To Prevent World Peace Read online

  Magical Mayhem Part 1:

  To Prevent World Peace

  by Emily Martha Sorensen

  Copyright © 2017 Emily Martha Sorensen

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: The Future

  Chapter 2: The Present

  Chapter 3: The Vision

  Chapter 4: The Decision

  Next Book

  Chapter 1: The Future

  It was a microphone, shaped like a flower. A tall woman stood behind it, elegant and emanating authority, for all the fact that she was barely eighteen.

  She lifted her chin, surveying the crowd before her. A sea of teenagers and children watched breathlessly, eager for her guidance. Anxious to hear what they should do.

  “The villains,” the woman said, “are dead.”

  A sigh went out across the whole audience. A sigh of relief, of pleasure, of anticipation.

  “The Olympians are slain,” the woman continued. “The Deathwaves have disbanded. The invaders from other worlds have all fled. For the first time since magic came to us in order to save this world, we have world peace.”

  A murmur of excitement danced across the crowd. Almost all of them were children and teenagers. Almost all of them were female. A great many of them wore colorful costumes, were surrounded by animal critters, or had magical glows or sparkles around them.

  “But!” the woman snapped sharply, bringing their attention back to her.

  The crowd stilled. Murmuring stopped, and eyes fastened back onto the speaker.

  “But,” the woman said more softly, “our problems are not over. For now there are those saying that where there is power, there can be both good and evil. Now there are those saying that we are no longer needed. That our magic should be set down. That we should renounce our powers and join the ranks of mediocrity.”

  Her voice rose sharply.

  “Is this right?!”

  “NO!” the crowd shouted.

  “Is this fair?!”

  “NO!” the crowd shouted.

  “Will we do this?!”

  “NO!!” the crowd screamed.

  Teenage girls clenched fists in outrage. Middle school girls looked hurt. Younger girls looked like they had no idea what was going on, but they enjoyed the opportunity to yell.

  The woman at the podium held up her hand.

  Silence fell.

  A few little girls shouted “No!” from the crowd, just in case there was about to be another question.

  The speaker waited for a moment, and then she answered.

  “No,” she said quietly. “We created this peace, and we are the only ones who can defend it. Without us, everything we’ve built will crumble, wither and die. So even now, we must continue to fight — to protect world peace!”

  “World peace! World peace! World peace!” the crowd shouted. “World peace! World peace! World peace!”

  One little girl near the front looked baffled. She stared up at a slender teenage girl beside her, probably an older sister. Then the small child’s face brightened, and she started chanting along with the rest of the crowd. “Would peas! Would peas! Would peas!”

  “Magical girls have protected our world for four and a half generations!” the woman shouted from the podium. The microphone shaped like a flower trembled. “And yet now, the politicians say we are no longer needed! We were given this magic to protect the world! We were given this magic to save it! We must do that!”

  “World peace! World peace! World peace!”

  Gigantic feathered wings sprouted from the speaker’s back, and she zoomed up into the air, presiding over the fervor of the crowd. Then, just as the screaming reached its peak, she plunged down and soared off into the distance.

  An alarmed-looking man scrambled up to the stage and grabbed the microphone. “A big thank you to our chairwoman — Avenging Angel!”

  “World peace! World peace! World peace!” the crowd chanted. “World peace! World peace! World peace!”

  There was no “Would peas” any longer. The little girl near the front had fallen asleep, sucking her thumb.

  The blonde-haired woman with the glorious feathered wings landed. Waiting for her was another woman, dark-skinned and bat-winged. This woman wore a crimson blouse and a long, layered skirt that looked like it had once been fluffy, but had morphed into shreds.

  “Terrific, Kendra,” the brown-skinned woman said. She put her hands on her hips. “That was not what you were supposed to say. Presidente Santos will be furious.”

  “Presidente Santos can do what she likes,” the blonde-haired woman said. Feathers glowed around her as she detransformed back into ordinary attire: a T-shirt and jeans with a butterfly patch on each of the back pockets. “It had to be said, and you know it.”

  “I do not know that,” her friend snapped. “We’re magical girls, not governments. Who elected us to decide the world’s fate?”

  “Magic itself did,” Kendra said. “We were chosen as the most pure in heart. Who else is so qualified?”

  The brown-skinned woman looked troubled.

  “Do you disagree?” Kendra demanded, folding her arms.

  “No . . .” her friend said slowly. “But I do believe in democracy. Not . . . whatever you’re doing. You’re the reason governments are getting scared of magical girls.”

  “They were always scared of us,” Kendra said scornfully. “Why do you think there’s so much pressure to relinquish powers in early teenage years? Because children can be controlled.”

  “I know that that’s a touchy subject for you,” the brown-skinned woman said slowly. “I know you think all magical girls should keep their powers until magic decides to leave because they’re unworthy or too old. But Kendra, the only reason Presidente Santos allowed you to call that press conference in the first place was because you agreed to . . .”

