Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 4 - Chapter 2

The Robot and the Nun

This story is set when there weren’t yet many magical girls in N City, a while before the Magical Girl Raising Project game first started.

When Makoto Andou didn’t want to do something, she would never, ever do it. Phlegmatic in all things as she was, she failed her high school entrance exams, dropped out of school, and got a job. Her parents said it was meant to be; Makoto herself believed that. When she didn’t want to do something, she just didn’t, and there was no helping that.

So once she graduated middle school and began lazing around, her parents tried to grab ahold of her and force her into doing things she didn’t want to. Then she went around staying at friends’ places instead, only coming back home once every two weeks.

She would sneak expired boxed lunches out from the convenience store where she worked. She would quench her thirst at park fountains. When she found edible plants, she would pack them into a plastic bag to take home. She would tag along with her homeless friends to line up at soup kitchens. When she was at a station transferring trains, twenty-nine times out of thirty, she’d resist the smell of the soba stalls.

This sort of lifestyle better suited her nature than buckling down to study like her parents told her to. Even Makoto herself couldn’t tell if this meant she had a tenacious personality or not.

Once, a friend of hers told her, “You’re pretty cute, Makoto. There’s a way to earn more money, y’know?” The friend even added that she’d introduce her to “someone nice.” But after that day, Makoto erased that girl’s contact from her phone, and they never hung out again.

Makoto had liked her friend’s voice, which still sounded a little immature despite its more prominent edge of cruelty and cunning. But Makoto had cut her off because she’d suspected that if she stuck with that girl, she would have been forced into something she didn’t want to do.

Makoto was sensitive to these things. In fact, she was indifferent about everything else. She would lie about her age—fifteen—in order to get jobs, she would suck up to nasty people, and when she gambled over mahjong, she would use cheap tricks to rip off the poor. She wasn’t proud. She just never did anything she didn’t want to.

If the task Makoto had accepted from a friend had been something unacceptable to her, she wouldn’t have done it, either. This task wasn’t interesting, just “work” and nothing more. But since she didn’t really mind, she accepted the task on the condition that she would be allowed to stay the night.

“All right, thanks, then!” her friend said and went off to school.

After that, Makoto was left alone with her friend’s smartphone. In the messy apartment filled with sloppy stacks of magazines, Makoto lay down on the sofa with the phone. Her friend had already explained to her how to use it. Since her task was clear, it wasn’t a bother.

The colorful logo of Magical Girl Raising Project rose on the screen. Makoto input the ID and password her friend had given her, and an avatar appeared on-screen.

Though this was supposed to be a magical-girl game, the avatar was designed to look like a robot. Not one part of it looked like one of the classic heroines: not the boosters on its back, the wings at its waist, nor its red eyes. It really did stand out among NPCs and other avatars. Why had her friend designed an avatar like this? Glancing about the room, Makoto saw that among the mess of magazines were a number of robot-themed monthly manga anthologies. There was even a plastic-model-kit box underneath the convenience store lunch she had eaten the day before.

Makoto hadn’t heard that this friend was into robots, but thinking about it now, she was the type to be easily affected by the guys she dated. Aha, Makoto thought, nodding as she began her task.

Makoto was to fight a certain number of battles within the game’s coliseum. This would fulfill the conditions for acquiring a special card. However, the total amount was incredibly high, and it seemed no small number of people had just given up when they found out how extreme it was.

Makoto’s friend had not given up. She had persisted, dumping the task of coliseum battles on Makoto instead. Now that Makoto thought about it, when she was a kid, she’d known plenty of people who made their younger siblings level grind for them in RPGs. I guess this sort of thing doesn’t really change even when you get older, she thought vaguely.

Her task was simple. Magical Girl Raising Project sold itself on the fact that it was completely free to play, but even then, in Makoto’s opinion, it was a total waste of time. If you wanted entertainment, there were ways to get your kicks that were actually profitable. It was better to earn yourself some pocket money than to kill time for no pay.

