Magical Girl Origins - Phantom Mist (Patreon)

Origin - One - Phantom Mist

Today, they were hanging out at one of the cricket fields just a couple of blocks down from the apartment her family lived in. This wasn’t one of the nice parts of Cape Town, but it wasn’t the worst either.

Neliswa knew these streets as well as any girl. She knew who to avoid, when to keep her head down, and that using any sort of public transport was as good as kissing her ass goodbye.

She only wished that her moronic little brother knew that much too.

A few weeks ago she caught him talking to some boys who weren’t any good. The sort that flashed their wealth and their criminal ties with equal ease.

There was nothing good that could come from making friends like that. The best thing to do was knuckle down, shut up, mind your own, and work hard.

She’d seen it work, she’d seen some people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They didn’t go far, not in Cape Town, but there was better to be had than a life on the streets. Which is why, when she caught her brother, she was going to beat his hide until it glowed for wasting her time.

Neliswa perked up as the guys hanging out by the cricket field picked up their stuff and started to head out. She followed, of course. Staying out of their line of sight when she could and keeping around corners when that was tricky.

Years of living on the city’s edge, with a few run-ins with troublesome sorts, had taught her to keep a good eye on her surroundings. Some called her a bit twitchy, but they shut up after she gave their shin a good workout.

The idiots were heading further out of the nicer part of the city and towards the coast. That wasn’t a good thing. The coast was all docks and warehouses near this end of the city, and while it might be easier to find hidden nooks to spy on the guys from, it would be a lot harder to blend in.

There was security too, out by the warehouses. Not saps, but company security guys who didn’t blink at the idea of beating loiterers up.

HERE

Neliswa walked with her head low and kept her steps quick, never lingering while also staying at a decent distance from the gang of thugs. They were about as observant as the typical thug, so it really wasn’t much of a challenge.

At least, not until they filed into a warehouse right on the edge of the docks. It stank of fish and diesel and Neliswa had to duck behind cover as one of the guards standing by the building started to turn her way.

She tapped her fingers in a rapid beat against her thigh as she considered what to do next. Going in the front was right out. She didn’t look like one of the thugs, not even one of the very few female ones.

So, that left either going back home and sulking while watching TV, or she could do something stupid. “His ass is going to glow when I’m done with him,” she growled as she got ready to do something stupid.

The warehouse was pressed right up to another similar building, with barely more than a dozen centimetres between their rusting tin walls. The one past the warehouse looked like it was in-use, but another seemed nearly abandoned.

It took a few minutes, but Neliswa went around, sticking to alleys and squeezing between shacks until she was behind the warehouse next to the one where the thugs had gone. There was a door at the back which was locked, at least until she found a length of pipe, jammed it between the door and wall, then pried open a hole just big enough for her head to fit in.

If her head could fit, so could the rest of her, after a bit of squeezing and contorting herself. The interior of this warehouse was entirely unlit, but her eyes adjusted to the darkness soon enough, and there were enough pin-prick holes in the roof to let in a tiny amount of light.

She crept around, found a staircase leading up, then winced with every creak and groan of the metal beneath her feet. Finally, though, she was on the topmost floor of the warehouse. She had noticed something about the building the thugs had entered. It wasn’t as old as some of the other places in this section of the docks, and it had windows on its second floor.

It didn’t take long to find a window in the warehouse she was in that lined up more or less with a window on the warehouse next door. Using the same length of pipe she’d used to pry the door open, she cracked the peeling paint keeping the window sealed, then leveraged it open.

From there, she managed to climb onto the window sill and hang off the side of the warehouse to reach the other’s window. That meant half of her was hanging over a four metre drop into a thin slice of an alleyway, but she had given up on being afraid of mundane things like height a long time ago.

The thug’s warehouse window was, of course, locked. She considered what to do for a long while. The room behind the window was dark, a small office space of some sort that looked like it was collecting dust. There was a thin sliver of light coming from under the door in that room, but she imagined it wasn’t quite as much light as she’d see if the room beyond was well-lit.

So, the office led into a corridor, or another room, which itself led to wherever there was light.

The rhythmic thump of a bass was coming from within, and she caught a scent in the air that she recognized as cannabis. There wasn’t a party going on, she didn’t think. It was too early for that, and not nearly loud enough.

Still...

She couldn’t open the warehouse window from the outside, even if it was newer. The window had a little plastic lock keeping it shut from within.

That lock had to go.

Still with her pipe, she aimed for the corner of the window, then struck with the end of the pipe.

The window clunked, and she pulled back, eyes shut. She opened one eye and stared at the unbroken window. “What?”

She hit it again, harder this time, and it still didn’t break.

Now a little annoyed, she jammed the end of the pipe where it was squished a little into the windowsill and using the sill of the window she was hanging out of, leveraged the window to the side while she hoped that it would crack and break.

Instead of the glass breaking the windowsill did.

“What the hell,” she muttered as the window wobbled in place, detached on one side from the wall it was encased in. The window, it seemed, was tougher than the wall it was placed in. Shaking her head, she shoved the entire window back and slithered across the gap of the alleyway and into the office. The window frame scratched at her back, but it was far less noisy than her original plan.

Once inside the office, she stood, unlocked the window itself, and brought it up, allowing some fresher air into the room and opening up an easy way out for later.

The place needed some fresher air. Cape Town didn’t exactly smell nice at the best of times (too many boats, and the air currents inside the bowl were a little strange), but at least the air wasn’t stale.

Neliswa walked with very careful steps across the room and to the door at the far end. She didn’t want to make the floor creak if she could avoid it.

The music was louder within the warehouse, so she wasn’t too worried, but the last thing she wanted was to get caught. She reached the door without making much noise, then checked the handle to see that it wasn’t locked.

