It's a few hours since class has let out. A desperate Puella Magi might be out hunting about now, and there's certainly enough reason to be desperate, but that's not what Homura's doing. She's not out looking for Witches because she knows that there's nothing to find. She is looking for someone in particular though, and she isn't alone. Madoka is with her.
The two of them wander down a sidewalk in the streets of Mitakihara. Homura is obviously looking around, trying to find one red-haired Puella in particular.
Homura's currently in a suit. It's a little different than the suit she used to wear when she worked with WPS, but it might be hard to tell the difference if one doesn't pay too close attention. Black slacks and jacket, white shirt, and purple tie. Her black hair is down, waving behind her as she walks.
"Careful, Madoka-chan. You know how Kyouko-san can be," she speaks in a low voice, but not quite a whisper. "Still... this conversation is going to happen sooner or later. No point in putting it off.
Homura's purple eyes are looking up, scanning rooftops and light posts since Kyouko likes to perch on those.
Madoka is also wearing a suit, a pink jacket and pants worn over a white shirt and a red tie that matches the ribbons in her hair. It was probably expensive considering how well fitted it is to her figure.
She looks around as well as she walks with Homura, keeping an eye out and also peeking over to her girlfriend from time to time, especially when the light catches her hair just right. "I don't think it's Kyouko-san we have to worry about right now... once she learns what's happening I don't think it's you or me she's going to be angry with." Her eyes turn upward for a moment before adding, "If we're not getting desperate yet I don't think she should be."
A moments pause and a slightly embarrassed look, "Though she is probably sharing with Sayaka-chan..."
"Well, ain't you two lookin' fancy."
That greeting is indeed called from somewhere above, Homura's well-honed knowledge of her fellow Puella Magi gleaned over countless time-loops proving accurate again. Kyouko is crouched on top of a lamp-post along the street, past where the two have already walked- she must have jumped down from somewhere higher a moment ago after they had gone by. She's in henshin, and her spear rests across her knees as she balances effortlessly on the pinnacle of the light, the long ruffled tail of her jacket hanging down beneath her.
"Is there a party I didn't get invited to, or is it somethin' else you think is gonna make me mad when I hear it?" The doesn't look mad now, her expression nonchalant, if anything, though there's a predatory mien about her which is a bit more intense than usual- likely unrelated to the present company, though one can never be certain.
"She probably isn't desperate, but since I don't keep tabs on her I don't really know." Homura stops in her tracks the moment she hears Kyouko's voice. She turns on the ball of her foot, looking up to find the red-haired Puella... roughly where she expected to.
"There was a pocky sale. You missed the whole thing." She delivers that in complete deadpan. "No, actually I wanted to talk to you about something else. It's about the Witches. I'm sure you've noticed it already."
She rests her hands in her pockets, looking up at Kyouko and standing close to Madoka. "Kyubey had a chat with us. He said a lot of stuff about working with men with suits and how we've been breaking the rules and other things... but most important to all of us is this: He doesn't intend to make any more Puella until you and I are dead. Possibly Sayaka-san, Madoka-chan, and Mami-san too."
A nonchalant pseudo compliment from above?
Madoka stops walking and half turns, closing her eyes and tilting her head up in the direction of the voice while twisting and lifting a hand to wave, "Hi, Kyouko-san!" She pauses momentarily when her eyes open and take in the stance and general look about her.
A giggle is suppressed at Homura's joke and Madoka nods in agreement with her words, turning the rest of the way around and holding her hands together at chest height. "Kyubey... he's not content to let things keep going as they have been. He's really decided to be our enemy from now on, even more than he already was."
She takes in a breath and lets out a small sigh, "There's something else, too. He said he was going to recruit allies to fight for him, that 'people in suits' were willing to sacrifice each other for some kind of gain. Homura-chan thinks he was talking about Eclipse, but we have to be very careful from now on either way."
Kyouko narrows her eyes at Homura, because surely if there was a Pocky sale she would have heard about it.. her conbenie sells Pocky! It would have been in the sales records! But no.. that is revealed as a jest. Just as she had suspected.
She doesn't have too much time to feel good about that, though, as Homura launches into the next revelation. It's clearly not a shock to Kyouko, as she doesn't look in the least surprised.. instead twisting her mouth into an expression which best conveys.. disappointment, perhaps. "Tch.. I thought maybe he had somethin' to do with it. He didn't tell me right out, but he made a lot of vague-sounding threats at me the other day."
