Magical Girl Origins - Gravity's Heartbeat (Patreon)

Origin - One - Gravity’s Heartbeat

Shanti didn’t expect to spend her Saturday morning hiding behind an embankment with a tree, but there she was.

All she wanted was to head out and grab some junk food, maybe a soda or something. She had an allowance and intended to spend it. She had stepped out of the house, leaving her parents in their respective offices without saying goodbye, and started to cross the city.

The more touristy parts of Pokhara were always busy this time of year, but that also meant that the shops would all be stocked up.

She expected to maybe see a few clueless Americans and Europeans. What she didn’t expect to see was a group of tigers roaming the streets.

There were only supposed to be a couple of thousand of those left, or so she’d been taught at school. They were meant to be protected, held in zoos or something. They weren’t supposed to be walking down one of the side streets next to her highschool, they weren’t supposed to be dragging people by the scruff of their shirts, they weren’t supposed to be walking next to snakes, foxes and colourful birds, and they certainly weren’t supposed to be wearing clothes!

She poked her head around the embankment again, just enough to see what was going on.

The wild animals were pushing through the gates in front of the school. An elephant (where did that come from?) grumbled then used its trunk to pull the pin holding the gate open out of the ground, then it pushed the gate closed with its tusk.

A fox wearing a child’s neon jacket jumped up onto its hindlegs and helped latch the gate shut.

Shanti smacked her cheeks to wake herself up. This had to be a fever dream of some sort. Animals didn’t act like that outside of cartoons.

Carefully, she backed up and away from the wall. Something was going on, and it was going on inside of her school. So, she did the obvious thing and pulled out her phone. It was an old thing, one that her mom insisted that she carry around in case of emergencies.

She figured this counted.

With another peek at her school to make sure she wasn’t see ran off next to the entrance of a nearby home and hid while pulling her phone out. She dialled 100 and waited as the phone rang.

“Emergency services, how can I help you?” a woman asked on the other end.

Shanti leaned into her phone. “Yes, hello, um...” she froze. Would anyone believe her? Then again, her parents had always told her to say the truth, and adults would know that sometimes things were a little strange. “My school’s being invaded by walking animals.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s true. There’s foxes with clothes on, and tigers and an elephant. I know it sounds strange, but can you help me?”

“Miss, we don’t have time for prank calls.”

“It’s not a prank call! There’s a fox in a jacket from the 90s walking outside my school. They kidnapped people!”

The link clicked and went dead.

Shanti glared at her phone. That was ridiculous. They shouldn’t have hung up, even if it was a prank call, which it wasn’t, that was just bad etiquette.

“Fine then,” she muttered. She would have to do something about it herself, she decided. Her phone had a camera. She’d grab some proof and figure out what was going on herself.

Her heart beat faster than ever as she poked her head out and looked around. The coast was clear.

Fortunately, she knew her school. It was a fairly new building, added just a few years ago as the city grew. She was in one of the first classes to ever attend, and it was way better than the school she’d been to before.

Running as quick as she could, Shanti went around the front of the school with its open courtyard and hugged the exterior wall. There was a door that led into the gym, but she zipped past that one, then came to a stop next to the far corner. She poked her head around the bend, searched for any animals, then she darted over to a door at the back of the school. It was next to a set of dumpsters, with a small wall around them.

It was where the cool kids--notably, not Shanti--went to vape and hang out.

The doors at the back had electronic locks that would close them from the outside when classes were in session or when school was closed. It meant that if someone was late, they had to get in through the front office.

It, of course, only took a few weeks for everyone to figure out how to break through anyway.

She checked inside and down the corridor past the door. Still no animals, just rows of lockers and an unlit passageway. Shanti pulled back, then snuck over to the place where she knew the others hid their ‘universal lock.’

It was a coat hanger with some tape on it, pressed in close behind a dumpster. She grabbed it and went to the door, then jammed the ‘key’ into the crack. The electronic lock only lowered a little bar down across the door. It was relatively easy to flick the bar up, though it would fall back down.

