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The idea first came to her while she was utterly incapacitated, drunk off her ass, and a little bit sad, as most of her greatest ideas do.
It was after a recently failed experiment, if it could really even be called that, in which she attempted to use a potato battery to power the lights for her new tulips, only to find potatoes were not a very common power source in modern nurseries (nor were they particularly useful), and scrapped the project after only a month of work. In repercussion, she’d developed a pretty bad back problem for near a month after the fact, potentially due to her poor desk posture—not like Marika would know, hunched over and typing her findings with raptor-like claws.
But the real kicker was that she completely forgot the so-dubbed ingenious idea after she blacked out and woke up to find her notes resembled a two-year-old’s scribbling. After thoroughly pouring over the chicken scratch, she concluded that alcohol was somehow involved in the process, pretty unsurprisingly, and from the indecipherable remains of her previous drivel, she decided to make up an entirely new experiment.
The procedure was pretty basic. It would be an observational study, with only slight manipulation of the variables. The first step was to ingest a few seeds (Marika haphazardly decided it would be orchids, for who knows what reason, while she was drunk) and ingest alcohol at a fixed rate over time, then observe the effects. She, unfortunately, couldn’t get drunk while she was in her magical girl form, so she would need to get her hands on some pretty highly-concentrated stuff. Magically-concentrated, that is. In other words, she needed magical beer.
When she expressed her idea to the sponsors—the very group that had paid for her greenhouse to begin with—they were less-than-thrilled, to put it mildly. But Marika was pretty good at bullshitting, and after a thorough explanation, she managed to convince them that it was for science. And the Land of Magic.
And so she procured a nice dozen bottles of magically-grown alcohol, since she couldn’t grow buckwheat on her head (she tried, once) and took to sipping it first. When nothing interesting happened, she increased the “dosage,” as she scientifically put it. Turns out magical beer is pretty damn potent.
She didn’t really remember hopping the rooftops, nor did she remember drunkenly falling into a garbage can, but she somehow managed to find her way to Snow White’s house at midnight and rapped on the balcony window, covered comically with an empty cup of instant ramen for a hat. Or so she was told. She was then promptly kicked out after Snow told her that they were meeting tomorrow, not tonight.
The actual events were still a mystery, but Snow assured her she hadn’t done anything completely stupid. At least, not while drunk.
Marika poured over the notes she’d scribbled last night while hanging out with Snow. Something along the lines of “nothing out of the ordinary,” but it looked more like “nodding out of ornery.” After salvaging what she could from her drunken notes, she flopped onto the couch and kicked her feet up. Late Sunday afternoon mecha anime was definitely the way to go.
Sure, her methodology could be considered a bit… casual. And, sure, a bit unprofessional. But Marika was still a responsible adult. She didn’t drink herself blearily until the morning. Not on school days, anyway. And, in her defense, she didn’t expect magical alcohol to have that much of a kick to it.
After eating two bowls of cereal, she took her laptop out and started writing the framework of the experiment.
Effects of Lambic Beer on the Growth and Health of the Phalaenopsis, and Concluding Remarks of Magical Confounds
By Marika Fukuroi
Background
The proper TLC for the Phalaenopsis (stupidly known as the moth orchid) has been a matter of incredible delicacy for both plant nerds enthusiasts and actual scientists alike. Experts suggest careful management must be conducted to ensure the plant grows to maturity; its leaves can easily sunburn with inconsistent observation. I wanted to know what sort of effects magical alcohol might have on its durability, and so I got drunk off my ass and probably embarrassed myself in front of my only friend that isn’t dead. Results coming soon.
Well, it sounded kind of stupid when she put it like that. She wanted to give “Phalaenopsis” a cooler name than “moth orchid,” but most people probably wouldn’t understand “Purple Crest – Kiss of the Royal Orchid” so she let it drop.
When she first heard that several magical girls were creating a free-to-the-public, open-sourced Database to gather experiments and projects geared towards a better understanding of magical abilities, Marika felt motivated. Maybe if she became published (well, as “published” as this counted), then her parents could see the merit in her hobby. She could prove she knew her shit and wasn’t just a weird, creepy hermit spending all her time tending to a bunch of plants in a greenhouse paid for by someone else.
Even if that’s entirely what she was doing, it sounded better to call herself a botanist. It was all scientific and shit.
After a few moments, she dropped her laptop next to her.
Marika sighed. And to think she was really onto something. Well, she thought she was when she was drunk. It sounded like a good idea at first, but most things sound like good ideas when you’re drunk and it was probably a bad idea to think she was onto something to begin with.