As Makoto went on pressing buttons and musing, I can’t understand people who do this and I’d have chosen an avatar that’s more like a magical girl, suddenly, there was a flourish of trumpets. Figuring she must have finished the right number of battles, Makoto looked down at the screen to see a sphere floating there.

“Congratulations! You’ve been chosen to be a magical girl, pon!”

What just happened? Makoto had been mashing buttons and was hardly watching the screen, so maybe she’d pressed the wrong thing. If so, that was bad. It would be fine if she could just redo it, but it would really suck if she’d done something she couldn’t take back. Even if her friend wouldn’t ask for money to repay her, it would still be a serious blow for her to lose someone who would do nail art on her for free.

“What’s wrong, pon? You’re not glad to have this opportunity, pon?”

“Shut up for a minute. This isn’t the time to be asking that.”

“‘Shut up’? That’s mean, pon.”

“Enough with the pon-pon thing. Is tagging the end of your sentences like that supposed to be cute? It’s obnoxious.”

At this point, Makoto realized she was having a conversation with the sphere inside the screen. The black-and-white orb floated and bobbed, scattering golden scales around it. Its eyes were simple, like a child’s doodle, but she could clearly see the light of consciousness within them.

Oh yeah. There was that rumor about this Magical Girl Raising Project game. People said it had the miraculous power to turn one in every few tens of thousands of people into a real magical girl.

And that was how Makoto—even though this was not her game or her own avatar—became the heroine Magicaloid 44.

“I’ve met the prince of my dreams.”

Magical Girl Sister Nana made her announcement, her eyes glazed over. She somehow reminded Magicaloid 44 of that one religious type who used to come around proselytizing now and then. This impression was irrelevant.

Her voice bright and clear, Sister Nana gushed about how wonderful this Prince Charming of hers was, cool and beautiful and academic and athletic, how everyone adored her, and how she cared for Sister Nana most of all. Though this bored Magicaloid 44, she listened.

The one who had taken on the mentor role for Magicaloid 44 when she’d become a magical girl was Calamity Mary, an outlaw who aggressively defied both good sense and common sense, so that was part of why, in Magicaloid 44’s head, there was a diagram that read, magical girls = absurd.

“I have come to see that your prince is amazing,” said Magicaloid 44.

“You do? Wonderful!”

“So you said you had business with me. What is it?”

Magicaloid 44 had met Sister Nana in the magical-girl chat, and it was there that Sister Nana had requested an in-person meeting. Though Magicaloid 44 had expected her to be a weirdo, she had agreed anyway. Why? Because it seemed interesting.

When she actually met Sister Nana at the designated location—on the roof of a building in Mizushiro—she found the other girl was indeed a weirdo. Her kind expression, sparkling eyes, and costume based on a nun’s habit made her resemble an actual nun, but all her blabbering about her ideal prince wasn’t exactly suited for a convent. She was a weirdo, but her eccentricity took her in a different direction than that of the wild and self-important Calamity Mary.

Sister Nana gave her a beaming smile. The moon and clouds made for a fitting backdrop, but the iron railing and water tank on the building’s roof clashed so badly with the picture, it gave the whole thing a surreal edge. “I’ve been told you’re a magical-girl-type robot from the twenty-second century.”

“Oh yes, that was my character background.”

“And you have a wealth of convenient tools and such.”

“Though I have more tools that are not so convenient.”

“Might it be possible for me to borrow one of them?” Sister Nana continued.

She went on to tell Magicaloid 44 that her ideal prince was quite literally everything she desired except for the one fact that blemished the word: She wasn’t a magical girl. What makes a prince an ideal one is the ability to protect a loved one when the time comes, and since she wasn’t a magical girl, then Sister Nana would obviously be the stronger one, physically, and the nun would be forced to protect her prince instead. And then this prince could not be perfect, even though standing on the same stage as Sister Nana would make her perfect.

