Just Like a Sport
I wasn't much of a television person, ordinarily. Work had me buried in overtime every single day at the company, and on the rare evening I made it home with time to spare, my idea of a hobby was cracking open a beer and tearing into a strip of jerky.
Variety shows, though, had magical girls popping up as guests often enough—beaming at the camera, recounting their battles against Mogumogu-dan, or giving the public a tour of their bedrooms, all in the name of selling themselves to the masses.
That was how I'd seen Prabel, the ice-wielding magical girl, on television before. That silver hair of hers was distinctive enough that it had stuck with me.
"Mother Unni!"
The moment I saw Dusick go down under a magical girl's surprise attack, leaping out to put myself between them was the most natural thing in the world.
"And you are?"
"Mother. Newly appointed boss of Mogumogu-dan. You're the magical girl Prabel, I take it?"
The girl glared, an aqua-colored wand already in her hand, trained first on Dusick and now on me as I stood in the way.
"I heard Mogumogu-dan found themselves a new boss. That you?"
"That's right."
"Hmph."
As if her interest had evaporated on the spot, Prabel lowered the wand and clicked her tongue. I was the one who wanted to click my tongue.
"Don't get the wrong idea. Dusick and I are classmates, so I was just saying hello. With a punch."
"Classmates?"
"You didn't know?"
"Know what?"
"Dusick and I are both high schoolers."
She was still going to school? Well, that was a new one.
"Time's marched on, and there's been a lot of new technology. Ever since we magical girls showed up, Mogumogu-dan always puts up a Two-sided Barrier before a fight, so even if something gets wrecked, it all snaps back to normal once the battle's over. These days it almost feels like a sport."
I ended up paying for the ice cream.
The magical girl Prabel was single-handedly demolishing a pint of mint chocolate. My lieutenant Dusick sat working through a perfectly ordinary cup of chocolate-vanilla. And next to Dusick, me.
"A sport, huh."
She had a point. At some point, news of Mogumogu-dan showing up had stopped coming with reports of actual damage.
"Dusick."
"Yes, Unni?"
"What's a Two-sided Barrier?"
"A Two-sided Barrier is—"
I'd asked Dusick. Prabel cut in anyway.
"It's like a barrier. A kind of rule we all play by."
Before launching an attack, she said, Mogumogu-dan would send an official notice to the Magical Girl Association—the date, the time, the place. The Association would then raise a Two-sided Barrier over that stretch of space. Only members of Mogumogu-dan and magical girls could go inside. You could see out from within, and you could see in from without. Anyone who'd been standing there got forcibly ejected the moment the barrier went up. And when the fight was over—whether Mogumogu-dan won or the magical girls did—every wrecked building and smashed fixture snapped back to the way it had been the instant the barrier came down.
"So it really is a sport."
"Pretty much. People even gather outside the barrier to watch. They broadcast it live, apparently."
A fixed match, then. Collusion dressed up as combat.
"They're even talking about getting sponsors now."
"Sponsors?"
"Yeah. Mogumogu-dan's back, so you'll be attacking more, and we'll be showing our faces more. So, you know—like other sports. Logos on the back, that kind of thing..."
This really was a sport. They ought to make it an official World Cup event.
I didn't answer, so Prabel turned to Dusick.
"Hey, Dusick."
"Huh?"
"Why've you been so quiet? Am I making you nervous?"
"N-no. It's not like that."
Dusick glanced at me, flinched when our eyes met, and hunched her shoulders.
"I was just happy to see you! Yeah. Happy!"
The problem was that whatever existed between Prabel and Dusick was painfully awkward. Dusick had been so lively while we were looking at clothes, but the second Prabel appeared she'd gone restless, watching my face, watching Prabel's, spinning in place.
I had a bad feeling about this. I really hoped it wasn't what I thought it was.
"So. What brings you here today?"
"Clothes. Shopping."
"Ah, right—you're a boss now, so you need a suit or something. But why a mall like this? You should have something tailored. At the very least go to a department store. That's how you look the part."
I know that, you brat.
I knew perfectly well that was how you looked the part.
"There's plenty of nice stuff here. I'd rather spend that money feeding my subordinates something decent."
"Ooooh?"
"And what good is a designer label if the person wearing it can't carry it? Slap anything on a face like mine and it becomes a luxury brand."
"So you're broke, then."
You little shit.
"Well then, once I finish this, I'll come with you. I do modeling work, so I've got an eye for clothes you wouldn't believe. I'll pick something out. Let's go together."
