Pudgeon woke with a start. His head was pounding. He had been having a terrible dream where his boss was just slapping him in the beak over and over again. How indignant.

He glanced at his alarm clock. It glowed with pastel pink runes that accented the bright yellow walls of his apartment perfectly. Oh no! He was late! How long had the alarm been going off?? He had to go! He was supposed to arrive early!

He wafted over to where he kept the his glow juice. One cup was all he had time for. He trapped it in his “mouth” and scurried out of his home.

He skipped down the stairs that spiraled around the outside of the floating ivory spire that he lived in. A modest dwelling which he shared with many other agents, but it was a living. He glided down as quickly as he could dodging in between other commuters moving at a more liesurely pace.

And then he tripped.

In a dizzying rush he was spiraling in empty space, falling down toward Earth. His glow juice scattered in the air into a million pastel colored droplets…

---

Elize Snow was going over the first day materials that HR had given her after she accepted the job offer. The wheels of the light rail she was riding clacked gently as she cruised through the city. There was a homeless man snoozing at the front of the car. Luckily it was also full of commuters. Some of them very cute…

FOCUS.

Benefits. Right. Does she need to think about a 401k at 25? PTO accumulation, life insurance?

Oh well. She’d figure that out later. For now she was going to focus on learning her new role and impressing her team. She had finally landed her dream job as a QA for an established game studio. She was a little overqualified, and would rather be a build engineer or work in ops, but QA was what was available.

The train dropped her off just one oversized block from the office. As she walked she looked up at the mountain peaks in the crisp morning air. A bit of mist clung to the peaks and the last of winter’s snow refused to melt. How delightful. She smiled to herself, energy building up from anticipation. She walked a little faster to try and work it out.

She arrived at the office, went up the elevator, and to the receptionist. She was a little hot from power walking and she could feel her cheeks flush as she entered the warmer space.

“Hi, I’m Elise,” she told the receptionist “It’s my first day?”

“Right right, I’ve been expecting you. Here’s your badge.” She handed Elise a badge on a dark red lanyard with the company’s trademarks printed on it. “Someone from your team should come meet you. You can wait over there.” She gestured toward some worn sofas in a corner.

Elise sat primly on the edge of the seat, too anxious to relax. She fiddled with the edge of her skirt, which was just long enough to be “professional,” but definitely cute. She wore a white blouse that said “I know I’m at work, but if you look twice I’d understand.” She had on conservative dark stockings and black shoes with low heels. She wanted to be professional for her first day. And adorable. She wanted to impress anyone who could matter.

Thirty minutes later, she was still waiting. She glanced at the receptionist who refused to make eye contact with her. Did they know she was here?

She got up and walked around a bit. The receptionist continued to pointedly ignore her.

After debating with herself for a few minutes, she decided to try her badge on the card scanner to see if she could go in. The scanner showed green, she heard the ka-chunk of the latch withdrawing. With one final nervous head bob to the receptionist (who didn’t return or notice it), Elise slipped into the office.

The world she entered was somewhat similar to what she had expected. It was dimly lit, no overhead lights were on, all the curtains closed. There were glowing monitors and people doing work in complete silence, over-ear headphones everywhere. The only person talking was someone who was obviously on a video call and didn’t seem to care that the rest of the floor could hear. Probably why everyone had headphones. Projected on the wall were several Steam dashboards of several games produced by the company showing concurrent players. One said 156, decent for an indie game, many of them said 0. Oh wait, that one said 2. How nice.

“Oh hello.” It was… John Jeppsen, he was the QA team lead and one of the primary people who had interviewed her.

“Hello!” Elise was ecstatic to see someone she recognized, and she extended her hand. He tipped his head in response. In one arm he carried his laptop and phone, and in the other he was gripping a 2 liter Mountain Dew and a party sized bag of Dorritos.

“I was expecting you a little earlier. Not good to be late on your first day!”

Elise’s eye twitched, thinking of sitting in reception for over half an hour. She continue to smile and dropped her head.

“I’m so sorry, it won’t happen again. I promise!” She said enthusiastically.

“Don’t worry about it. Over here,” he said as he started walking toward one corner of the office. “Welcome to our little QA utopia.” He chuckled darkly.

In the corner were four tables arranged in a clover with two work stations on each. They had cubicle walls on either side to block peripheral vision, but you could stare over your monitor at the other person on the other side of the table and people could loom over you from behind.

