Lina led Adah to a fitting room at the back of her shop, tossing her blazer onto a hook embedded in the wall by the doorway as she entered. Adah took her ditching her jacket as a sign she was getting serious, but she had no way of predicting what that meant. A serious Lina ended up being an overwhelming force of singular focus.

  Adah took off most of her own clothes at Lina’s direction, hanging her coat on a rack and setting the rest down on a bench in the room. Lina grabbed a rolled up tape measure and a pencil from a nearby table, then set to work measuring just about every length and proportion on Adah’s body. With the pencil stuck in her mouth and the tape measure stretched between her hands, she worked her way down Adah from top to bottom, taking five or six measurements at once before rushing over to the table to jot down the numbers on a notepad.

  Adah had been fitted for dresses before, but this went beyond anything she’d ever experienced. The usual measurements like her waist and legs were included, of course, but Lina almost seemed more interested in checking out random body parts like Adah’s fingers or bizarre proportions like the length from Adah’s ear to her shoulder blade.

  “A lace bracer,” Lina whispered to herself as she stretched the tape measure down the length of Adah’s middle finger. “A lacer? Just past the knuckle could work. Almost like gloves.”

  After what must have been a couple hundred measurements—and a diary entry’s worth of whispered rambling—Lina finished taking her notes. Adah went to grab her clothes off the bench, but the designer stopped her in a hurry.

  “No, no, not yet,” she said. “Almost done. First some photos, then some try-ons.”

  “Photos?” Adah said. “Here? Like this? I look like a kidnapping victim.”

  “Numbers are nice,” Lina said, “but they only tell half the story. To create something no on else can wear the way you can, I need to see you while I work. Your face, the way you hold yourself, which leg you favor, so many things. I need all of your essence.”

  “My essence, huh,” Adah said.

  “Indeed,” Lina said, nodding. “This outfit will be a magnifying glass held over your desires. My goal is to bring all of it out of you—out of each of you—and lay it upon your skin. These designs will be a way of communicating to the world what hides in your heart without you ever saying a word.”

  “Lately, I feel like I’ve been saying nothing but what’s inside my heart,” Adah said.

  Lina walked to a closet in the corner of the fitting room and produced a camera from within.

  “If I do my job right,” she said, “you may find a feeling you had yet to express when you look at yourself in the mirror. You’re a magical girl—think of me as another mascot, and these clothes are my magic. Didn’t you discover something different about yourself during your time as a magical girl? I know parts of your story—is Heartbreak not one such discovery?”

  Adah certainly wasn’t the same person she was four years ago, and the bulk of that change had occurred in the past few months. She couldn’t deny that all of her efforts as Heartbreak had shifted her perspective, perhaps even her personality.

  She’d flirted with the idea of destiny before. Maybe the reason her old Sparkling Starbloom persona never went anywhere was because it was a relic of the past. Twilight Heartbreak was an identity Adah could grow into, or was destined to grow into. That’s why she had found her footing as a magical girl after adopting it.

  Though, maybe it was merely survivorship bias, reinforced by the fact that leaning further into Heartbreak’s persona was yielding Adah more and more success.

  Clothes were just clothes, but Adah had to wonder what someone like Lina might see as her desires. Her “essence,” as the woman had put it.

  Though, she also wondered, “Since I am a magical girl, why do you need to make the costumes by hand? Couldn’t you sketch it out, and I could inscribe it as another transformation of mine? That’d make changing into it a lot easier, too.”

  “Absolutely not,” Lina said, nearly scowling. “Clothes are clothes and magic is magic. Whatever factory-sealed costume your mascot can produce will never have the same fingerprint as what I create for you. It will never sit on your body the same way mine will. And to have it appear on you, with a snap? Without any effort or consideration? I couldn’t stand it. This is a conversation between you and I, and every accident or correction we make along the way belongs in this design. And when you wear it, the tenth time you put it on should look different from the first, and the hundredth should be even more unique. And when it falls apart beyond repair, then its end will mean something to us. In short: absolutely not.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Adah held up her hands in surrender and said, “I understand.”

  Although she thought she understood, she really did not. The next phase of Lina’s preparation made that clear to Adah.

