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Out here in the canyon outskirts that flank Little Olde Tokyo, there is no solace from the presence of the sun. It beats down onto the arid soil, spiderwebbing cracks all across the desert earth. As far as the eye can see, and without a tree or shade in sight to dull its oppressive bite. Pink knows that were it not for her own straw head covering, massive and sprawling, she’d be faring similarly to Steel right about now.
There in the sprawling divide between the towering cliffsides, she watches with teeth grit as their weapons thunderously clash once more. She’s nestled in a tiny nook where the rocks part, fighting back to urge to jump into the fray and crack the Magistrate’s head herself, held back only by the knowledge that it would do little besides make the circumstances worse. This was not a problem of brute strength, not one The Pink Princess could skewer upon her sword. No, they had to be very careful here, or else…
“Persistent little cockroach!” barks The Evil Magistrate, jutting back with a powerful jump as The Steel Samurai lurches his spear. “And here I thought I could teach you a lesson with blade alone. What a fool I was to think you’d go willingly.”
He clutches at the pendant that hangs around his neck, encrusted with a fiery orange gemstone and glinting in the unrelenting sun. Pink fights the temptation to curse aloud, biting back the shape of the words as they fizzle—why was he so intent to toy with them? Was this all just a game to the Magistrate?
His ever-fickle whims grow no clearer as the sun above brightens, as the artifact in his hand spills over with searing yellow light. Waves upon waves of it shine outward, unbound, a beam of beckoning energy that commands the very atmosphere itself. Even in her makeshift cave, Pink feels the heat intensify around her, its shape feeling like a sheet of iron as it crashes down onto her. Squinting through the pain, she finds it in her to open one eye and look out at the battlefield—but what’s there is of little comfort, of course.
Steel has fallen to one knee, hissing back agony as he struggles to stay upright. Pink can see the way the steam falls up and off him, winces in sympathy as he fights to raise his spear from where he’s balanced against the crutch of it. At Pink’s feet, the desert flowers curl up and wither, the water inside them evaporated and useless.
“What’s the matter, Samurai?” cackles the Magistrate. “Don’t tell me Steel conducts heat?”
“Damn you…” Steel stumbles forward, limbs moving in disjointed anguish, “Damn you, Evil Magistrate!”
“Don’t speak so soon!” The Magistrate thumbs the crystal again. “I’ve barely gotten started!”
As another wave of powerful magic pours off the pendant, Pink is knocked clean over from the blistering shape of it around her. Her palms hit the dying land’s earth, and she is enveloped on all sides by broiling, grueling, weighty heat. It’s dry and white-hot, like the world itself is ablaze—the horizon turns liquid where the Samurai and Magistrate wobble and blur. Every part of her shaking, Pink tries to crawl forward, but her stomach drags across the dusty ground and her arms give way. Powerless to draw her sword from her hip, powerless to even stand, she feels the ignited atmosphere come down upon her with the pressure of a thousand cinderblocks.
No…
Desperate to raise her head, Pink looks out one last time toward the horizon, where Steel is lying in a crumpled heap, one hand still white-knuckle on the splayed-out Samurai Spear.
It can’t… end like this…!
Like a bolt of lightning, then, something changes.
Pink can’t say how she knows. It’s like a flash in her brain, an olfactory sense, and instinct that she feels like a heartbeat after death, gasping alive in her chest. What comes after is the rattling of a chain against itself, a cacophonous clinking that heralds something grand. The adrenaline replenishes itself, kicking Pink’s muscles back awake—she looks up toward the horizon, crawls into the light.
There on the clifftop is a sharpened silhouette, black against the howling sun, long blue cape fluttering gallantly despite the lack of any wind. The Magistrate whips his head around, staring up at her with scorn clear in every inch of his body. All at once, he forgets the Samurai, angling his battle stance at… her.
Pink can’t make out her features in the sunhaze. But when this heroine leaps off the rocky edge with kusarigama raised, her perfectly polished complexion shines in the glint of it, striking and skylit and saturated and cobalt.
“Impudent wench!” cries the Magistrate as he weakly raises his sword, and the earsplitting CLANG that radiates off the clash of them echoes like another heatwave across Pink’s face. It blows the coiffed hood out of the heroine’s eyes, confirming what Pink hoped all along—there in the divide is the Cobalt Crusader, lips pulled back in a snarl as she stares down her former mentor with determined intent in her icy gaze.
She flips backward, landing with perfect grace as always, and pulls the chain of her weapon taut—a sharp line that cuts across her face, a threat all its own. Seething, the Magistrate angles his sword out—pointing it accusingly at Cobalt’s face.
