Prologue

Crystal had slept in better places than a ruined, rusty trailer with a tree growing out of it, but this wasn't all that bad. Sure, it smelled a bit mouldy, but she doubted that she'd catch something, and with a few crystal walls around to keep the wind out and Rending Nightmare being so close to watch over her, she felt pretty safe.

So she slept, hugging herself close for warmth, until she felt Alice sitting down next to her. The older girl let Crystal use her lap as a pillow and played with her hair, and soon Crystal was plunging into pleasant, indistinct dreams.

She was woken up by a shake to her shoulders. "Crystal, wake up," Rending said.

She blinked a few times. The light streaming in through the holes in the trailer roof was a deep, dark blue. It was still deep into the night, then, and while Crystal felt somewhat revitalised from her nap... well, she could use a few more hours. "What's wrong?" Crystal asked.

"I'm feeling something approaching, and quickly," Rending said. She shifted her hips, and Crystal got the message and pushed herself up onto her feet, then stifled a yawn. Now that she was listening, she could hear something too, a distant thrum that was growing louder.

Alice brushed down her pants, then jumped out of the trailer and came to stand near the road. Crystal followed her, one hand rising to summon a fist-sized ruby that glowed with an inner light, casting a red glare across the abandoned trailer park they found themselves in.

It was just as dilapidated as it had been when they arrived. A couple dozen homes, clearly long abandoned, with nature reclaiming much of it. Trees were growing out of the sides of some, and weeds had overtaken gravel driveways and clung to the wrecks of old cars.

Crystal wasn't great at figuring out dates and such, not at a glance, but something about the decor and the cars and the antenna sticking out of an old boxy TV suggested that this place was very... 1970s, maybe.

Actually, if the technology here was from the 70s, then the place had probably been abandoned in the 80s. She doubted the average trailer park was on the cutting edge when it came to... stuff.

"There," Alice said with a gesture to one side. The direction the thrumming was coming from.

Crystal squinted that way, but she couldn't see much, just darkness unreached by her gem light and clouds in the distance. Clouds which were roiling and moving. Clouds which seemed almost as if they were alive, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other and approaching fast.

The wind started to pick up around them. Stray leaves scattered across the ground, and Crystal noted that her next exhale came with a plume of vapour even as the wind caressing her turned cold.

Dust started to be blasted off the ground, and Crystal found herself squinting as the wind continued to grow stronger. Soon the howl was competing with the rustle of a million leaves as every tree started to sway and twist. Some of the trailers clunked as tin walls buckled against the wind, and the big antenna towers with parabolas started to vibrate violently.

Alice gestured, and a wall of shadows rose up ahead of them, sharply angled and solid enough to cut through the wind. "Strange," she said just loud enough that Crystal heard.

"What do you think it is? A hurricane?"

"No, it's magical," Alice said. "I can feel something... I don't know what, though."

Then the first of the clouds reached them. Long tendrils of fog, thin enough to see through, but still able to obscure and hide and obfuscate. They shot past, and where they passed, Crystal noticed trees twisting bizarrely.

One of those tendrils slid past, touching the side of one of the trailers as it went. It was just for a moment, but Crystal saw a window... repair itself in reverse, pieces of glass rising off the ground and slipping into place until a window was restored and paint was freshened up.

"Oh boy," Crystal said.

Alice stomped a foot down and a pillar of darkness rose ahead of them, then it swirled around, creating a cocoon. And almost as soon as it was up, the fog was eating at it, sending the moving darkness backwards through time.

"Time crystal, now!" Alice snapped.

Crystal jumped to it. It had been some time since she'd worked with Alice, but that tone was all too familiar. She clasped her hands together, closed her eyes, and focused. There were just two of them, so she didn't need anything too big. Still, this was a trick that she wasn't as well practised with as maybe she should have been.

Beads of sweat were clinging to her forehead as she focused. She could hear the crack and tinkle of crystalline shards popping into existence and growing all around her. A barrier, time itself, crystallised into something solid and immutable.

The sound rose and rose until, finally, the last piece slotted into place with a bell-like chime that was loud despite the incredible roar of wind blasting past them.

The moment it was done, Crystal felt her ears pop. They were cocooned away from the rising pressure of the storm. She made sure that the crystal was well anchored into the ground, and protecting them from below, then she opened her eyes.

There wasn't much to see past the clear walls all around them, just buffeting black-grey tendrils. Flashes of a deep blue arced through it all, like lightning contained within a storm cloud, but they did little to illuminate what was happening.

"What is this?" Crystal asked.

"I don't know," Alice said. "It looks like something Meagan might have done, but this is wilder, less controlled."

Crystal nodded. It kind of made sense that they'd run into Fractured Time's magic here. It fit her theories about... well, everything.

When Crystal had awakened on the last world she was on, she discovered that the world's magic was eerily similar to Rending Nightmare's, to Alice's. Now they'd followed a thread to another world, and discovering that the magic here was like another magical girl's just seemed like a logical leap to make.

Was Meagan, Magical Girl Fractured Time, locked in a cocoon on this world somewhere? Her magic feeding the entire world's own and twisting it into something new? She wasn't sure.

The storm started to abate after a couple of minutes. The flashes were still coming regularly, but they were no longer above them, and instead the majority came from behind.

Crystal followed the storm's passing, craning her neck up to catch glimpses of stars through the fading storm front. "Pretty," she said.

"And terrifying," Alice said. "What would a normal person do against that?"

"Well, mostly die, I imagine," Crystal said. "Maybe that's why there's no one around?"

"No, that can't be right. A storm that strong, if it was a regular occurrence, would have flattened all of those trailers a long time ago," Alice said.

"Ah, I guess that makes sense," Crystal said. She smiled at Alice, who had always been so much better than her at making that kind of deduction.

The clouds continued to fade away, and soon all that was left was a lingering fog, but even that was rapidly dissipating.

"I think it's safe now," Alice said as the fog receded. She was clearly able to push it around with her open magic, so Crystal shut her eyes and worked on cracking the crystalline egg she'd created. She had a hard time unsummoning her gems, but breaking a door-sized hole in them was easy as pie. Just in case, she made the opening on the down-wind side. Maybe if there was another storm like that, someone could use it for shelter?

"Huh," Alice said. "It's... newer."

Crystal blinked, then raised her light up above her head to better illuminate the trailer park. Alice was right. The trailers looked a lot fresher. Not nice, by any means. They were still rusty, poorly-maintained, and not exactly pretty to look at, but the paint had been freshened up, the young trees and big bushes were gone. Some of the cars looked like they'd been repaired to... perhaps not new, but something close. Windows were fixed, doors were back on their hinges, and one trailer that had had a big branch going through it was completely repaired.

The branch in question was back on the tree hanging above it, and Crystal had the impression that it was only a matter of time before it crashed down again.

"So... time-reversing super storm?" Crystal asked.

"Seems like it," Alice said. "Never seen anything quite like it."

"It's weird, yeah," Crystal agreed. "So... you think that might make finding Meagan harder?"

"I imagine it won't help," Alice said. "Did you sleep enough? I think I want to find someone I can ask about all of this. I have questions."

***