The Real Dusick
I was tired, and I'd gone to bed late besides, but my eyes still opened early that morning. Even so, I felt refreshed. My body was light, as though I'd slept deeply, and my mood was bright.
When I woke, I was in my transformation form. The design was something like a uniform, and it had an unexpectedly charismatic look to it — I liked it a lot.
I'd lived as a man all my life and only recently become a woman, but that didn't mean I had any desire to live as one. So if my transformation form had come with a skirt, I would have had complaints about that, too.
"Keru."
"Mm. You're up early."
Keru was still curled up on my mattress. I hadn't even had a pillow, but using his belly as one had been surprisingly comfortable. Warm, too.
"What am I doing today?"
"Don't you think you should hear the briefing first?"
"Hmm. Let's do that in the morning, then. I'd like to go shopping in the afternoon."
I did have regular clothes. I'd brought some sweats along, and since it had been a month since I became a woman, I'd already bought underwear and the like. But I couldn't exactly go around in sweatpants all the time.
"True. You can't just wander around in gym clothes... and you're the boss now, so you'll need to dress with a bit more dignity."
"Yeah. Guro isn't far, anyway. There are plenty of malls around."
"Go in the afternoon, then."
"By myself?"
"Take Dusick with you."
Was the Dusick he was talking about the same Dusick I was thinking of? That Dusick who looked like someone had traced a judo athlete straight out of a textbook — and he wanted me to go clothes shopping with that?
"Are you serious?"
Keru looked at my thoroughly scrunched-up face for a moment, then yawned so wide his mouth nearly split. Then he grinned. So panthers could smile, huh.
"Come to think of it, I never got a chance to show you. Wait here a second."
Keru hopped down from the bed. He stood up neatly on his hind legs, grabbed the doorknob, and padded out.
What was he going to show me...? I was still turning it over in my head when a knock came at the door.
"Mother, I'm coming in."
"Yeah."
The door opened. And a girl with brilliant blonde hair came bouncing into the room.
"Mother Onniii!"
"Uh — w-who?"
Blonde hair, tied down on both sides into twin-tails. A girl who looked maybe sixteen or seventeen. That girl bounced over, threw herself into my arms, and started nuzzling her cheek against my chest over and over.
"Onniii!"
"Wait, hold on, hold on. Who are you? Who is this kid?"
Keru sauntered back in through the open door, yawning wide enough to split his face again.
"That's Dusick."
"So you're saying..."
"Yes! I'm Dusick! Kwak Doosik! This is my real form!"
The girl sipped her coffee with a little slurp, gazing up at me with sparkling eyes. Now that I looked, a slender silver bracelet was clasped around the wrist of the girl calling herself Dusick. And at the end of it, something like a tiny button... wait.
"She's a magical girl too?"
"Yeah. More accurately, you'd call her an evil magical girl."
"And this is her real form."
"That's right. Dusick, show her."
"Yes!"
Dusick pressed the button on her bracelet. There was a bang!, and then that enormous figure — the Kwak Doosik I'd first met — appeared before me.
"Do you believe me now?"
Well, when you transform right in front of my face, it's not like I have much choice but to believe it...
"Does your speech usually change when you transform...?"
"Not usually. Hair color and clothes, that's about it? You, for instance — your appearance stayed the same and only your clothes changed."
"Then why is Dusick like this?"
"There are all kinds of types, that's all."
"How would I know that?"
"Well, now you do. Anyway, that one just now is Dusick, and this one is also Dusick. Before and after transformation. That's the only difference."
Dusick was so tall I had to look up at him, with a build that looked twice mine. And when that Dusick dropped the transformation, he became the girl from before... wait. First things first.
"Dusick."
"Yes, Mother."
"Uh, this is a bit much, so could you drop the transformation?"
"Yes."
Another bang!, and the first thing that caught my eye was that glittering blonde hair. A girl with a smile filling her whole face beamed at me, watching me closely.
"Is my transformation form too much for you?"
I couldn't exactly say no. Even that smile was too much — I looked away from Dusick's gaze. Honestly, having a pretty girl look at me like that was... a lot. It was just... ah, how do I even put this. My heart was racing...? No. Wait. I don't know.
"Anyway, Keru told me. You're going to the mall this afternoon, right?"