“This is your seat,” John said, “and that is your desk mate, Jerk. I mean Jake.”

“Har har,” Jake said without looking up. It seems like he’d heard this joke before.

Before long, Elise was busy setting up credentials, installing needed software, arguing with IT about why she needed admin access on her machine, and doing regular first day chores. At one point, she noticed Jake staring at her with a bored expression.

“Hi!” She smiled at him.

“DEI.”

“Eh?”

“Pathetic. We should have hired someone qualified.” He went back to working. From the reflection on his glasses, Elise could see that he was jumping a character into corners of geometry trying to break the game world.

John reappeared. “Goddammit Jake, do you always have to be a jerk?”

“Damn straight.” Jake said, still not looking away from his obsessive jumping.

John scowled at him. “C’mon, now that you’re set up I’ll get you oriented on our current products and processes.” Elise followed him to a conference room.

John pulls up a steam page. On it was a game with happy, shiny, characters who were smiling brightly at the player. It was called Eternity Heroes, or Champions, or Summoners. Elise couldn’t quite remember.

“It’s a PvE MoBA,” John explained. “We built it during the MoBA craze and it managed to break even. Sometimes we release some new DLC and there’s a jump in players and a trickle of income, but generally it’s winding down.”

He flicked open another one “This is Eternity Explorers, our ‘troidvania in the same IP. Currently no players.”

He then proceeded to show a death march of games, all using the same IP, all chasing the “flavor of the year” genre for the past decade.

“Currently no players.” John said for the last time. “Any questions about the games?”

“Are there any projects outside the ‘Eternity’ IP?” She asked.

John brightened up, “Well, kind of, actually. A few years ago, we tried working on something new. It was this rad sci-fi magical girl adventure nonsense, where you could fly around through space and shoot like heart beams at aliens.”

John’s face fell, “But then Adam left and Bryan became CEO and canned it. No audience he said–that is, he didn’t want to play it so he didn’t want to make it.”

John sighed.

“Anyway, let’s look at the Jira board next.”

After luch, Elise had her first ticket to work on, and the Korean fried chicken salad she’d gotten from the hip place across the street had boosted her mood. “Check animation for new skill on the Lumina character in Eternity Heroes.”

Elise booted up the game and followed the Easter Egg procedure to get into test mode where she could download in-development assets and scripts. She found the module marked with her ticket number and let it install. Then she loaded up the save that was attached to the ticket.

Lumina appeared on the game’s loading screen, and animated through a few of her poses. She was cute, spunky, fun.

“DEI,” Jake lurked behind her. The light from her monitor reflecting in his eyes, which filled with hate for the Lumina character as he glowered down at her. Then he went and sat down.

Elise frowned, surprised to feel the mild sting of water in her eyes. She gulped them down. The game booted up and Lumina delivered her catch phrase to let the player know she was ready “It’s now or never, comrade!”

“Thank you Lumina,” Elise whispered to herself, casting a covert scowl at Jake around the corner of her monitor.

Elise put Lumina through her paces. The new skill looked pretty cool. You could only unlock it through taking specific character build options, and Elise thought it was a great addition. She went through a bunch of edge cases, trying to find ways to break the animation.

Ah ha! She found an issue. She smiled internally. This is what she was hired to do! She would report the issue, it would be fixed, and the game would be better because she was hired, and Jake could suck eggs.

She pulled up Jira, created a new ticket, selected defect, and filled out the fields. “When animation is canceled, visual effect persists until character respawn.” She filled out detailed steps to reproduce the issue and clicked submit. The status was set to pending.

She went on to pull in another card, but the time to leave came before she was able to wrap it up. She didn’t want to be seen as eager to get out, so she waited for other QA to leave before her. Luckily, that started at around 3 PM. John was gone as 4:15, sharp. Only Jake lingered.

“There’s an update on the card you logged,” he said flatly.

Elise imagined sticking her tongue out at Jake and pulled the card up. Had an artist or dev already fixed the bug? That would be really fast!

The card was closed with the status “Will Not Fix.” It was closed by John fifteen minutes after she opened it.

Elise left after that. The sun had started to set, its bottom edge flirting with the rugged skyline to the West. Her footsteps were heavy and weary. It had only been one day. It had felt like a year.

