Obviously the thing to do when the trees cry out that there's something awful and wrong in Doriath is to flee. 

She doesn't do that.

Obviously the thing to do if you're not going to flee is to shoot at it. 

She doesn't even know how to draw a bow. 

She turns and looks at it and it's a snake with a mirror held in its jaws and at this point she realizes how devastated everyone will be if she's injured and she turns to flee but by this point it's too late, no matter how swift she is on her feet.

...this does not usually happen, and Bella's standard of 'usually' is pretty rigorous.

"Who are you? - Keep your voice down."

She is no longer in Doriath; she feels it instantly as the absence of a thousand other senses. She then looks around and feels it more obviously; no Elves or even Dwarves would have built such a place as this. And someone's speaking a language she's never heard, and -

She should be terrified. She is actually kind of excited. Hello.

...the fuck.

Hello. If you make a noise we will have company I don't want. Who are you? How did you get here?

The girl is alarmed; she smiles apologetically and tries toning down the osanwe. There was a snake in Doriath. I'm actually guessing it wasn't a monster of the Enemy's, random creatures sometimes make it past the wards but things of evil never would. I'm Lúthien! It's nice to meet you, I'm sorry if I've somehow trespassed...

You're going to need to back up and give me way more context. I have never heard of Doriath or the Enemy or wards.

Some people call it Eglador? Are you Avarin? You don't look like anything I've ever seen, actually - and even the Avari've heard of the Enemy -

I'm sorry. This has never happened to me and I feel numb all over from missing Doriath and why is this room so appallingly ugly I think I need a little time to collect myself.

It's a hospital, they're not meant to be decorative. That's beside the point. The point is we need to figure out how to get you back where you came from because you cannot stay here.

...why not? I mean, I should go home, people will worry, but is this place dangerous? I'm happy to help in the war, it's just my father'd never let me risk it.

I think you've gone farther than you realized somehow and this is another planet entirely, and it's going to be eaten by a monster in a month.

...oh.

Then we need to get everyone out. Probably not to my home, it can't feed them all, but to Valinor, maybe, or even in the Noldor kingdoms you wouldn't get eaten by monsters, and also I'm likelier than any of you to be fine, since you're all incarnates. Are our months the same length? What's the monster?

A month is thirty days. If you've got a way to evacuate seven billion people I'm all ears. The monster is an unusually large version of a kind called a witch.

Seven billion? I think we need the Valar.

Never heard of 'em. Look, I think I can handle the seven billion people. It's you I can't handle, you're not supposed to be here.

How are you handling the seven billion people? That way of handling should work for me too, shouldn't it?

Nope. I'm in a time loop. I get more than a month to try stuff and practice and acquire resources. You are not in the time loop. You do not normally appear in this room now.

...can you maybe start at the beginning?

This planet is being used by evil aliens - by the way, if you tell the evil aliens anything of significance I will instantly restart the time loop without you do not fuck with me on that - as a power source. The extraction process involves granting naive teenage girls wishes and giving them magical powers in exchange for their service fighting witches, generally without telling them that they'll eventually turn into witches too. I made my wish before I knew about all this but fortuitously my magic powers manipulate time; when I reset or die I wake up here a few minutes ago. You are not usually here. You need to go home.

Uh.

Okay.

I can't think of an avenue more obvious than letting this body go and heading to Mandos but if you've never heard of the Valar it might take me more than a month even to find him. I can do that if you really think it's going to be dangerous to be here. What are witches?

Ex-puella-magi who run out of witch-hunting byproducts or have emotional meltdowns turn into horrible despair monsters who cause people to commit suicide or violent crime around them; that's witches. I do not know what Mandos is. - Since astronomers have not noticed discrepancies in the movement of the stars I think I am in fact traveling back in time per se, not just resetting the planet. Something genuinely irregular happened to you; you might be from a different reality with its own time stream or something.

My reality's going to be trying really hard to find me but I don't know how that'll work with time things. Mandos is where we go if we damage our bodies beyond repair, he makes us new ones. If this is a different reality I don't know how I'd find my way there if this body died. 

I don't either. If you don't have a way home the only obvious thing I'm coming up with is convincing a potential puella magi to wish you home. Which alerts the evil aliens, but I can reset right after that before they can do anything about it.

