Chapter Text
Homura sighed to herself. After time and time again of her failing to save Madoka, she had finally turned to the unthinkable: taking guidance from random comments on the internet. It was a plan made in desperation after she’d realized she’d just repeated the last 27 loops virtually verbatim, all of which rapidly failed. Clearly, something different was needed. Thus, she… decided to turn to the internet, and pray they were better at brainstorming than her. Or more realistically, could come up with a bunch of alternatives that for various reasons would never work, as well as a handful of surprisingly successful ones.
So far the results had been… around as well as usual, actually. Which of course meant terrible, but at least they weren’t especially terrible. Even some of the more… unique plans had achieved some surprising amount of success before their inevitable end in dismal failure. Tricking everyone into thinking she had percentage-based precognition powers, for instance, had been significantly more successful in convincing everyone she knew what she was talking about than saying it was because of time travel. For some reason. Which didn’t stop everything from ending in disaster, but still. She’d marked down the most promising of the plans for later exploration, but the fact that she was surprised meant it was even more critical that she explore even the remotest of possibilities.
Which led to… plan 47.
For the record, Homura hated plan 47. With a passion. That was why it was plan 47, after all, and not something she did much, much earlier.
But… she’d resolved to look into every possible solution to save Madoka, no matter how counter it went to her principles.
…She was just trying to avoid the inevitable at this point. She supposed she should force herself to get moving, then.
Stopping time, Homura stepped out from behind the tree she had been hiding behind. She carefully took a position in front of her friends unsuspecting victims, put on her best attempt at a friendly face, and dropped the time stop.
“Hello!” She forced out in what even she could tell was a terrible approximation of a cheery voice. “I’m… Akemi Homura. Would… would you like to make a wish and become a magical girl?”
As she observed the gaping expressions of Madoka and Miki, she felt her jaw involuntarily clench as she resisted the urge to run away out of embarrassment, tell them not to wish, or grab Madoka and run away to literally anywhere else. But no. Plan 47 said that she had to be as earnest as possible here. If the plan wasn’t carried out to the best of her abilities no matter how pitiful those abilities were then the results of the experiment would be tainted and she’d… have to do it again…
…And if nothing else, Homura hated plan 47…