Ami practically smushed her face against the window of the tiny café, unconcerned with the disturbed reactions she garnered from the diners inside. She stared at their meals through the glass, with drool almost dripping from the corner of her mouth. Emi tried to yank her away from the window, but Ami planted her feet and kept herself firmly in place.

  “Look at how many chocolate chips they stuff into those pancakes, Emi,” she said. “This place is nuts—we gotta get lunch here later.”

  “They won’t let us in if you scare their customers,” Emi said, still tugging her sister’s arm in vain.

  “I’m not scaring them,” Ami said. “When someone tells you they like your shirt, don’t you suddenly feel cooler wearing it? So if someone says your food looks good, won’t it taste even better when you eat it?”

  “But you’re not saying anything to them. You’re just staring.”

  And the café stared back with increasingly concerned faces.

  The twins were walking down the main street of Warhem, a moderately sized town on the border between Regions 3 and 4 and home to the Orbit Promo magical girl agency. Ami and Emi were following through on Rika’s suggestion to take the lead on reaching out to Seliah while their teammates enjoyed a day off. Ami had been all too eager to accept that responsibility on account of getting to see Seliah again, but now that the twins had arrived in Warhem, she kept getting distracted by the shops and restaurants along the main street.

  Since Emi’s efforts to keep her sister moving were proving fruitless, the twins’ mascots poofed into existence. Noon and Moon—the pair of chubby seahorses partnered with Ami and Emi respectively—usually appeared together whenever they did show themselves in the human world. Maybe that was due in part to the twins often being together, but the mascots also seemed to have their own close relationship. They had, after all, taken on similar physical forms and names.

  As it turned out, they also had some kind of preexisting relationship with Adah’s mascot Izzy.

  “Ami,” Noon said to her. “You promised Izzy’s partner that you would take this duty seriously.”

  “Should we leave to inform him you’re having difficulty completing your charge?” Moon added.

  “For us, it would only take a moment,” the seahorses said in unison.

  The threat of her mascot telling Izzy, and Izzy then telling Adah, about her slacking off finally got Ami to peel herself away from the café window. Her captain wouldn’t get mad at her over a little distraction, but she didn’t want to bother Adah when the whole point of today was to let the girl rest.

  “Gah,” Ami groaned. “You two are such narcs. I’m just having some fun along the way.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” Noon said, “but we’re only trying to help you.”

  “Sometimes you two work best when others are keeping a close eye on you,” Moon said.

  Ami ignored the mascot’s comment and started walking down the street again, this time with Emi’s hand tightly gripping her own. They weren’t far from Seliah’s agency at this point, maybe only a few more minutes of walking. According to the map on Ami’s phone, they’d take a right down the first street after they passed a pet groomer’s shop, then they’d arrive at Orbit Promo a few hundred feet later.

  “Speaking of keeping an eye on you,” Noon said despite Ami’s silence, “you did remember to let the girl know we were coming, didn’t you?”

  “It’d be troublesome if she was out on a mission when we arrived,” the other seahorse said. “Or even on a long vacation.”

  “Come on,” Ami said, “what kind of question is that?”

  She kept walking, not bothering to look at the seahorses who floated along on either side of her head. Ami just stared forward. Emi knew her sister well enough to know what it meant when she dodged a question like that.

  “Ami…” she said, her tone hovering somewhere between disappointment and pity.

  “Huh? Are you doubting me too, Emi?” Although Ami could ignore the mascots, she couldn’t help but spin to look at her sister.

  “I didn’t say anything…”

  “That’s the problem!”

  The four of them continued on, neither their walking nor their banter slowing down. A few minutes later, they passed the pet groomer that indicated it was time to turn. Not long after that, they reached their destination.

  The agency building was easy enough to spot from the outside thanks to its sign, a wooden placard that hung from a beam that jutted out from the side of the building. The sign had two crossing ellipses—a lame attempt at representing the idea of orbiting—on it with the words “Orbit Promo” painted underneath.