She sighed, and pinched herself. You have to be the change you want to see! She worked at the company now, and that means she could affect the culture. Maybe one day she could be a producer and really turn things around! Yeah!

She knew she was deceiving herself, but she had bills to pay and a contract on an apartment for the next 12 months. She was going to have to dig deeper than expected, but she was going to do it!

The people on the evening train ride were not as cute as the morning commuters had been. Now there were three homeless people and they were arguing.

By the next week Elise had stopped pressing her blouses. She started wearing joggers and a hoody. She didn’t put in contacts and wore her old glasses, not the ones with the frames she liked. It was too much effort to try to be appealing.

She was walking back to the train again. It felt like the thousandth time she’d taken this journey. She knew it was less than twenty. Sigh.

Chapter 2

Elise started from her miserable revery. A pigeon had fallen on the sidewalk in front of her. It lay flat on its back, eyes staring wide up at the sky. Some glitter fell slowly around it and sprinkled the ground around it with a pastel rainbow. Its legs pointed at the sky, its wings were tucked tightly around its round body.

“What the fu——!” Elise doesn’t usually swear, but she was very startled.

The pigeon’s head turned slowly, too slowly, and it fixed on her with one of its glassy eyes and its beak opened. A released a gargling splatter of a sound. Then it started wheezing, its entire body wracked with convulsions.

Elise was paralyzed by surprise and mild horror. It was a disgusting display, just more reinforcement of the cruel and uncaring nature of the universe. What was another dead pigeon to the cruel god, MOLOCH, who ruled this world???

Much to her surprise, after much coughing, the bird managed to roll over and stand up. It took a couple steps toward her before collapsing again.

“Help. Please!” it croaked at her. It tried to get up again, but collapsed again. It was pathetic.

Did that bird just talk to her?

Regardless, she took pity on the ugly thing and scooped it up and held it gently. What could she do? Would her landlord let her keep a bird? Was there an animal hospital nearby? Would they take in a pigeon?

She mused while her feet took her on autopilot to the train stop. She got on, and just stared at this weird, glitter covered bird while it weakly flopped around trying to get comfortable.

As the train got close to her apartment, Elise gently tucked the bird under one arm in a secure football hold. She disembarked the train at her home stop, which was thankfully close to her building. She keyed in and got on the elevator. A neighbor got on behind her, glanced at the bird and quickly looked away.

Elise smiled. The neighbor shook their head.

Elise got in to her apartment. It was a little one bedroom thing, but it was one whole bedroom all to herself, so it felt huge to her. She took the bird in to the bathroom and placed it on a towel on the counter top. Then she started googling how to give emergency care to birds.

She found a lot of information on pet birds, various kinds of parrots, parakeets, little song birds, etc. Nothing specifically about pigeons though. Maybe all of it would work? She had no idea.

“Ugh, disgusting” a gruff, thin voice said. Elise snapped her head up and started looking around her small apartment with wild eyes. There was someone else IN HERE.

“I didn’t even get dressed properly. And I’m covered in glow juice,” the voice continued. “Awful, just dreadful.”

Elise was running around the house. She has a LARP sword that a friend gave her so she could play one time. If she can find it.

“I’m warning you,” she called out, still unable to find the source of the voice, “I’m going to call 911!”

“Oh no! Is there an emergency???” the voice responded sincerely.

“Don’t mess with me!” Elise keyed in the numbers on her phone. There’s the LARP sword. It was just PVC pipe covered in foam and duct tape, but at least she could poke from far away.

“Yeah! Don’t mess with us!” the voice shouted.

What is going on? Elise was starting to think the voice might be in her head. Had she cracked? And at the tender age of 25. She had thought she was more resilient.

Alas. She was insane. That was the explanation. She carried a dead bird home and then started hearing voices. She locked her phone and went and laid down on the couch.

“Insane,” she tried the word on for size, “maybe it’s better this way?”

She closed her eyes and sighed. Maybe work would be easier if she couldn’t think straight anymore. Maybe.

She heard a clacking sound, like someone tapping on the hard floor of her apartment. Great, more hallucinations.

“Excuse me,” the voice said. She just groaned and buried her head in a pillow.

“Ahem,” the voice coughed, then continued with a stronger tone, “if you don’t mind, I seem quite stuck. Might you be so kind as to help me out for a brief spell?”

“Suuuuuure, sure, WHY NOT?” Elise shouted into her pillow, “WHY NOT lose my mind too? Nothing matters, it never mattered,” she laughed in an unhinged way.

