It was six thirty-six and fourteen seconds in the morning.

Emma knew this because she had started bouncing the football from foot to foot at exactly six thirty-five and 48 seconds. She hadn't picked up a football in a few years now, but it seemed that she'd retained some of her muscle memory. Being a magical girl helped a lot, it seemed. More than she'd hoped. The ball kept slowing down as it approached her foot, and she couldn't tell if it was because of instinctual telekinesis or if her perception was just accelerating itself.

The chain-link gate to the football pitch clanked behind Emma.

"G'morning," a young girl yawned, rubbing at her eyes as she shut the gate behind her. "I didn't expect anyone to be here this early."

"Hey," said Emma, nodding briefly at Fumiko Nozawa. "Sorry, am I in your space?"

"Nah," said Fumiko. She was dressed in a sky-blue and white football uniform, with black cleats and socks.

"You part of Mitakihara FC?"

"Yeah?"

"Bit late to start practice, isn't it?" asked Emma, glancing at her chronometer again.

Fumiko blinked at her. "Practice doesn't start until seven."

Emma raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Yeah? When would you start practice?"

"Five thirty for warmups, then practice proper at six," said Emma. She shrugged and bounced the football off her head, then returned it to her feet. "Though hey, it's up to your team."

Fumiko's eyebrows shot up. "Five thirty? That's crazy!"

Emma shrugged. "I did it starting when I was eight."

Fumiko was clearly getting annoyed. "W-well, just because— I mean— what gives you the right to brag anyway?"

"I played for London FC from 2446 to 2450 and was Team Captain for the 2450 season," said Emma, bouncing the ball up to her head and balancing it there. "And I'm not trying to brag, though I guess I'm being a bit of an ass. Sorry about that."

Fumiko's face went through a number of expressions and colors, before settling on a peeved pink. "I-I guess it's fine. I remember reading about you, a-and I guess if there's anyone who's allowed to criticize, it'd be you."

"You've read about me?" Emma asked. "Wait, really? I didn't make that much news did I?"

"I mean you're not— er, that is—"

"No no I get it, but like, what've you read? And where did you find that stuff?"

"Oh, I— well," Fumiko stuttered, before coughing and trying again. "I'm a benchy for Mitakihara Central, but I'm trying to get better and I read a lot of stuff on the web about older players and you showed up a few times as someone who made solid plays for London FC back in the day before you retired unexpectedly and, well, the articles sort of didn't really pay that much attention to you so- so- so I'm babbling oh god."

"It's, er, fine," said Emma, waving away the awkward air as Fumiko buried her face in her hands. "But uh, that's interesting. I didn't make that many waves, that's true, but…"

"Sorry, I'm doing this all wrong," said Fumiko. "I'm, uh, I'm going to get started with practicing."

"Right," Emma said, nodding and returning to bouncing her football on her feet. "I'll stay out of your way."

The small girl, a child, really, in the proper sense of the term, started a set of stretches that set off all sorts of nostalgic memories for Emma. That was a routine she'd never been able to forget, even during combat training. A few of the other girls had done morning stretches as well, before they started training for the day, though eventually they'd all stopped after they'd realized that they could use a small frisson of magic to limber themselves up.

Fumiko set off at a slow jog around the pitch. Emma watched her go, letting the ball she'd been bouncing come to rest balanced on her head. It was definitely nostalgic, watching Fumiko run. The younger girl quickly began to build up speed as she warmed up, cleats digging into the grass of the pitch and kicking up little clods of dirt as she ran.

Emma sent a quick command to her TacComp and considered Fumiko's current speed. It seemed to have topped out at around thirty kilometers per hour, which was generally quite impressive. Implants usually let children around Fumiko's age get up to thirteen kilometers per hour without any strain, and it didn't really take much effort to even get up to twenty. For the junior leagues, somewhere around thirty kilometers per hour was a good place to be for a sustainable pace. Adult professionals could sustain over forty easily.

