Trigger Warning- Transphobia 

Jethro opens the door to find his parents sitting in the living room watching the tv together. Currently swallowed up by his good mood, “HEY!!! Mommy! Daddy! I want to show you something!” They look over, noticing the wide smile on their son’s face, “What is it, Eggy?” And right as Jethro closed their eyes to focus on becoming a magic girl, showing off their cool new appearance. “-Basically molest and abuse children,” the end of the reporter’s sentence is heard on the tv which immediately broke Jethro’s concentration into trying to transform.   “Who does the reporter say is molesting children?” Jethro now frowns, feeling his parent’s mood shift. “Well, there are demons disguising themselves as girls when they are actually boys and going into the bathrooms and doing stuff to kids.” “Why would they disguise themselves as girls?” “Because the demons think that by pretending to be a girl the others won’t notice and they can get away with their boy-like desires. They even tell other boys that being a girl is better than being a boy and lie to them,” Jethro’s mother spits out with audible disgust. His mother’s words felt like they were carving something inside him, making his heart feel a pain somehow more uncomfortable than the first time he transformed, yet he couldn’t tell why. “What do these demons do?” He asked now wanting to get rid of the feeling of unease. “I will tell you when you are older.” his mom says with a tone of finality. Something told him that maybe he should not tell his parents about his new transformation, yet he could not pinpoint exactly why, “why don't i want to tell them any more? Maybe it's because magical girls must keep their identity a secret?! Why did thinking that feel so weird?” “You know what I forgot I wanted to show off.” “Oh that’s ok, how was the forest?” Jethro continues talking about his day with his parents but leaves out any details of magic, the smile he wears while speaking is stiff. 

Now in his bed he shook off the feeling of dread and decided to grab some headphones and watch some magical girl shows to learn more about what to do. Looking through them he picked Sailor Sun. Falling asleep watching the girls on their wonderful adventure he wished he could fight evil just like them. The next day, he awoke feeling mostly emotionally rejuvenated after the unsettling conversation with his parents. He decides to walk up and tell them he’s going to the forest again today after all, “Practice makes perfect, right?” Once again his mother is busy on the phone and he gets a dismissive vocalization of permission to go to the forest. Jethro transforms as soon as they arrive to their special spot, puts on some more sword training videos and starts taking swings at the trees. However soon she hears what appears to be a horrible screech around her unlike any she heard before, focusing her super sense she feels a strangely sharp energy coming from the burrows. As she braces for the now expected headache to detect the source of the screech she finds that there is only one target to focus on, a singular creature the size of the bunnies yesterday now resides in the burrows. Jethro readies her blade and slowly approaches the rabbit hole curious as to what the creature looks like. She peers in and lets loose a horrified squeal at what she sees. It’s a rabbit but visibly patches of fur have been replaced with tan reptilian hide, the eyes are a beading slit of yellow, and horned spikes come out its head. it lets out a deep low grumble followed by a grunt. It then lunged at her with large buck teeth scything outwards. In a moment of stumbling panic she steps forward and wildly swings her blade abandoning any form of edge alignment, missing the rabbit altogether. The rabbit's teeth connect and bite into her thigh tearing through skin and hooking into her flesh. Jethro lets loose a howl of pain and falls backwards with the horrible rabbit now eating her leg. She grabs the fur of the rabbits back and angles her sword in a reverse grip and with adrenaline helping her achieve enough focus, thrusts it downwards and manages to dig the blade into the creature's hide, even though it does not sink in deep the constant thrum of electricity coursing through the blade runs through the entire rabbit frying it. It convulses violently on her lap for a moment or two before dying and smoldering into charred flesh and bone. “What was that? It looked kinda like a bunny but something was wrong. Was that one of the monsters I am supposed to fight? Why is it so scary?” Jethro attempts to stand away from the monster rabbit’s corpse but the wound in her thigh screams at her to remain still. “What? Am I bleeding?!” Looking at where the bunny bit her, she found a small but deep cut on her leg, steadily letting out a trickle of blood down her leg. She thinks hard about what to do and remembers the first thing is to clean the wound. She slowly crawls over to the nearest pond and takes some of the cleaner looking water available and after taking a deep breath, pours it over the bleeding wound watching the water turn cloudy with blood. She continues to pour water over it and balls up her skirt as a makeshift bandage to press into it. It's during this moment that she feels her adrenaline high come down and begins to relax a little. After a few minutes, the bleeding eventually stopped, the wound fully scabbed over in such a short time. She took a look at her now soiled skirt and frowns at its navy colors now being a shade of murky brown with her blood in it. “I should really clean this as soon as I can,” after all, this was her magical girl outfit. Dunking it into the pond and rubbing it with her hands she managed to scrub most of the blood, miraculously it appears the material of the outfit is not very blood absorbent for one reason or another. Then, looking at her legs, she decided she needed to wash the dried blood remaining. Taking off her clothes, she lay down in the pond, bracing the feeling of water on her wound, and began brushing the blood off of her legs till it was clean. “Hopefully that’ll be enough to hide what I’ve been doing from my parents.” She gets out of the pond and puts her clothes back on while still dripping. She then decides to transform back to head home. As soon as he transformed, he noticed he was completely dry and any evidence of the cut had altogether vanished. “Wait, so I did all of that uncomfortable cleaning for nothing.”