@caffeinatedOtter: okay, now I'm sure I remember a prompt—
@caffeinatedOtter: —oh, it's a magical girl one, not an adventurer. Well. I'd know what to do for it, if it was an adventurer....
(Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Magical-Girls — Magical Enby Who Can Fold Like Paper)
Malia has been awake for forty hours.
Her mentor's staff slams on the floorboards next to her as her head droops. She hasn't eaten since before she slept, and the evil green-brown tea she is permitted is laced with stimulants and hallucinogens. Her heart is running like a terrified mouse, the woodgrain of the floorboards is crawling beneath her, and the burst of dust from the floor at the impact glitters like firework sparks.
Her startled, shaking fingers mash a half-folded paper crane into uselessness.
"Do it again!" screams Ashrak the Sight-Knife. "Goat-rut! You useless pizzle-suckling worm! If you can't fold a piece of paper, how do you expect to grasp the sublime mysteries of the art! You'd be better off hitching your skirt for sailors for coppers! If you can't do this thing, why don't you crawl away and learn to conjure pissant fireballs!"
On her third attempt, Malia manages to make her fingers, which feel squirmy and constantly elongating, coincide with the stack of folding-paper that's tripled in her vision. "Yes, Master," she says hoarsely, trying not to look too close at the paper. It looks unpleasantly sharp-edged; as if the outline of it, in her sight, is not the edge of an object in space but a razor-precise mosaic abutment. All the things in her vision merely tesselated shapes that might be dislodged and scattered by a single panicked scrabble of her hands, tearing up the fabric of the world to reveal who-knows-what beneath.
She begins to shakily fold another crane.
Her mind is jolted by each movement, each crease and fold wracking her perception. Each line in space she describes by the pinch of her fingers is a new razor-slash bisecting infinity, redefining the mosaic of reality. Each fold bends the universe. Something hot and acid and screaming and neon green is weighing on the back of her brain; she feels as if her skull is melting down her back like liquefying ice.
The world is impacted by a obliterating mountain of rage and sound. Malia's mind is shattered into motes, each a screaming singularity of overwhelm; the poison-green antihole dissolving her mind drags each of them in, her eyes perceiving in perfect no-thought the minute quiver in the wizard's oaken staff as it vibrates from its fresh impact.
"Do it—" Ashrak screeches, and Malia's hand dips with muscle-memory smoothness, brings up a fresh piece of paper, folds it once at an apparently random angle, and runs pinched fingertips along the fold to crimp it into permanence with savage precision.
She unfolds the paper again.
On opposite sides of the room, the halves of her mentor, instantaneously separated along a molecularly precise diagonal geometric plane from one shoulder to the opposite hip, fall wetly to the floor.
"Oh no," Malia croaks helplessly, dropping the paper and staring at her hands, at the edges of her fingers, at — everything. She can see — so much. Mind pulled inside out and reassembled though the green and screaming of the conceptual antihole, she can see space. She can see the lines and folds and the way to simply tweak and crease and refold it—
"My head hurts," she says, and passes out.