*
Devoid of breeze, a chilly stale air occupies the room of never ending walls. A cacophony of beeping sounds and brisk walking shatters the quietness as warmth and frost vie for dominance in an enclosed space. The sound of my own lips smacking and teeth clattering against the metal spoon rang about at my ear drums. In this air conditioned environment, the porridge I was served by the hospital staff would quickly get cold, so I was doing my best to finish it while it was warm. Compared to the state of the world outside, this was considered to be a very blissful state for myself.
The balanced mix of nutrients, an adequate quantity of seasoning, the side of hot soup that entertained the taste buds along side the porridge and the fruity desert for a final touch. It has been a week since I've been here, so maybe a month or slightly more since the great disaster. Compared to working in manual labour until my shoulders came off, it was much more peaceful and relaxing here.
Of course, being here warranted a reason. I don't think it would be easy to get here in a fraudulent manner due to the tight security and extensive process of problem analysis. They used magic to check if you're sick or injured or not. I don't think we can get any more thorough than that, checking for illusion magic would take too much out of the staff and the logistics of the faction.
***(After waking up in the hospital)
" Currently all of your magical particles are being sent into a hyperactive state, usually one would explode or melt from this 100% overload, but the wound you sustained was beyond even that." (Head doctor, Hedroi Malfz)
With a name like that, one would usually expect a wise elderly man to be the speaker of such grave matters such as informing the patients their symptoms. However, all of them, every single one of them, was a magical girl. Accompanying what seemed to be the tone an old man would use and a slightly hunched back posture, she stroked back her jet black bangs as her lab coat fluttered around her feet like a feathery large dress. She held a stethoscope just like a normal doctor and seemed to have been trained in responding to patients' inquiries.
"The best we could do was physically hook you up to a battery. Of course there is much more to it than just charging you like a phone with that tubing attached to your right elbow, but that's not the main point. The most significant impact is the one to your magical girl effectiveness level. It's been reduced to F. " (Assistant doctor, rendriz) The helper chimed in, adding a different tone to the conversation, a varied mix that one would not get bored off, she stared fixedly at my neck as if she could not accept her own words and look further up.
" in other words you're as weak as a normal human being. Maybe even weaker if the magical girl transformation reduces your muscle mass. It happens to some people, some even gain muscle mass, it varies from person to person." ( Hedroi Malfz)
***(present)
Anyways, a week has roughly passed since then and I finally got to discharge. Right now the nurses were busy hooking up the emergency mobile magic particle regulator -or EMMPR for short- to my right elbow. Without it, the transformation would go undone as the majority of my passive magic stocking regeneration was going into healing my wound. When it goes undone, the healing stops and I die from blood loss.
I would have to live in such a perilous circumstance from now on, it was not easy and was honestly a huge pain, but it was not as if I had a choice. My life depended on this instrument after all. Anyway the machine I was hooked up to, the EMMPR was like the size of a safe and had a similar amount of security to boot, below the safe like machine was a supporting pole that split into 4 legs with wheels.
Above the safe like structure was another pole that led to a strange orange jewel that emanated a mesmerising light of the same colour. Connected to the centre of the EMMPR was a thin tube that stretched a reasonable distance before ending inside my elbow. More precisely, it was attached to my elbow for support and security, but it had numerous more tubes embed inside my forearm to transfer the magical particles. Thankfully there were numbing magic attachments on the tubes, on the other hand, my right hand was nearly completely numb and senseless.
Moving with a large stand around the whole day is really inconvenient, but perhaps the frail maiden look will garner some random fans. Well it isn't a look and I'm actually extremely frail right now, seeing as how destroying the metal stand that's directly connected to my life would sever it very easily. Being discharged from the hospital-like facility was a smoother process than I thought, apparently the preparations were made while I was bed-ridden, So I didn't have to wait long to be released after being given a notice of discharge.
Gingerly walking through the streets, it was very odd in the first place to be attached to a bulky machine, so I sheepishly looked around in embarrassment before forcing myself to look straight while my neck trembled. Anyway, being surrounded by super humans while my endurance was reduced to F rank, a hand shake could tear my abdomen off which was ridiculously dangerous right now. I had to watch out and reduce contact.
In the first place it was extremely odd that being attached to a life saving machine would cause some passerbies to come and inquire why.
"Hey! What's that machine you're attached to?"
"What's that?? It's so interesting, could you tell me the specifics?"
"Are you parading around with your invention? How arrogant!"
