Queen in Yellow - Chapter 1 - MGNQ, Queen, Canon?

	Placing a chilled glass on the table in the back of the smoky bar, the tall, blonde woman slipped into the booth. Looking over her glass across the crowd, her eyes dropped to the other girl sharing the booth, a small smile on her face. “Well, I see you haven't changed much, Marie.”
	The other girl grinned, a broad smile sparkling mischievously under a curtain of sky blue bangs and cool red eyes. “And you're just as stuffy as ever, Sir.”
	“You know you can just call me Ingrid these days, right? I've not been your boss for a long while now...” the blonde scowled, annoyed at herself for already being annoyed this early into the conversation.
	“Oh no, you can't fool me Sir. I've grown far to set in my ways to change now... Though... you could always come my way, you know, take up with the Fourth? I'd love to have the chance to work together again, though I might have to be the one in charge this time...”
	Ingrid sat back in her booth, taking a big sip of her gin and tonic. Catching the eye of the pretty waitress making her rounds, she lightly tapped her drink, indicating that she would need another soon at this rate. “So, I've called upon you for a reason, actually.”
	The other girl frowned at this, looking a little hurt. “Really? You come visiting for the first time in two years, and it's for business?” She folded her arms, sighing. “That's cold, Sir, real cold.”
	“Oh don't be like that, I come bearing gifts, at least. I think I've got a lead on something you might be interested in.” Reaching into her inventory, she slid a  4x6 photo across the table, holding one corner firmly with two fingers.
	“Oh? Well... hmm... lemme... is that...” the blue haired girl looked up, an incredulous look on her face. “Really? You're going after El Dorado? You KNOW that's just a legend, right? I have that same pic, just WITHOUT the giant floating castle in the background. It's gotta be a 'shop.”
	Ingrid glanced down, looking over the picture. It DID seem like something too strange to be real; a local farmer and his alpaca, taking a picture deep in the mountains somewhere. The only thing that stood out was the enormous castle, made of what looked like gold, floating serenely over one of the mountain peaks in the background.
	“Ok, Marie, just follow me for a second here. I think this thing is real, I think I've got a solid lead, and I think it's connected to the Blessed Lady, somehow.”
	Marie folded her arms and sat back in her booth, looking put off. “Oh come ON, Sir! I can't believe you've fallen in with that Blessed Lady rubbish?!”
	“Well, if you just listen for one-”
	Marie leaned forward, stabbing the table with one finger, denting it slightly under her obvious annoyance on the subject. “Ok, look, that thing is just a cult! Some fake girl that the Incubators are pushing to make us feel better for our lot in life. I had hoped you were clever enough to steer past it, Sir!”
	Ingrid sipped her drink, bemused that she had turned the tables on the other girl. Somehow. Seems she HAD changed, actually... “It's not my thing, per say, no, but now you've got me curious. Why do you say its a fake?”
	“'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'” Marie put one finger in the air as she zoned out, clearly getting engaged in the debate. “The whole concept of the Blessed Lady is that there is some ultimate magical girl who transcended time and became our Lady and Saviour, right? But you gotta to remember who's pulling the strings, here. Despite all our fantastical powers and ability to rewrite our fates, we magical girls are nothing but tools of the Incubators, created for a very specific purpose. Sure, it might LOOK like we're using 'magic', but in  reality all we're doing is working for vast, utterly alien intelligences who are so stupidly, unbelievably advanced that our primitive monkey brain just kind of melts down and calls it 'magic'. None of this is 'magic', it's all just poorly understood superscience!
	“I can only see two scenarios that a Blessed Lady actually exists; one, she's some puppet of the Incubators designed to keep us in a hopeful, easily controlled state, or two she's some sort of mega-witch able to force her way into the mind's of magical girls all across the planet on a nightly basis.” She took a breath, gesturing at the half finished plate of food she had been working on before Ingrid showed up. “I've seen how both the Professor AND Quarty look when you come home with a loaded grief seed; do you HONESTLY think they'd let some sort of  witch all-you-can-eat buffet sit around long before they sent their entire Officio after it?”