“o-oooookay,” the voice said, closer, uncertain. “In that case, could you pour me some water? My throat hurts something terrible.”

Her throat was a little dry. Maybe the voice wasn’t entirely unreasonable. She rolled over and put her feet on the ground. She looked up at the cupboards and crossed to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of water and turned around. She leaned heavily against the counter, and crossed her arms, cup in one hand.

Then she saw the bird standing in the middle of her living room.

“Hullo!” it said in a chipper tone, “Are you going to share that with me?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, taking a sip. She glowered at the bird. At least it wasn’t dead, but she was definitely insane if it was talking to her.

She went and sat back on the sofa, water in hand. The bird hopped up next to her. That surprised her, but she was beyond caring at this point. It came up to her, somewhat cautiously, but being brave, it stuck its beak into the cup and slurped up some water.

“Lovely, just delightful,” he muttered, “I wish it was glow juice.”

“You can have the rest,” Elise sighed. She didn’t want to get bird flu or whatever disease this animal had.

“Thank you kindly. Erm, could you set it on the ground?”

Elise obliged. She leaned back on the sofa and sucked on her lip. The bird hopped to the cup and drank a bunch more, then it tipped the cup over and started rolling around in the puddle. Glittery colors started to flow off its feathers as it washed.

“So craven,” Elise said, “are you going to flutter onto some bust of Pallas and croak depressing one liners at me?”

“Craven? How rude. I believe the line is ‘surely you are NO CRAVEN,’ ma’am.” The pigeon tutted and tsked as it bathed.

“So pigeon, what’ll it be then?” Elise asked as she laid down on the couch, “You want to be the first in my crazy animal hoarder era?”

“Umm, preferably not that…” the pigeon said as he preened himself, “my name isn’t pigeon, by the way. It’s Pudgeon.”

“Right, because that’s so different.” Elise sighed. Even her insane mind was boring.

Pudgeon was considering her with his big black eyes. First one, then the other. Calculating.

“I don’t like that look,” Elise said.

“So I’ve got a problem–” Pudgeon began.

“Don’t we all,“ Elise quipped.

“–And I think I can trust you to help me. Maybe,” Pudgeon continued. “You see, I’m here quite on accident. I should be making my way to… my work… (yes, that’s a human thing to say, right), but I took a wrong turn–“

“You nearly died.”

“–And now I need help getting back to where I’m supposed to be.” Pudgeon finished.

“So, like, where’s that? Park City?” Elise asked flatly.

“Not quite, it’s a bit higher up.”

“Ah, Kamas then.”

Pudgeon fluffed up, indignant, “Aren’t you even a little bit curious about the magical talking bird in your house? Shouldn’t you be intrigued, your curiosity piqued? I AM FASCINATING.”

For some reason that little outburst hit Elise like a ton of bricks. That’s right, she was interesting, she was full of potential, was worth attention and care. She had good ideas. WAS. HAD. Now she was just a corporate goon working for a failing game company.

She started crying. Big ugly tears that rolled down her face and landed on the floor. Snot ran from her nose. She needed a tissue.

Pudgeon, shocked, slowly smoothed his feathers. He did not expect this. He fluttered in to the bathroom and came back out rolling a roll of toilet paper toward her.

“Best I could find on short notice,” he explained.

“Sanks,” Elise said as she snorted the tears and boogers out of her sinuses. ”I just, I just used to have dreams, ya know?”

Pudgeon fluttered up next her head and sat down, “Right? What happened?”

“JAKE HAPPENED! Every day he just says crap like, ‘women can’t game,’ and ‘nobody wants to play something made by a woman, but I know that Roberta Williams was a PIONEER, GODDAMMIT!” She snorted into the toilet paper again.

“That does sound awful,” Pudgeon cooed.

“And then John is all like,” she sniffled, “Nothing matters, it never did, it never will. There’s not point in trying. I just… I JUST!” More tears. More boogers. More toilet paper.

“I see,” Pudgeon said. “Perhaps… in that case…” he considered. “Perhaps you could help me in another way.”

Suddenly, Pudgeon started gagging, his breaths coming in gasps between spasms, and his eyes bulging outward.

“Omg, are you dying again?!” Elise said, giving him tiny jabs in the ribs with two fingers to try and dislodge whatever problem he was having.

