The Revival Broadcast
A bang rang out—or something that sounded like one. The pink gas that had filled the glass tube thinned and faded, and coughing broke out from every corner of the room.
"I knew your magic power was strong, but this is some kind of off-the-charts output..."
Keru's voice drifted through the haze. As the acrid smoke cleared, Keru and Dusick came into view, faces smeared black with soot, hacking and grumbling without pause.
That unidentifiable sensation that had been tickling every inch of my body—oddly pleasant, in its way—faded along with the gas. The lid was already open. I pushed it aside and stepped out into the room.
The smoke still hung in the air, but it didn't bother me in the slightest. Breathing was fine. Seeing was fine.
They're making a huge fuss over this? I thought. Keru wiped his tears—I found myself briefly noting that cats, apparently, were quite dexterous with their front paws—and looked up at me with a low murmur of awe.
"I really did land a monster catch. Jackpot. Absolute jackpot. The production machine just couldn't handle your magic power, that's what happened. With output like this, we could actually go for world domination."
"Yeah?"
Wait. Hold on.
"We're going for world domination?"
"Yep. That's Mogumogu-dan's goal. World domination."
A month ago I had been a corporate drone. Now I was the leader of an organization bent on conquering the Earth. This wasn't even a light novel.
"It's not really sinking in."
"Forget it. At your level, you'll figure it out once you live it."
Keru told Dusick to clean up the area, and Dusick passed the order straight down to the goons standing around. So this was that thing they called dumping work on the underlings. I'd never been in the military, so I'd never actually seen it in person.
A goon arriving with a broom. A goon fetching a vacuum cleaner. A goon hauling in a mop. They all looked identical at a glance, but if you paid attention, their heights and builds varied, just slightly. What were they, exactly? Were they even human?
I was still staring blankly at the goons sweeping up when Keru flew over to my side.
"Come on, let's go. I'll show you your room."
"Isn't that the order we should have done this in? Shoving me into the production machine first thing was a bit much."
"I was in a hurry. Anyway, let's go."
"Fine."
I followed Keru's lead—and heard the click of heels against the floor. I had definitely been wearing an ordinary tracksuit when I climbed into that glass tube.
"Ah, your outfit changed. That's your transformation form."
Transformation form? Now that he mentioned it, my clothes had completely changed.
"Dusick, bring me a full-length mirror."
I said it to Dusick, but two goons hauled over an enormous mirror.
Long black hair spilled over my shoulders and trailed down my back—I'd already seen that. A crimson uniform jacket, gold buttons running down both sides and linked by gold cords, pair after pair hanging in a cascade. Strangely, my right arm was left completely bare while my left was hidden beneath a draped coat. I wondered if that meant something. Black trousers with the look and feel of velvet, and boots punctuated by a rounded white accent. All told, the uniform called to mind the cavalry dress of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
"Hmm... this is a transformation form that's never appeared before. I wonder if it means something."
Keru fluttered around me in tight circles, thoroughly occupied with admiring the new look. Honestly, so was I. The person in the mirror was a woman, yes—but she had a real presence.
And more than anything, she was beautiful.
"So why did I suddenly transform?"
"Hmm... probably because your magic power erupted when you went into the production machine. Let's see..."
Keru circled me as if searching for something. Then he tapped my ear.
"Here. The earring. This is it. Press it once to transform, press it again to cancel. That's how it works."
"Aren't you supposed to strike a pose and chant a transformation spell?"
"You can do that too. Strike a pose, chant the incantation, and press the earring."
"It's not a remote control."
"It's like this for every magical girl, not just you."
Was this really how an evil organization was supposed to work? Was this really how magical girls were supposed to work? The whole thing felt painfully slapdash.
"Oh, right. Dusick."
"Yes, Keru."
"Let's do a broadcast tonight."
"A broadcast?"
"A broadcast announcing Mogumogu-dan's revival. Don't put it on Twitch like last time. Properly hijack the terrestrial airwaves. Imagine cutting in right when the nine o'clock news comes on—cool, right? And don't forget to slap the donation account at the bottom of the screen."
"The Twitch thing last time was because Bongpal wired it wrong..."
"Oh, shut it."
"Ah—understood. Then the one appearing will be..."
"Yeah. Her. We need to decide on an alias, and fast..."
"What are you talking about?"
Broadcast this, broadcast that—none of it made any sense. Well, I had heard something about a broadcast. But they were doing it tonight?
