Madoka walked into the training hall of the Magical Girl HQ, which was aptly named because it was the place where all of the magical girls in Mexico went to mix and mingle and improve their skills. Right now, several interesting OCs and blatant recolors were performing warm-up exercise as their teacher, the reformed villain El Guante, instructed them.

“Hey El Guante,” Madoka said, waving.

El Guante raised his machine gun/hand and waved back. They had their spats in the past, like when she pursued him all across the country and he shot her in the knee and all that fun stuff, but… he was okay now. Kind of. She tried to pay attention to something else before she got the urge to attack him again (It happened about once a week already).

Behind her were her friends and comrades Sayaka and Nagisa. Sayaka had Magical Girl Trainee inspection duty for today, so she was supposed to be here anyway, but Nagisa was here to meet with Madoka because she was just as overeager as she was tall. And there she stood, bright, ready, and dressed in her cute orange magical girl outfit. Madoka almost felt embarrassed she was still in her sweatclothes. Not enough to care though.

“Yo Madoka,” Sayaka said. She had a clipboard in her hands, and she was supposed to be filling out how the trainees were performing and all that, though Madoka was sure she filled it all out in advance, complete with meticulous detail in order to look like it was legitimate. Sayaka put a lot of work into slacking off, you know. “Where are we headed?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you,” Madoka said. “We’re going to my lab!”

Nagisa cocked her head to the right. “You have a lab?”

“Uh, I made it last night. It’s nothing special.” Another pink-haired magical girl walked by towards the vending machine against the wall. Her magical girl outfit looked almost exactly like Madoka’s back when she was a middle schooler, and if she had her hair tied in pigtails, she’d probably be a very suspicious doppelganger, but luckily, she had it in twintails. Very unique. Man, there were actually several trainees that had pink hair and frilly costumes. It was as if nobody outside the main cast could have any amount of originality but into them whatsoever...

“Hello? Madoka? Anyone home?” Sayaka was waving a hand in front of Madoka’s head.

“Oh, sorry.” She must have zoned out there for a moment. “But yeah, step inside my office,” she said, bowing and presenting her lab. She felt like this was really lame and not funny at all and immediately regretted it.

The three of them walked into the lab and saw… a table with a bunch of papers stacked on top of it. That was about it.

“Uhh….” Sayaka said.

“Uhh…” Nagisa said. “Good job so far!” Sigh, Nagisa.

“I’m trying to science the shit out of this,” Madoka said, trying desperately to be as cool as Mark Watney from The Martian. “But no luck so far.”

“Using science to travel to an alternate universe and save Homura?” Sayaka rubbed her chin. “Why?”

“Because science is so awesome!!” Madoka looked at the camera, winked, and gave a thumbs up. She continually felt like she was making a fool of herself at every turn but was unable to stop herself.

“But can’t you just use magic or something? I feel like that’d be easier to travel with the ambiguous and convenient powers of magical girl magic.”

“That feels like… cheating?”

“But do any of us know enough about quantum mechanics to build a transuniversal engine without the power of magic?” Nagisa asked with a quizzical and innocent expression.

“Um.”

The three of them stood in silence. Madoka bowed her sombrero in sadness. “You’re… right. Then I guess… it’s settled. We’ll… use magic to transverse the multiverse…” she shed a single manly tear.

Science was awesome… but magic was cool too she guessed...