That was, unless someone was pulling at the door, in which case it would jam, and all they’d need to do was wiggle the bar up while putting pressure on the door.

She stepped back as the door opened. “That was way too easy,” Shanti muttered before tossing the key aside. She glanced around, found  a decent-sized rock, and jammed it under the door, leaving it open a crack as she stepped in.

Walking through school after it was closed was... pretty normal, really. Both of her parents were teachers (professors, really) and so she’d spent a fair bit of time walking down school corridors after closing time. It was nice, in a way. Fewer people meant no crowds, and the place was nice and quiet, enough so that she could hear the ka-thump, ka-thump in her chest as she tried to stay quiet.

Now, all she had to do was discover where the animals were hiding, take a few pictures, then... actually, she wasn’t too sure where she was going with this plan.

She was in too deep to just pull out though, and something told her that she had to push forward with this.

Was it kind of stupid?

Yes, yes it was.

Was she doing it anyway?

Also yes.

“This isn’t like you, Shanti,” she whispered to herself.

The corridor ended in the school’s central hall. To one side of that was the cafeteria, with four stairwells in the corners of the hall leading to the corridors and classrooms on the second floor. The office was by the front of the school, on the opposite end as the cafeteria and diagonal to both the gym and their little theatre-slash-auditorium.

There were animals dragging people at the end of the hall, next to the offices and the main entrance and about as far from where she was as they could be. She hunkered down, pulled out her phone, made sure it was muted, then stuck it out around the corner and took a few quick pictures.

Then she backed up and looked at them.

They were a blurry mess, but she could kinda make them out. It wasn’t ideal though.

Someone screamed, and she flinched. That was right, those tigers had been carrying people with them. Then, as she paid attention, she heard someone talking in exactly the kind of tone someone wouldn’t use when addressing surprisingly smart animals.

“Worry not, fellow man! Your sins against the environment will be cleaned away soon!” A man’s voice, one that sounded close to laughter.

She pushed her camera around the corner and took another picture before bringing it back. Yup, there was a man there, in the kind of clothes she’d seen mountain-climbing tourists wearing.

Strange didn’t cover the half of it.

The animals, their captives, and the man all entered the gymnasium, and soon the coast was clear.

She hesitated. There was some proof on her phone, but would the police believe her now? Could she call the army instead? A zoo? Did they even have animal control that was equipped for Bengal tigers?

Shanti decided that she needed more evidence, and maybe more hints of what, exactly, was going on.

Entering the gym from the front would be stupid though, and the side door was very obvious. What was less obvious, she thought, were the bleachers on the second floor. There was a way to reach them from above too.

She glanced around the corner to make sure there wasn’t anyone, then she darted across the hall and up the stairs at a dead sprint. Her shoes clacked on the ground at the same fast beat as her heart, but she made it to the stairs without alerting anyone, then she slowed down and checked the upper floor.

The lights were all out, and it didn’t look like anyone had been through.

She didn’t run, because that would be a little too noisy and she was worried that people could hear her heart thumping already. Her nerves were on edge, her palms sweaty, and she felt like the corridor was subtly pulsing in and out.

Still, she didn’t turn back.

The door to the bleachers was, predictably, locked. She had to pull out her wallet, fish out her library card, and wiggle it between the lock and handle to get it to pop open.

Shanti considered whether the amount of doors she broke through that day was healthy or not, but she had other things to be concerned about.

Leaving the door open a crack, she slid into the section with the bleachers and carefully pulled the door closed behind her after making sure it wouldn’t lock up again.

With gentle, silent steps, she snuck around the many rows of seats looking down onto the main floor of the gym. The floor was separated into three volleyball courts, though when they had a big game it could be rearranged into a single one in the direct centre.

The animals were using the lines on the ground to split the room up. On one side were a dozen people, some of them clutching at wounds and cuts, others just looking a little dazed, and on the other, a few desks had been laid out with what looked like beakers and science equipment taken from the school’s lab.