	Ingrid nodded non-committally. “So you're saying that since no one, that we know of, has mobilized after the Blessed Lady that it's all one big PR stunt?”
	Marie held her hands out wide. “Well... yeah. Think about it. Occam’s Razor says that when your choices are “we're being lied to be creatures we know to be untrustworthy” and “magical space goddess”, the simpler one is the one more likely to be true.”
	The blond girl shrugged, tapping the picture on the table lightly. “That may be, but it doesn't change this. I'm fairly sure that the Lost City of Gold is real, and I think I've got a lead on it. Are you in? It'd be like old times, hunting down relics and breaking into labs for the eggheads back on the Rafflesia...”
	Marie frowned, looking genuinely torn by the matter. “Look... we've tried to follow up on the pic, and there's nothing out there. I've scoured the satellite data, and there's no huge floating castle. Why is the Professor still having you hunt these down, anyway? I thought I heard you got a new... girl, that you were doing more stuff close to home these days.”
	Ingrid shrugged, finishing off her drink. “I'm not sure where you're getting your info, Marie, but I'm still on active duty.”
	“I suppose I should be going. I don't think I've got much to offer that you'd be interested in. Sorry, Sir.” The blue haired girl nodded, looking a little sad, turning to wave toward the waitress for her check. “Check please!”
	She winced as a huge crash came from the back, from what sounded like one of the kitchen staff knocking over a huge stack of drying plates. They nearly drowned out her call to the waitress, and almost muffed the sound of a silenced firearm firing once, twice, from under the table.
	Almost.
	Ingrid chuckled, pulling her hand from under edge of the table, a tight ball of napkins clenched tightly in her fist. Marie whipped her head back, red eyes suddenly wide, as the blonde tapped her hand sharply on the edge of the glass like she was cracking an egg. But instead of golden yolk, two slivers of metal tumbled out, leaving glittering spiderwebs of cracked glass as they bounced off the bottom.
	“Looks like you really haven't changed much, after all, Marie. You're aim is still shit.”
	The blue haired girl snapped her arms up, both palms thrust forward, fingers spread wide, when she jerked to the side heavily, crashing into the edge of the booth. She jerked once or twice, as the waitress smirked behind her, silvery weapon held lightly in her grasp, pulling her wig off. “Heh, she was so worried about looking for magical traps she didn't even notice me in makeup.”
	Ingrid rolled her eyes, snatching the picture off the floor. “Great, just great Tamil. Now I don't get to grill her for info. I HAD this, you know.”
	“Oh come on! She was shooting at you!” The dark skinned Tamil pushed Marie to the side, sitting in the booth to not attract any more attention. She reached out to pull one of the thin disks from the splintering drinking glass. “What the hell was she trying to pincushion you with, anyway?”
	Ingrid opened her mouth to stop the other girl, who winced and snatched her hand away, a thin line of dark blood sliding down the inside of the glass. “Watch those- nevermind. Did get her goons?”
	Tamil flashed a big grin, before sticking her finger in her mouth. “Yeah, knocked out damn near half the bar. They should be dozing into their drinks for a while yet.” She pulled a mostly empty vial of colorless liquid from her inventory, shaking it gently
	Ingrid blinked, then slumped. “But... what about the drones?”
	“What drones?”
	“She's from the FOURTH, Tam! She's going-!” The rest of her chastisement was drowned out as the ventilation duct across the room popped open, falling to the floor with a clang as a small squadron of strange, disk shaped floating devices floating out, complete with an under-slung multibarreled rotary cannon quickly spinning to firing speed.
	Eyes wide out the sound, Tamil flicked her wrist out, transformation flaring over her as the silvery weapon cracked to life, a roughly hewn blade of electrical force cleaving the steel table from the wall. Ingrid snatched the holder of napkins from the air as her partner flipped the table, imposing it between them and the hailstorm of bullets roaring their way.