"I took a little trip to the surrounding towns.. doesn't seem like he's lyin'. Ain't no Witches to be found anywhere within 300 miles of Tokyo, near as I can tell." Her expression shifts into a slight smirk. "Still.. going that far just for us? I almost feel flattered. Seems a bit silly though.. there must be hundreds of Puella in the world. He gonna let all of 'em go just to get at two troublemakers? Seems short-sighted, an' I never known Kyubey to be short-sighted."
She eyes Madoka as she talks about 'men in suits'. "I don't doubt Eclipse would leap at the chance to gain from what Kyubey knows, but I dunno what he'd get out of it. Still.. I guess I ain't sure what he'll do if he's willing to go this far. I'd say this is a first, but I dun really know. Maybe he purges the system every couple decades and we just got unlucky."
Homura shrugs. Yeah, the two of them have mucked up Kyubey's plans in several ways,, but Kyouko does bring up a good point. It's a lot of trouble for the two of them. The part about Kyouko checking up on other towns is interesting, though. "I thought it had something to do with the Witch secret getting out, but I find that hard to believe. I know at least three non-Puella know about that, and from the way Puella started to turn faster afterwards I'm assuming that word got out one way or another."
She waves her hand in the air dismissively. "Basically, killing us won't fix that problem, and he should know that, so I have no idea what his real issue is. Frankly at this point I don't care. What's more important is what we're going to do."
"Right now, our plan," she gestures to herself and Madoka, " is to do whatever we can to survive and buck Kyubey's system. Madoka and I have decided not to feed Kyubey any more Grief Seeds. We've also decided to conserve energy whenever possible. I figure if you lasted so long without your powers we should be good for a while."
Madoka looks down and shakes her head when Kyouko says she noticed something was up, "I was hoping it was just a break, that they were thinning out. It was... kind of nice to not have to worry about people being attacked by Witches for a while."
When Kyouko talks next about being almost flattered Madoka's head lifts, and her expression has changed. Kyouko might not have seen this side of Madoka before; her eyebrows are lowered and she looks stern, resolute. "It's because we're winning." She sounds very sure of herself. She looks over to Homura and nods a few times as the dark haired Puella explains their plan before turning her soft pink eyes back to Kyouko, her hands resting on her hips.
"He said his system was working for tens of thousands of years before us, but now he has to intervene. This may be the first time he's ever been put so far off balance, and it's all because of us, Kyouko-san." An inclusive 'us', encompassing Kyouko and likely Puella not even present as well. "It's his system he's worried about, but now there are Veteran Puella Magi that can survive years, learn the truth, and inform the others. We've already broken one of his 'rules', and now I'm to break the rest of them, too, as I can."
She takes a few steps closer towards Kyouko's lamp post, "We've been working for him for too long, all of us have. It's not going to be easy, but I'm done doing things his way."
Madoka looks back over to Homura for a moment before retrieving a Grief Seed from her pocket, half used. "We're not going to give these to him any longer, and-" She cuts off mid sentence, "He's probably listening to us right now. We should talk where he can't hear us." Her gaze flicks quickly over to Homura, out of the corner of her eyes.
Kyouko mostly just nods in agreement with Homura, who seems to have a lot of the same feelings she does on the issue, although Homura's disdain for Kyubey is a lot more deep-seated than Kyouko's own. She quirks a brow in a sardonic manner at Madoka though, as the pink-haired girl gives her little speech.
"There ain't no 'winning' this game, Madoka-chan. Frankly, I don't see how us knowing the truth makes a whit o' difference. We still gotta hunt Witches, whether we know where they come from or not, and we can't warn girls we've never met not to make a wish, so he still has plenty of potential Puella to choose from. Maybe it's an annoyance to him that Homura and I have managed to beat the odds as long as we have, or that you can.. do yer thing with Witches, but I just don't see it bein' more than a blip on his plan. After all, none of that actually changes anything, at least from his perspective. We may have lived longer than usual but we're not immortal, and he is. He could just wait- we'd die eventually."
"There's gotta be more to it. I'd say he was bein' petty, but he's s'pposed to be all emotionless and stuff." A shrug of her shoulders. "Sounds like a lot of BS to me, what he told you, but the truth is it don't really matter. Situation is happenin' regardless of the reasons and it's gotta be dealt with. Kunzite and Mamoru said the same thing- that we shouldn't give the spent seeds to Kyubey anymore. Seems fine, though I'm not sure what it'll accomplish in the long run."
