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4.1 December Discoveries
🕑 Added 2025-09-21 17:33:55 +0000 UTC“Ready?”
Agatha nods. “I think so. I’ve been practicing a lot for this and I’ve gotten my record up to ten minutes. If that’s not enough time… well, there’ll be more windows.”
Ferromancer’s voice crackles over our hidden earpieces. “Camera blind is active and the nearest night guard is on the other side of the museum. Get to work, you two.”
In early November, I joined Visage as their newest partnered witch. The past month has been an absolute blur of public appearances around Forks, Twitch streams to build my online audience, and hobnobbing with other idols, but the real work has been investigating the Visage Spire. The version of the Spire that exists in the World of Glass is warded so heavily that not even Striga and the Morrigan were able to breach its defenses, and that’s a big problem.
Something within the alternate Spire is devouring all the conceptual energy generated by the people of Forks, and Howl’s scouting across North America confirmed that the absorption effect reaches all the way to the east coast, though its pull is weaker that far away. Finding the mechanism responsible and disabling it is my responsibility as a participant in Strix Striga’s secret war against Venus, Mars, and the Jovians who granted us all our powers.
Of course, Striga herself knows that “responsibility” is the furthest thing from my mind. Helping her is just a way to show my love. I was supposed to tell her my deeper feelings last Thanksgiving—the fact that I’m Rachel, that I know she’s Sophia, and that I’ve loved her since that night on the bridge in the rain—but we both ended up swamped with work and I couldn’t find a good opportunity to get her alone. Christmas, though. I’ll tell her on Christmas.
Finding an excuse to spend time in the Spire was easy; the lower floors are open to civilians, and being a good little earner for mommy Radiance—I think she’d kill me if I said that on stream—gets me fairly consistent access to the middle and upper floors. With Ferromancer taking advantage of her contract work with Visage to hack the Spire’s security systems, it should have been a simple matter of finding an empty room, summoning my plane shift device—which we nicknamed the shifter—and phasing over into the World of Glass.
“Okay, I see the link,” Agatha says with a wince, glasses tucked into her dress, holding out a shifter copy that I summoned for her. “This way.”
“Familiars on standby,” I say. “Ferro, tell me when I need to distract someone.”
Turns out, the wards block access even from within the realspace Spire—except, when we were puzzling over how to bypass that block, Agatha had something to reveal: since coming back from the World of Glass, her magic sight can now see those strange, impossibly-colored threads of connection in the real world. Some of those threads link to the shifter whenever I try to use it inside the Spire.
The trail of thread led us to the lower levels: a maze of lobbies, tourist traps, and gift shops. Specifically, Agatha’s investigation pointed us to the Visage Museum of Developing Culture and Magical Achievement, which is a very fancy name for a set of propaganda exhibits taking up an entire floor of the Spire. I'm a big fan of the souvenirs.
Agatha leads me through the wing of the museum dedicated to local history, every now and then stopping to massage her temples and blink away the stress of staring at colors that shouldn’t exist. I can’t really do anything for her, so I stay out of her way and glance over museum exhibits that I’ve already seen a dozen times before.
Plaques proudly highlight the influence of Dajani Multimedia Enterprises on the rise of Forks into a booming entertainment town, which—in conjunction with the Dajani heiress becoming a witch—led to DME making an aggressive bid on VisageCorp’s expansion into North America. Pearl Princess, Memento, and Radiance were all present at the raising of the Spire and form the management council that gets final verdict on inducting a new magical girl or witch into the ranks of VisageCorp NA. One or all of them, we suspect, are the direct pawns of Venus.
“Archon,” says Ferromancer over comms, “you've got a guard coming your way from the founders wing.”
“Roger.” I send a pulse of will to my minions and let them work their stuff.
For the purposes of infiltration, I've been developing another variety of familiar. The base design is actually inspired by the deimovore that tormented me in the World of Glass: a spidery horror with way too many legs. I've carefully incorporated gifts from Ferromancer and Herbalist—care of Striga—to grant the little fuckers active camouflage and voice mimicry, though it pales in comparison to the deimovore’s capabilities. Their main advantage as familiars is that they can conceptualize and execute complex tasks to fulfill vague directives, which costs so much flame that I can only field two of them before the cold seeps into my bones and I start suffering cognitive impairment. We're working on that part.
