Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Magical-Girls — Magical Warrior Who Just… Isn’t
Alice chews the end of her pencil, staring into her doodle-smattered notebook.
Something is nagging at her.
“Lizzie,” she says, dragging it out.
Lizzie isn’t just really pretty, she’s much smarter than Alice. Not that it’s difficult; Alice is not smart at all. That’s okay, though. She doesn’t need to be smart to be a good friend and fight evil.
Lizzie’s been real quiet since their last fight. They all have; Malevolord Ominox and its minions had divide-and-conquered, split them up and preyed on their insecurities, isolated and confused and dispirited them, and then — without the power of Teamwork! — they’d been picked off one by one in combat.
Nobody wants to talk about it, but it’s obvious what Ominox used against them all — even Alice can see it: Lizzie’s deathly afraid that being the smart one is all she’s good for, a giant brain unable to do any good because she can’t get her head out of the clouds, an unfeeling calculating machine without real human warmth. Carla love-hates her own violent darkness, bloodied knuckles and furious drive, afraid of getting lost in it, unable to plan or think or listen or Teamwork! — only punch and punch and punch, a brute. Ominox taunted Rose with the idea that her twisty-turny plots and plans, her devious sneakiness, is just treachery and untrustworthiness in its Sunday best with a lying smile.
(“You’re stupid,” he’d said pityingly to Alice, “but not quite stupid enough, are you, love? Just smart enough to know you hold them back. Just smart enough to hide it.”)
“Yeah,” Lizzie says quietly, lying on the couch with her hands folded on her chest, staring at the ceiling.
“I’m just trying to get it straight in my head,” Alice says. “Ominox picked off Carla first, right? Got her mad so she’d go off alone. And then tricked you into thinking you’d out-thought it. And then made me sad so I’d go in the cupboard under the stairs where I do my crying so nobody notices—”
Lizzie stops looking at the ceiling, then.
“And then tried to convince Rose that she’s just the same as the bad guys,” Alice finishes, ticking off on her fingers. “So I’m just — confused, I guess? Because at the end we were all back together and Ominox had its ass kicked, but I don’t know how we got from all separated to that and when I try to remember who did what it all goes fuzzy. But I’m not very smart, so—”
“No,” Lizzie says, frowning. “No, it tricked me first. Didn’t it? And — we — at the end, we—”
She shakes her head, as if trying to clear water from her ear.
“That’s weird,” she says, half angrily, and then she looks at Alice with haunted eyes, and Alice sighs.
“You never noticed me hiding in the cupboard crying because I didn’t want you to,” she says matter-of-factly. “Not because you’re some kinda sociopath robot. Anyway, of course you’ve got proper human feelings, Lizzie, you kinda want to kiss all of us,” and tucks Lizzie’s hair behind her ear and gives her an encouraging smile. “See, you’re fine? But I need someone smarter to figure out what order things happened in—”
“It was you,” Lizzie says uncertainly. “You’re the big heart of the team, right? You pulled us back together, and—” she blinks and squints, shakes her head again.
“No, I was crying in the cupboard,” Alice says patiently, and holds out her magical crystal. “These are all, like, symbolic and significant, right? And all the colours correspond to us, and all that?”
Lizzie looks from it to Alice’s face and back. She’s still red in the face from Alice saying she wants to kiss them all, and Alice is a little bit sorry — Lizzie didn’t want them to notice, like Alice doesn’t want them to notice she’s sad. But Alice had to, she thinks maybe Lizzie is even more confused about what happened than Alice is, because they’ve been confused on purpose, and Lizzie just has so many more smarts to be confused in; but she could trick Lizzie into noticing it a bit by confusing her a different way.
“So why are there five sides if there are only four of us?” Alice says.
“Five?” Lizzie says blankly. “It’s a pyramid, Alice, there are four sides and…a…bottom…side....”
She frantically digs her own out, then, turns it over to hide the shimmering red, blue, green and yellow; stares hard at the black base.
“Do you remember Ominox maybe talking to someone called Lacuna?” Alice says. She’s not really sure, herself. Maybe she remembered wrong, or dreamed it.
“Lacuna’s not a name,” Lizzie mutters, still staring at her crystal. “It’s a — well, not a thing. A kind of gap. A thing you can’t see or…remember,” and she looks up at Alice. “Maybe it’s a name, too,” she says slowly. “…I’m gonna call the others.”