Frankly, Magicaloid 44 didn’t really get what she was talking about.

“And that’s why I would like to assist her in becoming a magical girl. Could I perhaps borrow one of your tools for that purpose?” Sister Nana pulled out a standard manila envelope. The winds at this altitude made it flutter. “I’m aware this is presumptuous, so I’ve brought a little something to show my gratitude. Though it isn’t much…”

Magicaloid 44 still didn’t follow, but what she did understand was that whether she followed or not didn’t really matter. She accepted the envelope and checked its contents to find one ten-thousand-yen bill. Thinking about it now, she seemed to recall complaining in chat once: Being a magical girl is work, but it doesn’t make you any money. Perhaps Sister Nana had remembered that.

“Might you lend me a hand?” Sister Nana was smiling at her brightly, like an angel.

Magicaloid 44 cleared her throat, stuck her hand into the weapon rack at her waist area, rummaged around inside, and pulled out a device. It was the size of an alarm clock, stacked with meters or something all over.

Magicaloid 44 could tell what the object she’d produced actually was. It was an insect sex differentiation device. As the name said, it could help you tell if an insect was male or female. Could this item make a human into a magical girl? The answer was no. But she wanted money. But she couldn’t change the item. What should she do?

“What’s this…?” asked Sister Nana.

“Ta-dada-daaa. It is an insect sex differentiation device. As the name says, it is a useful tool with which you can determine if an insect is male or female.”

“What purpose could it have?”

“Insects are mysterious creatures. One theory even says the creatures we call insects are visitors from space, or even another world. Through contact with these fantastic organisms, you can increase your potential as a magical girl…although, I perhaps cannot know this for sure…” Magicaloid 44 said the last part very quietly and very quickly.

But Sister Nana accepted the item with great joy anyway. “Really?! That’s great!” It seemed she’d accepted the mercenary Makoto’s fabricated explanation.

Being a magical girl was not profitable.

The rule that you couldn’t reveal your true identity and the system of helping people for magical candy were not suited to making money. Calamity Mary had boasted of how she’d earned rewards by helping out organized crime, but if Magicaloid 44 were to do the same, she would clearly be impinging on Calamity Mary’s territory, and Magicaloid 44 didn’t have the guts to do something like that.

If she were to assist noncriminal organizations, she could easily anticipate situations that would contravene the rules of magical girls, and more to the point, Magicaloid 44 didn’t look human compared with other magical girls. When the others helped people, the recipients came away thinking, What a beautiful girl! But when Magicaloid 44 did the same, she just scared people. (“Ahh! A monster!”) In her brief time as a magical girl, she had seen such reactions from a number of people. Even if she wasn’t crying into her pillow at night, it did hurt in an ordinary way, and it wasn’t like it didn’t discourage her. On the aggregate sites, Magicaloid 44 occupied a separate category by herself, introduced as “a robot being controlled by magic(?).” She botched her introductions just about every day.

So one might think she should go straight to using her powers for crime, but if she did that, the other magical girls would come after her later, since they would earn magical candy for taking care of criminals who caused trouble for others. Worst-case scenario, someone like Calamity Mary would show up. Taking that into consideration, it was clear that the path of evil was a bad idea.

She had initially believed acquiring these supernatural powers was an unexpected stroke of luck, but instead, the powers were surprisingly useless. So Sister Nana, who had come to her in her hour of disappointment, was a lifesaver in a way.

Magicaloid 44’s magic enabled her to pick out one handy gadget from the future out of the 444,444,444 in her possession, once per day. But there were two catches. One, she couldn’t choose what would come out of the weapon rack herself. It was completely random. And two, the item was disposable and would only last that one day.

The bug sexer Magicaloid 44 had handed to Sister Nana was a throwaway, too, and it would stop working after a day. So the next day, Sister Nana came to visit her again. “While I was using it, for some reason, it broke.”