A model would have an eye for clothes, sure enough... I glanced at Dusick. And found Dusick already looking at me. Our eyes locked.
"I'll take the thought for it."
"Huh? Why? You don't trust my taste?"
"No, it's not that."
If you couldn't trust a model's eye for clothes, whose could you trust? The thing was—
"It's for my first public appearance. I'd like my lieutenant to be the one who picks it out."
After we finished the ice cream and parted ways with Prabel, Dusick and I headed back down to the second floor. We bought a few pairs of shoes—heels, sneakers—some everyday T-shirts and pants, then went up to the fourth floor to look at suits.
"You're tall, Mother Unni, so pants might actually suit you better than a skirt."
"Alright. You pick, Dusick."
"Yes!"
Dusick had been visibly deflated ever since running into Prabel, but she was starting to find her usual self again. That bright, energetic Dusick. Holding up navy, black, charcoal-gray suits, draping them against me, agonizing over this one or that one.
I hoped my worries were unfounded. Watching her, though, I had a feeling they weren't.
"Can't we just buy all of them?"
"One set."
I was the boss of an evil organization. What difference did it make how well I dressed?
"Well, you do look like a painting in anything. That was so cool earlier, by the way."
"What was?"
"'What good is a designer label if the person wearing it can't carry it? Slap anything on a face like mine and it becomes a luxury brand.'"
Dusick did a slightly soprano impression of my voice.
"It's true, isn't it?"
"It is, yeah. A brand can save an outfit, that's a fact—but there's a limit. You're starting from such a good original that pretty much anything's going to work."
"See?"
I sat with my legs crossed in the chair outside the fitting room, and before I knew it Dusick had finished paying and was holding out my card. The amount on my phone screen stung. Women's clothes really were expensive.
"Oh—this is pretty basic, but you've only been at this for two days, so you probably haven't heard a thing about mana circulation or any of that. It's completely normal not to know yet."
Every magical girl, she explained, was given a kind of virtual space. That space was filled with mana, and how large the space was told you how much mana you had. Which was why mana capacity was measured in liters. The unit alone made me picture a plastic bottle filled to the brim with soda.
The original Mother, Cyclone, had a capacity that wasn't precisely known, but estimates put it somewhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand liters. Eve, the current president of the Magical Girl Association and the highest-capacity magical girl known to exist, had about three times that.
So would I be in that range too? I still had no real sense of how enormous those numbers actually were.
And the funny part: you could put things in that space. You could even put a fellow magical girl in there, if she'd run her mana dry. In that case, you'd supply your own mana to restore hers.
"So that's how Frilly stuffed Pricue in there yesterday."
"Yes. It's a pretty standard way of carrying things, actually. You can use the space however you like. People stash things in there they don't want anyone else to see."
Dusick said this while tucking our shopping bags neatly into her inventory.
"I'll teach you once we're back at the base, Unni."
"Alright."
We were on our way back to the base. Guro to Gwangmyeong wasn't far, exactly, but it felt a bit much to walk. Dusick insisted it wasn't a hard distance at all, and that we should just go on foot.
The sun was already going down. Dusk settled over the road, drawing our shadows out long behind us.
I had been born a man, lived as a man, and spent three years at a thoroughly unremarkable job in a thoroughly unremarkable mid-sized company. Now I was a woman I had never been meant to become—and as if that weren't enough, I was the boss of Mogumogu-dan, the villains I had been taught since childhood to think of as the bad guys.
I had no idea where my life went from here. Not the faintest clue.
All that talk about the balance of good and evil still felt like so much vapor, nothing I could get my hands around. I had taken the job because it beat living the same day over and over, and because the treatment was better. I had snapped it up without thinking too hard.
Maybe that had been reckless. But what was life, really? People said everyone got a turning point sooner or later. Call it starting a business with zero capital. Trying it once might actually be fun.
And thanks to this Two-sided Barrier or whatever it was, even doing bad things didn't hurt anyone or cause any real damage. That, at least, was a comfort.
"Unni. Today was fun."
"Was it?"
Dusick hooked her arm through mine. She was grinning from ear to ear.
"Earlier—I was so happy."
"When?"
"When you said you wanted your lieutenant to pick out the first clothes you'd ever buy."
"That so?"
I wasn't entirely sure what there was to be grateful for.
"I really was happy."
Watching Dusick smile like that, I thought I'd done the right thing.