  With her measurements and first round of reference photos complete, Lina began tossing Adah a seemingly random assortment of clothes and accessories. A half-finished skirt here, followed by a matching tiara and earrings, then just a rectangle of floral patterned fabric that wasn’t any kind of garment at all. Stockings, bodices, shoes, chains, veils, glasses, belts, bracelets, and bangles—every article was fair game.

  Lina would throw Adah a few pieces at once and have her put them all on, usually producing a disastrously clashing hodgepodge of an outfit. Then, she’d either nix it immediately or take a few more photos. Rarely, she’d have Adah keep most of the outfit together, replacing only a single element with something new.

  She might have Adah put on one skirt and stocking combo, and mark the height of the stocking on Adah’s thigh with her pencil. Then, she’d have Adah replace the stocking with another of a different length, and measure the gap between the first marking and where the new garment reached. These measurements joined the others in her notepad of numbers.

  Adah had assumed most designers worked by coming up with a general image they wanted for a piece of clothing, creating it to roughly suit a particular model’s proportions and style, and finally making adjustments once the model had tried the piece on. Lina seemed to work in a completely different manner.

  Her method was almost scientific, like she wanted to observe every facet of Adah before developing a theory that she could later test via experiments in fabric. Of course, it wasn’t only Adah that she wanted to observe.

  “That’s enough for you today,” Lina declared. “Let’s see Heartbreak now.”

  Adah had lost track of time in this isolated fitting room. She might have only been back here for fifteen minutes, but she’d just as easily believe that it had been three hours. She was ready for a break, but decided that the shortest path to freedom was probably to follow Lina’s instructions as quickly as possible.

  She’d try to warn her teammates about what they were in for before it was their turn.

  Adah called for her mascot so that she could transform, but even after waiting a few seconds, Izzy did not appear. Usually his response was near instantaneous. She called for him again, saying his name aloud this time on the chance that her mental message had somehow gotten lost on its way to him. Whatever mascots did when they were away from this world was still a mystery to her, after all.

  After another short delay, the winged pig materialized in front of Adah’s face. Izzy spoke to her privately, through their magic channel, as he initiated her transformation.

  “My apologies,” he said. “I was occupied by a discussion between some members of my kind. I sensed the situation here was not an emergency, so I waited for our discussion to reach a point of resolution before responding.”

  “What kind of discussion?” Adah said to him. “Sounds like something important.”

  “It may not need to be,” he said. “It will, however, take some time to explain. We can discuss it tonight—it is something you should be aware of. You may have attracted the attention of some you did not mean to.”

  “Good attention or bad?” she asked.

  “That is what I am trying to determine,” he said, then vanished once more, presumably to return to his discussion with the other mascots.

  If that was the case, then the ones whose attention Adah had caught were members of Izzy’s kind. Surely they weren’t upset about her beef with Thibault? Without knowing if the mascots’ response was positive or negative, Adah really couldn’t theorize much further on the cause. She didn’t know enough about them to take a guess in the first place.

  From the sounds of it, though, she’d be learning a lot more about them tonight.

  “Is he shy?” Lina asked, nodding toward the spot where Izzy had been floating a moment ago.

  “Self-conscious,” Adah said. “I think he got made fun of for how he looked growing up.”

  “Is that how it is?” Lina said, her voice soft with genuine sympathy.

  “He brings it upon himself,” Adah said with a shrug.

  Mercifully, Lina was only interested in taking photos of Adah in her Heartbreak transformation, along with a few quick measurements of her horns. Playing along with the designer’s whims had indeed been the fastest route to freedom. Lina released her from the fitting room a few minutes later, signaling for Rika to join her next.

  As Adah walked past Rika, she whispered, “Good luck.”

  No warning for Rika. That was payback for the fern comment.

  Though, to Adah’s surprise, Rika emerged from the fitting room in under twenty minutes. The twins took slightly longer, probably due to Lina searching for as many distinctions between the two girls as she could find, but were still a quick turnaround.

  “Was I in there way longer than everyone else?” Adah asked Grace once Emi, the final victim, returned.

  “Over an hour,” Grace said, sighing as she remembered the wait. “We thought about calling the police.”

  “What the hell did I do to deserve that torture?”

  “You’re the problem child, as always. What else is there to say?”

  Adah could only hope that the outfit Lina designed for her would put everyone else to shame. She better make all that effort worth it!