Pudgeon continued this display for a few more seconds before spewing out an entire smart watch. It wasn’t a model Elise recognized. It looked kind of like a fitbit, but way too colorful and with whimsical angles that no designer would ever sign off on.

“Woo! This little body is not convenient!” Pudgeon laughed, his voice sounding small and sore again, “Put it on, put it on!”

“No… I don’t think I will,” Elise responded.

Pudgeon was crestfallen, “Why not?” he asked, deep earnesty written all over his body.

“Because it’s vomit.”

“Ah, that little detail.” Pudgeon grabbed the watch in his talons and flew it over to the kitchen sink, pushed the lever up and started washing it off. “I see that is a bit nasty. Let me remedy that.”

After a moment of washing the watch, he got distracted bathing and preening himself. Elise didn’t interrupt him.

“Oops, got a little distracted there!” Pudgeon said, turning the sink off. “Can you wear it now?”

“Fine,” Elise said. She gestured toward Pudgeon, her wrist outstretched. The watch flew on its own, shooting out of the sink toward her. It was too fast for her to recoil, and as it approached, he expanded and contracted, contorting to perfectly match her body. It felt like wearing nothing at all. She also couldn’t see how to take it off.

“Umm… I don’t know if this is my style,” she laughed nervously. Yup, definitely still insane.

“Take out your transit card!” Pudgeon encouraged, “Transit is very useful you know, one of the best ideas humans have had, so we adopted the system.”

Elise fished out her UTA card and looked at it dubiously. “Now what?”

“Use your watch to scan it!” Pudgeon urged.

Elise raised an eyebrow, but tapped the card to her wrist. The watch lit up, and on it was displayed a graph of nodes and edges.

“Perfect,” Pudgeon said. He hopped onto her lap and started pecking at the watch. It reacted by panning and spinning. “Here’s the one!” he said, triumphant.

He tapped on one of the nodes and selected an option. Suddenly, in her living room appeared a train car. It was painted in pastel yellow, pink, and blue. The doors opened and Pudgeon hopped on.

“Thank you so much for the help!” he said.

Elise nodded dumbfounded.

“I can take the watch back now,” Pudgeon hesitated, “Or you can get on the train too, and I can show you something.”

“I…” Elise hesitated.

“The train will leave soon!”

“Ok!” Elise decided, and leapt on to the train. The doors shut behind here.

The interior was empty beside her and Pudgeon. The seating was plush and comfortable, like overstuffed sofas. The walls were colored almost like with rainbow LEDs, but in pastel hues. Any artwork had star motifs.

“Just wild. I wonder if this is what shrooms feel like?” Elise mused.

“Shrooms are not advised for anyone working with an agent,” Pudgeon warned.

“And who is this agent.”

“Well, me, of course,” Pudgeon fluffed up proudly. “At least I should be by now,” he muttered.

“Eh? What was that last part?”

“Nothing!” Pudgeon swept past her question, “We’re going to be comrades now! You and I, US! There’s so much work to do!”

“What kind of work?”

“We should be arriving somewhere I can show you. Right. About… NOW!” Pudgeon looked smug as the train car stopped.

They had stopped at an empty rail yard. All the workers had gone home for the evening, and the place was abandoned except for the looming silhouettes of box cars.

“This location currently has a high level of BAD MOJO activity,” Pudgeon explained, as if it was obvious. ”Our job is to find it, and eliminate it!“

“How?”

“Hell if I know. I mean! Just put one foot in front of another!”

Elise scowled at the bird and shook the wrist with the weird watch on it. It refused to budge. She was having second thoughts.

She scanned the area. It was just an empty old rail yard. Nothing interesting going on here. The moon was rising behind the mountains, making it look huge as it silhouetted trees and rocks. She never understood that illusion but she was familiar with it.

In the alabaster moonlight, something moved. There was a creaking, the groan of old axels coerced into motion. Then it stepped out from behind a box car.

The creature, if you could call it that, was an immense, dark, iron beast that moved on mechanically articulated legs. Too many legs. It was stained with dark rust, but it was obviously so robust that the rust didn’t hinder it at all.