“Persistent, stubborn thorn in my side!” he spits, taking a measured step toward her. “Tell me, dear girl, do you miss me so much? When ever will you quit?”
Cobalt’s face doesn’t change, a stony, pupiless mask of resolve and tenacity.
“The day I give in,” she charges forward, spinning her sickle in a flawless circle overhead, “is the day you fall!”
Rocketing off the ground, Cobalt throws her kusarigama with careful intent, precise and deadly as she’s always been. It slices into the Magistrate’s sword-wielding hand, and in the shock of the moment he can’t help but drop it, lowering his weapon and his guard all at once. Cobalt wastes not a moment’s time, charging the Magistrate and pulling him close by the neck of his kimono. Practically nose to nose, he lets one bleeding hand drip down into the cracks that festoon the desiccated ground, staring at her headlong.
“The heat,” he simmers darkly, through his teeth, “why isn’t it affecting you?”
Cobalt glares back, stalwart.
“You should know by now. I’m built different.”
She plunges her other hand to his breast and rips the amulet from his neck.
There on the precipice, Pink watches as Cobalt raises the thing skyward, crushing it effortlessly in her hand. It crumbles into glittering dust, looking like fresh embers as that same, inexplicable wind blows it away. All at once, they all feel it—the chill of all that heat, suddenly gone. Like being doused in cold water, thrown into the fallen snow. With one final gesture of unfaltering power, she reels just barely back and throws The Evil Magistrate to the floor, pointing her kusarigama blade-edge to his temple with righteous fury burning in her otherwise blank eyes.
“Any last words?”
Behind the Magistrate’s mask, she somehow knows he’s grinning.
“Coward.”
With that, he throws his good hand toward the ground, disappearing in a blast of purple smoke and tendrils. When she realizes he’s gone, Pink’s expecting Cobalt’s temper to flare in that charming way it always does—but instead she simply looks at the empty space where her mentor once was, the stain of his blood looking black against the dead desert grass.
“That makes two of us,” rasps the Crusader, hanging her weapon back at her hip.
Stilted, then, Cobalt hikes her shoulders high, scrunches her brow, and pulls her coif back over her hair. She offers a hand out to Steel as he lays there, which he takes with a grateful sort of confusion before being pulled roughly to his feet.
“Steel Samurai,” she spits, about as cordially as she’s able.
“You… have my thanks, Crusader,” Steel says back to her, clearly just as perplexed as Pink is at her sudden appearance. He looks as though he’s going to say more, but the blue-clad heroine splays a flat palm at his face, signaling him to speak no more. Cobalt had such a presence about her, when she told others to act in a certain way, they rarely had the guts to disobey.
“That’s quite enough of that,” she growls out, voice low and husky and sexy as hell. “I didn’t come here to rub elbows with the likes of you.”
If Steel is offended by this, he surely does not say. Pink doesn’t have time to meditate on that, nor does she have time to meditate on anything that just happened, the climactic end to that fight. No, Pink has no time to spare as she realizes that The Freakin’ Cobalt Crusader is walking directly toward her, stride strong and confident and hot as hell. Pink watches her hips sway—lost in the jingle of her chainmail singing—for a few seconds before scrambling to her feet, stumbling out of her alcove and toward the beautiful woman before her.
Legs still weak from the atmospheric assault, Pink just barely makes it across the divide to Cobalt before her feet tangle and her head swims and she falls directly forward into the heroine’s arms. Cobalt, of course, catches her—her chiseled biceps bathed in their sparkling azure as they shimmer in the sunlight. Pink fights with all she is not to nuzzle into the bends of Cobalt’s arms, feeling like her heart is stuffed full of candy-floss.
“It’s you!” Pink says, eyes aglow. “What are you doing here?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Cobalt softens, placing a gloved hand against Pink’s rosy cheek. “I came for you, my dearest. I had to see you once again.”
Heart hammering in her ears, Pink feels her legs give out again. Cobalt is so strong, so dashing, so bad, and so hot. What the hell is even going on right now? That she’d bend down to give an insect like Pink the time of day?
“Oh, my Crusader…” swoons Pink, melting into the heroine’s embrace and laying a palm flat against her chest, “this makes no canonical sense with the established timeline of the show.”
“Canon cannot shackle us here.” She curls a finger beneath Pink’s chin, raising her head and looking deep into the warrior’s vacant eyes. “Kiss me, Princess.”
They proceed to make out. A lot.
