The Null Timeline details the events depicted in Null Magical Girl. As the story shows events in the far future, as well as fundamental ones, it is implied to take place in every loop, or outside of them altogether.
This timeline is characterized by its metaphysical nature as an eternal time loop and its ultimate revelation about the origin of souls, magic, and human relationships. Unlike other timelines, it exists both within and outside conventional spacetime, forming a closed causal loop that defines its own reality.
As Null Magical Girl doesn't connect to any other characters, the events attributed to it are listed in this article for convenience.
Johannes Gutenberg invents the movable typeprinting press. In a failed attempt to alter her fate and establish a non-anthropocentric reality by preventing the propagation of stories, Kosane Kiriha travels back in time to Strasbourg to kill Gutenberg.[1]
Kosane ambushes Gutenberg as he exits his workshop, striking him in the head with a piece of wood and beating him until his skull is shattered. However, her twin sister Eruna appears and instantly reverses time, undoing his death.[1]
Realizing conventional methods are futile, Kosane, with the aid of the universe's own "immune system" against Magical Girls, accesses the symmetry chrysalis, or the appendix of the universe. This allows her to manipulate fundamental physical constants and she launches a series of catastrophic, cosmic-scale attacks on the 15th century to ensure Gutenberg's death.[1]
She teleports the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune into close orbit around the Sun, triggering massive solar storms that strip away Earth's ozone layer and ultimately cause the Sun to explode, obliterating the planet.[1]
She merges neutron stars to fire gamma-ray bursts at Earth.[1]
She drops strange quarks to transform Earth's ordinary matter.[1]
She manipulates scalar fields to create local "big rip" events.[1]
Each time Eruna appears and undoes Kosane's efforts with her Rifle of the Inner World.[1]
These failed attempts prove that even wielding the power of the entire universe is insufficient to overcome Eruna, who represents the entrenched system of fate and human relationships. This failure forces Kosane to seek a power that transcends the known laws of physics altogether: the emotional energy of Magical Girls.[1]
1997 - 2021
c. 1997: A single fertilized egg, destined to become the twins Kosane and Eruna Kiriha, is approached by a future, Kyubey-merged version of Kosane, having traveled back through the time loop. This makes Kosane both the contractor and the contracted, and the wish is made: "To divide and proliferate."[1]
This creates self-replicating souls, the foundational time loops that would eventually form the basis of all human relationships and fate. This phenomenon is spread throughout time and space.[1]
The biological division of the twins is incomplete, and they are conjoined, sharing a single brain. During the process, this brain mysteriously disappears, and to save one of the fetuses from death, the future Kosane / Kyubey entity implants Incubator cells into it.[1]
The fetus with the Incubator cells survives and is named Kosane Kiriha. The other fetus, which was to be named Eruna Kiriha, dies. However, due to the nature of the wish, Eruna persists as a powerful metaphysical entity, the personification of the proliferated soul and the system of fate.[1]
1997 - 2011: Kosane grows up with Eruna as a constant, psychic presence she interprets as an "imaginary friend." The nature of their shared soul and the Incubator cells in Kosane create a unique existence outside the normal Magical Girl system.[2][1]
2011: Kosane, now 14 years old, is sent to pediatricians and therapists by her worried parents due to her continued insistence on Eruna's existence. As a result of this therapeutic process, the psychic presence of Eruna fades from Kosane's daily life, though she is not entirely gone.[2]
Kosane is approached by Kyubey, who offers her a contract to become a Magical Girl. However, the contract fails and Kyubey declares her a "null Magical Girl," stating she has no soul to place into a Soul Gem. This traumatic failure becomes a buried memory she later struggles to recall.[2]
This failed contract is because her soul exists as the larger, overarching time loop that defines their entire reality.[1]
2021
The year 2021 functions as a temporal "locked room" for Kosane. The following events occur within the original, linear iteration of the year, which then becomes the template for an endless, repeating loop.
