“It’s my birthday? Whaaaaaaaaaaaa?”

Yes indeed it is, Madoka Kaname! You’re thirty years old, and your birthday is October 3rd, just like it always is!

“B-but.... Narrator, how did I get to be THIRTY?! I thought I was fourteen like, just two stories ago!”

You have a bad sense of time passing, Madoka, but I know how you feel. It feels like yesterday that I was an ethereal voice floating in the void waiting for someone to call on me and select me as their own. Now, I’m the narrator for Caribbean Rim, an ethereal, omniscient being that can read the thoughts and feelings and see the actions and struggles of everyone in the entire universe! That’s neat, huh.

“Well, thanks for letting me know...”

“Honey, who are you talking to?”

“Uh, no-one! No omniscient beings here!”

Madoka was laying in bed, talking to me, but I’ll stay out of this now. So Madoka was laying in bed resting up after a really long day fighting the Furry Liberation Army out in the desert. She really didn’t understand how they existed like they did; they had tanks and lots of guns and superpowered Furry Generals who could punch holes through mountains and other dumb shounen stuff, but they were fighting in the Caribbean region mostly. Shouldn’t they have been like, pirates or something? Why were they some well-funded militia group? Who was paying them?

Ah, anyway, thinking about that made her muscles ache. Madoka knew she’d be pulled from the field soon when she got too pugnaciously pregnant, so she was trying to do what she could as best as she could but... It was a bad idea. Don’t let her do that anymore.

Her wife entered the bedroom. In a huge shock, she was carrying a huge tray filled with all sorts of breakfast items, and set it up where Madoka could eat... breakfast in bed! Yeah!

“Dude!!!!” Madoka shouted. “I can eat food while only being in a partly-upright position? This is mega crazy.”

“Happy birthday honey,” Kyoko said.

“Wait just a second!!!!!” Madoka’s daughter came running in too, carrying a large heart-shaped card with some stick figures on it based on her new hit comic book series, “Adventures of the Robot Girls.” She tried selling the comics at her school for ten pesos each but the teachers always got mad at her and confiscated them. Madoka thought it was just good business sense.

“Wow,” Madoka said. “All three of the Robot Girls wish me a happy birthday? I’m so proud of them.”

“I do too,” Makoto said. “You’re so old now!”

Eek.

“Makoto, don’t say that,” Kyoko chided. “Just because your old woman here is entering her fourth decade of existence doesn’t mean she’s old. It just means she’s growing up in a new way.” Kyoko giggled. “Anyway, let’s sing happy birthday, the non-copyrighted version.”

But Madoka didn’t listen to them. Her heart only broke on the inside as her very being shattered within her.

She was thirty.

The entire universe that had seemingly revolved around her--it WAS the Madoka Series Universe, after all--had suddenly passed her by. No longer was she a precocious teen with a somewhat-skimpy outfit and a somewhat-scatterbrained school life. She was a somewhat-old woman with somewhat of a family.

The time had slipped by. Somehow twenty years passed and she never even knew it. Holy darn.

Let’s go back in this mental calendar of hers and see what the Kaname life was like.

Her first decade was relatively simple, as first decades usually were. She was born, started growing older, got into box cars for a couple weeks until she realized she didn’t like building them. She went to Mitakihara Public Elementary No. 108, got a few friends, had her first kiss (with a boy; she didn’t know yet). She read Creamy Dreamy Cheery Goldy and all the other great shoujo manga of that era (the best era of course), went to the library a lot, and enjoyed school. Sayaka became her best friend and they stuck together forever.

Her second decade was where things started getting interesting. She got her first period at ten, which seemed way too early and freaked her out at the time like she had some weird disease. And then she went to middle school and had her first couple girlfriends, you know, this and that... that and this... and bam she met Kyubey, Mami, Homura (except she was actually just Kyubey in disguise), Nagisa, and of course Kyoko, who she never got to know too well before she was exiled to Mexico.

And then at age fourteen she travelled to Mexico to stop Sayaka, who had turned into a witch. Under no inclination of her own. she became the Sheriff of Mexico, saved her friend with the power of friendship, got engaged to Homura, found out her fiance was a shapeshifting space alien, and then married Kyoko on a whim because they already had matching sombreros anyway. The rest of the decade was pretty much like that.

Her third decade, though? Man, what a life. She started the Magical Girl Squad to protect Mexico and the Caribbean Rim, got in a lot of fights with eccentric villains like Galahad the Conqueror, who was a surly British man always in fancy suits that shot poison darts for fun and... it’s a whole thing, we don’t have to go into it. She travelled to an alternate universe and ended up accidentally summoning an extradimensional psycho lesbian to their universe and almost having reality be wiped out. And then she and Kyoko had their first child Makoto, and the Ryoshi Program started.

It’s like... everything started to change when she was fourteen. Man, if she hadn’t accepted Kyubey’s offer to become a magical girl, she would probably still be in Mitakihara City right now, doing... something. She would have never come to Mexico, she would have never married Kyoko-- she would have probably never even met her. No giant robots, no universe travelling, no giant bears of honey.

Madoka was now entering her fourth decade of existence...

What would become of her after that? After thirty years, she had become this confusing mix of eccentricity and femininity, motherhood and badassery... Madoka Kaname was an enigma even to herself.

“Madoka, are you okay?” Kyoko asked.

“Huh?”

“You’ve been staring at your food for like, twenty minutes. It’s going to get cold if you don’t eat it.”

“Uh, oops.”

Madoka ate her food, which was very good as Kyoko was an excellent cook somehow, but she was still stricken with the thoughts that she had no idea how this kind of life of hers had ever come to be, how so many ridiculous events could lead to such a strange, short woman becoming who she was.

She was going to take a walk in the park, mostly so she could have this story split into two parts.