My skitterlings scurry into position, my sixth sense of their invested flame allowing me to track their movements with a very hazy degree of accuracy. Seconds later, I hear the distant sound of a recorded message echo through the silent halls of the museum.
“In late 2017, just a few months after the shocking introduction of magic to the world, media company Takehara-Ishikawa Entertainment was faced with crisis and opportunity. They had spent the past several years investing significant resources into the development of the world’s first virtual idol company, VisageCorp, in a bid to become the face of the new era of online entertainers. With the advent of real magical girls, however, their cutting edge models and rigging were no longer ahead of the curve. VisageCorp understood immediately that whichever company first secured a magical girl idol would shape the future for generations to come.”
I'm quite proud of my foresight in feeding the skitterlings every line of audio the museum plays the day before. My beautiful spider monster continues its perfect recreation of the founding speech, covering Visage’s partnership with the Starlight Ruby Warriors and Mahou Shoujo Ryu-Ryu, which carried the stipulation that the magical girls of Visage would work on a senpai and kouhai dynamic, answering to their seniors in the organization before any of the group’s moneyed benefactors. The American branch works the same way; the hierarchy for witches stops at Radiance, though she can always be outvoted by Memento and Pearl Princess if they really disagree with her about an employee. To my knowledge, that’s never happened.
“Found it!” Agatha whispers to me. The guard’s unlikely to hear us, especially over the fake recording, but her caution is reasonable.
She’s stopped in front of an exhibit showcasing the current roster of magical girls and witches. It’s one of the museum features that uses fancy hologram tech for easier updates; an Archon hologram has been in here since my debut stream. Somehow, it’s a lot weirder staring at this copy of my face than watching back stream clips.
Agatha crouches next to the pedestal projecting the Big Three: Radiance in her rainbow white, Memento in black and gold, and Pearl Princess in pink and purple. While she looks for something on the hologram device, I consider the Visage NA founders and wonder which of them might be working for Venus.
“Is Pearl Princess too obvious?” I muse. “She’s a beauty streamer, the pearl thing could be a reference to The Birth of Venus, and her aura is one of the few mind-affecting powers on record. She’s almost certainly got Aphrodite. Of course, being so obvious would make her a shit mole, but the egregores don’t seem to be great at subtlety.”
“They’re all suspects,” Agatha murmurs. “Here, check this out.” She puts her glasses back on and points at an icon etched into the metal of the projector, faint enough and positioned well enough that I wouldn’t have noticed it without her. “We use that nowadays to mean ‘female,’ but it’s originally the astronomical symbol for the planet Venus.”
“That sounds like our key.”
The Morrigan explained it like this: magic—or at least, the version of magic that Hastur allows to exist—is a fundamentally balanced system. If you use magic to build a wall, any magic of equal power can break that wall. If you make that wall vulnerable to a particular kind of magic, however, you can make it proportionally stronger against other kinds of magic—and if you put a door in that wall, the effect is amplified tenfold. For the barrier to be completely unaffected by one of Striga’s Minerva-empowered precision strikes, there must be a condition we can reasonably meet to bypass the ward and get inside. A locked door has a key.
“Guard coming back,” Ferromancer warns us. “Now or never.”
“Right. Here goes nothing.”
I take the shifter back from Agatha, we grasp hands, and she covers the symbol of Venus with her other hand. Contact should be enough, according to the Morrigan. If it isn’t, well, there’s always next time.
I activate the shifter and take us into the World of Glass.
In an instant, the museum is gone and I’m standing at the entrance to a theme park inside a circus tent. Roller coasters rumble, children cheer, and pop music plays from an endless array of speakers. I see a water area, a cluster of restaurants, and a Ferris wheel. The structures between the rides have an architectural style that evokes an urban metropolis with glass, steel, and massive digital billboards advertising the park’s various rides and features, though nothing impedes my view of those distant attractions.
There is also, dead center in the artificial amusement park’s circular design, another Visage Spire. The striped cloth of the big top tent stretches down and bunches where the golden orb would be on the real Spire, and from this distance I can just make out the wrinkled impression of something with a lot of limbs behind the drawn curtain.
Joy, another boss monster to defeat.
“May I see your ticket, ma’am? Or do you need to buy one?”