Are you going to eventually figure out how to save the world?

Working on it. I'm trying to track down where the giant witch is earlier in the month before she's so hard to kill. And get better at killing witches. If you have any cool otherworldly resources of any kind to drop on me, wouldn't say no.

I mean, I'm half-Maia and sing like it and depending what kind of incarnate you are I'm probably physically a lot stronger than you? I can't compose a song specifically for witches in a month, though.

...reminder that this is not your planet and I have no idea what you're talking about.

Okay. Our world has the Valar who created it and the Maiar who are the same kind of thing only smaller and then it has incarnates, who are people who have to keep a physical form all the time. The incarnates come in Elves, Men, and Dwarves, and I guess Ents which are talking trees. There might be others; I've never left Doriath. You're not an Elf. You might be a Man. I don't know what they look like because Doriath's borders are closed to them.

Being half-Maia makes me a lot stronger and more resilient and better at magic than any incarnates I've heard of, but unfortunately I don't have much useful magic it's all things like making crops grow and making people happy. And I've been working on sleep. 

Making people happy might actually be a very big deal if it will decontaminate a soul gem.

It might do that. At full power it can do a lot - like, you wouldn't want to be in my vicinity or you'll be giddy for a week kinds of a lot.

It might or might not be the right kind of thing. Despair will contaminate a gem and a sufficiently contaminated gem will make it difficult to impossible to be in a good mood; I have never actually seen mood alone improve a gem's condition. But magical mood improvement might conceivably do it and if you can do that you can short-circuit the entire witch ecology. When we kill a witch - a big witch - then we can collect something called a grief seed and offload accumulated gem dinge from magic use or negative affect. When the seed's filled up the evil aliens'll collect it; if they don't, and sometimes they deliberately just leave the seeds lying around for evil alien reasons, they hatch into more witches. Witches can also bud off junior versions of themselves called familiars which don't leave grief seeds unless they stick around long enough to kill a few people. And we can't just stop using magic: existing, at all, while being a puella magi takes magic. So there's a perpetual supply of witches and we can't drive them extinct or we'll just be the next generation. And you wind up with puella magi killing each other over territory in which to farm witches which I remind you kill people. If there were any other way to clear soul gems it could short-circuit the ecology.

All of that is really awful and I really hope my magic helps. How do we check?

My gem's not in bad shape but it's not at a hundred percent right now. You have to sing to do this?

Yeah. Magic songs don't work over osanwe. 

Is that your telepathy power? How does it work?

You aren't used to it? It's for sharing thoughts, emotions, memories, senses - 

No, we don't have that. Some puella magi have mind powers but I've never met one so - friendly.

If you don't have that are you in the habit of keeping private thoughts?

I am in the habit of thoughts being private by default.

So the way osanwe works is that if you know what you're doing you'll only share what you intend, but if you're not keeping a mental distinction between things you want to share and things you want to keep private, then they're all readable. Everyone I know learns to keep their thoughts private when they're really little but if people don't have osanwe here they won't be doing that...

You've been picking up on context too slowly to have been reading my mind very much; have you gotten anything that in retrospect it seems like I wasn't trying to say?

At the beginning you were coming through very panicky, that was probably osanwe? It might be that in your race thoughts are private by default, I don't know, I've never met anyone but Elves and Dwarves and Dwarves are immune to all mind-affecting magic.

I was not intending to project emotions at you. How do I make this distinction more consistently?

Most people come up with an intuitive metaphor? Like, my private thoughts happen in Menegroth, my public thoughts happen outside in the forest. And then you practice mentally placing thoughts privately until it's a habit and you do it by default, and then you deliberately put something public if you want to make it readable by anyone or you can sort of send it to people if you want to share it just with them, though if I'm the only person here with telepathy that distinction doesn't matter. 

Yeah, okay. Private thoughts tucked in her shield and public ones anywhere other than that. Bella tucks herself into her shield. Kindly do not read me more than you have to in order to get what I'm sending, and I'd be wary of even that if it weren't our only way around the language barrier. And don't read passersby unless it's an emergency. Okay, I'm devoting this loop to figuring you and your situation out. Since you are from another planet please tell me what your day-to-day needs for things in general are.

