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Hana yawned and flopped unceremoniously on her bed, the towel wrapped around her shoulders falling to the sheets as she lay back. It had been a pretty stressful and interesting couple days, to say the least...first with accidentally kissing Saaya on the roof of the school, then her worries about coming out to her family and friends, then getting mind controlled and almost stabbing Saaya's eye out, and then getting her new haircut after falling asleep in the barber's chair...Homare called it her 'super lesbian' haircut as a joke, but Hana liked that. She really felt like a super lesbian after making it through all that crap. Her eyes turned to the clock. "Only 8:30, huh...? If I get started playing games, I'll wind up staying up too late...but I already did my homework, and I..." Hana groaned. "Saaya's busy, so I can't call her...bleh." She stood up and walked out to the balcony to watch the stars. It was a beautifully clear night, and the moon was very bright, shedding its cool silver radiance down over Hagukumi.
It really brought back a lot of memories...on this same balcony, on a night just like this, she'd met Hugtan and Harry...and that meeting had changed her life forever. What would have happened if she'd never met them? Would she know Saaya and Homare and the others? No, probably not...she wasn't even sure she'd have realized her lesbianism yet if not for that. So much of her life revolved around all the people she'd met after transferring and becoming a Precure...she couldn't imagine life without them.
A pink glint off to her right caught her eye, and she turned towards it. It was almost like one of those blinking lights on top of the radio tower, but in the wrong place...the radio tower was on the other side of town. Strangely, it also seemed simultaneously very close and very far away, blinking both slow and fast, uniformly yet erratically, moving yet stationary. The more Hana looked at it, the more her head began to hurt...and suddenly, a horrible wet tearing noise assailed her ears from every direction at once, and her vision sharply tilted out as she briefly lost consciousness.
She didn't know how long she was out, but eventually she felt someone shaking her shoulder.
"Hana...Hana...please wake up..."
"Mmm, five more minutes..." Hana didn't want to get up, honestly. Her head was still aching and she still felt dizzy.
"Please, I need you to wake up..."
Hana's scrambled brain slowly processed the voice she was hearing. It sounded like her own voice, but off...ever so slightly off, like it was passing through some kind of light distortion filter. "I don' wanna..."
"Hana, please. I need you to help me."
Her own voice, but distorted...and suddenly, it clicked. She remembered that voice. It was...
The cold shock of realization startled all the pain, all the drowsiness, everything from her body. She gasped, eyes flying open as she sat bolt upright and...
Crack. Hana's forehead collided with that of the person leaning over her, sending a spike of pain lancing through both their heads.
"MECHOKKU--!" Hana immediately fell back to the ground, clutching her forehead and rolling back and forth as stars spun in her vision.
"Mechokku--!" The owner of the distorted voice did almost exactly the same, falling back and clutching her forehead as supernovas of pain bloomed in her eyes like fireworks.
After a moment of hard-fought recovery, the two girls sat up together and looked each other in the eyes. Two magenta eyes stared deep into one magenta eye and one bright gold eye. Oh, yes, Hana remembered those eyes, even if she'd never seen them herself. There was no mistaking them...for they were her own eyes, just...off. "You...how are you here...?"
The other girl swallowed hard. "Hana...please, I was barely able to--"
"Shhh, shh!" Hana covered up the other girl's mouth...the lips even felt exactly like hers. "Save it for a second, and just answer me one question...are you who I think you are?"
The girl nodded, her slightly wavy magenta hair swishing a bit with the motion. Just as Hana's used to do, before her haircut...
"...One more question. Not how...but why are you here...?" Hana knew this girl...oh, how could she forget? This girl's visage had haunted her dreams ever since that day. "Never mind that you shouldn't be alive...never mind how you got here, or found me in the first place...but why? Why are you here?"
The girl formerly known as Dark Yell pulled Hana's hand away from her mouth. "...Because I want to live."
TO BE CONTINUED...