The thing about playing sports in the modern era was figuring out how to push the limits of your implants and play intelligently to get the advantage over your opponents. The human body may have been augmented, but that didn't mean it didn't have limits. Where those limits were varied between individuals, of course, but the variation between high-level athletes was minimal. What set people apart was their ability to read the field and react to changing conditions, something that Emma liked to think she could do fairly well.

Normally, this would be the time that Emma would have gotten upset about her lost chances. If she'd just been given a few more years, boarding in the team's dormitories, she could have made something for herself. Instead, she'd been made to leave, for reasons that didn't make any sense to her. But her parents had been uncomfortable with leaving her in London, and they had been forcibly obliged to move to Mitakihara. When push came to shove…

Emma mused over the memory. It had been a truly colossal fight. But the wisdom of leaving a twelve-year-old in London, alone, was definitely questionable. With what Emma could gather of the politics, it seemed that her parents probably hadn't had much choice at the time. It wasn't much comfort, but Emma had probably been "merely" collateral damage.

She snorted. Some collateral damage.

Life after that hadn't been that hard though. Emma had been distraught, but compared to training, school had been almost pointlessly easy. It had also been stupidly hard at times, but that was true for almost anything. It had been boring, though, and her parents had still been the distant, nearly absent people they had been when Emma contracted. Their family had been stuck in a rut, cycling endlessly between work and home, with little improvement.

At the end of the day, for Emma at least, it was probably still for the better that she'd made her wish. Being a magical girl was definitely not what Emma had thought it would be. There was more darkness than she had expected, more pain and regret, and it had taken hold of her for a while. But she had also found friends, and whatever it was that she was with Ayane and Ryouta, and something, maybe, in the Cult.

The darkness seemed distant that morning.

"Aren't you going to do anything?" asked Fumiko. The younger girl had been slowly winding down as Emma had been lost in thought, and was now toweling off the sheen of sweat that had built from the run.

Emma blinked, then tipped the ball off her head. "Ah, well, not really. I was just wasting some time."

Fumiko fidgeted nervously. "W-well, if you have time, do you want to, um, do a quick scrimmage?"

Emma gave Fumiko a skeptical look. "Just the two of us?"

"I guess it's not really a scrimmage," said Fumiko, rubbing her arm shyly, "but, I mean, you're a, well I guess were a pretty good player, and I want to get better and play as a starter, so I need to know how good I'm doing, s-so if you've got some time on your hands…"

Emma huffed a small laugh. "Well, I would, but I should probably get going and run my errands," she said. "Practice is starting soon for you anyway. Even if I could stay, I don't think it would work. I'm a magical girl, after all. Superhuman reflexes and all that. You wouldn't be able to learn much."

"Oh," said Fumiko sadly.

"Sorry," said Emma. She patted Fumiko on the shoulder.

Fumiko shrugged, before perking up again. "T-then, if you don't mind, do you have any advice?"

Emma paused. Advice? For football?

"Honestly, I'd have to watch you play to come up with anything specific," Emma said thoughtfully. "This being said, I can offer you some more general advice?"

"What do you mean?"

Emma rubbed the back of her head awkwardly. "Well, I know this is going to send kind of cheesy and canned, but make sure to keep your teammates close, okay?"

Fumiko blinked. "Huh?"

"I'm serious. Practice and stuff… when you're trying to get better, it's easy to let it take over. You need to make sure you're coming back to Earth every once in a while, you know?"

"I— do you think I practice too much?"

"That's not it, it's more like—" Emma made a frustrated noise "—how do I put this. What I mean is, your team is just as important as your own abilities. You have to be part of the team, even if you don't think you're that good, otherwise you're never going to play well. Just make sure you don't lose sight of that, okay?"

Fumiko wrinkled her brow in thought. "Okay."

"Alright. That's all I have. I guess practice is starting for you soon?"

"Yeah."

