused on the superficial, and everyone else either bounced off the post or was only interested in making fun of her. She couldn’t blame them, though. She hadn’t given them anything else to care about.

  Maybe the question she needed to answer wasn’t about who Twilight Heartbreak was so much as about what Twilight Heartbreak wanted.

  Just as she’d started pondering that question, the door to the back office swung open as if it’d been kicked in. Ami and Emi barged inside and marched in front of the whiteboard. They struck identical poses with their hands on their hips. When the twins stood side by side like this, they really were a perfect mirror of one another. Despite the similarity, you couldn’t mistake who was who once they started talking.

  “If you’re turning this shitty agency around, you better not leave us out of it,” Ami said.

  “I want FP,” Emi added, simple as always. “And money.”

  “Lots of it,” Ami slapped her sister on the back hard enough to make her stumble forward. She took a step forward so they were standing in line again.

  Grace took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She gestured to Adah with her free hand, prompting the twins to fix their gazes on their teammate.

  “I wouldn’t say you’re being left out of anything,” Adah said.

  “You’re having this meeting without us,” Ami retorted, then tapped the whiteboard near Adah’s budget with her knuckles. “And doing whatever this is without us.”

  Adah couldn’t deny that. Although she hadn’t actively excluded the twins from her meetings with Grace, she had insisted that only her own income be included in the budget tracker. She was approaching her goal as a lone wolf, but maybe that was part of the problem. The question of what Twilight Heartbreak wanted already had an answer—at least in the short term. She wanted to save this agency so she and her teammates could have a second chance to make something of themselves.

  A goal like that was hollow if those same teammates weren’t involved in achieving it.

  “You’re right,” Adah said, “though I don’t actually know what it is I’m doing. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  The twins took that as their signal to settle in, so they gave up the poses and brought two extra folding chairs in front of the whiteboard.

  “At least you’re doing something,” Ami said. “Acting like a captain.”

  Adah didn’t remember ever being named team captain, but it was true that the more veteran girls ought to lead the way for the younger ones. Looking back, she’d never filled that role for the twins. It’d been hard to be much of a leader when she was still working without any direction herself.

  “You killed a D-Rank alone,” Emi said.

  “Yeah,” Ami said, leaning forward in her chair. “That’s the kind of cool shit we wanna be a part of. We’re not gonna change our names or anything, but we’re ready for something different. Emi at least has a brighter future than being a bottom-tier magical girl.”

  The twins looked at each other and nodded in sync.

  Getting the chance to unite as a team for a common purpose reminded her of those early days with Rika, when the two of them had dreamed up what every step of their adventure as magical girls would look like. Looking at the twins now, she realized their honeymoon period must have ended even earlier than hers had. More than saving the agency, they now had a chance to reclaim that feeling of dreaming, if not the dreams themselves.

  “The more the merrier,” Adah said. “If we’re going to do this, it’s only right we do it together.”

  “So,” Ami said, “what are we doing?”

  Grace took this opportunity to rejoin the conversation and said, “You two should start by taking missions with Adah. You need to learn how to fight alongside her new spell, plus it’ll be good for you to be seen with her. Anyone interested in Heartbreak would probably be interested in her teammates, so you might be able to piggyback off her momentum.”

  The twins nodded eagerly at that suggestion, but something felt off to Adah. Piggybacking wasn’t exactly a strong rallying cry, especially when Adah was haphazardly building her own fanbase. She could figure out Heartbreak’s character at her own pace, but the team needed something more concrete to work toward.

  “Missions are a given,” Adah said as she walked up to the whiteboard. “We’ll grind out more than enough of those to keep this place afloat, but we also need a goal beyond a quota to keep us motivated.”

  “Like what, reaching a certain FP level?” Ami asked.

  “Kind of,” Adah said, “but the level is only a means to an end.”

  She pulled the cap off a marker and scribbled something across the length of the whiteboard.

  GOAL: Earn our weapons.

  “When you think of famous magical girls, isn’t their weapon one of the first things you picture about them?” she said. “Like if I saw Pureheart’s bow out of context, I’d still know exactly what it was.”

  Emi’s eyes lit up at the suggestion of weapons. She held her fists out in front of her like she was gripping an imaginary polearm.

  “It’s time for my halberd,” she said, the most animated Adah had ever seen her.

  Ami smiled and looked down at her own hands, visions of her own weapon clearly playing out in her mind as well. Adah had led with the most enticing part of her proposal, and it appeared to be sufficiently hooking the twins in. Unfortunately, there were a few gut punches of reality to deal with still.

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

  “The FP breakpoint for accessing weapons is 5000,” Grace cut in to explain, shattering the the twin’s fantasies so brutally that Adah could actually hear their brains crack in two.

  Grace joined Adah near the whiteboard and took the marker from her hand. She added that threshold value next to each of the girl’s current FP level.

  Twilight Heartbreak

  FP: 201/5000

  Dazzling Dewdrop

  FP: 70/5000

  Radiant Raindrop

  FP: 72/5000

  “So that’s the long term goal,” Adah said, hurrying to salvage the optimism of the twins. “Before that, there are baby steps we can target along the way. The first one is taking on a C-Rank mission.”

