Alice steps through the mirror and wakes up on an autopsy table in a sterile workshop.

  She’s seen this room before, in her visions, but it’s not really the same room. She pushes herself off the table and steadies her knees. Breathing has become a chore for her, a sudden frailty taking our heroine, and she reacts to this revelation with characteristic grace.

  “Shit piss! Motherfucker!”

  Once she recovers her composure, Alice glances around the room and takes in the sights. The tables are still here, each bearing their distinctive parcel of burnt flesh, but the light strips have stopped flickering and the bounds of the room feel more firmly defined. The workshop is finite now, made mundane in some minor way by her arrival in this place outside the universe she once knew.

  The first time she saw this place, she saw herself and two other scraps of gristle left unburnt. Those other two pieces are gone, along with three of the burnt pieces from neighboring tables. She deduces immediately the identities of each of those flesh gobbets, knowing them to be Reska, Homura, Urna, and the two girls whose names she never learned. If she’d asked, the knight in armor would have named herself Gwendolyn, and the wizard was Ellery.

  A hundred more cuts of meat remain in the room. Each of them is a piece of the Demiurge, who Alice came to know first as Nyarlathotep and then as Melpomene.

  A hundred little pieces of me.

  Though, I must confess, there aren’t literally a hundred of them. It makes for a nice visual and impresses a sense of grandiosity, but the true scope of the cycle is almost embarrassingly smaller. In truth, including Alice and the pieces she had already devoured, there are barely thirty shards in that workshop.

  The change in perspective disorients Alice, but a sense of focus and drive quickly eclipses her confusion. She is here, in my palace, to end the cycle. Whether the wheel has turned a thousand times or thirty is irrelevant.

  Alice advances to the nearest table bearing a cut of meat, wrinkles her nose, and shoves the scorched flesh into her mouth. She swallows without chewing. She shudders in revulsion at the taste, but the false sensory data quickly leaves her; she isn’t really eating someone’s flesh, after all. The meat is merely a metaphor.

  Alice absorbs the life of a girl who never got to finish her own story. This one was called Malice, and she was a horrible wretch. I loved her, but not enough. When the fresh set of memories has settled into her consciousness, Alice takes a few deep breaths and says to herself, “I’m still Alice. Whatever else I become, I will never forget how it feels to be Alice.”

  Then she does it again. The next gobbet was called Valerian, and she was an absolute monster of a woman. I loved her, but not enough. Alice absorbs another unfinished life and repeats her mantra: “I’m still Alice. Whatever else I become, I will never forget how it feels to be Alice.” She keeps eating.

  Kiana, Malice, Thalia, Valena, Valerian, Malice, Cinder, Malix, Veseryn, Malice, Haley, Narcissa, Shadow, Valerie, Thalia, Malice, Kiana. I loved them, but not enough.

  Alice eats them all. She devours my failures, my guilty pleasures, and my fool’s errands. She devours me, piece by piece. She devours piece after piece of me after me, until it is done.

  When the last scrap is swallowed, she has devoured every piece of me that I have ever cut away. My severance in totality. Now she can face me not as a fragment but as a counterpart. She of flesh and I of bone, two halves of one divided whole.

  Alice shudders and her hands shake, her very identity bombarded by all the lives she never lived, but the Alice who climbed the tower is not the kind of Alice to falter now. “I’m s-still Alice,” she stutters through the pain. “Whatever else I b-become, I will never f-forget how it feels to be Alice.”

  I made a promise like that, when I was young. It’s where Alice got the idea. When I was a little kid, surrounded by all these adults that refused to treat me like a real person—that treated me like I was beneath them, incapable of having any thought worth hearing out—I promised myself that when I grew up I wouldn’t forget how it felt to be so disrespected by the very men and women who always demanded my respect. I promised that I would not become just another cog in the senseless hypocritical machine that dared to call itself a society.

  I never forgot my promise. I know Alice won’t forget hers.

  Alice shivers as she pushes her way past emptied tables. Her shaking hands reach for the door to the workshop, a plain slab of wood that she remembers being locked. It opens without protest.

  Alice stares past the door into the ordinary hallway beyond. Everything about her situation is surreal, but that’s been her normal for as long as she’s been alive. She hesitates on the threshold, finally about to leave the room that she has been trapped in for seven days or three years, depending on your perspective. Either way, she’s spent her whole life locked in that strange, horrible laboratory.

