Meet Your Magical Girls! JAKE AND THE DYNAMO Bio 1: Pizza Margherita

We’re currently on track to begin serializing JAKE AND THE DYNAMO as early as next week. And thanks to my artist (you know who you are). Here’s the first of our featured characters.

CODENAME: Magical Girl Space Princess Pizza Margherita
ALTER EGO: Margherita Della Mozzarella
FAMILIAR: Pepper the dalmatian puppy
CURRENT AGE: 20
THREAT LEVEL COMPETENCY: 7.9
MAGITECH: Culinary

“Evildoers beware, for I toss the dough of justice, and justice is never half-baked!”

In an age when humanity faced the prospect of extinction at the hands of man-eating vegetables, comfort food came to the rescue.

Member of the fabled Mozzarella crime family and a direct descendent of Benito Mozzarella himself, Margherita can make you a pizza you can’t refuse. While working as a waitress at a pizzeria, she fed a stick of pepperoni to a starving puppy, only to find that the dog was actually a visitor from Planet Italia, who rewarded her for her good deed by anointing her princess and granting her the Power of Pizza.

Armed with a Vorpal Pizza Slicer, Pizza Margherita could fire boiling tomato sauce from her hands, hurl razor-sharp pepperoni slices like shuriken, fire gooey cheese whips, and toss dough without ripping it. Flying over the city on her Pie in the Sky, she was ever vigilant against the forces of evil.

It was no doubt fated that King Tosser, the caesar of the nefarious Salad Soldiers, would become Pizza Margherita’s nemesis. After his latest act of wanton destruction, Margherita could often be seen standing in the smoking ruins, shaking her fist at the sky, and crying, “Ooh, that Tosser!”

Her most famous (and destructive) battle occurred in Anno Principis 238, when a giant, tentacled bell pepper attacked city hall. Bravely standing her ground even after several other magical girls had fled the scene, Pizza Margherita shouted, “You can’t fight city hall!” and leapt into the fray.

She successfully sliced and diced the killer capsicum, but not before the nasty nightshade had exacted its due: the final count of those dead or missing was three hundred and twelve. During the funeral that followed, the High Priestess of the Temple of the Moon Princess famously and poignantly intoned, “Ask not for whom the bell pepper tolls. It tolls for thee.”

Margherita at last confronted her final boss on the eve of her eighteenth birthday. Their battle stretched across thirty stories of a downtown highrise and ended on the stroke of midnight when she landed the fatal blow with her Vorpal Slicer. When it was over, that Tosser lay dead, and Margherita was a mere mortal: like all eighteen-year-old girls, she had lost her powers. She thus ended her career with a respectable competency rating of 7.9, Tosser’s official threat level as determined by the city’s Threat Assessment Board.

Margherita publicly revealed her secret identity shortly after her retirement. Though no longer in service, she remains active in the magical girl community and has often been seen braving even the fiercest battle zones to replenish the girls’ needed supply of juice boxes. She currently runs her own pizza parlor.

In spite of her years of service to the city, some now regard Margherita as a nuisance on account of her political campaigns. Her attempt to instate Vegetable Awareness Month and Pizza Appreciation Day met widespread derision, as did her anti-vegetable “Toss Dough not Salad” billboards. After she petitioned the City Fathers for a restraining order that would require salad to remain at least a hundred yards from pizza at all times, she was banned from attending any further City Council meetings.

Author: D. G. D. Davidson

D. G. D. Davidson is an archaeologist, librarian, Catholic, and magical girl enthusiast. He is the author of JAKE AND THE DYNAMO.