Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Magical-Girls — Magical Girl Who Needs A Few Turns Of The Winding Key
Scorpion Master climbs over a shaft of evilly glowing crystal that's blocking the street, piercing the buildings to either side, and finally finds Celestial Mechanic Arcturus, face-down in the eerily silent street. In the sky, Loathario's Hyper Hate Gem rotates, humming in a horrible bone-resonating way, visible for miles. Painted around it, in the fabric of space itself, are the faultlines where reality has split into broken, parallel flakes, each imprisoning a lone Celestial Mechanic.
"Hey," Scorpion Master says hoarsely, edging closer. "Hey? You in there? You need to get up and fix this. You can do that, right?"
The Celestial Mechanics are inevitable as gravity, with their babble about crystal spheres and the cosmic clockwork of universal justice. Scorpo doesn't hate them, at least not terribly personally. It's like hating banks, or social workers: sure, they're awful, but that's also just the system.
They gingerly poke Arcturus with the end of stick they found.
"Hey," they say again.
"I've been lying here for three days," Arcturus says, in the creaking barely-voice of someone who's been lying in the street for three days. "No, I can't get up and fix it."
"Oh, come on," Scorpo says desperately. "This is fucked."
"Yeah," Arcturus says, and Scorpo slithers exhaustedly down onto a chunk of concrete, because honestly, finding whichever of the Celestial Mechanics was in this shard and punting the problem to them was the entire plan.
"You've got," they say eventually, "like...you've got a big old key handle sticking out of the back of your — whole deal."
"The clockwork cosmos," Arcturus mumbles, face against the asphalt. "It's a whole thing."
"...What if," Scorpo says, after another minute of staring at a nearby wall, and shuffles over to straddle Arcturus. "Look, I'm not, this isn't, you hear people doing the thing sometimes, right, ha ha ha, I'd love to get one of them Celestial Mechanics at my mercy, find out what's under those— and this isn't that, right? I'm just...." and gingerly takes hold of the key. "Which way does this—"
"Really not how this works," Arcturus mumbles, then inhales sharply as the key ratchets smoothly and audibly around a quarter-turn.
"Cosmos doesn't work like this, either," Scorpo says, squinting at the cracked sky, and keeps winding until Arcturus weakly scrabbles under them. "You gonna fix this now, or what?"
"I'm really thirsty," Arcturus rasps, so they stumble — the Celestial Mechanic's arm slung over Scorpo's shoulders — to a wrecked vending machine, and Arcturus tremblingly sips a pilfered soda.
They spend a couple of nights huddled in the wrecked and deserted image of the city, before the glowing portal forms. Really, there's nothing else to do.
"I'm going first," Scorpo says defiantly, and Arcturus makes a resigned noise of protest; they both know she's pretty fucked up, can't actually stop Scorpo from employing the power of "moving faster than a slow walk" to defeat her on this one, and so they step through, gripping their stick tightly in a threatening baseball-bat sort of way.
Celestial Mechanics Cygnus and Betelgeuse aren't expecting a baddie to pop out of their rescue portal, of course, so they nearly get annihilated.
"I think it's safe!" Scorpo yells waveringly over their shoulder, faced with fucking murder eyes, and Arcturus drags themself through and grabs their shoulder, leaning on them like they need support after running a marathon. They're playing it up a bit, Scorpo thinks, but they're not going to argue with that in front of Arcturus' friends.
"They're with me," Arcturus says wearily. "Nobody fights." She puts a hand on Scorpo's wrist, and they remember to lower the stick a bit. "They're with me," she adds, more quietly, and the others let up a bit, stop being so threatening.
"You can go, if you want," Acturus says. "Nobody will stop you. Nobody will follow you," and Scorpo gets as far as a dozen or so slow steps before grinding to a stop and scuffing their foot.
"You okay?" Arcturus says softly, when they catch up and grip Scorpo's shoulder, and Scorpo mutters something quiet and resentful and borderline unintelligible, but it's got "until" and "make sure you're okay" in it.
"Yeah," Arcturus says, and lets Scorpo familiarly take some of their weight. "Cool with me."