  Emi’s eyes had gone vacant after she’d been hit by the sheer scale of FP levels. Ami wasn’t much better off; she hunched over and rubbed her temples. Adah choose to continue explaining her idea while they recovered.

  “I’ve got a long ways to go too, but I’ve learned just how much more power comes with increasing your FP. The spells we unlock later are nuclear compared to what we start with. Even though there’s an exponential increase in FP thresholds, we’re getting exponentially stronger along the way. That’s why, if we can all unlock a second spell, I think we can take on a C-Rank mission.”

  While she spoke, the twins returned to reality. They mulled her plan over as they looked into each other’s eyes, almost as if they were debating the idea through some nonverbal gemini network only they had access to. After reaching a silent agreement, Emi gave a thumbs up.

  “So the plan is to follow in Heartbreak’s footsteps until we’re stronger,” Ami said, “then re-debut with a bang?”

  “‘Re-debut,’” Adah repeated, “that’s a good way to put it. We work on two problems at once that way. On top of getting stronger, I still need to figure out how to elevate Heartbreak’s appeal beyond a fluke. If instead of considering one magical girl, we focus on all of us, we can help each other stand out.”

  Ami cracked a big smile and gave her sister a mischievous look. Since she was caught between them, Adah felt a disconcerting chill crawl across her skin as the twins concocted a plan in silence. Nothing they could plot without words could possibly be too devious though, could it?

  Before anything came to fruition, Grace chimed in with another dose of reality.

  “Aspirations are great,” she said, “but right now we’re still not on pace to being in the black this month. I know you talked about not wanting to just grind out missions, but you will have to do some of that.”

  “Then let’s pick something and get going,” Ami said, gesturing to the desk Michel was still seated on. “Maybe we can take a cool mission now, if Heartbreak’s so strong.”

  The twins looked at Adah as if waiting for her confirmation. She was still a little fatigued from fighting the whale Cruelty, but not to the point she’d planned to take the day off. Her boost in FP had given her more magic essence and a leveled-up spell to play with, so she was eager to get back in action anyway. She only had one reservation about rushing into a new mission like this.

  “Shouldn’t we call Rika down here, too?” Adah asked. “If we’re moving forward as a team, it doesn’t make sense to leave her out.”

  Ami shook her head and said, “Nah, we already asked. We were planning to ambush you all together, but she turned us down. Said she was busy working on some music.”

  “Oh,” Adah said after a longer pause than she intended. “Well, let’s loop her in after then. I guess she’s already working hard in her own way, right?”

  Rika had seemed busier than usual since the news about the agency’s finances, having even missed a couple of dinners in favor of working in her room. Yet, this also wasn’t the first time she’d committed to her singing with such focus. Maybe the most accurate way to describe this kind of behavior from her was “rare.” That being said, perhaps the threat of the agency closing begot rare behavior. Adah herself had just undergone a drastic change, after all.

  The twins took a seat atop either end of the office desk, prompting Michel to excuse himself from the room. Apparently he was off to—in his words—help in a way only he could, a phrase which drew a glare from Grace. He deflected it with a smile and left before she could say anything, so she simply sighed and moved over to join the twins.

  As Grace pulled up the mission portal on the office computer, Adah looked over the whiteboard again. Grace hadn’t added the same 5000 FP goal underneath Rika’s name. There probably wasn’t any meaning behind that—Rika wasn’t present was all—but it still bothered Adah. She grabbed a marker and wrote it out herself.

  Shining Lyrika

  FP: 164 / 5000

  Back at the desk, the twins leaned in front of the computer monitor as Grace scrolled through the available missions. Their manager talked about balancing Adah’s new power with the fact the twins were unfamiliar with the new spell, and how they should try to push themselves but not take anything too dangerous on account of that.

  Emi ignored all of that and pointed at a mission on the screen. Without further comment, she said, “This one.”

  Their manager double-clicked the listing to expand its details. They all took a moment to read through it before Grace said, “It could be tricky.”

  “Tricky how?” Adah asked.

  Grace beckoned her over to read the details for herself. The mission Emi had picked out was N-Rank, with a predicted number of Cruelties ranging from twelve to fifteen. These number estimations were far from perfect, and oftentimes fewer or greater quantities of Cruelties would spawn, but the Magedar could still reliably predict the type of Cruelty. In this case, they’d be fighting wolf-like monsters. Individually, these Cruelties were even weaker than F-Ranks, but they posed a larger threat in a pack.

  The wolves were only as large as a Golden Retriever, but with the addition of wings in the style of a dragonfly which allowed for short range flight. Between the land speed you’d expect of a wolf and that additional vertical mobility, they could quickly overwhelm their prey in large enough groups. Luckily, magical girls were no slouches when it came to their own mobility.

  The mission itself was no problem. Like Grace had said, the number of enemies could be tricky with their particular spells, but they could handle it. More than the mission details, there was another reason Adah couldn’t fire herself up yet.

