Aurora “escaped” not long after I left. I wonder if she was curious as to how the robots got “distracted by a noise.” That’s one of the reasons I enjoy robots: Most of them have one-track minds. They can’t get distracted or sidetracked, unless I actively give them higher processing power. A second good reason is that they won’t disagree, which is perfect in cases like this. It wouldn’t make sense to “let the magical girl go,” but the robots won’t say no. I’d gotten what I needed, anyway.

Aurora’s words stuck with me as I considered. No schemes, not yet, and not now. I could be so much more evil if I wanted to, but I could also be so much better. Redemption, essentially. Hmm. I wasn’t sure how to think about it. What would inspire that kind of… reaction?

As some more time passed, the thought refused to leave my mind. I was, of course, vaguely aware of other villains in the area. I didn’t interact with them much, as I much prefer the company of machinery, but I kind of knew them. It made sense the magical girls dealt with them too, but… something felt off.

I sent out robots again, every so often. Again, not really with a destination or purpose. Just… look scary, maybe break a few things, provoke a reaction. I didn’t really get any usable data, not at first. The magical girls just… defeated the robots as usual.

But then I zoomed out and noticed something… odd.

The past few months, ignoring my pause of around two or three weeks, had been consistent. I’d send out robots, and they would be destroyed by the magical girls quickly enough. But now… there was a noticeable, measurable delay. It was never more than a few minutes, but there was a delay.

It piqued my interest. What could be causing it? I berated myself for not keeping track of data from past years, but that tends to happen when you fight magical girls. Either stuff gets blown up in spectacular fashion, or it just ends up deleted due to seeming super useful at the time. If they were big shot superheroes these kinds of delays would be vital, but with magical girls… I mean, you know how they are. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories.

Just as a test, I sent out one group, every day, for a week. Same place every day, slightly different times, just to see what happened. The magical girls arrived every time to stop them, but the delay… was drastically lower on the weekends. An additional week confirmed it: there was a delay on weekdays. Then I laid off on the groups for a bit to regroup and consider.

Why would there be a delay on weekdays so specifically? I knew I couldn’t consider finding their secret identities from videos. Magical girls have some form of glamor meaning that, despite having no mask, nobody can really recognize their magic forms with their actual personas. Even ages are impossible to tell beyond “vaguely youngish,” which could honestly mean anything between like… 8 -25 or so? I’ve never measured it, but the point is that I can’t tell. So I had to think, and fortunately I was good at that.

Many possible thoughts formulated in my mind. Jobs perhaps, or maybe familiars or charms being unavailable. Maybe they live in other, nearby towns and have speedsters run them over or they teleport. It could be that they need to finish up with other, much stronger villains. I wasn’t offended, especially since I’d been essentially sending fodder for the past while.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just ask them, as they’d assume it was a trap. So I just started sending robots out essentially at random on weekdays. Semi-random times, since I knew once it got too late there was a much more noticeable delay, probably due to them waking up. But I sent them all over the town. Parks, banks, the school, harbor, so on and so forth.

That’s when I hit it.

On all the times when I sent the robots to the school, the magical girls appeared near immediately.

After that, everything started falling into place. There hadn’t been a delay before because it had been summer. There was a delay on weekdays, because they were in school. The delay must have been caused by them making an excuse to get out of class, or whatever. Additionally, while I couldn’t identify the magical girls by person, I could still see actions, personalities, so on and so forth. They all had a couple of quirks that didn’t seem right for someone above a certain age. They must have been children, or more specifically students, at the school.

After realizing this, putting all the dots together… I stopped.

I sat down.

And I thought.

…

What did I want to do with this information?

I stared at the board with all the information I’d collected on it. I was, admittedly, fond of the whole concept of the poster board with the red string and pictures. I’d made one in a room away from any scanners or cameras in order that only I would see it, with no recordings. I didn’t want anyone else taking this information from me.

But I still needed to figure out what to do with the information. I could have easily attacked the school directly to flush them out, but… Aurora was right. I didn’t really like civilian casualties, and that plan would be chock full of them. And, frankly, I did enjoy our little bouts. It was fun getting to stretch my mind to combat them, let alone whatever inventions I’d get directly from data obtained from the fights.

I knew other villains would be… well, overjoyed to get this kind of information. But I didn’t have any kind of love for them. If I gave this kind of information it would just cause destruction, and I wasn’t… very… interested…

A plan formulated itself in my mind.

I ripped the poster board down, yanking down the string, tearing up the pictures and graphs, and tossed it into the fire. Following that, I quickly went into my laboratory. I had to search around for a bit, but I finally found an old, unfinished invention of mine. I’d meant to finish it, but the magical girls had stolen what I’d been planning to use as a power source and I’d essentially let go of it. But maybe I could scrounge up something…

Several days later…

Aurora rolled out of the way, narrowly avoiding a massive laser beam from the void being. She cast another burst of ice as Flare incinerated a group of its minions.

“This isn’t working!” Ivy shouted. “This thing’s way too big!”

“We’ve just got to wear it down!” Aurora shouted back. “It can’t last forever!”

“Well, we can get tired too!” Aria and Ivy entangled and wove a mass of tentacles into one solid, extremely immovable mass. “And I hate to break it to you, but I’m getting pretty close to that point!” The first to notice the quintet of lights in the sky was Brevi, who prided herself in getting civilians out of the way quickly and safely.

“Uh, guys? Something’s coming, really fast!”

“Huh?” The other girls glanced up at the sky behind the void being, as the lights started forming into beings.. Curious at what caught their attention, the void being turned as well, only to get hit along its face by the frontmost… thing. It roared, only to get hit by the next four in quick succession.

The five lights, now clearly humanoid beings, landed in front of the five magical girls. They were clearly robots, but more intriguing were their appearances. They weren’t identical copies, but they were remarkably close to the magical girls. The front one, seemingly crafted after Aurora, looked over and saluted her.

“Aur0, reporting for duty.”