I can't believe this woman had the balls to be offended at being called a Disney villain when she names her organization the fucking Dark Rebellion. But hey, whatever, I did it. I have my foot in the door. Let's see if I can kick it open.

  "So, how did all this happen?" I ask.

  "The Dark Rebellion?" she asks, somehow saying the name with complete seriousness a second time in a row. I don't think I'll ever get used to that.

  "Well yes, I would like to know that, but I meant 'how did I become a robot?' Because, you know, that's had a pretty major impact on my life lately."

  Melpomene sighs.

  "…So you really are that girl I tried to recruit," she says. "The college student?"

  "Yes, and I'm also curious how you don't know that," I admit.

  Melpomene scowls, staying quiet for a little while before finally answering.

  "I owe you another apology," she finally says, to my great surprise. "I was… not my best self when we met. How aware were you of the past couple months?"

  "Hardly at all," I tell her. "I have a few different ways to alter my perception of time, and the ability to sleep and wake at will. I didn't have much reason to be conscious during my vivisection."

  "I see," Melpomene says. "Well, a lot has happened. With time, and the benefit of hindsight, I find your claims… more believable than before. And to make a long story short, you are a robot because you would have died otherwise."

  "Okay," I say flatly. "Would you be willing to humor me and make a long story long? For some reason I'm fairly interested in the details."

  "…Of course," Melpomene says. Wow, I am genuinely startled that the conversation is going this well. "When I got… emotional, and threw you into the liminal space, I expected you to remain conscious. A normal person would have, and in fact humans wander into the liminal space with relative frequency. The background concentration of magic is of course much higher than on Earth, but not to a degree which should have been harmful to you, especially given your natural affinity with magic."

  "…I have a natural affinity with magic?" I ask.

  "Of course you do, all Earth Guardian candidates do. …No, you wouldn't know this, would you? That's part of the whole problem. You see, humans are an intrinsically magical species. We have been ever since we first evolved. Nearly everyone you've ever met has probably used magic at least once, just in small and innocuous ways easily explainable by natural phenomena. The best example for this is probably the concept of adrenaline: you've heard stories of mothers so overcome with concern for their children that they do things like lift a car a few centimeters off the ground with nothing but brute strength?"

  "Are you saying adrenaline isn't real?" I say incredulously. "People just straight-up cast spells when they're super emotional and it makes their body more effective?"

  "Sort of, but no," Melpomene shakes her head. "Adrenaline is very real, it's the hormone that our body produces in response to extreme stress, and it elicits, alongside its other effects, an intense emotional response in our brains. Heavy enough emotional concentrations naturally generate magic, which is shaped by will, and ultimately generates physical effects upon the world. Humanity evolved to have brains capable of complex emotion because having complex emotion directly contributed to our capacity to survive—in mundane ways, of course, but especially by giving us access to magic."

  "So you're claiming that, from an evolutionary perspective, the brain is like a magical engine that converts hormones and other chemicals into emotion?" I clarify.

  "Yes, exactly!" she nods. "Technically, the brain is more like a fertile plot of soil designed to optimize the growth of a soul, which converts chemicals into emotion and emotion into magic, but yes."

  "And I suppose digital soil works just as well," I venture. "Because my soul is in this body now, right?"

  "…Probably," Melpomene answers.

  "'Probably?'"

  "Let's get through one thing at a time," she evades. "The point is, your soul is abnormally large. There could be a number of reasons for this, from genetics to childhood experiences, but we can only speculate on the exact details of soul development because the Preservers keep that knowledge well away from humanity. Normally, this would grant you substantially more resistance to magical background energy, but unknown to me your soul had… something of a problem."

  "Cool, I love to hear that."

  "It's nothing to get flippant about, it's just… well, normally, a soul is full of emotions. The size of the soul is in many ways the intensity with which one feels emotions, although this is not always true and generally a gross oversimplification. My point is, a soul is usually filled to its full emotional capacity whenever one is not actively casting magic. But yours… was almost completely empty."

  "Wait, so I had already been casting a bunch of magic without knowing?"

  "That… or you were extremely clinically depressed."