"I'll be going then. See you around, Fumiko."

"See you."

It was raining on Lei Feng. This was normal, and not cause for concern for much of the population.

Rebecca Shu had found that she missed the rain of Lei Feng, and was happy to be back home. The planet's weather was usually icy cold, even with implant mediation, but it was infinitely better than the sticky moistness that accompanied the warm rain on Samsara.

She made a face at the memory. So much ew.

The lighthouse at the top of the cliffs at the mouth of Fengyu Bay was just over sixty meters tall, standing on a cluster of rocks that had fractured and split off from the main cliff face eons ago. The colony had driven long reinforcing rods into the stone, then buttressed it against the cliff-face with a one hundred meter long bridge, the metallic and composite main structure hidden behind a facade of stone quarried from nearby. The same construction method was used for the lighthouse itself, the interior faced with the waste stone left over from initial construction.

The top of the lighthouse had two rooms instead of the usual one. The largest was the beacon room, which held equipment to maintain and support the beacon. These included the main lamp, of course, the primary signal amplifier, a multispectral signal generator, and all the various maintenance equipment required to repair and replace any of the main components. The local star's capricious nature often made satellite navigation impossible, and made it necessary to have other options to ensure safe passage for the colony's ships. The lighthouse's beacon room generated a vast variety of signals that, in conjunction with other lighthouses on the planet, provided essential backup navigation for ships at sea which, inevitably, got caught in bad weather.

The second room was almost not a room at all. It was a small alcove, isolated from the main lantern room, though without a door to properly partition the two. It was just large enough to fit in an armchair with side table, a bookshelf, and a small table for a drinks machine and mugs. One wall of the alcove was windows, made of 100-millimeter-thick, high-impact polyglas, rated to the same strength as a magical girl's soul gem cover, and sealed tight against Lei Feng's frequent violent storms.

Rebecca Shu sat alone in her armchair, wrapped in a thick quilt, her legs tucked up under herself, and stared out at the sea. The ocean outside Rebecca's window seemed to gently rise and fall, belying the power of the breakers as they crashed against the rocks below. Sea foam streaked along the surface of the waves, forming short little trails that Rebecca's enhanced vision could pick out easily, even from her height above the shore.

She took a sip of cocoa and pulled the quilt a little tighter. The trouble with the lighthouse was that it could occasionally get incredibly dull, but all in all it was still a pretty good gig. It was part of the local garrison, these days, and only required one magical girl team to do some basic maintenance on the exterior from time to time. This was, of course, easy for any magical girl, let alone a squad of them. Rebecca was the only one who was from Lei Feng. The others were on garrison rotation, all in various states of mental disrepair, like Rebecca herself. They gave each other the space they needed to deal with things as they needed, but kept an eye out for anything serious.

So far, they seemed to be doing alright. The sharp pain in Rebecca's chest had faded, leaving a dull ache that stayed quiet most days and flared up only occasionally. When it did, like now, a few hours in the alcove with a mug of hot cocoa seemed to take care of things.

Rebecca's interface beeped at her: "Vid-call request from Emma Sinclair."

"Hey Emma," said Rebecca, accepting the call with a blink.

"Hey Rebecca," said Emma. The British football maniac was sitting in a cafe somewhere, the background brightly lit with giant windows. "How are you doing?"

"Alright," said Rebecca. She smiled slightly and took another sip of cocoa. "We're having good weather today at Fengyu Bay. Winds at sixty kilometers an hour and ambient temperature hovering around 260 Kelvin."

Emma made a face. "I— seriously?"

"Yeah. Colder with wind chill, but I saw worse as a kid. This isn't worth canceling school over or anything."

"W-what is worth canceling school over?"

Rebecca paused to reference her memories. "I think they called it once when we started seeing winds top a hundred kilometers per hour. That was a bad day. I think my house flooded."

"Your house flooded?"