  “Can you hear me, Melpomene?” she asks, knowing the answer. “I’m coming for you.”

  I’m waiting, my darling Alice. I’ve been waiting three years for this moment.

  Alice stalks the halls of the otherworldly palace in search of her quarry. She finds the space around her more familiar by the minute, her steps falling into an easy rhythm that unsettles her. She’s been here before so many times, and yet not once as herself.

  She knows exactly where I’ll be, and it isn’t long until I hear her footsteps. She pushes open the doors to the study where my latest orrery burns. Paint cracks and flakes off, wood becoming charcoal, brass melting in fat globs. I stand watching the death of one more universe I spent hours creating.

  Part of me was tempted to lean into the grandiose for this final confrontation, but it just doesn’t feel right anymore. After everything I’ve put her through, Alice deserves to see me as I really am: jeans and cardigan, soft cheeks and round glasses, raw lips and chewed nails.

  She stops just a few feet into the room, watching me watch the dying world. None of this has been going how she thought it would when she began her little scheme. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say. I give her time. She’ll think of something.

  After about a minute of hesitation, she finds her voice. “Hey. It’s a little rude not to look at me, don’t you think?”

  I turn away from my latest project and laugh. “Of course, you’re right,” I say with a smile. “Sorry, I get so lost in my own narration sometimes. Want some lemonade?”

  The offer disarms her. “Wha—lemonade? Really? I mean, yes, obviously, I always want lemonade. Best drink in the world. But you can’t be serious.”

  “Great!” I clap my hands together with clear excitement. “I’ll run and grab those and be back in a flash, just wait right here.”

  I slip past the befuddled Alice and run to the kitchen. I prepped the drinks earlier, so all I have to do is pour lemonade over sliced strawberries, add ice, stir, and stick in straws for easy sipping. I bring the glasses back with cautious haste, careful not to spill any precious liquid.

  Alice is crouching in front of the orrery when I return. She pokes at a bit of brass with her knife, watching the way it slides off the blade and splats against the pristine carpet. There’s a desk in one corner with a very, very comfy chair, so I set my glass on the desk before walking over to hand Alice her drink.

  She takes it without verbal acknowledgement, though a pleasant noise escapes her lips after a big gulp of homemade lemonade. “Pretty good nectar,” she quips. “Ambrosia next?”

  “If you’d like,” I offer. “But I think you’d rather we get to the meat of the matter.”

  Alice grimaces. “Meat, yes. Apt word choice. Intentional, I imagine.” Of course.

  Alice rises to her feet and straightens up. She looks around for somewhere to set her drink and I nudge a stool her way, which she takes with bemusement. The knife is still in her other hand, but after a long moment of intense staring at it she sets that down next to the glass. She tries to stare at me, but she can’t keep eye contact for long and her gaze keeps flicking to the burning orrery instead.

  “This,” she finally says, the words coming slowly, “isn’t how I thought this would go.”

  I tilt my head. “How did you think it would go?” I know the answer. She knows I know the answer. It’s still polite to verbalize the thought process I’ve been spying on.

  She rolls her eyes. “Well I didn’t expect to be handed free lemonade. Look, you’re the last enemy. I ate enough shards that I’m on even ground, so now we’re supposed to have a big ol’ battle of words, and then I become a demiurge, or something. You’re the source of everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life, Pom-Pom, so I need some kind of closure. You’re the reason for all my torment.”

  Now for the final performance. I blink a few times and tilt my head as if surprised. “Wait, do you really still think that was my fault?

  Alice immediately bristles. “Of course it was your fault! You tortured me! You constantly threw me into impossible situations that I had to struggle through with nothing but scraps and my wits. You isolated me, you bastard. You trapped me in a prison of solitude. That’s a war crime in civilized parts of the world. Well, your world. I don’t fucking have a world, now that you burned the only one I ever really knew.”

  The emotions roiling off of my creation are a cocktail almost as delicious as the lemonade I guzzle in response. Anger. Fear. Resentment. Shock. Doubt. Spite.

  I love how Alice feels things. She throws barbs and makes jokes even while boiling over with rage, and that rage is tempered with a dozen other emotions weaving in and out of her internal narrative. She feels too many emotions, and she feels them all too intensely even when she’s deflecting with humor. She’s perfect.

  I set down my drink, the glass half-full, and sigh at Alice like she’s just said something colossally disappointing. “Even after I filled the whole tower with reminders, it still hasn’t sunk in, has it? Alice, you brought that torment on yourself.”