  “I’ll agree to anything,” Kendra cut her off, “if it’s a necessary step to reaching my goals. That doesn’t mean I’ll do it. Listen.”

  In the background, the chanting was growing louder and louder and louder. Other flying magical girls were now filling the sky. “World peace! World peace! World peace!”

  “What did you do?” the brown-skinned woman asked in horror.

  “You might ask, rather,” Kendra said in satisfaction, “what did Namikaze do when I gave her the signal?”

  “What did she do?!”

  Kendra smiled. “They’re going to the border. For a . . . peaceful demonstration against Brazil’s demands that we give up our powers. Such an unimaginably stupid thing for them to do.”

  “You’ve probably just started a war, you know.”

  The smirk fell from Kendra’s face. “I know.”

  “And you really think that risk was worth it?” her friend snapped.

  “If there’s a war, we’ll win,” Kendra shrugged.

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  Kendra sighed heavily. She reached out and pushed a stray hair back behind her ear. “Flo, you know someone has to rule the world. And the only people pure enough to do it are the magical girls. If it takes a war to stop all wars forever, that’s what we’ll do.”

  The myriad future wars, the multitudes of deaths and chaos, smashed through Chronos’s mind and jerked her awake. She sat bolt upright, gasping.

  It was that dream again, she thought numbly, clenching her bedsheets. The point of no return.

  She had woken up from that dream every night for two weeks straight, and that hadn’t been the first time she had seen it. Two years ago, when she’d first seen it, it had been so unlikely that she’d dismissed it as one of the many irrelevant futures that haunted her at night. But unlike most of those unlikely futures, this one had persisted. I
t had gradually become more and more likely, until it was showing up once every few weeks.

  And then it had doubled in likelihood and started showing up every night.

  Chronos clutched the bedsheets in angry frustration.

  Two weeks ago, something had happened. That much was plain. But she couldn’t see the past, and there was no way she would ask the person who could. She knew what her sister’s advice would be: “Just kill the kid.”

  Chronos, unlike most of her family, didn’t believe in killing children and teenagers. It just seemed so obviously wrong. That was why she wasn’t on speaking terms with her sister. That was why she hadn’t gone to her parents’ funeral. That was why she basically lived like a hermit.

  Well, that was a small part of the reason. The major part was that she didn’t like people much.

  Chronos muttered furiously under her breath and pounded the pillow beside her. She hated that dream. Hated it. Hated it. Hated it. Hated it because it was growing more likely. Hated it because it wasn’t going away.

  Chronos’s dreams were never dreams. They were her born mage gift acting out of control. Chronos could see the future, which wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was that she couldn’t get it to stop.

  Chronos closed her eyes, remembering the time she had felt cheated. The time she had learned that, if she’d just known earlier, she could have had a way to turn off her powers, if only temporarily, if only short-term.

  She would have taken temporarily and short-term.

  Her parents had asked her to search for futures of specific people, strangers in some sort of powerful position who could be blackmailed overseas. Her sister was the one who excelled at that, and who actually enjoyed doing it, but Chronos’s parents had insisted that she should learn to do it, too.

  “The two of you would be the most amazing team the family has ever known,” they’d told her, “if you’d just learn to work together!”

  But Chronos, who was known for her rebelliousness and uncooperativeness, had just answered rudely.

  Still, because she’d had some grudging desire to please her parents, she’d put some small effort into it while grounded in her room. If nothing else, she’d had some mild curiosity about their targets, and it had turned out to be justified.

  One of the targets had been a member of their greatest rival, the Deathwaves. A born mage family of great power and villainy.

  And one of the target’s futures had been that his seven-year-old daughter would turn into a magical girl.

  Chronos lifted her fist and smashed it down into the pillow beside her. The rage she’d felt then was still strong now. She’d always been told that born mages couldn’t be magical girls. That the two magic systems were natural enemies. That that was why born mages and magical girls couldn’t coexist.

  And it had been a lie. Everything her extended family believed in had been a lie.

  Once she’d known to look for it, she’d searched for other futures like it, and there had been dozens of them. Born mage magical girl futures littered the world. Most were born mage girls with such weak powers that they didn’t even realize they were born mages, yet the results were always the same. In every future, the two magic systems coexisted. More than coexisted: they could hybridize together.

  In other words, if she’d had magical girl powers, she could have used them to control her born magic talent.

  And it had been too late then, because she’d been too old to become one.

  Two decades later, long past the point when she would have been able to keep magical girl powers in any case, it still stang. Perhaps she would never have succeeded — it was likely, as she’d never been particularly innocent — but she had been robbed of the opportunity to try.

  Chronos shook her head, reminding herself that brooding on that memory had never accomplished anything except to put her in a sour mood. The past had never gotten her anything.

  The future didn’t seem much better, though.

  Uneasily, Chronos checked the alternate possibilities. There were hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Millions of them. All sorts of other paths the future could take. All sorts of ways the world would be safe. And yet . . .

