The Jade Bangle (Miho Aiuchi)
| The Jade Bangle (Miho Aiuchi) | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 06 August 2023 |
| Location: | Pikarigaoka |
| Synopsis: | While picking out jewelry to make Miho look more feminine, Miho's mother gifts her a mysterious jade bangle. This is followed by a bad decision. |
| Cast of Characters: | Miho Aiuchi |
It was late evening in Pikarigaoka, in the neighborhood where Miho and Kurumi Aiuchi lived with their mother, Naoko Kagami. It was relatively peaceful, natch, with no sign of everything that was going to happen directly because of Miho's decisions that night.
Gender transitioning involved a great many things, and one of them was constructing a new sense of style. Miho had had a particular aesthetic before she came out to herself, which she now described as "trying too hard"; the process of getting a new look was something Naoko was now helping with just enough enthusiasm so as not to smother her "new" daughter, and right now, they were picking out jewelry from items which Naoko already owned.
Miho wrinkled her nose at a necklace with gaudy red beads. "Yeah that's, like, too shiny, and stuff," she said, adjusting her glasses. "I dunno if it'll fit the school uniform, either." She smiled faintly. "I mean I'm just being, y'know, a girl. Not, like, a princess, kind of thing." As usual, her voice was scratchy, and on the wrong side of androgynous. It was still a work in progress.
Naoko chuckled. "All right, Miho," she said. "Are you sure you want jewelry?"
"Oh! Uh, yeah, it's just." Miho shrugged. "I don't suppose you've got something ... simpler?"
Her mother considered this, then got up and went to the closet. Miho watched, curiously.
"You know," said Naoko, "I didn't think of it until you said 'simpler', but my aunt Setsuna found this in a box that was buried under a tree in Nishimura, eleven years before I got married."
Kurumi and I sometimes wish we still lived in Nishimura, it was a lot more quiet than Tokyo and the school was normal-sized instead of ginormous, Miho refrained from saying.
Naoko exited the closet with a small wooden jewelry box. "Apparently, it was made out of pure jade," said she, handing it to Miho. "She got it cleaned and all polished up, and then gave it to me as a wedding present."
Miho's parents had been divorced a year ago. She knew the significance in giving away a wedding present.
With a vague sense of ceremony, Miho opened the box.
Inside was a green bangle. Just a simple circle, wide enough to fit on her wrist.
She picked it up. Experimentally, she put it on her wrist —
Darkness. Black clothing with a capelet. Horns and a tail, and decades of agelessness. Duels with a teenage witch in a jade-green and white outfit.
Miho blinked.
"What do you think?" asked Naoko, who hadn't noticed anything.
Miho stared at the Jade Bangle for several seconds as the implications began to pile up in her mind.
"Yeah," she said finally, smiling faintly. "I think I'll take it!"
Once again, she felt weird about telling her mother this sort of lie of omission. But as she'd thought in Adachi: what was the alternative?
Half an hour later, Miho was in Penguin Park, staring at the bangle on her wrist. She biked over to a relatively out-of-the-way spot, a small cluster of trees she'd found the other day, all but hidden from the outside.
Miho took off her helmet, and peered at the bangle. "So, uh," she said softly, "like ... who are you?"
No response.
Miho considered this. It didn't seem to be "reacting" to any outside stimulus, per se. Miho could just catch glimpses through it.
Okay. Hm.
Somehow, her great-aunt Setsuna Kagami had found a magic bangle, with memories that had come from ... someone. Or from something.
Miho wondered at the timing. She'd only just learned that magic had existed the other day, when she'd gotten caught up in a Witch's machinations. Now she had a magical artifact dropped in her lap, by her mother? Who'd just been holding onto it for the past sixteen years, never realizing that there was anything magical about it? And her great-aunt had had it for eleven years with an equal lack of result?
(She would have been less perplexed if she'd known about the Fade. Her mother had gotten married at the age of twenty-nine, and her great-aunt Setsuna had been in her fifties when she'd originally dug it up.)
"Of course, there are other paths to magic," Kyubey had said the other day in Adachi.
Maybe magic just ... found you, once it had gotten a taste of you, and now that it had been dug up, it had to end up with someone, sooner or later. Her mother and great-aunt had presumably never met any Puella Magi or a weird talking white cat-rabbit-thing, or gotten mind-controlled by a gargantuan eldritch monstrosity born from curses and subsequently gotten rattled enough that her fears overrode her desire to HELP PEOPLE, DARN IT, AND NOW SHE STILL SHAKEN —
... Ugh. Miho made a mental note to apologize to Kyubey and Madoka at the next opportunity, and also to kill every capital-W Witch she saw.
At least, once she got her powers, whatever form that took. Miho focused her attention on the bangle.
It took several minutes. Miho wasn't skilled at magic; she just had "some potential", as Kyubey had put it. All she could do was turn the bangle over on her wrist, and in her mind.
Sometimes, mere contact with magic is enough to awaken your own.
At the end of her examination, Miho frowned, lowering her hand. Her poking and prodding had given her her three definitive facts.
First, there was a spirit sealed away inside this bangle. Second, it was some manner of dark spirit, but it had originally been human. And third, that spirit was dead. Very dead.
Miho sighed. Okay, this was going to be harder than she'd thought.
Maybe she could channel the spirit, with her vague fledgling powers?
A part of her thought that this was a bad idea. It was ... it was a dark spirit, wasn't it? Bluntly, everything she'd glimpsed unnerved her.
On the other hand, Miho Aiuchi was also unnerved by the prospect of walking up to someone and initiating a nice friendly conversation. She made a conscious decision to treat her fears as mere anxiety.
After all, this was a path to magic which didn't require making a contract, figuring out a good wish, or indeed interacting with anyone, and she'd been struck with hope.
She could do this on her own. Without anyone's help.