At the entrance to the park is a set of turnstiles that cover a truly laughable portion of the central avenue, making it trivial to just walk around them. A ticket booth is next to the turnstiles, and sitting in that booth, slouched lazily against the counter and dressed in a Visage-branded vest-and-slacks uniform (complete with bowtie) is Venus.
I shoot her in the head. The gun I stole from that joker at the bank job has since been thoroughly modified with Ferromancer’s assistance and my own diligent transformation work to shoot with greater precision, rate of fire, and stopping power. It invests a bit of my flame in every shot to better counteract defensive magic, and it is of course completely ineffective against the golden-eyed goddess of love, beauty, and the adoration of the masses.
I banish the gun and make a noise of disgust. The bullet didn't even ricochet or flatten against a barrier; it turned into rose petals the second it would have touched her. “Why do guns never work?” I complain. Agatha hides a smile, having not even flinched at the sudden shot. A month ago, she would have.
Venus raises an eyebrow. “Girl, what part of ‘divine daughter of Hastur’ made you think a gun would do anything to me?” The goddess sounds more bemused than offended that I just tried to splatter her brains across the interior of her ticket booth.
“Call it optimism,” I grumble. I eye the turnstile, wondering what would happen if I went around it without paying.
Agatha tugs on my arm and points behind us. “Archon, look outside: it’s Howl.”
At the edge of the circus tent, the curtain parts around a familiar set of glass doors. On the other side, the courtyard where we killed the Spire’s angelic defender is visible, the surrounding restaurants still ravaged by our fight. Howl sits on the edge of the marble fountain, nursing a bottle of whiskey and petting her dog. Both Howl and Fenris are watching the entrance to the Spire, but neither seem to have noticed our appearance.
“If your friend wants in, you’ll need to buy her a ticket.” Venus is back to playing the bored wage slave. “Can I interest you in a set of annual passes? They get you a ten percent discount at participating eateries. Upgrade to the deluxe package for access to the exclusive Club Vivarium in Little Forks.”
I squint at Venus. “You seem… different.”
The goddess grins. Her smile is just as glamorous as ever, her figure somehow eye-catching despite being stuffed into khaki slacks, a stiff white polo, and a purple Visage-branded vest. Her nametag claims ten years of service. “C’mon, kid, you didn’t think that was my only face, did you? We got off on the wrong foot back there, honest mistake. You’re a different kind of customer, I see that now. I can work with that. Just give me a chance, let me show you around, see all the wonders of Venusland Resort in Anaheim, California. Buy a ticket.”
Agatha adjusts her glasses and glares at the egregore. “We’re not selling our souls to get into a Disneyland rip-off, Venus.”
Venus rolls her eyes. “No duh, Detective Cain.”
For some reason, Agatha blushes bright red at that title. She splutters, “That’s—”
Venus waves a hand and cuts her off. “I’m not asking for your souls, or any kind of binding contract—what do you think I am, some kind of extortionist? You made it very clear last time that you’re not interested, and I respect that. All I’m asking is that you play the game. Buy a ticket. Go on a few rides. Eat a churro, for mom’s sake. And, when you’ve done all that… spare a thought for ol’ Venus. Ask yourselves if you have any real reason to distrust me. All I want to do, my little chickadees, is make the world a happier place.”
By brainwashing everyone into your mindless puppets, I’ll bet. I narrow my eyes at Venus. “What’s your price?”
She jerks her thumb at a detailed diagram on the side of the booth listing the benefits of each ticket option. The costs are all listed in dollars, ranging from $200 on the low end to $2,000 per person for the most luxurious year-round park pass.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Venus grins again. “Will that be cash or card?”
Comments
Lako
Hell Yeah! Thanks for the chapter!
Joshua Dávila
Great to see you back! I hope there is more obsessive yuri ahead of us.
Vorpal Corporal
It would be quite amusing if neither of them had enough cash on hand for the $200 option
Theodore Suzukawa
Venus has harnessed an even stronger and more evil power : Capitalism.
Tali Parts List
I really love Agatha so much. I feel like she's not the sort of personality I usually get really invested in, but something about her cute little detective schtick and the glasses just is so charming I can't help but love her.
Mhai Wind
Hahaha, this version of Venus is great. Love the humor and mercantile ask here.
VoraVora
AND WE'RE BACK! WELCOME TO BOOK 2!
