Scenes From A Destination Wedding Weekend, Part 5: An Attempt At A Costume Event

Mona

{reveal "Author Citation"} Fiona (codename: Banshee) is a contestant from Harem Hotel: Genesis Response. {endreveal}

Okay, Mona, you got this! You know all about magical girl style! And, I’m sure your partner is a hottie that you can totally style to be super cute and sexy! Okay, I need to make a cool hat! Every costume designer needs a cool hat!

So, Mona digs through the supplied materials, looking for inspiration. Paper bowl, white ribbon, pink highlighter? Let’s go!!!!

The mistress just goes ham with the highlighter, covering the outside of the paper bowl in hot pink markings. She wraps the ribbon around the base of her hat’s crown, then uses Mending to seal the ribbon together. Yeah!

So, her partner sees her slip on her cool paper bowl hat as she stomps in. Mona smiles and waves, “Hiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!”

“What are you wearing?”

“A cool hat I made with crafting supplies and magic!”

Her partner narrows her eyes. “Not the dumb paper hat. Why is my face on your T-shirt?”

Now that Mona takes a moment, the cute redhead in front of her is very familiar. She was one of the girls from Van’s harem from yesterday! The stubborn one... “Oh, hiiiiiiiiiiii, Bansheeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! Oh, you totally have the twin drills hairstyle energy! We are gonna be the cutest pair of magical girls in the whole bachelorette party! So, do you want a design hat while you figure out how I should wear my hair?”

“The shirt?” Banshee bristles like Tegan, minus the ears and tails. Oooooh, Banshee would look hawt as a kitsune! No, Mona, focus. We got a prize or whatever to win!

“Oh, I got a lot of Wai-Fu Quest shirts. I’ve been losing weight and my old clothes got too baggy. Also, the designs are cute and something, something, cross-promotion? Soooo, hat?” Mona holds up a paper bowl.

“Hat me.”

Mona finds a green highlighter and gets to work. Same basic idea. Highlighter for color. Ribbon for the band. Mending to fuse the edges of ribbon together. Yay hat!

Banshee looks good in her design hat. She starts to play with Mona’s long hair, supposedly to decide what to do with it. Mona starts to look at the materials, picturing what she can do to turn this into the best Magical Cuties Go Go cosplay that she can. Hmm we can turn this construction paper into uniform collars!

“So, who are you in the System, huh?”

Mona uses Mending to stitch construction sheets together to make a bigger page. She momentarily looks up to give Banshee a confused look, “System? Oh, yeah, your Host talks like a robot librarian lady for some reason. We don’t have a ‘system.’ I’m just... Mona.”

“Who’s your so-called Master, then? He hurt you yet? You need me to...”

Mona looks at Banshee, trying to figure her out. “I get that I’m not nearly as sexy as Van, so I don’t blame you for assuming, but I’m the Mistress of my season.”

Banshee stops playing with Mona’s hair. Mona turns around. She doesn’t need Windows of the Soul to see the redhead’s confusion, but it is there, as apparent as the green of her irises.

“Mistress? The system can be built around a woman?”

Mona turns around more fully to measure the construction paper collar on Banshee and to say, “Still don’t like the robot librarian talk, but why not?”

Banshee stutters, “‘Cause it’s a sex show!”

Mona considers it, then retorts, “Are you telling me you never watched a video made for women to be titillated? You know, a steamy sex scene in a romantic comedy or a sexy sportsball scene with a slew of shirtless studs? You saying the show couldn’t be built around something like that? A little bit sexist of you...”

Banshee again bristles. Her responses to being teased as sooo cute! I should tell Van when I see him!

“Prove it! Tell me about your hunky boy contestants!”

Mona thinks she can bond with Banshee by perving with her (like she did with Cammy) for a few moments. Then she notices a shift in the redhead’s emotions as Mona answers, “Well, my hunkiest guy is over at the bachelor’s party, so you’ll probably see him tomorrow? His name is Kevin and he’s my best bud! His first transformation turned him into a beefcake hu-cow bull. Seven feet of solid muscle. Super hawt!”

“And Kevin’s boyfriend, Winter, is here at the bachelorette party! He was helping to judge the cake baking event, so you definitely saw him. Sure, he’s a little bit shorter than me and he’s more cute than hunky, but he’s great!”

Mona continues, “I got one more guy, but he’s kind of an asshole? It was his date night last night and he made me watch hockey? But, oh boy, the guy I brought in to tutor him in romance was amazing!!!! Strong, lithe, hung like a (figurative) horse! I hope Van will be just as good to you as he was to me!”