"Uh, yeah, I think I should. I need to buy some clothes."
"Well, that makes sense. Those sweats you're wearing now — you just grabbed them, didn't you?"
"Yeah."
"Honestly, they don't look great. Someone as pretty as you should put a little more thought into what she wears."
"Really? I'm... pretty?"
"Oh my?"
Dusick tilted her head, then broke into a radiant smile.
"What, you thought you weren't? Of course, I'm the prettiest one here, but still."
Yeah, this one wasn't entirely normal either.
The evil organization, Mogumogu.
Keru said he didn't know when it had been founded. Just that it had been created by the first boss — a magical girl known as an evil magical girl, who went by the alias Cyclone.
"And ever since, they've been operating under the motto of world domination."
Which raised a question.
"So the first boss was an evil magical girl to begin with. Can't you just corrupt other magical girls the same way and have them fight? Or just create Mains who are evil magical girls from the start?"
"Well... it's not as easy as it sounds."
Magical girls were strong. Strong enough to hold their own one-on-one — and Mogumogu-dan had no means of steadily producing magical girls of their own. So they'd had to take a different approach. To face powerful magical girls, they produced weaker units — but in greater numbers.
It had worked, Keru said, back when Cyclone was still around. They'd actually pushed far enough that world domination had been nearly within reach. But then Cyclone overconsumed her magic power producing Mains, and after she retired...
"Wait. Magic power doesn't recharge or recover on its own?"
"It does. But if you're spending more than you recover, there's nothing you can do about it."
In other words: magical girls kept appearing, but the only one who could produce Mains to fight them was the Mother. Consumption far outstripped recovery, and they simply couldn't keep up with the numbers.
"Then just increase the number of producers — more Mothers, right?"
"You think we haven't tried? We've put in so much effort. It doesn't work, which is why we're in this mess."
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
"So the balance of good and evil is off right now?"
"Yeah. Good's tipped over ninety-five percent."
I may have skipped class, but I'm not stupid. I still remembered what Keru had told me the first day we met. The balance of good and evil had to be maintained. And right now, there were too many magical girls.
"What happens if the balance breaks?"
"Don't know."
"What?"
Keru's answer was so blunt, so utterly certain in its ignorance, that I was left speechless.
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"I don't know what I don't know. All I know is that something big happens. Something enormous."
"So I have to do bad things."
"That's right. I don't mean kill people or blow up buildings, though. We couldn't even if we wanted to, not as we are now. The point is to get Mogumogu active enough to form a reasonably even match against the magical girls."
"Build them up as a check on the other side?"
This was a full-on management sim.
What was this "something big," this "something enormous"?
Why had magical girls appeared in the first place? Which had come first — Mogumogu-dan, or the magical girls?
Keru had said Mogumogu-dan's history alone stretched back over a hundred years. And yet the organization had only entered public awareness a few decades ago, if that. What had they been doing in the meantime? And had magical girls existed back then too?
I didn't know.
"Dusick..."
"Onni, Mother Onni, look at this, look!"
"Dusick..."
"Mother Onni, try this one on too!"
"Dusick..."
"Mother Onni!"
"Du—"
I'd thought a month was enough to get reasonably used to living as a woman. I was about to learn just how premature that thought had been.
I'd come out to a mall in Guro with Dusick, and I was now three hours into a shopping ordeal.
Like most malls, the first floor was a beauty floor with cosmetics and the like, and the women's clothing started on the second. I'd already spent an hour on the first floor and two hours on the second being dragged around by Dusick. The problem was that even after all that, there was still no end in sight.
"Dusick, want to get some ice cream?"
"Vanilla? Yes! I know the ice cream place on the ninth floor! Come on, Onni, hurry!"
Being young was a blessing. She didn't even get tired from shopping. I was hauled up to the ninth floor on the escalator like a piece of luggage.
"There it is, over there!"
Sure enough, at the tip of Dusick's pointing finger hung the sign of an ice cream shop.
I handed Dusick my card, told her to get me the same as hers, and dropped into a food court chair, tipping my head back with a long sigh. Just a little rest here...
"Hey, Kwak Doosik!"
"Ah... Prabel...!"
"Perfect timing!"
Dusick's high-pitched scream rang out, followed by the sound of something shattering, and I muttered to myself that rest was a pipe dream.