  The building looked much the same as every other building the twins had seen along the main street and its adjoining roads—that is, rustic and in need of an upgrade. The siding was weathered to a degree that no amount of powerwashing could restore its true color, and the corners of the windows were permanently stained by a yellowish hue. Despite Seliah’s recent surge of success, clearly renovations were a far-off dream.

  The front doors were unlocked, so the twins wandered inside where they were greeted by a cramped reception area that offered only two thin chairs for seating. No one sat at the front desk, nor was there any sign that anyone had sat there at any point today. In fact, the whole lobby was suspiciously sterile, like no one had ever before stood where the twins now stood. The room was dustless, so someone was cleaning it, but what mess could there even be to clean?

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Hello?” Ami called out.

  She received no answer.

  “It’s a ghost town,” Emi said.

  “It seems the girl truly did leave on a mission,” Noon said. “And took everyone else with her.”

  Ami shook her head and said, “Grace said Selichi’s manager is pretty hands-off. Just because they aren’t here doesn’t mean Selichi herself isn’t.”

  With that, Ami began snooping around, not that there were many places to search. The lobby offered less space than a deli counter, with only a few doors leading off of it. One of those doors was for the bathroom, in which Ami did not find Seliah. Another was locked, presumably leading to the private dormitory area of the agency. The next door Ami checked, despite her sister’s objections, awaited behind the front desk.

  Ami climbed over the top of the desk without hesitation and tried the doorknob. The door opened, leading to a small, square backyard crammed between the agency office and the rear of a building on the next street over. In that tiny yard, shuffling from left to right with a dumbbell in each hand and her back to the doorway, was the tiny magical girl Seliah.

  The girl had on hefty headphones, which must have been blasting music loud enough that she didn’t notice the door opening behind her. She continued her workout, adding onto her shuffle some lateral raises whenever she reached one end of the yard. She was panting like she’d just been saved from drowning, but she completed another five laps across the yard before coming to a stop and dropping her dumbbells in the grass. At first, she bent over in exhaustion, though she quickly forced herself to stand upright and walk—apparently this was meant to be a moving break.

  At that point, Ami yelled to the girl again, “Selichi!”

  Seliah leaped into the air, almost high enough to clear the head-tall brick walls that separated this yard from the space next door. Her headphones flew off her head and she spun around with her arm extended like she was about to cast some magic.

  Her eyes were as wide as the moon, but it was the sweat running down her face that caught Ami’s attention. That and the dark patch of moisture that covered the top half of her gray t-shirt. Her extended arm shook involuntarily, its muscles still trying to recover from the workout Seliah had just put them through.

  “D-Dewdrop?” Seliah said in between her panting.

  “It’s Zerker now!” Ami said. “Sorry, I should have given you a heads up. I didn’t mean to scare ya.”

  Emi and the two seahorse mascots joined Ami outside now.

  “The truth comes out,” Emi said.

  The presence of Noon and Moon prompted Seliah’s own mascot to reveal herself. At first glance, she appeared to be a normal raven, but as she stretched out her wings, she exposed that there were four of them. Beyond that, the feathers on their underside were a pure white, in stark contrast to the rest of her black plumage. She landed on Seliah’s shoulder and looked over the twins and seahorses.

  “I recognize one face, but somehow I recognize two,” the raven said. “You’re the magical girl from that day Seliah was ambushed. And this is your sister?”

  Thus, everyone but Ami went through the rounds of introducing themselves. Seliah’s raven went by the name of Shikk, though it seemed Noon and Moon had never met her in the mascot’s world before.

  Eventually, Seliah asked an entirely reasonable question.

  “Why are you here?”

  “What, I can’t check in on a friend?” Ami said.

  Seliah shook her head and said, “Not that, but you came all the way here. And you brought Raindrop with you.”

  “Ah, there was one other reason, too,” Ami said with a chuckle. “Basically, we want to start a rebellion.”