"Yep. Mogumogu-dan found Mother and has been revived. Of course, no need to mention Mother or any of that. Just give them something like, we're going to beat every last magical girl to death, and you humans will bow your heads before us!"
"And if they trace the signal and come storming in?"
Honestly, I wasn't even sure this building had any security. The base was the kind of place you could walk into if you just opened the door. If a magical girl attacked, could we even handle it?
Becoming the boss of an evil organization was appealing enough. Getting into a fight and dying screaming on day one was not.
"Nah, it's fine. The magical girls already know we're here. They even helped us when we moved into this place."
"Huh? What are you talking about now?"
"Come on, think about it. Listen."
Keru flew up and settled on my shoulder. He was light—so light I couldn't even feel his weight. From up there he licked his front paw and started grooming his fur. Seeing him like this, he really did look like a cat.
"If we disappeared completely, the magical girls would lose their reason to exist. They'd just be a bunch of crazy girls who happen to be good at fighting. Regular people would start thinking the magical girls were the real threat."
"Well, yeah. That tracks."
"So they don't wipe us out completely. They leave us around. If we revive at a reasonable pace, they have something to do, and they get to stay the good guys. They'd probably be happy to hear we found Mother. I heard talk about cutting magical girl funding because Mogumogu-dan hasn't shown up in a while."
"Ah. I get it now."
So they were in a mutually beneficial relationship. I understood—but it still felt a little underhanded. From the perspective of someone who had been an ordinary human until a month ago, it felt like I'd been stabbed in the back. They had known where the evil organization was and just left it alone. Worse, they had been cooperating, living in some kind of symbiotic arrangement.
"Anyway, Mogumogu's revival isn't a bad thing for the magical girls either. We need to start producing Mains and launching raids so they have someone to fight. This broadcast is basically us saying, we're ready now, so you get ready too. Got it? You have to act as evil as possible. As much like an evil organization as possible. Sinister, dark, brooding. Understood?"
"You're not going to write me a script?"
If I was going to crash a network broadcast and deliver lines, I at least needed a script. I wasn't exactly great at improvising.
"Good point. Dusick, prepare a script."
He dumped the work on her out of nowhere, but Dusick didn't look the least bit put out.
"Yes, understood."
Judging by her build, you'd think she had walked off a judo team—but she really did seem to be the brains of the outfit. Told to write a script, she just nodded without a word of complaint.
Which left the remaining problem: me. A broadcast... I had never even streamed before. Could I actually pull this off?
Following Keru's guidance, I arrived at my room. It was about three times the size of the studio apartment I had been living in. Apparently this was where I would be eating and sleeping.
"There's no furniture yet. After the previous Mother passed away, we hit a serious funding crisis, so we sold off everything that was worth any money."
"That's... kind of a pathetic situation, isn't it?"
Ahem. Ahem. Keru cleared his throat a few times. Was this guy even actually a cat?
"It's a sad story if you dwell on it. Anyway, once we do the broadcast tonight, we should get a decent amount in donations. We'll use that to buy furniture, clothes for you, some daily necessities. And we need to treat the kids to a company dinner."
A company dinner. That was the moment reality came crashing back in.
That aside, Keru's words had sparked another question. Donations? What kind of lunatics would send us money?
"Oh, that? The magical girls do it. For the reasons I already explained."
The more I learned, the stranger this all got. And I felt a little betrayed, too.
I pulled the chair out from the desk and sat down, then straightened my posture. Facing the camera in front of me, I worked through my vowels—ah, ee, oo, eh, oh—loosening the tension in my face. So this was what a national address felt like.
"Just do it exactly the way you did in rehearsal. Um... Mother?"
"Yeah."
"Count five, and when the red lamp on this camera lights up, you start."
"Got it."
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
This was bad. In an instant my mind went completely blank, and I could not remember a single line I had memorized. What was it? What was it? Dusick's frantic hand gestures—hurry, hurry!—only made my mind go blanker.
"Foolish humans."
Okay! Keru's voice, audible only to me. You little shit—if you could do that, just feed me the damn lines! I needed to start reciting something, anything.
"My name is—"
Wait. We hadn't decided on that yet.
"—none of your business. I am the leader of Mogumogu-dan."
"I stand before you today—"
Good. Just keep going like this.
"to announce the revival of our great Mogumogu-dan to you hoomans, for the purpo—"
...I'm fucked.