  And yet, Chronos thought, it’s getting more likely every single day.

  She knew that after that press conference, after that scene she had just witnessed, there were no futures remaining where the world would be safe. But it was three and a half years in the future. Plenty of time for something to derail it.

  Except that it had been growing for two years now, and nothing had yet.

  Chronos opened her fists and watched the scene she knew would happen two months after that press conference. In her hands lay a transparent landscape, a cityscape of broken buildings and a shattered moon strewn across the sky. There would normally be sound, too, but there were no sounds in this scene. There was nobody left to speak.

  Chronos moved her hands and flicked back to the press conference, then flicked back further than that. Brazil’s ultimatum. Cream Angel changing to Avenging Angel. Green Fairy dying.

  She could do all this in her head, but she preferred to watch the images with her eyes and hear the noise with her ears. It felt more divorced from her thoughts that way. Less intrusive and unwelcomely intimate.

  Their fifth arch-villain. The founding of the Magical Girl Union. Kendra deciding not to go to college. Their fourth arch-villain. Flick. Flick. Flick.

  And then at last, she couldn’t flick anymore. She had gone as far back as she possibly could.

  That’s the present, Chronos thought, touching the transparent image with her fingertips. Or only seconds away from it.

  The fifteen-year-old girl who would destroy the world in three years lay fast asleep. She seemed so innocent and peaceful, compared to what she would one day be.

  “Why?” Chronos muttered, even though she knew no one would hear her. “Why is this your future? What would cause someone to do such a thing?”

  She waited, watching with narrowed eyes, but there were no answers in the present, and the past was inaccessible to her. So she flicked forward to the future, surveying tomorrow.

  “Oh, so you want me to be a washed up, former magical girl whose life revolves around her glory days?” a brown-skinned girl with dozens of tiny braids was asking bitterly. “You want me to be like your mother?”

  The fifteen-year-old Kendra leapt to her feet. “YOU TAKE THAT BACK!”

  The fifteen-year-old girl with dozens of braids hopped up out of her chair and headed towards the exit. “Whatever. I’m late for track.”

  Chronos stopped the scene and tapped her fingers on her sheets.

  Trying to figure out why was a fool’s errand. She didn’t want to spend that much time watching somebody else, either. She was a hermit because she didn’t want to spend time with people, and watching their futures qualified.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t have a choice when she was asleep.

  Chronos’s fingers stilled.

  Maybe, she thought, maybe . . . if I stop it . . .

  Maybe then she would be able to sleep without that dream recurring constantly and driving her insane.

  Her sister’s methods were out of the question, of course. She’d never killed anyone, and she had no intention of starting.

  But . . . Chronos thought, a conversation . . .

  She grimaced at the thought of it. She hadn’t left the apartment in two years. She paid someone to deliver groceries to her doorstep, and anything else she needed, she left a note for that person to buy it with the money.

  Money had never been a problem. She’d day-traded stocks for a few weeks several years ago.

  Chronos sighed heavily, and got out of bed. Unpleasant as the prospect was, she couldn’t think of any other way to make the nightmares stop. Besides, the end of the world seemed like a relatively unpleasant thing.

  I wonder, she thought, could one conversation solve anything?

  Chapter 2: The Present


  Kendra was bursting with pride. She’d had a fantastic idea that she could hardly wait to explain to her teammates. After last night’s terrible battle, she had figured out exactly what the problem was with their team and what they needed to do to fix it. Florence might object, but she was fairly certain that she could persuade her. And Felicity . . . well, Felicity was easily persuaded by anything.

  The trick would be convincing Florence. Kendra’s best friend had been very unreceptive about the same idea a year ago. But this time, Kendra was sure she could make her see the necessity.

  Florence walked in through the entrance she usually arrived at.

  “Hey, Flo!” Kendra called, walking briskly over and waving. She fell into step with her best friend, acting casual as if she hadn’t arrived fifteen minutes early and been waiting there this whole time for her. “I wanna talk about something. About the battle last night. We have . . .”

  “Shhhhhh!” Florence hissed, glancing around at the crowded hallway.

  Kendra let out an exasperated sigh. “If anyone listens in, I’ll erase their short-term memory. Anyway . . .”

  “Or maybe you could just not say things like that at school!” Florence hissed in a strangled voice.

  Kendra snorted in annoyance. Lately, not using magic had been her best friend’s favorite pastime. Florence should never have joined that track team. Kendra had warned her that it would take away from their magical girl time, but no . . .

  “Kendra! Florence!” an excited voice shouted. Kendra glanced over to see Felicity dashing down the hallway, brown ponytail bouncing behind her. “Wasn’t that the greatest battle last night?”

  Florence threw her hands up in the air.

  “The part where I powered up because of my love for Daniel, eeeeeeeeeeee!” the girl squealed, squeezing her hands into fists and jumping up and down. She made no attempt to moderate her volume. “I knew it was true love! Only true love could make me power up, right? Daniel and I are destined to be together!”