Animals were roaming around. Foxes and wolves, a few large and rather colourful birds, a rhino which was so large she wasn’t sure how it had fit into the room, and even a few blackbucks. What caught her attention the most, though, were the tigers and wolves.

Mostly, that was because they were armed.

The big animals had jackets on, with rips and tears and obviously re-sewn sections that allowed them to fit on their non-human frames, but most of them also had guns.

Guns on metal mounts that circled their torsos and came out ahead of them. They were all pistols on little swivel mounts and with what she guessed were bite-activated bars connected to the triggers.

There was a lot more duct-tape involved in the mount’s construction than anyone would be comfortable with. But what really had her confused was...everything about that.

The biggest of the tigers was as long, from tail-tip to the end of its snout, as a car. It didn’t need a gun.

“Are you ready for the next one?” one of the tigers growled.

Shanti almost jumped out of her skin at the voice. It was unmistakably the tiger who spoke, the big one.

Talking animals that were human-intelligent.

She pulled out her phone and started filming. This was important.

“Yes, we’re nearly ready. Bring out the next one,” the man from earlier said.

A pair of sleek wolves walked over to the people and then grabbed the one who was slowest to back away by the leg. He was pulled over to the table with the beakers and science equipment.

Shanti watched in confused horror as a few more animals came up and held the man down, then the only human on the animal’s side picked up a large syringe and jabbed it into the man’s torso.

She gasped at the sudden violence, and her heart beat even louder as she watched the man scream and flail and turn into an animal.

It was horrific to watch. His arms and legs spun in on themselves and he twisted about until, with a scream, his hands morphed into hooves and his clothes went loose over his body.

Soon, the animals around the man backed up, and what was left laying there was an antelope with twisting horns and a braying, confused cry.

DO YOU HEAR THE WORLD’S BEAT?

Shanti eeped, and then stared with widening eyes as a few of the animals looked her way, then the rest followed their example and soon she was being stared at by everything present.

“Go back,” the tiger said to the man. “We’ll take care of the interloper. They might have contacted the authorities already.”

The man scoffed, then ran to the table and started tossing syringes into a duffel bag before he ran off. A few of the tigers and wolves ran with him.

“Get her,” the tiger roared.

Shanti spun around and started to run up the stairs to the exit, but her head spun and the world felt like it was shifting in and out in time with the thumping in her chest.

She stumbled and winced as her shin smacked against the next step up. Her phone went clattering away.

“Get her!”

YOUR SOUL KEEPS A FUNDAMENTAL FORCE IN CHECK. BUT WHAT IS POWER IF LEFT UNGUIDED? LET YOUR HEART GUIDE YOU. LET YOUR KINDNESS USHER IN A BETTER FUTURE, LET YOUR ANGER PILOT YOU TOWARDS JUSTICE. TRUST YOURSELF.

She turned. The animals closest to her were already on the steps, rushing up to meet her faster than she could move.

The voice in her head... that wasn’t the animal.

Her heart beat again, and this time she knew she wasn’t the only one to feel it. The animals twitched, the building felt like it pulsed.

A massive tiger, not the one giving the orders, but a larger tiger than any teenage girl should ever have to face, leapt up and reached for her with a paw bigger than her head. She saw white claws stretching out.

“Stop!” she shouted.

I AM PULSE, THE ARTERY OF YOUR WILL. TOGETHER LET US SHOW THE UNIVERSE YOUR HEART, GRAVITY’S HEARTBEAT.

Shanti’s heart stopped. She didn’t feel it anymore. It was still, quiet.

When she opened her eyes she found her outstretched hand gripped around a wand with a floating heart within its crook. She wasn’t dressed in the same clothes.

More concerning, the tiger was floating ahead of her, paws batting at the air with almost comical confusion.

Then her heart thumped, and everything grew so much heavier. The animal came crashing straight down.

“Oh, oh wow,” she said.

“Did I tell you to stop?” the tiger roared.

With an eep, she bounced to her feet and fled. She could figure out what all of that was later, once she wasn’t being chased by ravenous carnivores.

***