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It was the nightmare blunt rotation.
Homura Akemi did the only thing she could do, and took a long drag of the blunt in question. Letting the smoke fill her lungs, she slumped forward a bit, and passed it off.
"Fuck~"
"Yeah," Sayaka Miki received the weed, agreeing with her fellow magical girl, "'Fuck' is right."
Taking a hit with one hand, the bluenette chuckled darkly. A tear rolled down her cheek, before splashing against a large, nearly black gem cradled in her lap. A single speck of blue remained, kept intact by the haze of zaza filling the area.
"God, I was so stupid..."
Homura groaned, flipping her hair. "Why do you *always* say that? I was *this* close to finishing a loop without hearing that damn phrase."
"I'm not wrong, am I?" Another puff, "Besides, what do you mean by loop?"
The weed exchanged hands again as Homura loaded up a deflection.
…But, you know what? She was gonna reset anyway! There was no reason to keep this particular secret.
"It's my magic." she explained, "I've been using it to turn back time for another chance at stopping Madoka from becoming a magical girl."
Damn, that actually felt kind of good to get off her chest. Silver linings, Homura supposed.
'Ah, that explains why I don't recall ever making a contract with you.'
Using one of his ears, Kyubey brought the blunt he got from Sayaka up to his mouth. He didn't actually inhale anything, because he couldn't, but it was the thought that counted.
Sayaka blinked as she registered the exposition, finally looking up from her soul gem, "You're a time traveller?"
"I... I suppose so."
Kyubey tilted his head, constellations of data points connecting in his hive-mind.
'When you seem to disappear and reappear elsewhere, you must really be stopping time, correct?'
"Yes."
He wouldn’t remember this, Homura realized. She had handed him the answer to one of if not the biggest mysteries of recent times, an anomaly within a system that’s entirely predictable… right after telling him she would undo it. There was no way for the incubator collective to retain this knowledge once she turned the clock backwards.
The schadenfreude caused a smile to begin growing on her face. Maybe she should do this every time some bullshit happens and a loop goes bad. Why stop there? Her shield’s storage carried over between the loops. Dangle that in front of the incubators, a possible and easy solution to entropy, and then not doing it. Take the hope out of their eyes for a change.
In fact, why not一
"That must suck."
Homura double took, instinctually flipping her hair to distract the others from her surprise.
"Sayaka Miki, what do you mean by that?"
The blue haired girl looked balefully at Homura. The weed may have given a red tint to her eyes, but the irises were as blue as ever, seemingly staring into her soul.
"Not the time stop thing. That's a cool power to have. The looping thing though? You've probably been doing this for a long time, right? Means you must've failed over and over again. You have to go for a 'perfect run', because otherwise, what's the point of being able to loop?"
Stunned, Homura stared at the other girl. Out of the corner of her eye, Kyubey took another faux-drag of weed.
"Meanwhile, everyone you know is just making the same, *stupid* mistakes again and again. If you've heard me call myself stupid every loop, I became a magical girl every loop, no matter how you tried to stop me."
Another humorless laugh escaped the bluenette.
"So yeah. That's gotta suck."
Kyubey tilted his head, this time in the opposite direction. Clearly, he had figured something else out, but that particular angle meant it wasn’t particularly pleasant. Ah, he must’ve realized the implications of Homura’s confession. Silently, he passed the marijuana to the final group member.
"w̴̼̃e̷̺̽e̸͚͛d̷̩̒!̵̻̇ ̶̯͝w̶̯̐ĕ̷͔ĕ̷̮d̶̬̉!̶̝͋"
Charlotte took the joint with gusto, her tiny doll frame standing up to do a little dance with it. She sloppily rubbed it against her face, smearing a bit of weed on her cheeks. Like Kyubey, she couldn’t actually smoke it, but unlike the alien, she probably didn’t even know what it was, outside of ‘funny white stick’.
The absurdity of the situation, once hidden by the haze of pot smoke, hit Homura with full force. Here she was, throwing a literal pity party, smoking a drug she'd literally never tried before, with an incubator and a witch, while Sayaka of all people espoused profound observations about the Sisyphean task she was undertaking.
"Heh.” Homura started chuckling, involuntarily. “Ha, ha. Ha ha ha ha!"
Her laughter was solely amusement, at first, because this was a ridiculous fucking scenario, but as seconds passed, other emotions slipped in. Incredulity, fear, anger, desperation. The feelings built up over the course of not just this loop, but previous ones as well, were all currently being expelled in a bout of overwhelming hysteria.
It took a couple of minutes before the final peals of cackling left her. She fell backwards, lying face-up on the ground. All around her, the ruins of Mitakihara feebly reached for the sky.
Charlotte placed a slightly squashed blunt in Homura's hand. The ravenette looked at it for a moment, before taking a fat rip.
"Fuck!"
"Fuck."
'Fuck.'
"F̶̟͘u̸̱͝c̸̡̔k̶̖͠!̶̢͛"