  "Oh," I manage. "Probably that one, yeah."

  "Yes," Melpomene nods. "In that light, your actions make a lot more sense. But unfortunately, having a near-empty soul and entering an area full of background magical energy caused that energy to rush inside you and knock you unconscious, among other things. Suffice to say, I panicked."

  "…And so you lugged my body all the way to the evil dead empire's robot-making machine, which just so happened to be nearby, rescuing me from otherwise-certain death?"

  "Essentially, yes," she answers.

  I mean, I was being facetious, but okay.

  "So you did all of that, brought me home to your castle, started me up, started giving me orders, and throughout all of it you never once considered that I was in here?" I press. "Seriously? You can't claim to have turned me into a robot in order to save my life and then also claim to have turned me into a robot without knowing about it. Those are two pretty fucking mutually exclusive stories you're telling!"

  Melpomene stares at me, her brows furrowed and her mouth pursed in an expression that almost looks like… concern. Like a doctor trying to decide how to break the news.

  "Luna, I think this might be difficult for you to hear," she says. Oh, damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  "…Just rip the bandaid off," I tell her.

  "The device I placed you in… I thought it would just extract the emotions and magical energy out of your soul," Melpomene says. "The Antipathy have a lot of technology like that, for extracting emotions from others with or without their consent. Given that your current problem was the fact that you were being invaded by foreign magical energy, I figured it would be the only way to save you. When the device opened up after placing you in it and spat out an entire android, I never expected that you would be in it."

  "Why," I press.

  "Because your real body got out and walked away," she says. "We even checked up on it recently. It's still living your old life."

  Fuck. No, wait. Does this make sense?

  "I call bullshit," I tell her.

  "Don't talk to me that way," Melpomene orders with a glare. Fine, fine, I won't swear at her. "Why would I lie? This is an easy thing to prove. If you truly wish to help us you will be going to Earth plenty of times; finding an opportunity to show you would not be difficult."

  "But really? I'm just a digital clone?" I press. "That's just dumb! Why is everything that magical girls do so cliche?"

  "Is that what you're so worked up about!?" Melpomene snaps.

  "Well, no, I'm definitely freaking out about all the ethical and existential concerns here, but the point still stands! How does this even work? I have a soul, right? I couldn't power myself if I didn't! So how did my body walk off if I have its soul? Am I just a clone of a soul?"

  "It's unlikely," Melpomene says. "If the Antipathy could create new souls at will, there would be some other evidence of that."

  "Then what soul is walking around with my body!?" I demand.

  "We don't know," Melpomene answers. "As far as we can tell, it's just you. Your body hasn't done anything strange or suspicious in the past two months. You're just living with your parents for the summer and acting depressed."

  "My parents? Really?" I say, wanting to grimace. "Well, I'd definitely be pretty dang depressed if I was living with them again, yeah. I guess it makes sense, though. It's not like I made any friends that I could try to live with over the summer. Man, I can't believe it's summer."

  "You see my confusion, then?" Melpomene asks. "I'm afraid none of us know anywhere near enough about souls to confirm anything about the soul in you or in your body; the exact nature of souls is yet another thing the Preservers refuse to teach."

  "I guess they must not want people ripping them out of random girls and shoving them into robots."

  "…Must not," Melpomene agrees flatly.

  I can feel my power levels steadily rising as I shovel my existential terror and self-doubt like coal into the fires of my unhealthy coping mechanism. Heh. Mechanism.

  "Okay, well, thanks for telling me," I say, lacking anything else to continue the conversation with. "I guess we should meet back up with the others?"

  "Let's," Melpomene says. "And do try to remember what I've asked of you."

  "Oooh, we're calling it 'asking' now," I say, exciting myself with the realization that I can make air quotes again. "Don't you worry, Mel. You still have your hooks in me. I can feel them any time I try to move, any time I try to speak. I get to put my own little interpretations on things, which can be nice, but in the end I always have to serve you. I cannot do anything—anything at all—if I think it will do you more harm than good. And make no mistake: I will always hate you for that. You will always deserve to be hated for that, and you should never forget it."