Suddenly, it burst in to flame. An iron grate where its head should have been showed the interior, an inferno of flame and steam hammers pounding away. Steam and smoke bellowed from the stacks on either side of its body. It moved forward and two mandible like appendages started pulling up the rail lines in the yard, feeding the metal into the inner forge. The machines inside shaped the materials into chains which emerged from a spinneret like structure near the back of the beast. With care it attached one end of the chain to a box car and started to scuttle around it, wrapping it up in a caccoon of chain until it was fully covered. Then it howled, pulling the chain taut, causing the box car to be crushed inside of the ball of metal.

The creature trembled, vapors bellowing out of its stacks and whistles. It seemed satisfied. For a moment.

“Well,” Elise said, paralyzed by the sublime horror of the moment, “this seems like a somebody else’s problem! Been nice knowing you, Pudgy!”

She tried to spin on her heels and stalk off as quickly as possible, but the sound of her voice had alerted the beast. It turned to her and dashed forward, unsettlingly fast for something so large. In an instant it was upon her. Elise released a wide-eyed gasped as she was snatched up in one mandible, the other probing her. The beast was curious for the moment, but obviously pitiless. Its grasping, scissor-like mandible claws found her head and measured it, on one plane, then another with mechanical accuracy.

“Ya know what?” Elise said, finding her voice, “Fuck you! You all suck!” She shouted at the beast, the rage rising in her chest. Her face was hot and flushed and she could feel the hairs on the back of her neck.

The probing mandible seemed to have made a decision and moved to snip her neck, to precisely decapitate her. She jammed the smart watch into the joint of the mandible. The pressure rose and the watch shone brighter and brighter, refusing to break. The light shone so brightly it illuminated the entire rail yard in stark, harsh shadows. At last, the hinge on the manible snapped under the pressure and the beast scuttled back, recoiling on itself.

Elise fell free. She gasped as she landed and stumbled forward, barely keeping her feet. Her breathing was fast and shallow, her heart threatened to pound out of her chest. She steadied herself.

The beast roiled, its legs wrapping and rewrapping around itself. It prodded at its broken mandible with the other, trying to make it functional again, to no avail. It gave up, and stuffed the broken limb into its burning maw. The hammers and mechanisms got a hold of it and tore it off. The beast howled through its whistles and pipes. It stood up and started moving toward Elise again.

Pudgeon appeared next to her, “Listen–!” he started

“Nice of you to show up,” Elise jabbed.

“Use the watch! You have to transform!” Pudgeon continued, ignoring her interruption.

Transform? Into what? She didn’t feel like she really wanted to have another transformation right now. She thought of how eager she was on her first day of work, to how terrible it felt to go to the office now. Definitely a downgrade.

Pudgeon landed on her head and started pulling at her bangs. “Do it! Do it now! YOU WILL DIE!” His wings fluttered in a confusing feathery mess.

The beast lowered itself, preparing to pounce. It leapt into the air, charging down on her.

“Not yet!” Elise grunted and raised the watch to her face. It glowed brightly, and a large star shaped button was on the screen. She pressed it firmly with her other hand.

Elise was bathed in light. Bright light. A pastel rainbow of overwhelmingly calming shades.

“Summit Scout Nova — IGNITE!” She heard her voice shout.

She felt naked. Was she naked? It was hard to tell. Her hoody and joggers were definitely gone. She was bathed in light so bright, she couldn’t see her own body. She closed her eyes and let herself be consumed by the warmth.

The light swirled around her, a tornado of pastel serenity. The tornado suddenly snapped to her skin, covering her torso in to a snug white leotard. It had some cute ribbing and bones in the right places. Fancy.

Next the lights spiraled around her shoulders and a light red jacket appeared. It was made of something like canvas or denim, and had a straight upright collar. It was cropped just below her chest. There were epaulets each with two small four pointed stars, and on the back was a large embroidered four pointed star in bright crimson. On her arm was a patch with two downward pointing chevrons in a calming lavender.

{note to self, adjust the order in which elements appear for better descriptive flow}

Next the lights swirled around her hips and a high waisted skirt in calming lavender that hugged her waist started to materialize. As it extended down, pleats grew down from her hips. A petticoat materialized beneath the skirt and tossed the skirt outward with a slight bounce.

She felt a gentle snuggle on her calves and thighs as tall socks that reached most of the way to the hem of her skirt. She felt her feet lift as sturdy platform soles appeared beneath them. Canvas boots with reinforced rounded toe boxes wrapped her feet and climbed up her ankles, stopping their upward growth right below her knees. There was a strap around the ankle with a star shaped buckle. Another strap wrapped around her calf, near the top of the boot, securing it tightly against her leg. Red laces magically ran their way of up the eyelets and tightened, bringing the boot into perfect conformance with the shape of her leg.