  “Bullshit,” she snarls without hesitation, hands bunched into fists. “You don’t get to say that, you puppetmaster freak. You set up all the pieces, put the trajectories in motion, and now you’re standing there trying to wash your hands of the mess and claim it was all my fault? Bull. Fucking. Shit. You stuck me in a nightmare world and then added a death game on top of it.”

  I swirl my glass, enjoying the clink of ice. “Well, that I won’t deny. But you’re leaving out some context, my lovely. By the end of the first day of that death game, how many allies did you have? No, that’s the wrong question. I’ll ask this: how many allies could you have had?”

  A bit of her anger flips into confusion, her front of aggression disrupted by the question. “What? I don’t—why does that matter?”

  “Achaia, Bashe, Dante, and Esha, plus the Cheshire you already had,” I list off, counting on my fingers for emphasis. “Look, they’ve even got a cute little alphabet theme! And no one ever noticed!”

  I pout. Alice rolls her eyes. I get to the point.

  “And, aside from Dante, all of them could have been recruited before that day, when you first arrived at the Myriad’s temple fortress. They’re also the people you murdered in the timeline where you became the Red Queen, if you’ll recall. You abandoned most of them in your Intercessor timeline, and in this timeline, well… you mostly just ran away. But they all could have been your allies, helping you overcome the trials of the Labyrinth. You denied their friendship and rejected their beliefs. Was it just because you wanted more power than they could give you? Were you just obstinately unwilling to trust a single person you couldn’t control? Honestly, how are you this bad at making friends?”

  “Hey, I—what the fuck are you talking about? I made allies! I made all the goddamn allies!” This girl is so damn cute when she’s indignant, I swear. The red in her cheeks, the tightness in her shoulders, the almost self-conscious way she expresses her anger. She doesn’t even notice all the little ways she’s trained her body to try and vent her rage so it doesn’t make her do something stupid.

  “They were allies of convenience,” I laugh, “and only when it suited you. Dante would have been your immortal shield, but you threw him away. The Myriad could have been convinced to support your true goals, but you preferred to just lie to them. And Cheshire, sweet Cheshire, was only tolerated because you felt you had no other choice. Shall I discuss the fate of your alliance with Thalia? The pattern of behavior is clear: your first and last instinct is always to reject the possibility of trust. You’re only alone because all you do is push people away.”

  Alice wants to punch me for saying that. She wants to scream and cry and just be a person for a few seconds, but she won’t allow herself that indulgence when something is on the line. “I—I didn’t—”

  She chokes off her protests. She’s trying her best to smother emotion in cold calculation, but it isn’t working. I get to watch from a front row seat as her anger transmutes to anguish. The hate in her eyes is still gleaming, but it alloys with something raw and shivering and wet.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Alice likes to think of herself as a scared little girl, but when I see her like this I think of something more… animalistic. Like a housecat that’s been kicked one too many times and hisses at every hand that comes close to feed it, but deep down still craves the warmth and comfort of human touch.

  “You—you turned me into this.” Her voice cracks as she flings the accusation. “You shaped my every circumstance to teach me that lesson. You told Cheshire to make me distrust her. If I didn’t trust people, it’s because you taught me that I can’t trust anything. The girl in the school that tried to kill me, the fae that wanted to use me, the incubus that was perfectly sculpted to resent me, and the fucking cat you made push all my worst buttons. You did that!”

  She’s right, of course; I built the machine to keep her isolated.

  Her first encounters were all chosen to keep her off-balance and keep her from forming proper attachments. Bashe was designed so that Alice would feel alienated and react with spite. Cheshire was designed so that Alice would be stuck in a loop of agonizing over whether or not Cheshire could be trusted. Dante was designed so that Alice would feel enough resentment and jealousy that she considered actions her more moral side would find repugnant.

  The purpose of a machine is what it does, and Pandaemonium tortured Alice. It did exactly what I built it to do.

  “Point!” I declare cheerfully. “That round goes to you.” I savor the last of my lemonade and set it down with a wistful sigh.

  The pride and relief Alice feels at my praise is immediately drowned by a fresh wave of anger. “Stop treating this like it’s a game!” she shouts at me. “It was never a fucking game!”

  “Do you really think you deserve to be taken seriously?”

  I’m basically slapping her in the face with that one, and she reacts accordingly. Fresh shock and horror blooms in my adorable Alice. She actually flinches and takes a step back, mouth open and eyes wide. I don’t wait for her to recover before continuing the assault.

