Madoka Kaname, Sheriff of Mexico, stood in front of a high-tech holographic projection screen thingie. At the conference table in front of her was Sayaka Miki, Kyoko Kaname, Crispina Gonzales, Asuka Langley Soryuu Miki, and cute little Nagisa Momoe (she was currently twenty years old and six feet three inches tall), all waiting for whatever she had to say.

Except Madoka forgot what she was going to say already. Damn, she had a really bad headache right now, too… Kyoko seemed to notice her lack of doing anything at all and got up, standing beside her.

“Sorry, she’s not feeling well,” Kyoko said. “Why don’t you sit down, Madoka?” Madoka shrugged and complied. She grabbed a Morning Rescue from a cooler and hoped it would, er, rescue her this morning...

“So are we gonna get to anything soon?” Sayaka asked, clearly about to start spacing out extremely soon. If they didn’t hurry, they would lose her completely, which happened more often than anyone liked to admit.

“Yeah, yeah, my apologies,” Kyoko said. “Okay, so we’re supposed to brief everyone on the current status of Operation Magical Girl, as we do every month.”

“Which one was that?” Sayaka asked in her absentmindedness, allowing for the readers to get some easy and organic exposition about what they missed in the gap between “Once Upon a Time in Madoka” and this story here.

“It’s our only current Operation, Sayaka,” Kyoko said. “How do you not remember?”

“I leave the remembering to Asuka,” she answered. It was true.

“Well, for the one person who doesn’t remember, we are currently trying to recruit as many magical girls to our cause as possible, and train the next generation of peacekeepers all across Mexico, and eventually the world. We now have a large number magical girls in our ranks, though most of them are pure newbies. So we are trying to find people to join our ranks, as well as people to help train the girls we recruit.”

Kyoko took a pack of Reese’s Pieces out of her pocket and began eating them. The conference room went silent as everyone waited for her to finish. Madoka put her head down, trying to get her headache to go away.

Finally, Kyoko finished and continued. “Okay, so to continue. Counting those of us in here, we have five magical girls who are adequately trained, and also El Guante for some reason because I guess he’s a good guy now. So that is literally just the people in this room, and El Guante.”

Asuka raised her hand. “Hey, um, you know that I’m still here, and you guys never made me a magical girl, right? I always wanted to be one…”

Sayaka then raised her hand. “How do we make magical girls without Kyubey anyway? It makes no sense.”

Kyoko raised her hand. “Hey, guess what? Shut up so we can keep talking about the report.” Everyone put their hands down. “Thank you. In addition to our extremely small roster of trained magical girls, we have recruited sixty-six new magical girls in the past twelve months, somehow, and none of which have received enough training to be able to operate on their own. This is a very bad thing for us. So uhh… I don’t know what Madoka was going to say after this. Madoka?”

Madoka, head still on the table, gave a thumbs up. “Good going so far, Kyoko.”

“That’s not…”

“I dunno, ask people for ideas.”

Kyoko looked around at everyone. “Okay, well… Does anyone want to give any ideas on how to fix our predicament?

Asuka once again raised her hand. “Make me a friggin’ magical girl already! That or give me a giant robot to pilot.”

“Noted,” Kyoko said. “Anyone else? Uhh… what about you guys, Crispina and Nagisa? You haven’t said anything yet.”

Crispina shook her head. “I don’t have anything to suggest.” She was usually pretty silent, though she was also usually pretty grumpy, so it was hard to tell if she actually had nothing to suggest or if she was being sarcastic about all the time-wasting that had been going on.

Little cutesy Nagisa stood up (and was then taller than anyone else in the room by far) and hopped with excitement. “I have a plan!” Which coincidentally is the title of the first song in Michael Guy Bowman’s newest album, “Hush”, which you can listen to on his Bandcamp page today.

“Oh yeah?” Kyoko seemed impressed by Nagisa’s enthusiasm.

“Yeah! We should bring Homura and Mami back to life so they can join us!”

Everyone in the room froze. Even Madoka looked up in confusion.

Sayaka burst out laughing. “What?”

Nagisa sat back down and huffed. “Well, I thought it was a good idea…”

Kyoko raised her finger and stopped for a moment. “Actually... “

“You can’t be seriously considering that, can you?” Sayaka asked her. “What, did you accidentally eat a pot brownie or something? Or on purpose eat a pot brownie or something?”

“Shut up Sayaka,” Kyoko said. “And yes, Nagisa’s idea sounds insane, but… Homura would be a very valuable addition to our team.”

“Except the fact that Homura never existed in the first place,” Sayaka said. “She was just a transformation of Kyubey used to fool us into almost getting the world blown up at Madoka’s wedding. Like, this is one of the most important plot twists in this series. Not only was she actually Kyubey, but she didn’t even have time travel abilities in the first place to help us out. Or, maybe she did but didn’t use them like she said she did. Or something. Yeah, I stopped trying to figure out the continuity there midway through ‘Madoka’s Birthday Wish.’”

Suddenly, Madoka stood up with all the vigor she had been lacking before. The Morning Rescue seemed to be working after all. “Then that’s why we won’t get back the Homura from this universe… We’ll travel to another universe and get the Homura from there!!”

Everyone gasped. Madoka closed her eyes, smiled, and tried to pretend that her hangover was gone despite the pounding headache.

Chapter 3

“No, no, stop.” Madoka opened her eyes and saw Asuka shouting. “You can’t just move onto the next chapter like that! You just had this insane idea to travel to another UNIVERSE with no explanations for how to do it, or really much of any justification for doing it in the first place. It makes no sense! You can’t just go to the next chapter like that. Why would anyone want to keep reading?”

Everyone stared at Asuka blankly. Sayaka, sitting next to her flicked her on the cheek. “Are you okay?” she asked her.

“If you need a break or something, feel free to use the restroom or go get a soda or something like that,” Kyoko said.

“I, uh…” Asuka stammered. “No, I’m good. Keep going, Madoka.”

“Alright,” Madoka said. She closed her eyes and smiled again. They were finally going to do something extraordinary, and she felt so excited.