(Strangers)
Other than the occasional "are you okay?" and "Do you need help?", the rest were more like questionnaires for the EMMPR than they were for me, just what the heck! Did people care more about the machine then they did for me?! Or did they think I was just fine being this shameless?
In any case, this was a life-saving tool that came from the hospital. I may have just been the first patient to use it, and it had an absurd level of efficiency going as far as to be automated the moment I grabbed a part of the pole with my hand. The numbing injections and the embedding of the tubes into my blood capillaries was pretty much done by the machine itself and not the doctor-roled magical girls at the hospital.
Apparently healing magic couldn't work at all as Ray's anti-magic skill was still in effect. It was why the treatment could take so long in the first place, it went through the alternate and more arduous route of boosting and accelerating my natural regeneration. Naturally my metabolism was also sped up as a result, causing my meal portions to be larger than others by quite a bit. To the point it stood out, but after 5 days, people got used to it.
With my magical girl effectiveness level reduced to a F grade, participating in any strenuous or dangerous side activities was forbidden. And in the first place, missions to fight off monsters or enemy-factioned magical girls was not something a student should be dealing with. I couldn't exactly go home like this, so I just sent a letter to the manager of my residents that I may not return for months and that he could allow someone else to live in my room.
My stuff had been transported to me anyway. The Eye god high priest administration was a scarily powerful organisation, said to boast a force of many power A-grade magical girls. They had to manage a large territory over a decent chunk of Asia anyway. Even when all the continents crashed into one large pancake with the exception of Australia, we were one of the first factions to organise and recover our forces. Its still too early for any faction to fight though, considering recovery efforts are still extremely meagre. Anyway, as a magical girl, I received privileges such as this where they had moved all my belongings into a new housing area in the underground stronghold for me.
With this, though a week late, I could finally attend the school for magical girls tomorrow. Due to my injury preventing me from working part time, my 5 day studying syllabus had increased into a 7 day one. No more break time, since I'll be spending all of my free time indoors anyway. Of course I was allowed to go outside if I wanted, but my school work now took priority in my education and life schedule.
Since it has been a month, small cities or large villages should have been completed by now. Concrete advancement or perhaps some new magical material investment would start soon. On the other hand, this underground labyrinth already had the aesthetics and the presence of a secret underground society.
***(next day)
Perhaps to camouflage with all the other buildings, an address was specifically given to every student, but the destination of that address looked just like every other building in this place. Walking with a stand akin to an ivy drip support pole was extremely awkward, but I made it through the curious and disdainful stares into my classroom. The building was like a boring skyscraper, in fact every building was a long grey elongated block from the ground.
Each class room was assigned to a single floor with the appropriate facilities just adjacent to the teaching rooms for convenience. Such facilities include rooms where we can test out our magic, practice our magical girl skills and a lab with various unknown tools. Those tools were likely to be magical just like everything else in this place-even the people here are magical haha-, so we were likely to learn about their uses and out them into practice.
The syllabus was only about 3 years long and was basically an examination to get our car license sort of deal, instead of being a constant chain like the normal education journey one ventures through life.
Entering the classroom, everything down to the positions of the tables were exactly the same as one in a normal classroom. Of course I was starting a little late due to awakening late, but people awakening into magical girls weren't rare right after the great disaster, so there were many like me in this class alone. Out of 15, only 3 of them seemed to have been in this classroom from the start. 1 of them was extremely cheerful and enthusiastic about my arrival, another was smiling intently at me as if trying to provoke me and the last one only seemed displeased.
Kreumier Fiel,
Shentoff Gune,
Usaimi Kirin,
Were the 3 magical girls with much more time spent here, though I won't equate that to power as it had only been less than a year.
"Alright, we'll first be going through the very basics. What is a magical girl? A magical girl is..." (Jein-sensei)
With that flow of things, the lesson had started before anyone noticed after introductions were done. I greeted everyone with the business-like vigour I put on at work and returned my seat in a hurry. An odd sensation shook my very nerves as my whole body shook, shivering with excitement. It was extremely nostalgic to come back to a school-like atmosphere after more than a week.
The material, though taught at a hurried pace was relatively manageable. It was all interesting concepts regarding the biology and origin of magical girls, discussing the differences between it and normal human beings and the conditions which have to be satisfied for one to become a magical girl. Apparently it was when the magical particles inside a human had reached a suitable threshold for transformation to occur. As for how it reached that very threshold to begin with, it was all kinds of varying methods that weren't documented.
Once again, I was reminded of my weakness. My magical girl effectiveness level had been reduce to a never before seen F-grade, I wonder how the others would react to it.