"You don't have to worry about me.. I have.. methods of surviving that Kyubey can't do nothin' about. I'm more worried about Saya-chan." She sighs. "And, just so you know, Mamoru and my bros are pretty convinced that the world is going to explode within a few weeks unless Fiore is stopped, so that's kinda priority number one right now. Like I told 'em, I've got enough seeds to last that long at least."
"That little plant guy is causing that much trouble?" says Homura. She remembers hearing about flower things on the news, but she didn't really link that to a potential apocalypse. To think that this was going on and Homura was only barely aware of it. She has been pretty busy lately. "Well... it wouldn't be the first time."
Did Kyubey feed them a line of crap? Probably. It wouldn't be the first time for that, either. Homura wouldn't trust that rat for anything, and even when she was explaining it to Kyouko she thought Kyubey might be twisting things around.
"Honestly, that depends on how you define winning. You can always set your goals so high that you'll never reach them. I don't really think that outlasting an immortal, unkillable pest is really that important in the long run. I'm only concerned about staying in the game, and making sure those I care about also stay in it. We all die eventually, but that doesn't mean we have to die today."
She frowns, looking down and away. "It's... unfortunate that this happened while Fiore was attacking Earth. I... don't really think I can afford to fight unless it's necessary."
Kyouko's lackluster response to her words takes some of the wind out of Madoka's sails, and she gives the redhead a surprised look for a moment or two. "There isn't if you've already given up and decided you lost." She lifts her chin a little, "If it was just an annoyance he wouldn't be acting so desperate. This is the first time Kyubey has ever changed the way he approaches Puella Magi in all the time Homura-chan has known him." This is stated as simple fact, as if she knows it to be true.
She smiles a little as Mamoru is mentioned, "You're forgetting something, Kyouko-san. Even if we all die, all the friends we've made will still be here. Not everyone has the potential to become a Puella Magi; if they did Kyubey's job would be easy, and there'd be swarms of Puella Magi and more Witches than we could know what to do with. I think if he let us all die Mamoru-kun, Hannah-chan, Usagi-chan, Haruna-chan, and all the others would make it very hard for him to find anyone with potential that didn't already know the truth."
Now Madoka shakes her head again, "I'm not saying I think we've won already, but I think he has to react so strongly something we've done instead of the other way around for the first time in probably a very long time. Maybe ever."
Of course Kyouko has news of something that is even more dire the potential death of all of Madoka's Puella friends; the potential deaths of everybody else as well. Her eyes widen momentarily, "Fiore? Who's Fiore? How is the world going to explode?!" Even if Madoka is completely certain on some things she's clearly not omniscient!
"Well, it ain't so much Fiore himself as the evil alien plant-monster he works for," Kyouko says in response to Homura's disbelief, "But apparently if we take him out, said plant monster ain't got the ability to dig its roots in anymore, so." A shrug of her shoulders. Pretty nonchalant considering she's talking about the destruction of the planet, but eh, in some ways its just another Thursday.
"I guess that's true." She says, to talk of winning. "I ain't plannin' on dying anytime soon, so I guess you could consider that winning.. although it also depends on what sort of game you're talkin' about. Personal loss aside, world might be a better place if Kyubey never made another contract, even if it means we all die. Might be worth that price, y'know?" She laughs, showing fang, and shrugs. "Still, I ain't gonna die if I can help it."
She still regards Madoka as if the girl is helplessly naive, but she doesn't refute her points, just shaking her head. "Well, like I said.. his reasons ain't really important. What is important is doin' something about it before things get desparate." She meets Homura's eyes for just a moment. "Cuz we know that ain't gonna be pretty." There's no threat in those words.. just a knowing. They may be exchanging words civilly enough at the moment, but if things get really desparate, all bets are off.
"Don't worry about Fiore." She says to both Homura and Madoka. "He'll get handled." She doesn't say 'I' or 'we' will handle him though, because despite her talk of 'other means' of surviving, the truth is she's just as concerned with conserving energy as the rest, at least for the moment, though honestly there's little point if the earth explodes.
Homura suddenly looks embarrassed as Madoka asks who Fiore is. One might suspect that she didn't want to tell Madoka about the kidnapping, but the truth is that Homura just completely forgot to mention him. She just forgot to mention a potential world-ending threat. Oops.