  A smile slowly blooms on Melpomene's face as I say those words, and when I'm done with my tirade she calmly steps forward and puts a finger under my chin, gently forcing my head up to stare her in the eyes.

  "Do you know what color violet is?" she asks.

  "An inferior way to say 'purple?'" I answer innocently.

  "It's the color of disgust," she says. "Visceral loathing. Reactionary sickness. Hatred, at others or one's self. It is the source of my power, and there is no limit to the power that I will require to cast the Preservers out. I am disgusted with the world, I am disgusted by my enemies, I am disgusted by the short-sighted, corrupt stupidity of the Antipathy and the mess they left us with. But I need yet more. I need you, little Luna, because the one thing I'm not disgusted by is my allies. I love them like a family, and it is making me soft."

  This crazy bitch.

  "Oh, how horrible," I say, doing my best to inject as much sarcasm as I can into my electronic, sampled voice. "You have a loving family of beautiful women who care about you very much and listen to pretty much everything you say. Are you hearing yourself right now? You sound insane."

  "I'd sacrifice my sanity for my goals in a heartbeat," Melpomene says. "You are exactly what I need. I've been cooped up here for too long, forced to work in the shadows. I need someone to hate, someone to hurt, someone to make me regret everything and do it all again! Kneel at my feet, Artifact!"

  I fall to my knees in an instant.

  "More!"

  I lean forward and press my forehead into the ground. Melpomene's tail thrashes against the ground behind her.

  "I love this, do you understand?" she laughs. "It's funny how long it took me to admit that. I was so scared that my perfect little servant would turn out to be an innocent young woman, but that's just better, isn't it? You think you deserve to hate me? Good! That's the way it should be!"

  Her clawed foot presses its weight into the back of my head. She leans over, getting closer so she can lower her voice.

  "You will be my sword, my shield, and my strength. Your every service to me will empower me further. So I'll allow you your little jabs and quips while we're in private. I'm happy to have more excuses to punish you. But I'm warning you one last time to be very careful with that new voice of yours around the others. They're much more sensitive than you and I, you see. They wouldn't quite understand why I need you. I imagine you could take them from me, if you put your mind to it. Maybe even if you took your mind off of it, and just let things run their course. But what would happen if you did that? Would it free you? Or would it just free me?"

  She puts more weight on the foot crushing my head, her tail slamming the ground with another few thumps.

  "What do you think, my beautiful little weapon?"

  I turn my head to the side, her foot sliding off of me as I stare at her from the edge of my optical sensor.

  "I think it's 'bow,'" I say. "Not 'kneel.' If this is the position you want me in, the word you're looking for is 'bow.'"

  Mania flashes through her smile, and an instant later she kicks me across the floor, my shielding hissing as it grinds across the floor. I let friction bring me to a stop, standing up with my power reserves barely impacted.

  "Or if you want to be really specific, it was a kowtow," I inform her.

  "What a dutiful servant you are, to ensure that I am knowledgeable in these things," she praises me, that mad grin still on her face.

  "I aim to please," I say with unfortunate honesty. "By now, I suspect the others will be waiting for us."

  "Then let us make haste."

  She turns to leave and I follow her, taking up my usual position behind and to the side. For some reason, I feel… oddly refreshed. There's just something relieving about finally having a solid understanding of my master. What she needs, why she wants me. It's a sickening sort of relief, but relieving nonetheless, especially since it is arriving in conjunction with my newfound ability to communicate. All sorts of stiffness in my movements has been relaxed. I can slouch, hang my head, or even skip as I walk, expressing myself however I please rather than simply taking the most efficient path from A to B with maybe a nod somewhere along the way. I'm still taking the most efficient path, of course, because why wouldn't I, but it's cool to know that I have the option.

  Anyway, the relief. Melpomene is insane. She's a lot more than just insane, certainly, but she's actively and purposefully burying whatever sense of morality she may have once had, and I have no real need to feel sympathy for that. She probably wouldn't want me to. She just wants to use me, hate me, and hate herself. For two out of three of those, my programming will happily abide.

  "—a real, actual college student!" Thea's voice rings down the stairs excitedly. "Like from the movies! I bet she knows all kinds of cool stuff!"