  “This looks good to me,” she said. “Take it, but let me check something before we leave.”

  Without waiting for a response, she hurried out of the back office and made her way upstairs to the dormitory, stopping in front of Rika’s room.

  Adah knocked twice. Not long after, Rika poked her head out from behind the door, but made no further move to come into the hallway. Her eyes had the slightly red, strained look typical of the sleepless nights she pulled when working on a cover. She greeted Adah after a long yawn.

  “The twins told me you were busy,” Adah said, “but I wanted to check. We’re taking a mission together, if you’re up for joining us. It’s out in some farm fields, so I guess it’s not glamorous enough for anyone else.”

  Rika smiled but still didn’t step out of her room.

  “We’re just a bunch of ranch hands, huh?” she joked. “If you need someone to corral Cruelties, there’s nobody better.”

  “At least being a cowgirl pays better than most of our jobs,” Adah said with a laugh.

  “Sad but true,” Rika said with resignation. “I think I have to sit this one out though. I’m finally getting in the zone, and if I leave now my brain will be so split I won’t do a good job out there or in here. Sorry.”

  “You get a pass this time. Try not to overdo it, though. I’m a little worried about you, if I’m being honest.”

  Rika feigned a gasp and replied, “I must really look like shit for you to say that. Forget me, though. I should be worried about you. Will you girls really be okay without me?”

  “For now, we’ll manage. But I will miss having my hotshot next to me,” Adah answered with a wink.

  Rika slammed her door shut. When she opened it again a few seconds later, she reappeared fanning her face in an exaggerated motion.

  “Something about Heartbreak strikes the soul so much more intensely than Sparky,” she said.

  Adah sighed. “When you act that over the top, it just makes me feel like an idiot. I’ll have you know I really was worried about you. Clearly I got worked up over nothing.”

  Rika stuck out her tongue and said, “Worried about what? I’m just doing what I’m best at—making songs and teasing you.”

  “Only one of those qualifies as a skill set.”

  Perhaps it really was that simple: Rika was working hard on her music, which had always been what drew her to magical girls. For her, magic and costumes were enhancements to a musical performance first and foremost. Missions worked more like pressure release valves for her. She could meticulously craft a musical project in a long period of isolation, then go out and reset her brain by letting loose on Cruelties.

  That was how it seemed to Adah, anyway. Rika had always been someone who took your help when she wanted it, not necessarily when you offered it. The discrepancy between her usual bubbly personality and her intense inward focus when working on a project was just something Adah never fully got used to.

  In any case, if Rika could still joke around like normal, then she must be doing okay. In time, she’d open back up completely. Then it wouldn’t be long before she started begging to blast away some Cruelties.

  Adah had to recognize she wasn’t all that different, in her own way. She had been isolating herself as well, albeit unintentionally, until the twins reached out to her. As long as one teammate was willing to talk to another, they would never truly drift apart. The rest of what she wanted to talk about—the weapons goal, starting over as a team—could wait until Rika finished her current project.

  With that on her mind, Adah held out her arms to Rika. Finally, the other girl did leave her room, and accepted the hug. They said a quick goodbye, then Adah joined the twins downstairs to prepare for the mission.

  The trio of magical girls initiated their transformations. As she emerged from her smoky cloud of magic, Adah tried to read the expressions of Moon and Noon, the two mascots who had paired with the twins. However, given that they were otherworldly seahorses, her effort was completely and utterly useless.

  “You ready?” she asked the twins. “Let’s take the first step towards our goal.”

  “First of five thousand,” Ami said with a chuckle.

  “Only 4928 steps for me,” Emi said.

  With that, they took off towards their destination: a patch of farmland not far south from the agency. As they approached, it became clear why the Cruelties were targeting this spot. The farm in question was primarily a dairy farm, with some cattle grazing out in fenced fields and others being processed inside a large barn-like milking parlor. Corn grew throughout the surrounding flat fields, presumably as feed for the livestock. With such easily navigable terrain and only a short fence separating the grazing cattle from the wolf-like Cruelties, it was an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  Adah and the twins paused to hover over the grazing fields and observe the area. The Cruelties were anticipated to spawn a short distance from the farm, so the girls would be able to see them coming. Each girl scanned the horizon in a different direction. Adah must have been looking to the west, as she needed to shield her eyes against the setting sun as it fell nearer the skyline. Through the glare, she thought she saw something odd.

  Her eyes were surely playing tricks with the silhouettes of the Cruelties she spied heading towards her. The sun was blinding her, she was squinting, and the Cruelties were still far away—that all must have created a sort of mirage.

  What she saw looked like a small army of wolves.

  “That mission brief said there were only a dozen of them, right?” she asked the other girls, who soon floated to her side.

  As the three of them looked at the approaching horde, the twins’ silence confirmed Adah’s fears.

  “Baker’s dozen,” Ami eventually said.

  Rushing toward them over a small hill in the distance was a gray crowd of Cruelties, seemingly growing faster and faster the closer they got. Adah’s panicked estimate of a headcount? Sixty, if they were lucky.