“Three guys? That doesn’t sound like a harem.”

“Oh, I got ten, but you just asked about the guys.”

Mona watches as a seething mass of rage and disgust boils over in Banshee’s eyes. “Ten? So seven women... and you’re forced to... how can...”

Mona understands, deep down inside, that Tyalangan views her “cool magic” as little more than party tricks. But, seeing that look on Banshee’s face and the roil in her eyes...

Three times her normal yelling volume is probably nothing to Banshee. The minor tremors radiating from her feet are also probably nothing. The sounds of thunder reverberating in the room are still probably nothing. Mona lets them all rip as she uses Thaumaturgy anyways, “Look, I don’t know your whole deal, Banshee, but I will NOT have you think poorly of my girlfriend or my fiancées or anyone else in my harem. They are precious to me. Some of them have been through a lot, a couple arguably through worse stuff than Van. You don’t get to judge them. EVER!”

A paper hat is crushed and tossed away. “I didn’t say anything!”

Mona pulls out her phone from her Inventory. “You didn’t need to. See?”

Clear as day, the phone lists out her transformations, with the description of her final one expanded:

The Windows of the Soul – Mona often feels a little unsure about how to handle the situation. Let us give her a tool to cope. She now has limited empathic abilities. When she stares into the eyes of another person, she can innately understand what they are feeling at the moment.

“You can read my feelings? No, you can’t...”

Banshee runs. Mona drops Thaumaturgy and takes off her T-shirt. Sitting on the floor, nothing above the waist other than her bra and a paper hat, she starts to sob. She had enough of those looks from her parents. She doesn’t need the same thing from people who could’ve been friends.

Banshee doesn’t close the door on her way out. Mona notices it in a distant sort of way, the same way she notices the party still going somewhere down the hall, muffled and bright and happening to other people. Close the door, Mona. But closing the door means standing up, and standing up means being a person, and Mona is not up for being a person right now.

So the door stays open. Which is how she gets found. The woman in the doorway is not one woman. Mona scrubs at her eyes and counts again and still gets two of her, same dark hair, same clothes down to the fold of the sleeves, same concerned look on both faces.

“Oh,” Mona says. “Oh, no, hi, hello, I’m fine, this is a totally normal thing that I’m doing...” Two of them. There are TWO of them. Mona, do not. Mona, this is not the time. Mona, she is getting MARRIED tomorrow...

“Hi,” they say, and only one of them is talking. “I’m Laura.”

Oh gawd. Oh gawd, that’s the Consort. Mona’s brain, which has been offline for a solid four minutes, comes back online all at once and immediately regrets it. She is sitting on the floor of a guest room. She is wearing a bra and a paper bowl. There is a T-shirt balled up next to her with a cartoon redhead’s face printed on the front of it. She has been crying loud enough to be heard from the hallway, at somebody else’s wedding, in front of a woman she has heard about in every single letter she’s ever gotten from this island.

“I’m fine,” Mona says, and her voice cracks in half in the middle of it.

“Yeah,” Laura says. “You look great.”

One of her steps into the room and sits down on the floor, cross-legged, close enough to touch. The other nudges the door most of the way shut with her foot, not all the way, and comes and sits down on Mona’s other side. “You don’t have to talk,” Laura says. “I’m going to sit here for a minute. I’ve had a really long day and honestly the floor is great.”

Mona does not talk. Mona cries instead, which is worse, and it takes about ninety seconds, and nobody makes it a thing. “Okay,” she says finally. “Okay. Sorry. I’m so sorry. You can go, you have a whole... you’re getting married tomorrow, you should not be sitting on a floor with the girl who...”

“You’re Mona,” Laura says.

Mona stops. Something goes wrong in her chest. Being a stranger is survivable. Being known is so much worse. So it all comes out. The hats. The magical girl thing. The System questions and the robot librarian and “is he hurting you yet.” The part where Mona said “ten” and something behind the redhead’s face came apart. The yelling. The floor shaking. The look.

“And I know that look,” Mona says. “I’ve had that look before. From, like. Home.”

“Your parents.”

“Yeah.” Mona wipes her nose on her wrist, because there is nothing else, and she has no dignity left to protect anyway. “So it’s not new. It’s just, I thought here it would be...” She doesn’t finish it. Laura doesn’t make her. “She isn’t a bad person,” Mona says instead, and it comes out fast, defensive, before anyone accuses Banshee of anything. “That’s the whole problem. I looked at her. And she wasn’t disgusted with me. Not at the bottom. At the bottom she was...” Mona stops. Her hands do something useless in her lap. “Somebody did something to her,” she says. “A long time ago. It’s still in there. It’s still all the way in there and she’s been carrying it around this whole time and she’s so mad and it’s not even about me, it’s not about me at all, and I made her look at it and she ran, and that’s...”