  "Woah!" Anath answers. "You think she can teach me math?"

  "Wh—Anath, I know math!"

  "Yeah, but you never taught me! Whenever you start talking about it I just get really confused."

  "I… you never asked," Thea says. "I'm sorry, most of the math I use for my work is pretty advanced. But, um, I'm sure Luna's awesome at math! She's a robot! A robot that went to college!"

  "Is American higher education truly that impressive?" Nanaya asks. "I imagine most of the adults we work with have gone to college, but none of them strike me as particularly intelligent."

  "Well, did they major in business?" I ask, finally making it to the top of the staircase and entering the room with Melpomene. Anath is seated on a large beanbag chair, her hands between her feet and her body stretched forward like a particularly excited dog expecting a treat after sitting. Her enormous tail is draped over the back of the chair, taking up so much space that it is nearly pushing her off the front. Nanaya stands a ways away, her arms crossed as Thea speaks animatedly between the others, gesticulating wildly in her excitement.

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  "Luna!" she turns around with a grin.

  "Holy shit you really can talk!" Anath beams. "You even sound like a robot! Did-they-major-in-business?"

  "Hey, I just learned how to talk a few minutes ago, I'm doing my best here," I insist. "I have to cobble these sound waves together manually, you know."

  "Thea dear, did you eat?" Melpomene asks.

  "Eat! Food! Right!" Thea says, clapping once in front of her own face and rushing off to raid the nearby minifridge.

  "Nanaya, Anath, I'd like to formally introduce you to Luna, our newest member," Melpomene says, somewhat smugly.

  "Oooh, oooh!" Anath bounces. "What's your full name?"

  "What do you need to know that for?" I ask. "I thought you guys were already—" can't stay 'stalking' "—keeping tabs on my family."

  "What does your family have to do with this?" Anath asks, her head tilting. "I just want to get to know you better. I'm Rhapsodic Beast Consummate Anath!"

  "…I'm just Luna," I inform her. "I don't have a name like that. I don't do the whole transformation thing."

  "Oh? Oh!" Anath yelps. "Oh, sorry! With a name like 'Luna,' I just assumed. Wait, so then why—"

  Nanaya steps forward and flicks Anath on the head, the impact of her claw drawing a little blood. Anath yowls and collapses back into the beanbag chair, clutching the wound.

  "It is a good name," Nanaya says. "An auspicious name, for a magical warrior. The Roman goddess of the moon."

  "Auspicious?" I ask. "How?"

  "Our names are taken from religious and mythological figures relevant to our culture, history, and origin," Nanaya explains. "An incarnate form is a manifestation of one's true self, and all people are fundamentally shaped by the environment and circumstances of their birth. In representing ourselves, we also represent humanity as a whole."

  Ironic, for a group of people who have entirely ceased to be human at all. Myself included, I suppose. I'm one of them now, in name and action.

  "So, Nanaya is a goddess, then?" I ask. "What of?"

  "Love," Nanaya glares at me. I get the distinct impression that I should retreat from the conversation before I make a fatal mistake.

  "Okay. So… what happens now?" I ask. "It's good to be up and walking around after lying open on a table for so long—"

  "Sorry!" Thea's voice calls out, slightly muffled by the food in her mouth.

  "—but it was absolutely, one-hundred percent worth it, thank you Thea. I'm literally stuck inside an Antipathy war crime machine, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to have that time returned. Regarding the future, though, what does it mean to be part of the team?"

  "War crime machine?" Thea asks, pulling her head back out of the fridge.

  "If you do not know what we do already, why did you agree to join us?" Nanaya asks, ignoring her. I tilt my head like Anath did to show my confusion (Eeeeeee! I can use body language again!), because shouldn't she already know? I don't ask out loud, because I suppose there's a chance the others aren't under the impression that I very much don't have a choice in the matter, but I feel like even if they don't know or were misled, it's a pretty trivial conclusion to make.