Her hands felt warm as supple and secure gloves appeared and wrapped around them. They were fingerless, and as she flexed her fingers, she felt her knuckles being reinforced by bronze star studs over each of them.

She felt her head pulled back and erect as her hair blew itself out, becoming longer and much, just, bigger. The huge mass was pulled to the side and magically braided into a ponytail that stuck out behind her left ear at a jaunty angle. A small beret with a tidy bow on it was pinned in place at an angle on the top right side of her head.

She felt her feet touching down on hard ground and returned to herself. She was back in the rail yard. The beast was barreling toward her. She flexed both of her hands, and into her opened palms fell an enormous, five foot long, crescent spanner wrench.

Instinctively, she swung the spanner at the bestial machine’s remaining mandible. It connected hard. A metallic ping somewhere between the sound of a bell and a hammer striking an anvil resounded through the yard as hot sparks of molten metal flew.

Elise screamed in primal rage as the beast fell over, totally thrown off balance. She dashed—much faster than she ever had—to catch it before it could get back up.

The beast, stumbling to get its legs under it, made a wild swipe with one of its legs, knocking the spanner spinning out of Elise’s hands. As it reversed the blow to come back with another swipe, she punched the leg. Another clanging bang reverberated as the blow landed, the bronze knuckles on her gloves driving her punch home. The leg cracked and lay still at an impossible angle.

Despite losing a leg, the beast managed to pick itself up. It scurried around Elise, now cautious. It was scuttling back and forth, trying to create an opening.

Elise matched its movements, her hands held up and ready. Sometimes she circled, sometimes she matched it, so they were sidestepping together. She didn’t want it to become comfortable with her movements.

Suddenly it lunged forward, another of its metal legs raised to crush her. Elise dodged to the side, prepping to meet the blow with another of her own, but it was a feint! The monster leapt forward, bringing the full weight of its body down on top of Elise.

Unable to dodge, she acted on instinct. Crouching low, she leapt up toward the underside of the forge beast as it barreled down on her. Her knuckles connected with the steel plates that formed its immense underbelly. A shockwave of pressure blew out where the two impacted each other and with the roar of metal being torn apart, the beast split in half.

The mechanical forges and steam hammers sent components flying everywhere as the high pressure steam was catastrophically released. The smoke and steam flowing from the beast’s many exhaust pipes stopped. The forge went dark. Cold.

Elise had continued flying in to the air after the impact. Higher than expected. Too high. She passed straight through the beast, higher and higher. She was above the boxcars, above the trees, silhouetted against the moon. She did a graceful flip at the height of her ascent and headed back to earth. She landed with a graceful thud and dust was scattered by the speed of her descent.

Pudgeon landed in front of her, “Magnificent! Wonderful!” he lavished her with praise before saying, aside, “somewhat terrifying…”

“Eh?” Elise cocked her head.

“Huh? You were amazing!” Pudgeon finished. He fluttered his wings slightly.

“I feel–“ Elise started.

“Amazing? Powerful?”

“–Very confused!” She blurted out. “Why would you bring me here? Where did that creature come from? WHERE ARE MY CLOTHES?”

“Ah, very important questions!” Pudgeon said. He didn’t continue.

“Questions with answers, maybe?” Elise pushed.

“Uh huh!”

“…Now?”

Pudgeon fluttered about from one foot to the next. “Well, as for your clothes, you can control that. Just use the watch.”

Elise raised the watch again. There was a different UI element now, a button with a large crying emoji with a blue face. The button read “Activate Utterly Non-Fabulous Mode.”

“I guess you mean this?” Elise showed him.

“The very one.”

Elise sighed. It didn’t have to be so mean. And accurate.

Notes:

• Does she fix the lumina bug she found herself? She has a BS in information systems, so she has some engineering chops, maybe she could do it on her own?
• Maybe she begins to reboot the magic girl adventure game on her own time after that, and gets enough of the team on board by the end that even bryan can’t stop it from being published?
• I want at least two patriarchy themed monsters, a benevolent and antagonistic styled one. The antagonistic one is, ya know, a regular monster, basically, and the benevolent one might be a parody of a “girl boss”