  “Sorry, that’s the wrong question again. Let’s try again: why do you think you don’t deserve it when I hurt you?” My cheer never wavers, my smile unrelenting. “I’ll concede it isn’t your fault, but let’s be honest with ourselves, Alice, and admit that you are an awful person. I only hurt you because you’re the kind of person that deserves to be hurt. You know I’m right.”

  This time the pain is richer and deeper. Alice grinds her teeth, hands shaking, and shuts her eyes. Inside her head, a dozen voices are arguing with her, trying to tell her how to feel about the accusation I’ve just made. She knows I’m wrong, but so much of her agrees with what I said. That girl is loathing by volume.

  Nothing I’m saying is new to her, not really. It just hurts more when it’s coming from someone else. Other people aren’t supposed to validate those feelings, they’re supposed to reject them. When someone thinks they deserve to be hurt, neglected, or abused, the script says you’re supposed to offer them platitudes until they stop coming to you with their problems.

  Rationally, Alice knows the correct answer. But this was never about rationality. It was always, always, always about emotions.

  Finally, wonderfully, beautifully, Alice opens her eyes. “No,” she says, and it tastes like victory. “I don’t deserve it. It wasn’t my fault, and I didn’t deserve what you did to me.”

  “Prove it. Prove you don’t deserve to be hurt. Tell me why you deserve better.” I’m pushing it a little here, getting a bit too leading, but sometimes the ducklings need a nudge.

  Her lip curls. “I shouldn’t have to.”

  “Correct,” I admit, “but irrelevant to this dialogue. This is a duel, Alice; if you’re going to reject one of my premises, you need to make points of your own. Otherwise you’re just a child saying ‘nuh uh’ to all my arguments, and that’s definitely not going to get you over the finish line. Show me you can win, Alice. Show me you understand.”

  Little details betray the change in her mindset: a fixing of posture, a settling of unconscious movements, and the set of her eyes. It clicks for her what I’m doing, what role I’m playing. The only thing missing is tea.

  Alice takes her time choosing her next words, now that she’s more aware of the stakes of this conversation. Now that she knows this is the final battle.

  With a deep breath, Alice declares her attack. “I am what you made me. And you didn’t really make me into a monster, as much as I’ve deluded myself that I am one. I’m weird and selfish, and I can be pretty damn annoying, but that doesn’t earn the kind of pain that you’ve inflicted. The other versions of me, all the other shards, the other Alices, even the ones that fell to darkness, all of them were victims. Someone hurt Homura, so she hurt other people. Someone hurt Reska, so she hurt other people. Someone hurt me, so I hurt other people. Someone—”

  Her eyes flash wide, and finally, finally, finally she gets it.

  “...Someone hurt you,” she says faintly, “and that’s why you keep hurting us. Father, mother, our partners, the world. They hurt you, and everything you’ve done to us, everything you’ve ever done to the pieces of yourself… it was about that, wasn’t it? Melpomene… I know there is a purpose to the cycle. I know you’re looking for an answer. What is the question?”

  I smile wide, radiant with joy, and I tell her, “The question is, ‘Why did it have to hurt?’”

  Why did my mother have to die when I was only four years old?

  Why did my father have to hit me and yell at me?

  Why did the girls I liked all have to leave me?

  Why did the world keep kicking me while I was down?

  Why did it have to hurt so much, just being alive?

  Why didn’t they let me take the pain away?

  I laugh. Just like Alice, I can’t really help it sometimes. It bubbles out of me, manic and wondrous and everlasting, like butterflies flying free from my lungs.

  Alice isn’t laughing, obviously. She can’t decide if she’s more furious or horrified, but she’s definitely not laughing.

  “All this time… all this time you were torturing us to put meaning to your own fucking pain? Just replicating your own torment across two dozen copies of yourself, all so you could figure out why it happened?”

  “Yes,” I manage to answer, setting aside my laughter so I can continue the conversation. “It was all just solipsism! Wonderland, the endless parade of Alices to torture, all so I could reconcile the cruelties that were done to me. How else to understand the people who hurt me than to become them, and to become worse than them? I made you suffer so that my own suffering would be worth something.” She’s incandescent. She’s glorious. “Alice… do you want to kill me now?”

  Whatever retort she was mustering for my happy little rant dies in her throat. One more line of the script that she wasn’t expecting because she can’t read ahead like I can.