March, 2021: Kosane Kiriha, a 24-year-old graduate student, faces imminent unemployment and a deep existential crisis. She lives a listless existence in her apartment, haunted by a growing lump on the back of her neck.[1]
During her morning routine, she experiences a dissociative episode in front of her mirror, hearing the voice of her long-dead twin sister, Eruna. In a fit of frustration and confusion, she repeatedly smashes her head into the mirror, cracking it. This act of self-harm "cracks" her perception of reality, allowing her to remember her first meeting with Kyubey ten years prior. Immediately after this revelation, she collapses and experiences a vivid dream of her failed master's thesis presentation, during which her professor transforms into Eruna.[1]
Kosane awakens at sunset to find herself covered in dried blood. Upon inspecting the damage in her bathroom mirror, she discovers her skull is cracked open and hollow, with no brain inside. The entity Kyubey appears and explains that her body is controlled by a tumor of Incubator cells on the back of her neck. He confirms her status as a "null Magical Girl" and states that the spacetime collapse is centered on her.[1]
Kosane and Kyubey cohabitate for several days. Kyubey, acting as an investigator for the Incubators, monitors the exponentially growing spacetime distortion.[1]
After failing to gain any helpful information, he decides to leave Kosane's apartment. Before doing so, he retrieves a physical letter from inside Kosane's cranial cavity, addressed to her from Eruna Kiriha. The letter details that she's waiting for Kosane at the epicenter of fate, and it also contains instructions to fold the letter along a dotted line to create a ticket for the Time Railroad.[1]
Kyubey helps Kosane folds the letter into a tetrahedron, which activates and projects a kaleidoscopic tunnel of light. This phenomenon transports her and Kyubey to a station platform, where they board the "Time Loop Railroad Express 107." Upon boarding, Kosane is attacked and knocked unconscious by a group of five Magical Girls.[1]
Kosane returns to her apartment at the exact moment she left, now fused with the essence of multiple Kyubeys and the Time Railroad after the boiler explosion. She initially believes she has a chance to live her life anew, but quickly realizes she is trapped. The year 2021 has become a closed temporal circuit—a "locked room" from which she cannot escape.[1]
The voices of Homo magica from the future permeate her reality, transmitted through the minds of other people and the environment itself. Eruna's presence becomes overwhelming, manifesting in reflections and even writing messages in her own blood.[1]
In October, Kosane sees the face of Eruna staring back at her from a mirror. When she smashes it, her own blood pools on the floor to form a message from Eruna, telling her she's waiting to see her at the epicenter of fate.[1]
By December, through her newfound temporal perception, Kosane can clearly see the outcome of the year: her own corpse in the corner of her room. She realizes she is trapped in a "locked-room murder" where the victim, the culprit, the witness, and the detective are all herself.[1]
Kosane becomes aware that the year 2021 is repeating endlessly. Each cycle begins anew, and each cycle ends with her suicide by December 31st at 23:59:59.[1]
Assuming the role of the "ultimate detective," Kosane uses the loops to investigate her own death. She replays the year trillions of times in a desperate search for a way to alter her fate.[1]
Every possible method of suicide is explored and inevitably occurs across the loops: hanging, poisoning, jumping from a bridge, starvation, self-immolation, drowning, electrocution, and gas poisoning. The countless repetitions stain the fabric of 2021 with infinite variations of her death.[1]
In a final, desperate effort, Kosane uses the emotional energy from her own contract to push in the direction of "super-time," rising above the flat timeline of 2021. She and Eruna breach the boundary into the "inner universe," a metaphysical plane where time exists as great rivers and "fate" manifests as grotesque, tree-like structures modeled after Kosane's own nervous system.[1]
In this space, Kosane deduces the final truth. She understands that souls are self-contained time loops, emotional energy is the power of fate, and her suicide is the "waste heat" of the hyper-prediction machine of human relationships. Most importantly, she realizes that the entire timeline is their soul, created by their own wish to "divide and proliferate."[1]
Despite understanding that she can never win—as she is fighting against her own existence and the system she authored—Kosane chooses to resist eternally. The story ends with her continued struggle against Eruna and the fate of Homo magica ad infinitum, fulfilling her role as the Null Magical Girl.[1]
The Far Future
Humanity progresses in their discoveries. They learn to utilize nuclear fission, then nuclear fusion, antimatter technology, then antimatter itself and finally wormhole technology.[1]
Through these discoveries, they spread to the rest of the solar system, the space around it and eventually most of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.[1]
At some point, the Magi Wars rage across the galaxy. Homo magica, with their passive and immense generation of emotional energy, systematically exterminates or displaces Homo sapiens and other intelligent alien species. The Incubator collective is also driven to complete extinction.[3]
800,000 Years in the Future
Kosane and Kyubey arrive via the Time Railroad to a world dominated by Homo magica. This evolved species has externalized human relationships into a vast, embedded Labyrinth, creating a society where individuals perform endless rituals of "cuteness" to generate positive emotional energy and avoid the despair that creates Witches. Their civilization exists within a distorted spacetime that functions as a planet-sized Witch's Labyrinth.[3]
With help from Kyubey, Kosane is rescued by Coeurl, a "Magical Girl" from the last remnants of Homo sapiens. They flee to a gravity-controlled asteroid fortress, the Yamata no Orochi. It escapes the battle by generating a wormhole and arriving at Planet Terminus, the last sanctuary for old humanity and refugee alien species.[3]
Kosane is tasked with becoming an "emotion manager," attempting to create a corps of non-human Magical Girls from races such as the Kronos, Hemitheos, and the Mediums.[3]
The project is a total failure, as stories—the templates for emotional relationships—require anthropomorphism, which these aliens lack.[3]
After years of failed efforts, Kosane falls into despair and alcoholism. She spends her days among the Incubators, who have multiplied from the Kyubey she brought along, and is eventually informed that Coeurl has died in battle.[3]
Homo magica soon assault Terminus and the planet is destroyed. Homo magica use the leftover planet matter to construct a Ringworld around the system's sun, a single, continuous landmass with a surface area millions of times greater than that of all planetary surfaces combined. On the Ringworld, New Homo magica are spontaneously generated from the soil of the Ringworld via magic, populating the infinite landscape exponentially.[3]
In a coordinated, universal event, all Homo magica simultaneously allow their Soul Gems to taint and transform into Witches. The colossal release of emotional energy from this event is used to imprint the algorithm of "cute human relationships" onto the very fabric of spacetime, creating a predetermined fate for all possible interactions. This imprinted spacetime becomes the foundation for the complete Time Railroad, allowing Homo magica to establish their eternal dominion across all timelines, from the beginning of the universe to its end.[3]
Kosane is pursued by the manifestation of her sister Eruna, who is the personification of this completed system of fate. Using the Incubators' calculations, she makes her way to the Time Railroad locomotive while carrying as many Incubators as she can. In a desperate attempt to escape, she overloads the engine's temporal "coal," causing a catastrophic boiler explosion. This event fuses Kosane's consciousness with multiple Kyubey bodies and the locomotive itself, granting her a transcendent state from which she can perceive and manipulate the timeline from a higher dimension.[3]