	“O...k... guess it's time to go! Ready to run?” Tamil hefted the table, gauging it's weight one handed. Ingrid nodded, her right eye glowing a pale, sapphire blue.
	Taking a deep breath, Tamil rushed out into the open, table held as a shield, trying to put her body between the shots fired and Ingrid rushing alongside her. As shots pinged off the floor below, the ones that ricochet too close get wrapped up and dragged down by napkins, drifting behind the two like fallen leaves.
	Moments later, the two burst from the from front of the cafe, Tamil dropping the shredded table to the ground as they took off down the street. “Well- I... I guess... that's onto the next stop? Huh?”
	Ingrid paused long enough to fling her hand out, the last of the napkins and paper menus she had collected from the tables on the way out plastering the door shut. “Yeah... looks like this one's a bust, for now...”

- - - - -
	“Eeeh!”
	The blackhaired girl jolted backward out of the ruined booth, holding her hand gingerly. Her partner came over, a smirk on her face. “Now what did I tell you about playing with glass, hmm...?”
	“Oh, shut up. I think I found something. Here, look at this. Definitely not glass. Doesn't look like shrapnel, either. I'm gonna call the others, check in with them.”
	The brunette nodded, carefully taking the silvery object from her friend and licking the edge ever so delicately.
	“New Girl here, what have you got for me?”
	“I think we've found something. It looks like a weapon, maybe. Kind of like one of those ninja star things. Shuriken, I think? Den-”
	“Wren!” The voice on the other end of the line cut in sternly. “Radio discipline, please. Who knows who might be listening in? Call signs only.”
	Wren rolled her eyes. “Ok, ok, Blood Angel is working on it n- hey! Get off!”
	Blood Angel smiled around the black haired girl's finger, gently licking the cut. “Why widen't you twell me you got hurlt?”
	“Quit playing around, New Girl's on the line! Did you figure anything out about the shuriken or not?”
	Blood Angel pouted, her already red painted lips an even darker shade as she cleaned the blood from them with her tongue. She brought a hand up to her ear, joining in the conversation. “Yes, yes. I was working; I had to get a fresh sample. Its definitely a weapon, though I have no idea how that would even work...”
	“Hmm... probably from Fourth. We ARE in their territory, after all.” New Girl pipped up. She sounded a little distracted, though Wren couldn't tell what she was up to on her end.
	“Well, if it WAS one of them, who was she shooting at? This whole place is trashed, but no bodies anywhere.” Wren looked around as she spoke, trying to place the damage pattern.
	“'Maybe just a local who was getting handsy?” New Girl put in.
	 Blood Angel blanched. “Ick. I wouldn't wanna taste a tinny even if I WAS a nerd.”
	“What's wrong? They taste like motor oil?”
	“Ha ha. No, not like that. More like it's been through a coffee filter one too many times, scrubbed clean and sanitized. Though... actually...” She thoughtfully licked her lips, then grinned. “Your a genius, Wren! It tasted like a sparkly before, but I figured that was just the tinny! But no, you're right! I don't think it's her blood at all! It tastes too... vital, fresh somehow! She was shooting another magical girl! Must be fast, barely nicked her...”
	New Girl's voice perked up, like she had finally joined the conversation for real. “Oh? You're sure of that? That's GOT to be them! They must'a had a disagreement or something, and tore the place up trying to get at each other. Alright you too, come on back, you did good. I'll pass the word to Duchess. Meet us in the safe house in a couple hours, don't be seen.” With that her line went dead, leaving the two girls in the ruined bar.
	“Well, that went well, I suppose.” Wren sighed, looking at her partner, who had a strange expression on her face as she licked her lips more. Like she was trying to place something.
	“What's wrong?”
	“...She's definitely a magical girl... but... why does she taste like... ink...?”