ROYAL REWARD: The Toy Witch Plays With: Girls und Panzer (Toy TF, Girls und Panzer)

Theodora ‘Teddy’ Berenstain, Toy Witch, hummed to herself playfully as she sailed her broom over the school ship. “Wow, so big!” she cried, rising even higher, so she could take in the whole thing at once. “I wonder how they make something so heavy float…” 

Shaking the question out of her head, she allowed the broom to drop again, zooming in on the sprawling map of Ōarai Academy till she could actually make out the tanks trundling across its grounds. 

Double-checking to make sure she was still wearing her invisibility cloak, she came to a stop over one particularly, um, tank-y tank. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t moving–instead, the crew were standing about in the open, chatting happily to themselves, as if they weren’t even aware Teddy was floating over their heads. (Probably because they weren’t, silly!) 

“Hmm,” she said, looking down and frowning in thought. “I wonder exactly what I should do with them…” She tapped her chin with her wand, releasing little puffs of sparkles, until at last her eyes lit up. “Oh, of course! I’m such a dummy! I know exactly what I should do!” 

Giggling, she floated ever closer, raised her wand, and started to swing it in wild circles, like a conductor trying to make her orchestra dizzy. As it spun, it released a growing cloud of sparkles, which floated down to the ground and swirled around the tank and its crew, making them squeak in surprise as it coated their bodies. 

“G-gas attack!” cried the brunette in charge, clambering up the side of the tank and leaping inside. The other girls hurried to follow her, and soon the hatch slammed shut with a tremendous clang. 

Still giggling, Teddy continued to swing her wand, releasing more and more of her magical sparkles. Soon, they formed a thick cloud around the tank, so dense you could barely see it through them. If she listened closely though, she could hear the tanker-girls muttering to themselves inside, wondering whether it would get in through the guns. 

Unfortunately for them, it didn’t have to.

Satisfied, Teddy stopped shaking her wand, and the rain of sparkles ceased. The cloud of the stuff shrouding the tank continued to shimmer, though its brightness grew weaker and weaker with the second as the vehicle drank it up, absorbing the magical energy like a sponge draining water. In seconds, the cloud was gone–instead, it was the tank that was sparkled. From inside came screams of panic, the hatch bouncing and thudding as the crew struggled to escape, but Teddy’s magic kept it sealed firmly shut. 

As the spell worked, the tank’s armor groaned as if it were being put through a crusher. And sure enough, the vehicle started to shrink, one component compacting after another. First the gun collapsed, then the treads, then the turret, leaving the vehicle looking comically out of proportion. Finally, it was the hull’s turn, and with one last shriek of panic from the girls inside, it collapsed, crushed to scarcely a percent of its former size. Clang! 

It floated there in the air for a second, before dropping to the ground and sitting sadly in the dust. Now, no sound came from within whatsoever. 

Floating down to it, Teddy picked it up with a giggle and turned it around in her hands, inspecting it from every angle and even shaking it a little, which made it produce a fun rattling sound. “Wow, it worked so well!” 

Rummaging in her bag, she pulled out a remote control and, with a few taps of her wand, repurposed it. Placing the little tank back on the floor, she seized the control’s joystick and thrust it excitedly forward. 

With a whirr, the little tank’s treads started to spin. It took a second for it to gain traction, and then, just like that, it shot forward, leaving a trail of dust in its wake. 

Teddy spun the joystick in circles and fell back laughing as the tank did loop-de-loops in the dust, raising a thick curtain of the stuff. Finally, she brought it to a stop at her feet and raised her controller with a frown. “How do I make it…?” 

After a few failed attempts to achieve what she wanted, she settled on a brute force solution: tapping the controller with her wand, she added an extra dial and a button. When she twisted the former, she grinned to see the tank’s turret spinning as well, and for several minutes, she amused herself by spinning it back and forth, making it wag like a mother’s chiding finger. Soon, however, she grew bored with this and decided it was time to move onto the main course: 

Pressing the button she’d added, she made the tank fire. Pop! A little ball shot out of the tank’s gun and stuck the nearby wall, falling sadly to the dirt. “Wow, look how far it went!” With a giggle, Teddy punched the button again and again, firing off shot after shot. After five of them, however, the tank refused to shoot another, and she realized it was out of ammo. 

Floating over to the wall, she bent down and snatched the little balls up. White and green and flesh colored, each ball bore the face of a young woman, her eyes wide and her mouth stretched in a cartoonish grin of happiness. Snickering at the image, Teddy carried them back to the tank, popped open the hatch, and slipped them inside again.

She spent the next ten minutes driving the tank all around and firing off its former tankers at random, till she’d lost all but one of them. Finally, she drove it up a large slope and over the edge, laughing in delight as it sailed through the air, spun several times, and finally crashed to a stop upside-down. When she tried to move it again, only one of the treads spun. 

“Eh, I was getting bored anyway.” Tossing the control aside, Teddy hopped back onto her broom and sped off. Her creations never did keep her interest for very long. 

Fortunately, there were always other things to play with.