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"It was much easier to avoid collateral damage in a labyrinth. Nothing you could hit was real." Homura stated her argument as matter-of-factly as ever.
Sayaka smirked. "That's not a problem for anyone but you, because magical girls normally don't use military-grade explosives."
Mami chimed in. "It's still relevant to firearms users. If I didn't have to be careful about what's behind my target, I would spend much less time maneuvering. But it sounds like labyrinths wouldn't be as easy to escape as a wraith engagement."
Kyouko retorted: "So just win. Anyway, wouldn't grief seeds be hard to ration out? I'd rather take a handful of little cubes than a big ol' one-shot seed."
"That's not—" Homura started to reply, but was interrupted by the sudden appearance of their host, Madoka, radiating hope and serenity.
Before Madoka could greet them, Sayaka pointed to her, and demanded: "Witches or wraiths?" The goddess answered with a befuddled stare, so Sayaka elaborated. "Which would you rather fight?"
Little Nagisa's addendum was characteristically precocious: "Under the pretense that witches emerge just as wraiths do, and not from despairing magical girls."
"Oh. Hm ..." Madoka touched her index finger to her chin as she thought for a moment. Then her face lit up with an epiphany. "Nightmares!" she exclaimed. Homura facepalmed. "Please, no."
Nagisa got excited, jumping up from her seat and pointing. "Ooh! Yes, that! Am I permitted to revise my answer?"
Homura tried to shut down the topic: "It's not a real option. Nightmares were just an aspect of a witch's labyrinth." She tossed her hair.
"Your labyrinth, you mean." Sayaka gave Homura an easygoing smirk, hoping her taunt would be taken in good fun. "But we're already changing the rules for witches, so why not pretend nightmares can exist for real?"
"Because you still need another witch to end the nightmare." Homura started to seem a little agitated.
Sayaka shrugged. "Just get Kyouko to eat the cake."
Kyouko grinned. "Look, I get that you wanna give me a Heimlich stomp, but are you sure you want me to be the one coughing up your friend's face-blob?" "Oh, ew. Ewwww." Sayaka made a face. Kyouko shrugged wide and slow. "Hey, wasn't my idea. Just making sure you know the consequences."
"I think we could have made it work, even if we didn't have a witch!" Madoka insisted. Mami smiled at that. "You really liked that summoning ritual, didn't you, Madoka?"
Homura doubled over, softly bonking her forehead against the table. "That goddamn cake chant. Why? Why is this what we're talking about right now."
Madoka pouted. "The cake song was fun!"
Homura, still resting her head on the table, rolled to face Madoka without rising. "Seriously? It was bizarre. It was insane." She sat up again, and looked around the table. No one backed her up.
Homura gestured silently for a bit, pleading, incredulous. She turned back to Madoka, and demanded: "Get someone who wasn't in my labyrinth. I'm going to explain nightmare fights to them, and you will watch."
Madoka instantly conjured a tall, dark-skinned girl with a green afro, wearing cargo pants and a pastel Puella Magi Madoka Magica T-shirt. Homura stared at the T-shirt, and blinked rapidly, weighing a new rant-impulse against the one she was already invested in.
"Hey." The girl glanced around at the Holy Quintet (plus Nagisa). "Wow, okay, lotta big names here. So, uh, God-chan told me you needed a narrative foil?" Madoka frowned (playfully) at the "God-chan" moniker, and flicked the girl's forehead; the girl just stuck out her tongue in response.
Homura gave her foil a blank look. "Sure. Narrative foil. Let's go with that. What's your name?" "Mikaela."
"Well, Mikaela, you've heard of witches and labyrinths, right?" "Yeah, I saw Miki-san's demo once." "Great."
Homura took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. She clasped her hands in her lap, and began to explain.
"Let's suppose that, besides wraiths and witches, there's another kind of grief spirit, called nightmares. Nightmares happen when someone goes to bed in a really bad mood. They look kind of like a witch's familiar, but uglier. When they appear, your favorite doll (who is a witch) alerts you, and then starts babbling about Camembert cheese.
"So you tell your magical girl team to rush over, and you nag them for being slow. Then, you take two and a half minutes to transform into your magical girl outfits one at a time, so everyone gets an equal audience for their convoluted dances. The nightmare politely waits for you to finish, and then immediately blows up an entire building and wrecks a few blocks of the city.
"Now, you do your most extravagant combo attack. You don't aim it at the nightmare. No, you aim the attack at the building it already destroyed. Destroying the building again causes it to be un-destroyed, and fixes the collateral damage too. The reason this works is because ribbons.
"The nightmare now recognizes that it is hopelessly outclassed. You hunt it down and chain it to a table. Then you all sit at the table, and your witch doll sits on the nightmare.
"Now, here's the crucial part. In unison, you all start chanting about cake. This inspires your tiny witch doll to vomit up an enormous clown worm. (The clown worm is still the same witch.) There's no cake yet, so the clown worm witch accuses one of you of being the cake. Now you take turns deflecting this accusation by self-identifying as other kinds of food. Self-identifying as a food, naturally, conjures that food into existence, and you feed it to the nightmare.
"Once you've all come up with some idiotic reason to accuse your friends of cakehood, and stuffed the nightmare with your foodsonas, it's clear that none of you is the cake. So you all pull the tablecloth apart, and a huge tower of cake slowly erupts from the table, kind of like an ICBM coming out of an underground silo.
"Your clown worm witch devours this ridiculously huge cake tower in one bite. Now you perform the witch equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver, which is a vaulting stomp to the gut. She coughs up what looks like a melting human head, as well as a blizzard of shredded dream notes. You show one of the dream notes to the melting head, and it drifts off to sleep. Congratulations. You've defeated the nightmare.
"So, Mikaela, what do you think of all that?"
Mikaela stayed silent for a moment, stunned. "That," she began to reply, "is the most amazing fucking thing I've ever heard. Creepy cake rituals? Foodsonas? Wait," she glanced again at the others, "is one of you the witch doll ... worm ... clown thing? Please tell me this actually happened. Lie if you have to." She clutched at the air for emphasis: "I need to believe."
The radiant goddess pouted again. "The cake song wasn't creepy," she muttered to herself. "Homura called me 'sweet'."
Nagisa stood up, and raised her hand eagerly. "I'm the witch doll!" Mikaela went over and gave her a high five. "Girl, you are my new hero. What the fuck!"
Mami pursed her lips, and shot Mikaela a stern look. "I wish you wouldn't model foul language around her." Mikaela alternated looking at Mami and Nagisa, and then replied: "This girl is a child soldier who got her soul turned inside out and then died. She has seen some shit. You wanna deprive her of curse words?"
Nagisa beamed in awe at her new friend. "Thank you for the succinct summation of my stance on the matter. It is immensely validating to hear another person affirm it." Nagisa pondered a moment, and then issued an erratum: "Immensely fucking validating." Mami set down her teacup and closed her eyes. She leaned on her lap, and started taking deep breaths.
Homura got up and wandered out the door in a defeated slouch. "Dead people. I swear to God." She pretended not to hear Kyouko's quip about taking Madoka's name in vain.