2.4 For Yuri, I Build a Better Monster

“Again.”

Ferromancer’s voice is like a whip crack echoing through the vast space of her workshop. It lashes down my spine and jolts my nervous system into frenzied action, but the joke’s on her—I was already moving before the word left her mouth. When the holographic projectors spin up and the featureless pink outline of a magical girl flickers into existence with fists raised, I’m ready for it.

With a flourish of my hands and a whisper of will, I set fire to the air and burn open a portal—or at least the image of one, though the actual effect is more complicated. Green and purple twine together, forming a ring of flame, and scaly devils push their way into the world from out of that ring.

Red-skinned imps, half with wings and half without, spread out in compliance with preprogrammed instructions. The winged imps carry whips and harass the magical girl simulacrum up close, while the wingless imps throw balls of fire—bright red and harmful, which I can’t wield myself but can grant to my servants as part of their power budget—into the fray. We’ve practiced this formation, and as each imp leaves the portal it takes its place in the layers of minions that stand or swoop between me and the hard light hologram coming after me.

This is the greatest trick I’ve learned under Ferromancer: the ability to combine both colors of flame to create fully-formed familiars from nothing. I was disappointed when I realized that my creation power couldn’t copy my familiars directly—it doesn’t like living things, turns out—but together we found a workaround.

I’ve tested my transformation power on as many targets as I could find, and it turns out I really hit the jackpot. Most witches can only convert a narrow category into familiars—humans they find attractive, animals they’ve fed, objects they own, you get the picture—but I can transform just about anything into one of my minions. Well, excluding other magic users and their own familiars, but that wasn’t a surprise.

So I bought some demonic-looking figurines from the local game store, painted them with the help of a few online tutorials, and shoved them into the conceptual furnace of Prometheus. In the spirit of my love for wargaming, I wrote up a stat sheet for each type of familiar and burned that into Prometheus too.

Purple flame makes a copy of a figurine and green flame grows it into the corresponding variety of imp, the whole process happening nigh-instantaneously after lots and lots of practice to cut down the transformation time. I’m proud of the progress I’ve made.

Of course, every time I hit a milestone, Ferromancer cranks up the difficulty of the simulation to push me even further.

The hologram trades blows with the imps, shrugging off hellfire and pulling whips out of clawed hands. It tears wings when it can catch them and shoots blasts of pink energy at the distant fire-throwers, but it’s falling behind as the swarm grows, my conjuration unrelenting. And then a second hologram appears, the hard light projectors adding another enemy to keep me on my toes, and suddenly I’m losing again.

The hard light duo turn familiars back into figurines faster than I can make more. They stutter and slow down when an imp gets a good hit in, but that’s happening less and less as my swarm loses critical mass and the holograms adapt to my tactics. The imps are smarter than the clay golems, but they’re still not smart enough to get creative; they know the handful of battle plans that I sketched out on their character sheets, and that’s about it.

It’s time to introduce an elite to the mix. I focus my will and halt the flow of lesser minions, concentrating all my power on summoning a greater threat, and as the holograms get closer my masterpiece steps through.

Where the imps are spindly little shits, like starved monkeys draped in a thin layer of reptilian skin, this demon—for it truly deserves the title—is a saurian abomination that towers over me by at least a pair of heads. Its flesh isn’t just scaled but plated, covered in hard chitin growth everywhere but the joints, and its face is a mass of horns where its eyes and nose should be. Its mouth is endless rows of teeth dripping highly acidic saliva that sizzles and steams as it splatters against the workshop floor.

With both hands the brute tightly grips the weapon I stole from Thunderclap, her sapphire axe transmuted by flame into a slag hammer. A piece of ego I’ve allowed myself. A reminder to other magical girls, when they see it, that I can beat them.

The brute dashes forward on heavy legs, every step a seismic event, and positions itself between the back line of flamers and the advancing magical girl holograms. I switch my summoning back to imps, spawning more minions to distract and slow down the enemy.