"He's... an old friend of Mamoru's who was mind-controlled by an alien plant. He's from outer space, apparently? He has plant powers, a bit unstable... I actually don't know him that well."
Would the world be better off without Puella Magi? Well, that's an obvious yes. Clearly they would be. It's true that a handful of them have helped save the world before, but it's also true that their Witches could threaten the world. They're about as much of a threat as they are a benefit. Like all things, it zeroes out.
"I'm sure Kyubey wouldn't see it that way. He's often claimed that Puella Magi were necessary for human progress, that humanity wouldn't be where it is without us. I wonder how true that actually is." She flips her hair out behind her. "That said, I wouldn't mind if he stopped taking advantage of unsuspecting girls. I just want to make sure that if we do get wiped out, we're the last ones ever."
She looks up at Kyouko, frowning. "Don't forget. If Sayaka-san turns into a Witch, Madoka-chan is the only one who can fix it. I won't pretend that our lives will be easy, but I'm not looking for a fight."
Evil alien plant monster. Well, that explains the whole world exploding bit easily enough for Madoka. Homura explains about Fiore and Madoka frowns, eyes turning sad for a moment, "So many people being used against their wishes. Poor Mamoru-kun... he's seen enough of that for several lifetimes already."
Kyouko brings up the point that the world might be better off without Puella. "You're not wrong. A world without any Witches might be worth a world without Puella Magi, but I wouldn't trust Kyubey to let it stay that way for very long. I think if we could convince him we were willing to let things return to the way things were before he would, but I don't intend to sit by while he lures innocent girls in with dreams and wishes and tortures them until they lose their minds and become monsters."
Madoka's gaze goes up to Kyouko again as she mentions things getting 'really desperate'. She takes another step forward, and one to the side, slightly in front of Homura. "You should really know better than that by now, Kyouko-san. There's no point at all in that kind of desperation; if it came to that neither of you would even have a Grief Seed fight over, and you'd waste more magic trying to catch her than she would running away if she didn't want to fight you, anyway."
Her lips turn down into a slight frown, only for the pink-haired girl to take in a breath and let it out slowly. When she speaks again it's in a softer tone, "You once told Homura-chan to forget about the Kyouko's she'd known before, that none of those were you, do you remember? I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I don't think you understand Homura-chan nearly as well as you think you do anymore. The worst of the bitterness and anger she felt towards you- she doesn't have that anymore, it's gone; I took it from her." A small shake of her head, "Homura-chan hates infighting almost as much as I do. She wouldn't fight another Puella Magi unless they forced her to, and she has no reason to go after anyone. That's just a waste of energy none of us can afford, now more than ever."
Kyouko shrugs her shoulders in an almost carefree manner. "Life's never been easy, Homura. I wasn't thinkin' it was gonna be now, either." She eyes Madoka as the girl goes off on another speech about goodness and stuff. "Look, I appreciate what you're sayin', and you're not my enemy, Madoka-chan. But, just like you say I dun know Homura as well as I think I do, you should be aware there's a lot you don't know either.. 'bout me, and a lot of other stuff."
Her red eyes narrow slightly, though the expression is more stonily determined than threatening. "I'll tell you the same thing I told Kyubey. I'll do what I have to do. I'm sure that goes for any of us- when the chips are on the table, all bets are off. I'll do what I have to do for myself.. and for Saya-chan."
Then she laughs, tossing her head so her long red ponytail sways behind her. "I'm never lookin' for a fight, Homura. But they always seem to find me anyway." With that said, she turns and leaps from the lamppost, vanishing in a moment up into the shadows alongside the buildings in the deepening dusk.
'I'll do what I have to do for myself.. and for Saya-chan.'
Madoka's expression shifts at that as well. For once she's blunt and direct, shouting after Kyouko as she leaps away, "Sayaka-chan isn't stupid! If you kill someone or doom anyone to get a Grief Seed for her you might as well save her the trouble of Witching and kill her with your hands instead of your actions!"
Homura frowns at Kyouko's back as she vanishes, and then turns to Madoka with a deeper frown. Would Kyouko go that far? Kyouko's crazy as hell and doesn't mind fighting to get her way, but would she really...?
It occurs to Homura that she's never seen what happens when Kyouko gets desperate for Grief Seeds. Especially not desperate for someone else's sake.
With a sigh, and a shrug, she comments after Kyouko leaves. "Well. I don't know what I was expecting." It's not as if telling Kyouko was going to change much.