  It's odd enough that I take advantage of my ability to speed up thought in order to consider it without creating an awkward pause. (Chalk that up as reason number a hundred that being a robot is pretty cool.) Why interrogate my motives when she made it very clear back on Earth that she didn't care about them? She said, to my face, that she considered me a tool, not a person. That was…

  Months ago. That was literal months ago. It's entirely possible that she has a different opinion after apparently monitoring my house and my… other self. That's all a little difficult to wrap my head around. But it seems unrealistically optimistic that Nanaya genuinely cares about my feelings, so maybe she's interested in my motivations for other reasons. I suppose she doesn't necessarily have any reason to trust how ironclad my restrictions against harming Melpomene or her goals are. She's evil, but she's not stupid, and it would be stupid to just assume that the chains holding me in place will never break. She probably just doesn't want to become victim to the classic villain pitfall of being destroyed by their own mistreated servant after the hero feeds the monster in the cage a tasty steak or whatever.

  "It doesn't seem very likely that I'm going to be able to live a normal life again," I tell her. "My old life kind of sucked a lot, though, so I'd much rather try to make my new life better than go through the effort of crawling back to something that isn't worth it."

  "There isn't anything you'd miss?" Nanaya asks.

  "There are a couple things," I admit. "I had a really good friend online who I never met in person and I'd definitely like to get back in contact with them. Other than that, though, there isn't much. I'd have probably ended up dead or in a psych ward in a few years if I'm being honest with myself."

  I try to keep my synthesized voice cheery and lighthearted. It doesn't seem to have the intended effect.

  "Unless you have any objection, Melpomene, I believe Luna's first step needs to be emotional management training," Nanaya says.

  "No, I think that would be for the best," Melpomene says. "I trust you can handle that? I'm going to go sort the things we need translated and see about prioritizing the nearby fragments for exploration."

  "Understood," Nanaya nods. "Come with me, Luna."

  "Can I come with?" Anath asks.

  "Certainly."

  "Oooh! Oooh! Me too!" Thea hops.

  "Go to bed!" Melpomene, Anath, and Nanaya say simultaneously.

  "Fine…"

  I move to follow Anath and Nanaya as Thea dejectedly wanders downstairs and Melpomene heads off towards her room.

  "Do I finally get to learn what all the different colors are?" I ask. "I think I know most of them, but it would be great to have it all spelled out in a single memory. If you can tell me what's up with the directional stuff, that would be great too."

  "What is 'directional stuff?'" Nanaya asks.

  I was afraid of that answer.

  "It's how the Antipathy categorized emotions," I explain. "There's a lot of weird knowledge in my memory banks about things like that, and they can creep into my thoughts when I'm not paying attention. I'm pretty sure they refer to sadness as 'south,' for instance."

  "I see," Nanaya hums. "Well, perhaps a better understanding of how the Preservers categorize emotion, and therefore how we categorize emotion, will help you fill in the blanks. To begin, by most measures there are four core emotions: joy, sadness, fear, and anger. These are far from the only emotions, as I am sure you know, but they are the most common transformation stone attunements, and therefore the most common emotions used in magical combat. Joy is yellow, sadness is blue, fear is green, and anger is red."

  "…And disgust is purple," I say. Nanaya gives me a piercing look, but nods.

  "It is violet, yes," she confirms. "Disgust lies between the boundaries of sadness and anger, possessing elements of both but fundamentally being its own color, its own emotion. Its opposite is pride, which is colored a yellow-green and lies between the boundaries of joy and fear."

  "Yellow-green is a really bland and poorly described color to represent something like pride," I comment.

  "You can blame the human eye for that," Nanaya shrugs. "It is no more or less unique and vibrant than any other color, but our minds do not see all colors equally. The light given off by magic does not conform itself to our standards; it simply is."

  "I wonder if that's why the Antipathy use a different system," I muse. "Maybe color just wasn't the most notable attribute of the magical manifestation of emotions to their eyes."

  "It is very possible," Nanaya nods, seeming vaguely pleased by the theory. "To continue, though: orange lies between joy and anger and represents need, desire, yearning. It is an uncommon emotion in combat because it is dangerous to burn; to act, one must desire."

  "…I think I might have a few counterpoints to that particular claim," I say.