The effort of making so many familiars is starting to strain me. My hands are shaking, the tips of my fingers going numb, and little shivers run through the rest of my body. That pleasant heat beneath my skin has vanished, replaced by seeping cold that gets colder and colder the more I push my magic.

I’m nearing my limit, but I can’t stop now. Not until I win.

Blows are traded. Violence is bought and sold. Energy blasts against hellfire, fists against a hammer. Collision and conflict and cold, so very cold.

I watch their fight in a haze, my vision blurring as my thoughts slow down. My legs wobble and I sink to one knee, wishing I could brace myself but unable to move my hands or the portal will break and the flow of familiars will stop. Even though my fingers are so cold. Frosting. Little popsicle fingers.

I bite my lip to keep focused. I can’t lose. I can’t stop. My elite smashes a hard light hologram so hard that it goes flying, out of the range of the projectors and out of existence. The second is swarmed, falls, and mercifully vanishes.

I scream victory and drop every familiar as I drop fully to my knees and breathe heavily on the floor of the workshop. Staring down at painted figurines, still frighteningly cold but just a bit warmer now. Shivering and triumphant.

I blink away the haze and remember to dismiss the figurines, too, turning matter back into nothing. The flame inside me reignites, the furnace in my chest pumping sweet warmth into my limbs. It’s the limit of my power, the invisible capacity placed upon me; every creation or transmutation I maintain costs a bit of the flame empowering me, until I risk freezing to death—or more likely, to unconsciousness—if I summon too many things.

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Ferromancer’s footsteps signal her approach. “You’ve got grit, but you work harder when you could be working smarter,” she criticizes, fully in teacher mode right now. “Think how many figurines you left lying on the floor when you could have been reclaiming their fire to ward off cold shock.”

I wince. “You’re right, that was stupid.”

“Not stupid,” she insists, “inexperienced. You have to think of it that way or you’ll be too busy beating yourself up to learn anything. Got it?”

“Yes, teacher,” I say ruefully.

She helps me to my feet and I brush myself off. I’m still sore and tired from all the training we’ve been doing, but I get a boost of energy seeing the look on Ferromancer’s face: she’s satisfied. Her smirk is almost a smile.

“Come on,” she says, and then she points behind her into a hall that I know from experience leads to the workshop’s kitchen. “Break time. I bought sandwiches.”

It’s been two weeks since I became a witch. Two weeks since I met Ferromancer, ate lunch with her, and started learning her signature craft. It’s been a hard two weeks, but also maybe some of the best weeks of my life.

Getting to the point I have with my familiars took a lot of work, though not all of it felt like work. We didn’t start with the figurines; it stands to reason that clay would be the best material for Prometheus to mold, but the pottery class I managed to get into was a total nightmare. Wet clay is gross, and it gets everywhere, and the result of all that toil was the ugliest vase I’ve seen in my life. Hard pass.

I looked up a few blacksmithing videos, given the other half of the imagery I’ve been seeing, but they didn’t appeal either. I mean, it’s cool stuff, and the videos are much easier to watch when it’s a buff lady doing it and not a dude in his sixties, but even then it just isn’t my thing. Mord linked me some nerd historian’s articles on blacksmithing and I couldn’t even finish those, though his Lord of the Rings articles were fun to binge.

Prometheus wants me to do something physical. My power wants me to make something with my hands, I can feel that intent. But I’m terrible at making things with my hands and I hate being terrible at things. If the choice is between doing something poorly and not at all, I’ll pick the latter every time. It’s a shit habit, I know it is, but the compulsion is strong and I can’t change my brain chemistry overnight, or even if I had a whole month. Knowing isn’t enough.

So we gave up on pottery and refocused on the one thing that does work for me: card games. And it’s helped, as silly as that sounds. I reinstalled the app on my phone, found a few streamers with good Magic: the Gathering content, and started playing against Erica.

That woman is terrifying at the game. I thought I was decent, but she could play pro. She loves the older formats—the ones where decks have prices in the thousands or tens of thousands and games are over in two turns or twenty—but if there’s a format she’s bad at I haven’t found it yet. She plays fast, precise, and formal, always clearly outlining what she’s doing and how as she moves through her entire turn in the time it would take me to think through mine.