“Mona.”

“...that’s on me, my stupid transformation just goes off, I can’t turn it off, I never meant to...”

“Mona.” Both of Laura say it this time. “You are sitting on a floor with your shirt off, crying, worrying about the person who made you cry.”

Mona blinks at her. Then at the other one. “...Is that bad?”

“No,” Laura says. “That’s the opposite of bad. I’m telling you what it is so you can hear it out loud.” She tips her head toward the paper hat, which is a little squashed now. “Do you know what tonight’s event is actually scored on? Myra isn’t judging who looks the best. She’s judging who looks more like themselves.”

“...Oh no.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna get destroyed.”

“You made a woman who hates being handled a hat, and she wore it,” Laura says. “You are winning and you don’t even know it.”

Mona laughs, once, and it’s ugly and it’s mostly snot, and then she’s crying again anyway. “It’s the eyes,” she says. “That’s the part. If somebody looks at me, I just get it. All of it. And then they can tell I got it, and, if it’s bad enough or whatever, they go. And I can’t even be mad because I’d go too.”

Both of Laura are quiet for a second. Then one of them shifts, and turns, and faces her straight on. “Look at me,” Laura says.

“What?”

“You said people leave when you do it.” Her voice is perfectly level. “So do it. I’m not leaving.”

No. Nope. Bad idea. Terrible idea, worst idea, she doesn’t know what she’s asking for, nobody ever knows what they’re... Mona looks. And it is like putting her hand flat on a wall and feeling the whole building on the other side of it. There is so much love in there that it doesn’t read like a feeling, it reads like architecture, like the thing everything else is built on top of. And under that there is fear, enormous, cold, patient fear, and it isn’t only for herself. And under that there is something Mona has no word for at all, something that feels like holding a thing in your hands and not being sure it’s yours. Mona turns her head. The other Laura is already looking back at her. Same thing. Exactly the same thing, the same wall, the same building. One person. Two windows. Mona’s mouth goes dry.

“You’re scared,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Not for you.”

“Not just for me, no.”

And Laura doesn’t look away. Neither of her does. She just sits there on a guest room floor and lets a young dropout in a paper bowl see the whole thing. And she does not leave.

“...Okay,” Mona says, very quietly.

“Okay.”

“I wasn’t gonna tell anybody.”

“I know.”

Mona sniffs hard and looks at her hands. “That’s the worst superpower ever, by the way.”

“It’s not a superpower,” Laura says. “It’s just a door. Everybody’s got one. Yours doesn’t have a lock on it, that’s all.” She reaches past Mona and picks up the crushed green hat off the carpet, and turns it over once, and holds it out. “She didn’t run because of what you did. She ran because of what she saw. That’s not the same thing.”

Mona takes the hat. It’s mangled. The ribbon has torn loose on one side and the crown is folded almost flat and there’s a boot print on it, which, honestly, fair. She uses Mending anyway. The paper unfolds itself with a small dry crackle and the ribbon knits back down flat, and in about four seconds it is a hat again, a stupid green hat that took her eleven minutes to make. Mona sets it on the little table by the door, brim up, where you would see it from the hallway.

Laura watches her do it. “You think she’s coming back?”

“She left the door open,” Mona says.

Both of Laura get up. One of her holds out a hand, and Mona takes it, and gets hauled to her feet with considerably more force than she was expecting. The other hands her the balled-up T-shirt without comment, cartoon redhead and all, and Mona pulls it on over her head and it is still too big on her and she still likes it.

“Hey.” Laura stops at the door. “If she says anything like that to you again, you come find me. Or Andy. Either of us, I don’t care which, we’re the same on this one.”

“...Can I tell Tyalangan you said that?”

“You can tell the whole island I said that.” Both of Laura go out into the hallway. Neither of her closes the door.

Mona feels better. Still not great, but better. A few swipes of Prestidigitation to fix smeared makeup and dripping snot later, and she feels a bit better again. A calm slowly settles in. Okay, Mona. You accidentally dug something up. You need to warn Van carefully when you can. Maybe this is a good thing in disguise? Help a cute girl and get her to like a cute boy. In the meantime...

Mona sits and works on the costumes, just in case Banshee swoops back around. That is the most herself she can be right now.