  That statement immediately set Emi, Noon, and Moon all in a rush to correct Ami and set the record straight for Seliah. Little did they know, that had been Ami’s plan all along. She didn’t have the eye for detail that Emi did, so it would be better if her sister did most of the explaining when it came to Adah’s plan. Sometimes that girl needed a little push to start talking, though.

  Once Emi started recapping the plan to Seliah, she got on a roll. Ami had noticed that her sister had gotten along a lot better with Adah recently. Ever since their captain became Twilight Heartbreak, the two of them kept growing closer and closer. In Ami’s view, they thought about the big picture of being a magical girl in the same way. The main difference between them was that Adah couldn’t resist being the one to steer the ship, while Emi preferred to sit and observe.

  If Emi wanted to, though, she’d probably make just as good a leader as Adah did.

  Ami, on the other hand… Well, as long as her voice got heard by people like Adah and Emi, that was what mattered.

  Once Emi got done explaining Adah’s idea up to the point of their magical carnival, Seliah wiped some fresh sweat from her brow and frowned.

  “I don’t think you want someone like me for that,” she said. “I’ve got so far to go to catch up to you four. Don’t take it the wrong way—what you’re talking about is like a dream! But at this point, I think it’s just a dream for me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Ami raised her voice to rejoin the conversation. “You just took out a C-Rank by yourself, didn’t you? Something like that would’ve been out of reach for any of us not too long ago.”

  Seliah blushed, but shook her head again.

  “Maybe I’ve been working hard, but a mission is just a mission,” she said. “I mean, look at this place. Even my manager’s taken on a side job. I’m lucky to still be a magical girl, but I’ve got a ways to go before I’m the kind of magical girl you are.”

  Ami had looked around.

  She’d already looked all over this old, tiny building—not that there were many places to look through. She’d been searching for Seliah, only to find her busting her ass all by herself, sweating to the point her shirt was drenched. Even Ami had been slacking on her workouts lately, yet here was Seliah, training to exhaustion where no one could see her. And where were her teammates? She didn’t have any. Her manager? She might as well not have one.

  What did that mean? Every day, she’d go fight a Cruelty or train in this yard all by herself. She’d come home and eat her meals all by herself. At night, she’d climb up the stairs to what was probably a piece of shit dormitory to fall asleep all by herself. Then she got up and did it all again.

  Seliah couldn’t have wasted even a single day since she and Ami took out that ibex Cruelty. She couldn’t have possibly come as far as she had if she’d spent even one morning sleeping in. She’d kept pushing forward, and she’d done it all alone.

  “You’re the same kind of magical girl as me,” Ami said. “Even better, maybe. That’s why we wanted you for this event. It’s supposed to be just for the event…”

  Seliah looked up at Ami, her head tilted to the side.

  “But if we play our cards right… I think you could join our team.”

  “Ami!” Emi called to her sister in a stressed whisper. She stared at Ami, her eyes sending her message loud and clear.

  Why did you say that?

  “I’m not promising anything,” Ami continued, ignoring both Emi’s look and the voice of Noon in her head. “I can’t promise anything. I’m sure there’s business decisions on both ends, too. But for whatever it’s worth, I’m in support of it.”

  Seliah was frozen in place. While her partner’s brain processed what had just been said, the raven Shikk stared at Ami with her black eyes.

  “It’s a natural fit, don’t you think?” Ami said, hoping to spur a reaction in Seliah. “We already know you and I work well together.”

  “S-Sure,” the girl said. “But it doesn’t sound like the rest of your team knows about this idea.”

  Ami chuckled again and scratched the side of her nose.

  “Yeah, about that—for now, let’s just keep this conversation between us, okay?” she said. “Noon, that means you guys, too.”

  The seahorses exchanged a glance, but then rocked back and forth slowly to indicate their agreement.

  “And Selichi,” Ami continued, “If you don’t want to take this any further than the carnival, then I’ll drop this. But if you do, I’ll do whatever I can to help make it happen.”

  Seliah paused, then nodded. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of her nose.