"Do you want to teach me or should I use the standard tutorial?" She's not great at heavy strategy games but she will try enthusiastically!

The app shows a bunch of different factions, all named after some cool and infamous pirate captain. The default option is someone who was famous for slowly building a bigger and bigger crew, meaning that he gets extra bonuses for controlling territory. He's probably the simplest option to begin with; everyone else requires a fair bit of game knowledge to play without being crushed immediately.

The tutorial explains how things work: your soldiers can attack, or they can defend. If they defended last turn, they can attack with a bonus next turn. After a randomly chosen amount of time, you get reinforcements, based on how much territory you control. The tutorial has Kyra trying out each of the possible actions the game has and winning a game from a very good position, before the liver donor invites her to a game.

She's going to get crushed immediately no matter which faction she picks, so she goes with the pirate who plays the hurdy-gurdy! She keeps her starting territory mostly on defense, with a random attack every few turns, while driving the rest of her fleet deep, attacking with her musical morale bonuses as often as she dares. At the end, she breaks her flagship away from her supply chain in a final glorious lunge.

(She would naturally tend to huddle defensively, but she's picked up a lot from playing games with Alia.)

The liver donor chose an infamously brutal pirate captain, with a special ability causing each soldier on both sides of a battle to do as much damage as 3 soldiers, enormously increasing the damage taken by both sides. It turned a slight advantage on either side into a one-sided massacre. He was infamous for letting stronger players steamroll weaker players over just a few turns.

"I'm sorry if I was a bit mean. I just love rolling people over, and I really like the high-risk, high-reward playstyle."

"I had a good time! I was expecting to lose at your favorite game."

"But it's just as fun every time!"

"How about talking about your life? Me, I own a cafe just a few blocks away. I've been slowly perfecting a caramel macchiato, and I'm hoping to publicize a truly fantastic recipe once I'm done with the last of the experimentation. I'm trying to find out what went so well with one particular batch of beans; I keep grinding and roasting those beans in differing ways, but still haven't managed to replicate the magic flavor that I tasted just over a week ago."

"I look forward to trying your caramel macchiato when you're back at work!

I build and repair ukuleles. I'm currently working on a custom 24-string uke. Four 3-string courses and 12 resonance strings under the fingerboard. It's not going to have tuning machines - that would make it heavy - just small stiff bolts and special key to turn them.

Alia sells dance clothes... I don't know if she'll be able to keep doing that. We might need to do a proper hospital-room conversion next to my workshop, if she both needs that and doesn't need me to take care of her full-time.

What's the first Event you witnessed? Alia claims she saw a 'weird worm' in Five, but she was actually the first activated creature I saw myself. That was Event Twenty-Two."

"I remember seeing a fish jumping through the air, smacking against the ground and damaging parked cars and buildings. I don't remember what event number it was; I saw it from a distance, and tried getting as far away as possible."

"Very reasonable! If only Alia shared your attitude.

But she would never."

As this conversation is happening, the Magical Girl Solidarity Council is hard at work attempting to further their predictive and reactive systems to be ready for any attack. It will be just over 10 days until the next event, with locations that seem entirely random, but Thomassia refuses to concede without doing their very best to understand anything that might let them know about them in advance. Planning always begins by asking questions about the scarcest and rarest resources, in this case, veteran Magical Girls. Planners are hard at work, trying to guarantee that there was one of them in striking distance of the most important and exposed areas, so they'd "eat" its powers instead of releasing a poisonous cloud.

The full-time Magical Girls, those whose job is it to practice and be prepared to fly anywhere in the world, are still training at various army bases. And handlers are working with girls like Alia, brainstorming which creatures would be ideal to fight to let them absorb helpful, rather than hurtful, powers. Unfortunately, those prove to be in short supply. But at least Alia has plenty of support during her recovery while untransformed.

A plane gets sent over where Alia heard sounds, with a microphone to detect the low-frequency noises produced by monsters. The world is on high alert, ready to send in transformed magical girls if the monster poses an urgent threat. But for now, recon planes are just keeping a close eye on anything that they might spot flying over the source of the sounds.

Just an ordinary temperate forest here!

Alia wakes up and eats three mini croissants, a gooseberry scone, and four and a half spicy breadsticks!

Then she throws half of it up again (into the bucket this time), coughs out a hunk of congealed blood, retches, and flops helplessly on the bed.

"My eyes hurt."

"Here, have some eye drops; we think the squid did something to make your ears not work properly", said the nurse who was hanging out in Alia's room. It's common for patients to let nurses spend their break time in the suites; it lets nurses have more space during breaks, and patients get better service.

Seconds later, the siren started blaring, a series of sharp noises that made anyone hearing them snap to attention. A smooth, clear voice was requesting everyone to rush to safety, and put on their most protective PPE. A monster had been killed somewhere out in the forest, and a plume of purple smoke would rapidly flood the city. The nurse scrambled to put on her mask, before hooking both Alia and the liver donor up to their breathing masks. In spite of the hospital's effective defenses, the gas could find its way through even the tiniest of leaks in filters and ventilation systems, so anyone inside would wear an additional layer of protection if at all possible. Unlike before the Events, thomassians had begun to keep several days' worth of food in their apartments; it wasn't uncommon for plumes to make the outdoors uninhabitable for 2-3 days.

But Alia and Kyra would both be safe, as a purple haze blocked their view of the beautiful garden across the street for the next day and a half.

"I mean, occasionally, a bug that's experienced the super-power transformation walks into a zapper and makes a few wisps of smoke like a blown resistor. What the hell kinda creature was powerful enough to make a plume like that lasting more than a day?", asked Alia's nurse after the smoke had died off.

The magic smoke got out :(

Kyra puts on her mask and double-checks Alia's mask. And, after a moment, the liver donor's mask too.

"The - eyes helped.

The thing I heard was big?"

"Heard? You were miles away, you couldn't possibly have heard it! Anything that loud would be heard by everyone in the city!"

"I can hear really low sounds now. Well not right now, but I could. And there was a thrumming that the monster I got was going towards. Maybe it was just a really loud cat-sized cicada, but it sounded big to me."

"... wait, the creatures make really low sounds? A better detection system could help save people's lives! We have to find out about this; this could be a real game-changer. Have you told that to your personal assistant yet?" "Personal assistant" was the nicer term for the handlers assigned the responsibilities of determining where Magical Girls should be used, as well as finding out the best ways of caring for their medical needs while untransformed.

"I only heard the one sound. So only really big ones, or only the one individual..."

"I told a soldier!"

"We'll have to try finding out as much about this power as we can. We can bring in the headphones, see if we're able to find the pitch the noise was at, what kind of microphones we'll want to detect these creatures. I'll run off and get you a pair." The nurse returns with the huge headphones after a few minutes, playing sine waves through her phone in a slowly decreasing pitch, hoping that Alia will be able to recognize the pitch that the creature made in the headphones.

Um.