Rebecca shrugged and giggled at Emma's disbelief. "It happens. The furniture is self-cleaning, so it's no big deal."

"Why do you live there?"

"It's better than Samsara," said Rebecca, drinking more cocoa. "The weather was terrible on Samsara. Especially the warm rain."

"I liked the warm rain…"

"You're so gross, Emma."

"Gross? If you want to call 'having sense' being gross, I guess…"

Rebecca laughed and drank more cocoa. The conversation lulled pleasantly as Emma accepted a cup of coffee from a drone.

"Haven't heard from you in a while," Rebecca said once Emma had gotten her coffee sorted. "It's not like you to call randomly."

"Ah, well," said Emma, scratching her cheek awkwardly. "You know. We haven't talked in a few weeks."

"Huh. Well that's true."

"Really though, are you doing alright?" said Emma. "I've been dealing with things through the Cult, but I don't know what it's like for you."

"I'm… managing," said Rebecca. She sipped some more cocoa. "It's been good getting away from people. The MHD checks in on me every few days, to make sure I'm not at risk."

"You're a lot quieter than you used to be."

Rebecca snorted. "As you might expect, yes."

The two of them fell silent.

Emma sipped her coffee pensively. There wasn't that much to say, honestly, at least if Rebecca wasn't feeling like talking. The fact that Rebecca didn't really want to talk was sort of worrying, but then, the MHD supposedly knew what it was doing.

But then again, was it really that Rebecca didn't want to talk? Emma glanced up at Rebecca over the rim of her coffee cup. The distant mind-controller was staring off past Emma's shoulder, presumably out a window in the lighthouse. She was lost in thought, cloaked in a sort of seriousness that wasn't supposed to be worn by the young.

"You should come to Earth," Emma heard herself saying. Some kind of impulse had pulled the words out of her. "Just to visit, maybe. There's a lot of interesting places you might like at the poles."

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. "That's random."

"I— I guess," said Emma, taking another sip of coffee. "But I mean, Mitakihara has a lot of fun places to visit too, and, you know, we won't have much opportunity once we have to redeploy…"

"Like you've visited any of them," Rebecca snorted. She paused to sip her cocoa, then: "Football geek."

"I've visited some! O-or, I'm planning, at least…"

Rebecca chuckled, then started laughing, and was soon keeled over to the side in her chair, cocoa set onto the side table and hands clutched around her middle as she laughed and laughed and laughed.

"Ahhh… that's a good one, Emma," she eventually said.

Emma squirmed, face as red as her costume. "It wasn't that funny…"

"No, but I needed it," Rebecca sighed, wiping at her eyes. "But yeah, I'll think about visiting. Just to get you out of the house, if nothing else."

"I'm not that bad, Rebecca. Jeez…"

Eliana Cruz did not usually worry about young girls like Emma.

It was a bit heartless of her, she knew, but she was four hundred and thirty-seven. She'd seen too many girls get themselves killed over the stupidest things. It was like trying to give a shit about lemmings, aside from the fact that real lemmings didn't go jumping off cliffs. The analogy was terrible, but it conveyed the point: far too many young girls got themselves killed for no good reason.

Despite this, Eliana found herself sweeping the area from atop her favorite bar for Emma's particular magical presence. She hadn't seen the girl for a few days now, which wasn't itself worth worrying about, really, but…

Ah. There she was, right back in the same bar that Eliana had found her the second time they'd met.

Eliana leaped in one long continuous bound off the top of the building and let herself fall like a cannonball into open space, the air whipping past her before a pulse of magic pushed back, arresting her fall gently like falling into a cushion of duck down.

The bartender nodded to her as she opened the door, sliding in like a spirit on the wind. It was remarkable how prescient bartenders were, really. Eliana had never met one who didn't have near-magical-girl levels of awareness of everyone in the bar.

Sometimes, Eliana wondered if humanity really needed magical girls.

Emma looked up as Eliana slid into her booth. Eliana raised a single hand in greeting. "Yo."