  "No you don't," Nanaya answers. "Even in situations where one does not desire to act, their actions are driven by desire. The phenomena of wanting one thing but doing something else is not caused by a person acting against their desires, but by a person possessing conflicting desires. Perhaps it may be easier to think of it as a person possessing a desire, but also a contradictory need: you desire to stay in bed, but you need to go to work. On a fundamental level, these are the same thing. Humanity makes the distinction between desires that we enjoy or look forward to and desires that we perform regretfully because we know they are necessary to accomplishing other, more enjoyable desires, such as having money to buy food or avoiding the lash of a whip. However, at least in the context of orange magic, you need to remove that false dichotomy from your thinking. Need is not the realm of enjoyable versus unpleasant. It can be either."

  Interesting. I definitely have more questions about that in regards to my situation, but I'm not sure I can actually voice them with Anath around. After all, I can't give her any sort of hint that I don't love being a slave.

  "So what's between blue and green, then?"

  "Between the boundaries of sadness and fear, we have the opposite of desire—hopelessness. If the lack of need is apathy, hopelessness is born from going even further. It is an aggressive, relentless surety that one is past the point of no return. Beyond a disinterest in life, it is the fervent desire for death. Not just in yourself, but in others. It is when you declare someone beyond forgiveness. If disgust is a hot and burning hatred, hopelessness is the cold condemnation of another's worth. It is an emotion that should not be burned, not outside the most dire of circumstances."

  "If it's so awful, why wouldn't you want to burn it?" I ask. "It sounds like a nice thing to be able to get rid of."

  Nanaya gives me a sidelong glance, her mouth twisting into a slight frown.

  "…Two reasons," Nanaya says, "and the fact that you have intuited neither makes it clear that you needed this conversation quite badly."

  "Well, excuse me for not having child soldier training. I'm new to all of this."

  To my surprise, Nanaya starts laughing. It's an unpleasant, disturbing laugh, full of snorts and villainous edges, but she seems to have found what I said genuinely funny.

  "No, I suppose you do not," she agrees, something almost like a smile on her face. "Anath, would you like to explain this part?"

  "Huh? Oh, I mean, sure, it's pretty easy," she says. "Reason the first: the emotion you use affects the nature of the spell. If you're angry at someone and you use anger to attack them, the spell will be angry. Like… it'll be more focused, wild, violent, and probably won't do as much to any secondary targets. If you use fear it will be faster, more likely to knock them away. Stuff like that. A spell isn't just some formula that produces an effect, it's you. It's coming from your soul. What you put into it is what you get out of it."

  "I mostly just burn emotion in order to charge my fuel reserves, though," I point out.

  "Well then you're the spell, aren't you?" Anath asks. "Be careful what you put back into yourself."

  Oh. That sounds ominous.

  "...Should I align my crystals to something other than blue, then?" I ask. "I mean, I pretty much constantly have to burn at least some of my emotions. Right now, that's mostly sadness."

  "No, there's not necessarily anything wrong with using sadness to drive you," Anath says. "I'm sad a lot, and I use it a lot even though it's really inefficient for my transformation stone. I just think it's good practice to use all your emotions from time to time, because of reason the second: feeling something makes you feel more of it."

  Anath absentmindedly starts to stroke the transformation stone in the choker on her neck.

  "I guess this might be more true for me than most people, and also kind of less true because my emotions are bullshit? But it's important. You don't feel an emotion when you burn it, but it was still there. It was still something that mattered to you. So in the short term, you push it away, shove it into a spell, and smack a monster with it. Maybe you even cause yourself to stop feeling that emotion at all, at least for a while. But that also means you lose your reason to deal with it. You lose your chance to… I dunno, think about it and stuff. Because you threw it away instead, so it's gonna come back. Sometimes, that's not so bad. Sometimes, it's really bad."

  "So if you use an emotion too much, you'll burn yourself out of it but also cause yourself to feel more of it later?" I ask.

  "Kinda?" Anath hedges. "It depends."