Opening it just a tiny bit, she peeked out into a corridor that didn’t seem any busier than the office she was in.

The music was louder though, and while the corridor wasn’t lit, there was light streaming into it from elsewhere.

She poked her head out and scanned from side to side. Another door was open, and the light seemed to be coming from there.

Leaving the door open just a crack, she tip-toed across to the next room over. It was another office, but this one had a large window against the far wall that overlooked the warehouse’s main floor. One of those windows was broken, allowing sound to spill through. The lights within the warehouse, hanging from the ceiling, were tall enough to splash some light into the space.

She crawled over to the wall, then carefully rose up until just the top of her head was poking above the lip.

There were, at a count, about twenty guys and a few girls below, all of them clearly thugs of one sort or another. Most of them were hanging out in clumps, chatting with beers in hand, or sitting on ripped-up couches and staring at their phones.

A laptop off to one side was plugged into a set of oversized speakers thumping along to some bass-boosted amapiano. No one was dancing along, but the music did seem to fit the environment.

Neliswa searched for her brother, but there was no one like him below, just a lot of morons minding their own business. She worried that she’d just broken into the wrong place, and was considering standing up to leave when a commotion started below.

A few thugs walked in with some urgency, and the mood shifted. People jumped off the couches and a few older guys came in. Some of them were in suits and ties, and she had the impression she was looking at a higher class of criminal than just common street bangers.

One of them was decked out, with two guys standing by his side who were clearly bodyguards of some sort. He looked around the room, then zero’d in on the laptop. “Someone shut that noise off,” he snapped.

Someone ran over to turn the music off and the room went quieter as the speakers shut off. People moved to the sides, and another pair of thugs came in with a large crate between them. They set it down with a heavy thump, then opened it up.

Neliswa watched with mounting confusion as they started pouring sand out of the box onto a tarp in the middle of the floor, then they started placing little statues down in a circle on the sand. She couldn’t tell what the statues were of, or what they were really up to, but the room was relatively quiet except for some shared murmurs.

The air started to shift, twirling about and whipping at clothes and sending the sand spraying across the room. Some of the people below shouted, but the older guys just stayed put.

People started to appear, first one, then two, then finally a third. Ghostly figures who glowed a faint blue and whose feet hovered above the ground without touching it.

Neliswa had an interesting relationship with magic. When she was young and being raised on Disney shows playing on pirated satellite, she wanted magic to be real. Then she grew older and wiser and cast that aside, only for the world to twist around as it so often did and reveal what she’d dismissed to be true. She’d seen the videos of the magical girls and the magical things they fought, and she wasn’t sure what to think of it all.

It was all so, so far away. Like the miracles that happen in the movies, it was a thing for Hollywood and the places she’d never see, not Cape Town.

She supposed this was the world twisting under her one more time.

The ghostly figures collected themselves, turning into sharper, more distinct people.

Pirates.

There was nothing else they could be. The one in the centre was a large, rotund man with a huge beard and crooked teeth set in an evil grin. His clothes were ancient and decrepit, as were the swords hanging by his hips and the musket stuffed down the front of his coat.

The others weren’t better. One even had an eye-patch. They were caricatures of pirates, and she would have dismissed them as a joke if they weren’t also ghostly figures and if the thugs downstairs weren’t taking them so seriously.

“Hello,” the well-dressed thug said.

“We’re not summoned for pleasantries,” the pirate’s leader said. “We’re here for the new crew.”

“And we have them. If you have our end of the bargain?”

The pirate growled, then he gestured to the ghost next to him. That ghost twisted in on himself, then when he rematerialized, it was with a small chest in hand. He passed it to the ghost in charge who opened it and reached in.

Metal clinked, and Neliswa held her breath at the sight of gold.

“Fresh off your own shores. Old Dutch gold,” the man said. He closed the chest and let it drop before him where it landed in the sand with a thump. “Spend it while ye can.”

All three ghosts laughed, and Neliswa fought back shivers.

The leader of the thugs gestured and an underling ran out of the room. There was a pause, which Neliswa used to consider what to do. Call the cops? That... seemed a little mundane. Besides, they wouldn’t do anything.

Neliswa had to hold back a gasp as the underling returned. He had a few thugs with him, and between them, a line of prisoners. Young boys and girls, trudging along with their hands zip-tied together.

She saw her brother, third from the front, sporting a black eye and split lip.

“Good! The pirate haven of Atlantis needs fresh souls,” the pirate captain said.

“No,” Neliswa whispered.

YOU CAN SAVE HIM.

She gasped and spun around, thinking that she’d been made, but the voice hadn’t come from there.

YOU CAN SAVE MANY. FOR EVERY FORCE OF GOOD, THERE MUST BE ONE WHO SHOULDERS THE DUTY OF DOING WHAT MUST BE DONE. THE EVIL WITHIN WHO CASTS UPON THE EVIL WITHOUT.

She looked around some more, but no, she really was alone.

NEITHER OF US ARE SPEECHMAKERS. NOR ARE WE FOLLOWERS.

“Who are you?” Neliswa asked.

I AM MIASMA. YOUR WEAPON, SHOULD YOU CHOSE TO WIELD ME. TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. TOGETHER, WE CAN CREATE A FUTURE WHERE CRUELTY ONLY LIVES WHERE YOU WILL IT TO.

Neliswa glanced over the wall again. The ghosts grabbed one of the children and pulled. She watched as a ghostly image of the child was ripped out of their body, a body which flopped to the ground, unmoving and unbreathing.

“Look,” she said. “I’m not one for magic and shit, but if it’ll let me save my brother, then yeah, sure, you’ve got me, alright?”

WE HAVE EACH OTHER. SCATTER, MAGICAL GIRL PHANTOM MIST, AND LET LOOSE THE FOG OF WAR.

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