"You're late," said Emma blandly.

Eliana paused. "…I am?"

Emma chuckled and took a swig of her coffee. "Nah, I'm just kidding. I wasn't expecting you to check up on me."

Eliana wrinkled her brow as she ordered a beer from the bar. It was truly rare for her to get caught off guard. "Well, I was in the area, so I thought I'd see if you were here."

Emma snorted. "Ah yes. I'm familiar with that one. I guess you also happened to be in the mood for drinks?"

"Yes, exactly," said Eliana, scowling and settling into her seat. "You're drinking coffee?"

"Coffee's good here," said Emma with a shrug. "And I need to fill out paperwork, so it's fine. I might have a glass of bourbon later."

"Bourbon huh," said Eliana. Her beer arrived on a coaster. "I thought you liked the Irish stuff?"

Emma shrugged. "I'm branching out. Could be fun."

"Bourbon's pretty rough stuff."

"I've had worse."

Eliana wasn't sure if that was funny. She sipped her beer instead.

"What paperwork are you filling out, anyway?"

"I've decided to join the Soul Guard," said Emma, picking up her coffee and taking a sip. "I'm a bit worried about the part where I might need to fight other magical girls, but I think that, ultimately, I want to help people."

Eliana rubbed her chin. That was…

"Well, having been part of the Soul Guard, I feel like I should tell you some things," she said with a sip of her beer. "The most important is that you shouldn't get confused about your role in combat. The Soul Guard is important, sure, but in the end we're all important no matter what we do. I know the MHD likes to parade the idea around like a bit of propaganda, but it's pretty accurate."

"I know," said Emma, nodding. "I just…" She tapped the table, thinking. "I guess, as a magical girl, I want to help people more directly, and focusing on hunting demons and preventing other magical girls from mistreating humanity feels more…"

"More like you're doing something, right?" asked Eliana with a nostalgic sigh. She looked down at her beer contemplatively, eyes suddenly focused far into the past. "Like… like you're actually affecting things, yourself, rather than just another cog in the machine."

Emma nodded. "Yeah."

"I was the same when I was your age," said Eliana with another sigh. She took a long drag of her beer. "That was… a time."

Emma raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

Eliana snorted. "What do you mean 'what do I mean'? I joined the Soul Guard when it was still young. When the world was still dirty and violent and us magical girls needed to watch each other. You couldn't trust that another magical girl would help you, not unless she was a battle sister who'd hunted with you and stood by you when times were bad. You—"

Eliana cut herself off and drank more beer. Damn. Those were bad memories.

"You had to fight to live," said Emma, finishing Eliana's story quietly. "But it's like that now, too, you know? When my leave is up, I'll be going out again, to the battlefield. If I don't fight, I'll die. It's not the same kind of fighting, but it's still a place where you need to keep your head up and your senses sharp."

"That's true," Eliana said quietly. "I guess I'm just being a jaded old maid. You girls these days…"

"Well, that's what everyone says," said Emma with a small shrug and a smile. "But then, that's why we fight, right? So that the next generation can be a little better off?"

"Hah! Perhaps," said Eliana. "Where'd you get that one, Emma?"

Emma shrugged again. "Honestly, I heard it from a vid. It's not actually that inspirational."

"I guess not," said Eliana with a wry grin. She blinked quickly, then sighed. It really was important to talk to the younger generation occasionally. When you got old, it was easy to forget things. Easy things. Things that were important.

"I'm sorry," said Eliana. "I'm being dumb, and raining on your day when this is a big moment for you."

"It's fine," said Emma. "I can… understand what it must be like."

And wasn't that an understatement?

"Well, alright," said Eliana. "Thanks. Despite what I said, I don't regret being part of the Soul Guard, so good luck. I hope they accept you. To the future?"

Eliana raised her glass. Emma snorted and raised her coffee mug to clink it against Eliana's beer.

"To the future."