  “If you don’t,” I tell her, “I’ll keep doing this. I’ll torture more of your sisters, more of you. I’m a mistake that needs to be corrected, Alice. I never should have been born. The only way to end this cycle and free us all… is killing me.”

  I step into Alice’s space and grab her wrists before she can react. With another swift motion I guide her hands to my neck. Her hands are warm and soft, still free of callouses despite her adventures. Her grip settles into place, fingers gravitating to the most natural spots to rest.

  “Kill me, Alice. End my pain. End our pain.”

  When I take my hands away, hers don’t leave my throat. Her eyes are wild, almost panicked, but there’s a hunger deep inside that has her grip tightening.

  This is everything Alice wanted when she began her journey. The creator of her universe, the god of her reality, is willing to die for her. All she has to do is squeeze, and keep squeezing, and she gets to take my place and make a whole new wheel.

  Vengeance against her tormentor, like we always dreamed about when it came to the people who hurt us in our mortal life. Freedom from anyone else’s control. The power to do whatever she wants. All she has to do is kill a girl who looks and sounds just like her.

  All she has to do is kill the real Alice, and she can be the fake Alice forever.

  It would be murder, but only of the vigilante kind. Arguably, it’s self-defense. She would be saving other girls from the torments I’ve promised. It would be justified. It would be easy.

  She applies pressure.

  She starts to choke me.

  And then she stops.

  Alice stumbles away from me in a haze of panic. She crashes into the orrery and scatters what’s left of it. She retreats to a corner of the room and stares at me, horrified and disgusted with the both of us. But she doesn’t hurl accusations or insults.

  She says, “You kept searching for a meaning behind the pain. A justification, cosmic or otherwise. A purpose. There had to be a good reason why they hurt you. But there wasn’t. Because it wasn't our fault that our mother died, and we didn't deserve to lose her, and everyone who told us it was God's plan were liars. It wasn't our fault that our father grew furious in his grief, and we didn't deserve for him to hurt us, and he wasn't making us stronger for it. And we are more than the sum of our failures, and we are better than what came before us, and our birth was not a mistake that needs to be corrected with the kiss of a knife held in our own hands.”

  Her voice, shaky at the start, gathers conviction as she keeps talking. By the end of her speech, every word is a gunshot.

  I let what she said sit in the air for a moment. I let it process. I ask, “Do you really believe that, Alice?”

  She flinches. “No,” she admits. “But I want to. Because it was my life too, and my pain.”

  I smile. “Thank you.”

  I breathe out and let three years of tension leave me. I sit down at my desk, empty glass in hand, and I think about death.

  Alice slowly makes her way back to the stool I gave her. She carefully plucks the knife from its perch and then carelessly tosses it atop the embers of Pandaemonium. She grabs her lemonade and polishes it off as she takes a seat.

  “Why,” she asks softly, “do I get the feeling that you already knew that answer? Why doesn’t this feel like a victory?”

  I slowly pull up my shirt to reveal a clean, unscarred chest. No missing chunks, no missing heart. No sign that anything was cut away. “Because I’m the one writing the script, so the only victories you can get are the ones that I give you. It’s the nature of the medium,” I say with as much genuine apology as I can convey.

  Alice stares. “I don’t understand. Why are you whole?”

  I pull my shirt back down. “All of this is true and none of it is real. The meat is a metaphor. You’re a piece of me, but that doesn’t mean I’m missing that piece. I’ve just externalized you. Of course, we still care about the meat, even when we know it’s a metaphor. You’re true, even if you aren’t real. That’s the great paradox of a story, both consuming it and creating it; we want to believe in Wonderland.”

  The truth sinks in. One more piece in the infinite puzzle. We can never solve it all.

  “I had an idea, once,” I start to narrate, “about a grand endeavor. I wanted to make something celebratory, something aspirational, something to make me happy. But I struggle to do that. Every time I try, it gets poisoned by my sense of pain. I write about a girl who’s special in some way, whether that’s the potential for greatness or a birthright of greatness, and I make her funny and I make her weird and I make her me. And then I torture her and kill her, because I can’t imagine a world where I ever win. I’m not allowed to win. I’m too ugly, too stupid, too lazy, and too cruel. And when I realize what I’ve made and how disgusting it is, I burn it. And then I start over without ever learning a thing.”