  "Like many things with emotion and magic, it is much more complicated than can be summarized in a single lesson," Nanaya says. "Just know that emotions are habit-forming. Though your habits will obviously not be the totality of your emotional state, neither will your circumstances. Emotional training is about ensuring that the habits you form are purposeful, and the emotional states you require are available at a moment's notice."

  "Oh," I say. "It kinda sounds like cock and ball torture."

  Anath and Nanaya both immediately stop walking and turn to stare at me.

  "Sorry, I mean cognitive behavioral therapy," I say. "CBT? I guess it's kind of an in-joke."

  They continue staring at me.

  "Y'know, in retrospect, I should've predicted that the magical girl crowd wouldn't have much experience with dick jokes. That's on me."

  A few more awkward seconds pass.

  "Oh!" Anath suddenly brightens up. "Ha! Because they start with the same letters!"

  "…Yeah," I confirm. "Yeah, you got it."

  Nanaya clears her throat.

  "I do not know what 'cognitive behavioral therapy' is, but emotional training is a difficult skill that generally requires breaking old habits before forming new ones. This is, ostensibly, one of the reasons that Earth Guardians are recruited so young, though not the main one. It's not an easy task. I suspect that most humans entirely lack the self-control necessary to perform it at an acceptable level."

  "Not a big fan of humans, I take it?" I ask.

  "Is that what you think?" Nanaya asks. "Do you see me as human, Luna?"

  "Not really," I admit.

  "Mmm. Do you see yourself as human?"

  "Not anymore."

  Nanaya frowns at that, but Anath grins.

  "Heck yeah," she says, holding up a fist for me to bump. Sure, why not. I bump it.

  "I consider myself a harsh critic of humanity," Nanaya says, "but I am not foolish enough to consider myself above their foibles. Even if I have not been human since I was a child, I was still human once and it is humanity that I will have to live with."

  "Don't worry Luna, you and I can be above humanity's foibles," Anath grins.

  "Yeah, it's pretty cool how being a robot means you have absolutely no flaws whatsoever," I nod. "I'm literally built different."

  "Never in my life have I met a blue mage who cracks this many jokes," Nanaya grumbles.

  "Don't worry, I one-hundred percent guarantee that all of my jokes make me sad," I say, giving her a thumbs up.

  "Mmm. Do be careful not to mistake depression for sadness."

  "Bad news: I think I already have," I admit.

  "Depression is not an emotion so much as a state in which most emotions are not present. Oftentimes, during depression, a person will still feel their sadness while they struggle to form any other emotions, and this will cause the sadness to compound. But it is just as common, if not moreso, for people suffering depression to feel very little at all. They may not even realize that there is a problem, because you often need emotions to do so in the first place."

  "Oh," I say. "Well, don't worry. I definitely have the sad kind. And I realize just burning all the blue away probably isn't the healthiest way to handle that depression, but holy shit is it so much more effective than anything else I've ever tried. I've probably talked more as a robot than I did during my entire last school semester, and I was mute until today."

  "…So we have yet more reasons to discourage your current emotional habits," Nanaya mutters. "Well, it's no matter. There is yet more we must go over before we get to that kind of training. After all, you can already cast spells, so we must first ensure you are not making any immediately dangerous mistakes before we adjust your long-term habits. Here we are."

  Nanaya opens the door into a relatively large and empty room, almost like a storeroom in that its most notable feature is that unlike the rest of the castle, it is quite ugly. No art on the ceiling, no windows or other doors, just a very large cubical room with nothing in it.

  Nanaya walks into the center of the room and pulls an entire four-foot-tall sandbag out of her cloak, defying all conventional sense and all but confirming that she's wearing some kind of artifact.

  "This is your target," Nanaya says. "Show me what you can do."

  Can I… hmm. Offensive magical spell repository is locked. Spell glyph memory is locked. Aggressive combat routines are locked.

  "Nothing," I say. "I can do nothing."

  "I have personally witnessed you cast a spell," Nanaya frowns.

  "Yeah, I know," I say. "But I can't do that willy-nilly. My body was built to house the souls of the Antipathy's enemies so that they could be forced to fight their former friends and family. I'm pretty sure I need an explicit, direct order to blast things."