Magicaloid 44 manufactured a look of happy surprise. She wasn’t too bad at this sort of acting. “Oh! That is amazing! My items emit magical power, which gradually depletes. In other words, the rapid depletion means you were absorbing its magical effects incredibly quickly! Congratulations.”

Sister Nana, in her total ignorance, was overjoyed. Happy and excited, she bought a new item, the “debris removal manipulator,” for ten thousand yen and went home.

After Sister Nana left, Magicaloid 44 leaned against the iron railing and gazed up at the full moon hanging in the sky. Just barely peeking through the gaps between the clouds, it reminded her of a five-hundred-yen coin.

“This is…a truly profitable business.”

For a week after that, Sister Nana came to visit Magicaloid 44 every day. Each time, Magicaloid 44 said things like “It’s just about time” or “I can see the signs!” or “It won’t be long before she becomes a magical girl” to get Sister Nana excited and happy. Magicaloid 44 sold her a fully automated cleaning machine, a pen that could draw a manga in a day, an anti-magical-creature ray gun, and more, fattening her purse by ten thousand yen daily. And each day, she smirked as she watched her wallet get heavier bit by bit. At this rate, she might even be able to buy the house she’d dreamed of.

But the honeymoon period didn’t last long. One week after their first meeting, Sister Nana’s “dream prince” ended up becoming a magical girl. Sister Nana said that when she equipped the seventh futuristic item, the magical-power-amplifying earring, her prince had received her powers fairly quickly.

Ah, so that was what the magical-power amplifier was? Damn it, so then I should not have given it to her. She was grinding her teeth in regret, but on the outside, she celebrated the event and congratulated Sister Nana.

Sister Nana was thrilled. She grasped Magicaloid 44’s hand and swung it around and then spun her in circles. As the nun twirled in circles on the building’s roof, Magicaloid 44 felt disappointed. Being a magical girl really didn’t pay.

Then Sister Nana gave her an invitation: “I’d like to have a party—as both a celebration for her becoming a magical girl and a thank-you for your help. I’ll put together a little something in the way of treats and drinks, so I would very much love it if you could come.” Magicaloid 44 accepted without hesitation. Eighty percent of the decision was based on the enticing phrase “a little something in the way of treats and drinks.” The other twenty percent was curiosity about this ideal prince.

Sister Nana’s Prince Charming, the magical girl Weiss Winterprison, was indeed quite princely. Between her somber gaze, her cool manner, her fitting name, and her appearance, she was beautifully androgynous. Her nobility was enough to make them completely forget the plainness of her costume, which consisted of a long coat and scarf, along with how cheap their setup was: a simple folding table with snacks and juice in an empty supermarket.

The venue for their party was an out-of-business grocery store, which of course looked old, though it wasn’t dusty. Apparently even now, someone was taking care of it. Sister Nana may have been the one cleaning it. Magicaloid 44 could see her diligence in the chocolate treats, pudding, and cookies.

Even with Winterprison right there, Sister Nana still gushed about her, going on and on shamelessly (“She’s so gorgeous, just like her normal form!” and “She’s such a nice person!”) as Winterprison snacked on the chocolate without reproving her. There were two invitees in total, and the other magical girl besides Magicaloid 44 only watched in apparent boredom at the lovebirds’ mushy flirting.

Mentally decrying the pair as an unabashed and annoyingly sappy couple, Magicaloid 44 figured she would at least be compensated for her trouble with some food to take home. Responding with vague uh-huhs and yeahs, she dropped snack after snack into her weapon rack. When the lovebirds excused themselves, she let out a deep sigh from the bottom of her heart and addressed the other magical girl, who was eating and drinking in silence. “It has been a rough time for you, too.”

“Hmm?”

“Being an awkward third wheel.”

The knight with a tail, La Pucelle, seemed to consider this for a while. But then she said, “Sister Nana is my teacher. As her squire, cooperating with her is a matter of course.”