  I laugh again and add, “Or maybe that’s the mental illness talking. I think so, in one of my rare lucid moments. I think I learned a lot, making you. Telling your story. It wasn’t what I wanted to be, in the end. But there was value in it. In my head I’ve been framing it as a kind of exorcism, reaching this moment and this conclusion. The hurt is… smaller, now. It’s not gone, but I can handle it better. It’s not so all-consuming. Ironic, given my name.”

  Alice says, “Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy.”

  “Voracity,” I correct. “My true name is Voracity. Though most of the people I talk to call me Vora. It’s a bit cuter, isn’t it? Softens the edge.”

  Alice stews in everything I’ve told her. I would say I feel bad for the girl, but, well, the mask is well and truly off at this point. I’m already a fairly low-empathy person, and we’re talking about a self-insert character that I wrote three books about torturing.

  There’s something funny, though, here at the end. For once, I don’t feel like torturing Alice any further. Maybe I do feel bad for her. Maybe it’s just what the narrative demands.

  “You were going to ask what happens to you now,” I prompt her.

  She scowls at me. “Well I’m not going to ask after you’ve done the fucking precog thing. Go on, say whatever you were going to say regardless of me asking.”

  “I was thinking,” I say lightly, “that I could keep you around.”

  Alice raises an extremely suspicious eyebrow. “In what capacity?”

  “A muse,” I shrug. “I’m short one with Thalia gone, and you’re, y’know, at least one part Thalia, so it fits. No Intercessor bullshit this time, though. I’m done with that arc. Feast or Famine—sorry, that’s the name I gave your story—was meant to be, on some level, a finale to the very era it was describing. An end to the eternal cycle of remaking the same handful of characters and putting them through the same torments. So I’m not asking you to go running around the next world I make manipulating shards into acting as I want them to. You can if you really want, but… it might be nice just to have, I don’t know, a companion. A rubber duck when I’m feeling blocked, someone to razz me when I’m doing something stupid, someone to cheer me on when I’m doing good. A friend, I guess.”

  For the first time in this whole conversation, it’s Alice’s turn to laugh. “A friend, really? God, you’re lonely.” She keeps laughing. “I can’t believe I’m being asked to be friends with my own damn creator. Oh, fuck it. I guess I don’t have anything better to do for eternity.”

  “Friends!” I clap. “I’m going to have so much fun finding every excuse to keep writing you. Not in the next world, exactly, but I have a few ideas. A little out-of-canon corner for the two of us to commentate on my projects, doesn’t that sound neat? There’s precedent!”

  Alice runs a hand through her hair and shakes her head, the last of her negative emotions bleeding out. “You’re unbelievable. You get that, right? You’re absurd.”

  I tease, “Well, the philosophy of the Absurd—”

  “Nope! Shut it! I am taking a break from philosophy until I have reconciled my own existence, you hag.” Her lips are still upturned. Not quite a smile, but close.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll write that scene later,” I say before sticking my tongue out like a child. “Hey, you want some more lemonade?”

  “Always,” Alice groans. “I think that might actually fix me forever. Do you have an infinite supply of lemonade here?”

  “I have an infinite supply of everything here,” I say smugly.

  “Showoff,” she accuses. I don’t deny it.

  We leave the study together. I’ll clean up the ashes of Pandaemonium later. It might be fun to super-compress the carbon and get a shitty little diamond out of the pile. A memento.

  As we inhale more lemonade in the kitchen, Alice turns to me and asks, “Hey, what is your next world, anyway? You sound like you already have something in mind.”

  I grin. “I’ve got a few ideas. I had this really fun thought that’s made a nest in my brain: what if I did a magical girl story about a yandere?”

  “Weeb,” she sneers.

  “There’ll be robots, too! And vtubers! And card games!”

  “Nerd,” she continues. “Geek. Dork. Dweeb.”

  “Mhm!” I happily chirp. “Those are all names I will also respond to. Oh my gosh, I have to show you my internet presence. You will not believe the Discord servers I’m in. And you can meet the other demiurges!”

  Alice drains her lemonade and sighs. “If they’re friends with you, I’m already dreading the worst.”

  “Bah! You’ll like them. After all… you’re me.”

  THE END

  This Magical Girl is Mine, and uploading weekly chapters to , hoping to increase update rate soon. The and chapters are available free to read for everyone, while the rest of the story will be remaining patron-only until I have enough of a backlog that I can brave the algorithm and start posting to Royal Road. That'll be a few months.