The design of my familiars started with a deck that Erica helped me build. There’s this big demon guy in the game that has a cult of murderous BDSM theater freaks—the type of freaks that make sure their orgies include a pit of spikes, a flaming wheel, and a juggling trumpeter—and he’s been one of my favorite characters since I found out about him. One of his cards cares about different kinds of fiends, and it was in the process of building a deck that I settled on demons as the theme of my familiars. From there I picked a few cards that looked coolest to build wargaming sheets for, and then it was Erica who suggested the figurine painting idea. It worked!

Getting the details right took experimentation. Framing the capabilities of my familiars as wargaming statistics helped me figure out that there’s some kind of invisible power budget in effect. For the cheap units like imps, pairing wings with a dedicated ranged attack—the fireballs that I’m still peeved I can’t cast myself—pushes the imps out of fodder range and makes them harder to summon, so I’ve had to split up those traits. The brute demon is at the top of the next range, another stat breakpoint. I have no idea what the actual system governing them is like, but for now I’ve had enough success with the game rules lens that I’m sticking to it. I just need to keep experimenting so I can find more power combos that will make for interesting demons.

I’m not hard claiming the trope space of a fallen angel—not going to go by Lucifer or Lucyfar or some other corruption—but it’s not a bad fit. The name Archon comes from the ancient Greek word for “ruler,” but the connotation I’m aiming at Sophia is a kind of demon prince with a pseudo-angelic origin. For everyone else, I can be just another edgy atheist reclaiming the imagery of the Satanic. I’m sure Lilith would get a kick out of that.

“Your progress has been good,” Ferromancer praises as she polishes off her banh mi with a crunch of carrot and radish. The Vietnamese place she ordered from is amazing, and I greatly enjoyed my own pork sandwich.

Of course, I enjoy her praise more, and I resist the urge to preen. “I feel like you’re always keeping me on the very edge of my ability,” I admit. “You’ve got a really good sense for what I can handle.”

“All part of the gig,” she says. “I’ve taught enough witches to have an instinct for it.”

“Anyone I’d know?” I ask with a grin.

“Trade secret,” she replies with a wink and a finger over her lips.

I lean back in my chair—we ate in the kitchen, which is fairly plain but still on the nicer side—and consider who Ferromancer might have taught. She’s tight-lipped about her past, but I know she’s been all over the world, which makes guessing her exact path trickier. My knowledge of witches falls off pretty dramatically outside North America and Japan.

Before I can go down that rabbit hole of contemplation, Ferromancer speaks again. “In light of your progress, I think we’re ready to ramp things to the next level. To practice fighting alongside your familiars, not just using them to fight for you. And once we do that… you’ll be ready for a real fight.”

I straighten up. “Really? Yes! Let’s go back in, I’ve got another few hours in me.”

“Actually,” she says, holding up a hand to stop me as I rise from my chair, “I was thinking we take the rest of the day off, and tomorrow.”

I sag. I want to complain, but I don’t know a way to do that without sounding childish in front of the cool older lady I desperately want to impress. But I want it now! isn’t exactly a mature and well-reasoned argument.

Ferromancer chuckles. “Love the enthusiasm, doll, but breaks are important. You need to stay grounded.” Her expression gets serious again. “Witches who let this become their whole life get burned. It’s how the golden chosen can become the ninety-nine. So take tomorrow off. Take the whole weekend. And force yourself to be human for a few days. You need to build that habit before it’s too late.”

I swallow nervously, suddenly aware again of how dangerous the world of witches can be if I’m not careful. It’s not a game. It was never a game. I have to remember that. “Yes, teacher. And… thank you.”

Erica smiles, bright and rakish and spectacular. “Enjoy your weekend. I’ll see you Monday, Rachel.”

We part ways and I wander home.

Well, shit. What do I do now? I’m at a bit of a loss, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. I mean, it’s not like my life was completely directionless before I became a witch.

Right?