That this girl called herself Sister Nana’s “squire” must have meant Sister Nana had been in charge of teaching her how to be a magical girl. “Squire” was such a knightly and old-timey term. Magicaloid 44 was also the type who liked to get into character, which she did by speaking in a more robotic tone and cutting contractions and such, so she resonated just a bit with this knight’s choice to use an old-fashioned term.

So she continued the thread of conversation. “What did this cooperation entail?”

“Dressing up in a disguise and pretending to be a bad guy to attack her, stuff like that…”

“Oh, so scenarios where Winterprison can protect Sister Nana?”

“Well, yeah.” The knight was clearly a bit embarrassed about it. It seemed she did indeed resonate with Magicaloid 44.

“Plus…,” the knight continued, “I think love is a wonderful thing.”

All at once, Magicaloid 44’s “possible sympathy” gauge dropped to zero. Anyone who would look at a stupid, gushy couple and then recite the empty cliché that love is a wonderful thing was not someone Magicaloid 44 would want to be friends with, frankly.

“Um…are you in love, too, Lady Knight?”

The blush in La Pucelle’s cheeks deepened noticeably. She crushed the juice-filled paper cup in her hand, sending a spray of orange liquid in all directions. Her tail smacked the ground with a thump, thump. “Oh, not really, um, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that. She’s a childhood friend. It’s just, I’m a little interested in her, that’s all. It’s not love or anything like that.”

“What is she like?”

“She loves magical girls, and she’s so nice, and she can never look away when someone is in trouble… Anyway, it’s really not serious enough to be calling it love.”

“I see, I see. That is wonderful.”

Maybe now that Magicaloid 44 was done with Sister Nana, La Pucelle or that childhood friend of hers should be her next mark.

The party had basically just forced them to watch a stupid couple even more sickly sweet than the treats, but now it was over. Magicaloid 44 was about to leave when Sister Nana called out to her to stop her. “Would you perhaps know of any dangerous places, Miss Magicaloid?”

“What? Dangerous places?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I do. But it is a person, rather than a place: Calamity Mary is dangerous. To put it in terms of a location, that would be the Jounan district, her territory.”

“Miss Calamity Mary, is that right? Thank you so very much for telling me.” Sister Nana bobbed her head in a bow, then headed back into the supermarket.

Magicaloid 44 pressed the ignition on the backpack-shaped jetpack she wore and zoomed off through the sky. The moon had waned during the past week, unsurprisingly.

She couldn’t figure out what Sister Nana’s intentions were in asking that question, and Magicaloid 44 had almost asked her what this was about before dropping it. When Sister Nana had raised her head from the bow, she had been watching her with a certain…black and vicious something within her eyes. That was not good. She didn’t want to get mixed up with that.

When Makoto didn’t want to do something, she would absolutely not do it. Even now that she was a magical girl, that hadn’t changed.

She went back to her current crash pad, detransformed, and went to visit her homeless friends, bringing the snacks along as presents. After being forced to endure that awkwardness, she wanted to relax, even just a bit.

“Y’know, pops, chatting with you like this is always the most relaxing thing.”

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that, Mako. So then will you marry me?”

“Nope.”

Sister Nana was smiling gently, hands placed together on her lap. That smile looked very much like Nana Habutae’s, but it had a different sort of appeal, too. This smile inspired in Winterprison a desire to protect her.

Now that Winterprison was a magical girl, she could protect that smile. Nana was a little sad that her prince had gotten her powers from her, but the source of her strength wasn’t an issue right now.

“Do you know of a magical girl named Calamity Mary, in the Jounan district?”

“No. You know that I’m a newbie. I’m ignorant about the others in this area.”

“I’ve heard some unpleasant rumors. I believe we should go there and ask about the situation.” Sister Nana was smiling, but she must have been seriously considering the peace of the town. She always prioritized others over herself. She really was a holy woman. Her darling. Winterprison wanted to embrace her. It was because of who she was that Winterprison had to protect her.

Nana had given her the power that now overflowed within her—so she should use it for Nana’s sake.