Maya snorts herself awake, her eyes feeling like they’ve been sealed shut with someone’s faulty secondhand two-dollar hot glue gun. The snort turns into a dreadful cough, and she feels the bed shift ever so slightly, and then there’s a hand in her hair smoothing out tangles and facing some notable resistance. Tutting fades into the aether, dreamy and nebulous in half-sleep, and Maya feels a bit like a baby bird in its nest, coughing up feathers and weighted down by the warmth.
“Poor darling…” fusses the voice, and Maya remembers it’s Franziska. “That fever of yours just keeps climbing, doesn’t it?”
“S’fine,” Maya mumbles, half-alive. “Waifu smashed the cursed amulet.”
There is a moment of pure silence, the room entirely quiet besides the whirring ceiling fan and Maya's stopped-up breathing. The fingers at her scalp cease. Franziska clears her throat.
“Who… is ‘Waifu’?”
“Nngh,” Maya says, helpfully, before finally managing to get her eyes open. As soon as the light hits her face she feels the headache twice as strong as it was before. “I’ll tell you later, fuck—”
She makes a half-hearted attempt to scoot further up, prop herself against the headboard. It works, mostly, but her whole body aches like she’s carrying the world on her shoulders, and Maya finds herself out of breath by the end of it. With no small amount of nauseated disgust does she realize she's soggy, sweat plastering her bangs uncomfortably to her forehead and dripping ice-cold down her back.
“How long was I out?”
“About three hours,” Franziska says, her novel folded and bookmarked at her side. “Truthfully, I was hoping you’d be able to sleep a little longer, but… was it at least pleasant?”
“Uh,” Maya says, clearing some of the gunk from her throat. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m gonna break that rule we have,” Maya says, “about not telling you about my dreams.”
Franziska had made it known—passionately so—that people explaining their dreams to her was a pet peeve to end all pet peeves. She wanted nothing less than for the various fools who walked the earth alongside her to espouse foolish tales their brains foolishly invented while they were unconscious. For so many things in life, she had scripts that she could memorize—practiced responses that she loathed just as much, but that she could at least fall back on if the glare she leveled at small-talkers did not clue them in.
Being told someone else’s dream had no practiced script. What did one even say to such nonsense? Oh, how she despised it, and oh, how she loved Maya.
“Very well,” Franziska says, scowling regardless. “But only because you are so unwell.”
“I just think fever’s a dumb fucking immune response.” She throws a hand out, exasperated. “Our bodies are like, aw shit there’s germs in here, let’s see who burns first, fucker! And we aren’t even the winners half the time but it works enough that we just keep evolving to do it. Dumbest shit in the world.”
“Maya.”
“Right, yeah.” She grabs approximately seven tissues from the box on the bedside table and blows her nose at a frankly illegal decibel. “I had a dream about the Steel Samurai.”
“You’re not convincing me.”
“For a hot second I thought I was watching an actual episode,” Maya says, throwing the bioweapon in her hand in the trash. “The bad guy kept heating up the sun. And, uh, it got weird at the end but I’m pretty sure my brain was trying to make sense of whatever the fuck my immune system’s doing while it’s off the shits.”
For a moment, Franziska is silent, no doubt attempting to navigate in her head the proper way to respond to this information. In the end, all she ends up doing is folding her hands politely on her lap and saying, “That happened to me once.”
Maya looks over at her. “No it didn’t. You don’t have sexy PinkBalt dreams.”
“Correct, those words are completely meaningless to me.” And yet, Maya can’t help but notice that she is smiling. “But I once came down with something dreadful the night before a rather important trial, and I dreamt the individual states of Germany were holding a vote to raise my body temperature by 1.5 degrees.”
What?
“What?”
“The vote passed, I awoke in a feverish tangle of blankets, and I was over my illness instantly,” she says, amusingly matter-of-fact. “Vielen dank, Bavaria und Baden-Württemberg.”
Maya’s head feels fuzzy. The ache in her temples is subsiding a little, at least. She wants to be semi-coherent. To comment on that in a way that is meaningful, thoughtful. To laugh at how on-brand it is for Franziska to have dreams about something so procedural and boring.
Instead, she stares feverishly into the void in the far-off middle space and says, “Germany has states?”
“Good lord you are American.” Franziska, exasperated, pulls out from under the covers and rounds the bed, kissing Maya’s temple slowly and sweetly. “Thank goodness for that beautiful face.”
“Beautiful enough that you’ll get me more Sports Drank?”
“How ever could I say no to you?”