She was just tired of seeing her parents’ disappointed faces. Tired of letting people down.
She closed the lid of the laptop. Yeah, maybe this wasn’t her best idea ever. Thinking back on it, trying to find out the effects of magical alcohol on her plants was pretty dumb, and ingesting the alcohol itself probably wasn’t the best way to see the effects to begin with.
Something told her to reach over and call Snow, and apologize for last night. But when she pulled out her phone and realized she still had Mimi’s contact number in there, she decided to just relax for the rest of the day.
One week had passed since Marika drunkenly banged against her balcony door.
Though she chastised her for waking her up, the truth was that Snow couldn’t sleep that night. She was finding her thoughts had drifted farther than she’d wanted them to, and with the past haunting her, it was difficult to get any real sleep.
Seeing Marika looking so hilariously inept was a mood-lifter, though. She still didn’t feel incredibly optimistic, but her drunken biology teacher had managed to lift her mood a little. When she saw her at school the following day, Marika seemed embarrassed and avoided eye contact at every possible moment, like a shy schoolgirl more than a teacher. Snow couldn’t bring herself to tell her that she burst into drunken tears and bawled herself to sleep in a pile of Snow’s stuffed plushies, then wobbled her way home with Snow as an escort. Snow wasn’t sure if Marika was just a crying drunk or if the supposed magical alcohol she ingested somehow affected her, but leaving her outside on her balcony didn’t seem like the right thing to do regardless.
She could hear her distressed thoughts through the night, and they only finally quieted when she took her home and put her to bed.
Normally, the thoughts hurt Snow as much as they did the victim. She used to feel her heart ache when she heard those distressing, subconscious feelings. And, to some extent, she still did. But hearing Marika hurting as much as Snow did also filled her with a sort of companionship; she knew, even though the people she cared about were either dead, missing, or criminals, that she still had someone who knew how she felt right beside her.
When Marika cried for Styler Mimi, Snow felt her own heart reach out for her lost ones. La Pucelle, Hardgore Alice, Ripple… Yet, at the same time, she felt less lonely than she had been in the past few months.
Marika wasn’t a very observant person. She was pretty headstrong and had a one-track mind, but she was also pretty bad at reading other people. Snow knew there was a good chance she didn’t know exactly how much she meant to her, but at the same time, saying something like that was a little…
Cheesy? Years ago, Snow might not have felt the same way, back when she was unwavering in her convictions and love for magical girls.
She squeezed her hands into fists against her desk. After helping to clean the classroom, Snow approached her teacher.
Against the backdrop of the city lights, Snow White’s hair looked more yellow than white.
“You...” Snow paused, as though trying to parse her words. “You were trying to do an experiment? While completely drunk?”
“Uh… yeah, that’s about the gist of it.” Marika Fukuroi kicked her legs where they dangled, watching the blinking lights below. Everything seemed so small and insignificant from up here.
“How… how did that go?”
“Not real well.”
“Mm, I see.”
Marika pouted. “Hey, I’m very experienced with this sorta thing, y’know? It just turns out that doing experiments while drunk’s not a good idea. Kinda ruins the whole thing.”
“You’ve been published before?” Snow looked honestly impressed.
Marika flattened as she continued her explanation, sheepishly shrugging her shoulders. “Um, I wrote a zombie apocalypse survival guide when I was in high school. It was pretty good.”
Snow’s expression fell. “Right, okay.”
“I won fourth in the creative writing contest!”
Snow ignored her interjection and focused on the cityscape. It was silent for a short while, and Marika struggled to break the silence before Snow spoke up again.
“I don’t think you really need to try all that hard.”
Marika looked a bit pained, and Snow flinched. She didn’t need to read her mind to notice her distress. “That’s not what I meant to say. Sorry, I just...”
She shrugged. “It’s fine.”
“No, no it’s not. What I meant to say is, um… I’m…” Snow trailed off, mumbling.
“Huh?” Marika leaned closer. “What was that? Couldn’t hear ya.”
Though it was difficult to see, Snow’s cheeks seemed to turn red. “I said… I’m proud of you, so...”
Marika grinned and laughed off her initial embarrassment. “Hey, that’s my job! To be proud of ya, I mean.” She paused, then faked a stern frown. “You did your homework, right?”
Snow rolled her eyes. If nothing else, at least she had Marika to keep her on the straight and narrow. Something told her she would need her in the times to come.
But for now, they were content to watch the city lights, an orchid blooming on Marika's crown.