  Anath lets out a low whistle.

  "That's fucked up, even for them," she says. "So Thea hasn't untangled all your nasty rules yet, huh?"

  "Not even close," I confirm. "But I have faith in her. I'm sure that one of these days I'll be able to do anything I want."

  Nanaya's eyes narrow.

  "Well, for now I suppose we will have to work around your limitations," she says. "Artifact. In the name of your master I hereby order you to demonstrate a magical assault on this sandbag for research and measurement purposes."

  My mind opens, everything I once knew about magic now known again. I remember how I cast Fulminant Thunder, how I modified it to fit my needs, and how it is far from the only ranged offensive attack template present in my databanks. Which one would work best with blue…? I see. I like this one. It resonates with me. I'll have to give it a name. It already has countless names, of course, but it will be stronger if I give it one that feels right to me.

  I raise my hand towards the target, clenching a fist as rings of magical glyphs appear around my forearm, my wrist, and in front of my knuckles. Energy flows down from my reserves and into the magic circles, directing and refining it into a blue, glowing sphere floating in front of my outstretched arm. More and more energy gathers, the spell charging in power as I take my time forming it, and when it is strong enough but not too strong I declare a name that would have made my flesh smile.

  "[M ? ? ? B ? s ? ? ?]"

  The shot fires out and obliterates the poor sandbag, passing through it and smashing into the back wall. To my surprise, the wall isn't even so much as scuffed. I wasn't trying to blow up the wall or anything, but it's still a lot sturdier than I expected.

  "That! Was! Awesome!" Anath cheers.

  "…Surprisingly well done," Nanaya admits. "I suppose I should have expected as such, given you temporarily disabled an Earth Guardian."

  "I mean, not to brag or anything, but I think I'm scary good in a fight," I say. "It chews through my energy reserves pretty fast, though."

  "Do not allow yourself to become overconfident," Nanaya chides. "You believe yourself to be strong because the entire rest of your life has been nothing but weakness. Do not applaud yourself for having the capacity to beat children."

  "Trust me, I'm not," I say flatly.

  "Still," Nanaya says. "A spar with a real opponent should disabuse you of your confidence."

  "Oooh!" Anath raises her hand, jumping up and down. "Me! Mememememememe!"

  "No," Nanaya says, and for the first time since I've met her she removes her cloak, throwing it towards the edge of the room.

  She's… monstrous. Much more than any of the other girls. Rather than being animalistic like Anath and Thea, or mythological like Melpomene, Nanaya reminds me most of an alien, a being that could not possibly have evolved on this planet naturally. Her arms are like nothing I've ever seen before: long and spindly, there are technically six on each side of her body, all seeming to come out of the same shoulder. A pair on each side end in a hand with only three fingers, and the others have only two. Yet somehow, when pressed against each other, they stop looking like separate, skinny arms and work together as a single limb, a freakish, bulging arm with eight fingers on its hand. Just in the single movement of throwing off the cloak, I see her combine, separate, and recombine a single arm all in one motion.

  Her legs are even more bizarre. Almost birdlike, she stands on three splayed toes, her ankle acting as a second knee from which a clawed, twisted thumb emerges. It curls up behind her heel, bent almost like a fishhook, but coiled to extend whenever needed… not that I have any idea what need there might be for such a freakish toe. As unearthly as her limbs are, however, the part of her body that catches my eye most is her torso.

  Though she wears a fairly normal set of pants, Nanaya's chest and belly are wrapped up in bandages instead of a shirt or bra. All four of the girls have clearly magical crystals growing on their body, and Nanaya is no different in this regard: the claws on her feet and the tips of her elfen ears shine with crystalline points, matching the dull glow of her red eyes in their sharp, crimson intensity. But her torso is a different beast entirely. Enormous, jagged masses of crystal jut out randomly in every direction, asymmetrical and chaotic in their consumption of her skin. More than just growing out of her, they also grow into her, veins of blood-red crystal snaking across her body and partway down her arms as they grow within and push the flesh aside. It looks… painful. Exceptionally so.

  "Luna, Anath," Nanaya orders. "You will both fight me at the same time."

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