If it's only thirty days, uh, I'll need to sleep once or twice and drink most days and that's all. I'll be most functional if I can sleep five or six times and if I can eat and drink things. I eat berries and nuts and I drink wine and water, but that's just what's available in Doriath, I can eat anything an Elf can and if something of your world's was not edible for me I'd notice when I tried eating it. 

...okay, you will have a hard time getting wine without theft, there's an age limit on alcohol and you look young enough to have to produce proof of age to buy any, so ideally that's an option and not a necessity but I can steal you some pretty easily if you actually need it. Humans need to eat and drink a lot more frequently than that so even if you can only eat ten percent of the things I'm having you'll be fine. I can't think of any compelling reason to involve my parents in this loop so I'm inclined to steal a car and take you to Seattle. Seattle's got a potential magical girl who I think will wish what I tell her to if I sleep with her first, whether that's "wish you home" or "wish you into my loop so you can help", it'll depend whether your magic music works at all and if so whether it works recorded and whether you want to stay if it's a case of yes to the first and no to the second.

What.

...which of these things is throwing you, is it the grand theft auto or the dubious prostitution?

The latter. Even if I otherwise get erased from existence forever at the end of this time loop I wouldn't ask you to do that.

...well, that's very noble of you but it is also possible you have irreproducible magic that can save a lot of people from death-or-worse. Besides, she's a sweetie and the only reason I haven't gone for it before without even wanting something from her is because I have weird feelings about being forgotten after a reset.

I know it's sketchy, it is incredibly fucking sketchy, but she is the only potential magical girl I already know how to find who I am reliably capable of getting on friendly terms with and I don't have the time to run twelve trial loops to find you one who'll do it purely out of the goodness of her heart.

This is your world. Mine isn't about to be eaten by a monster and I guess I don't know what I'd do if it was. 

If the worst thing I have to do in order to get what I need to stop the world-eating witch is spend the night with a cute girl who really really wants me I will count myself lucky. - It's also loosely possible you could just wish it yourself, if and only if you are staying here or your magic works for clearing soul gems including on recordings, it risks drawing evil alien attention to you but we might be able to play it casually enough that they don't take action before we're safely back now?

Okay.

Sounds like the thing to do is to check whether my magic clears soul gems, then. Do we need to go somewhere else to do that?

Yeah, if you start singing here the nurses'll notice and come running. We can stop on the way to Seattle.

I think I am very confused about a lot of things about your world but okay. Nurses? ...I can also heal you if you're injured?

Was in the first version of this month. I fix up when I loop back. First time around another puella magi swung by and healed me because I was a potential and the evil aliens wanted me alive to make a wish; now they feel my potential wink out and assume I die and leave me alone.

Okay. But you have to sit here anyway? Uh, with enough creativity I could probably do invisibility but it'd be - it'd take something really bad -

I don't have to sit here, I know how to get out without anyone stopping me, but it's a perfectly good place to sit as long as I don't come back with such a contaminated gem that I have to go kill a witch or steal a grief seed immediately. Nobody comes in for a couple hours as long as I magic the medical equipment not to tell them I'm awake.

The gem damage doesn't reset when you do?

No, that carries over from when I reset.

I really hope I can fix it.

It'd be really amazing. By default I wouldn't touch mood-altering magic with a ten foot pole but this is kind of an extreme situation.

It sounds like one, yeah. At home I tried using it for rescuees of Angband, different kind of extreme circumstance.

Oh! I can also sing you something that'll make you need to sleep less, if my magic works on you at all.

That'd be nice too. I can trade magic for sleep but it's really inefficient.

How long have you been doing this?

This is... She flips through her notebook. Loop seventy. But I don't always take the whole month.

Still. Must be awfully lonely. You poor thing.

It's not great. Sometimes I tell one of my parents and take a loop off to decompress.

I really wish my mom was here. She could fix everything for you.

Really? How?

She's a proper Maia, not half like me. She could probably just protect your whole realm, and if singing doesn't fix the soul gems she'd be able to find another way of doing it. She's so much faster than a person that it wouldn't take her long at all. 

Well, maybe you'll do the trick. Okay, to get out of here without being seen I need to open the window, pause time, and then jump out - I can carry you - and get you to the car I steal. I'm told it's kind of disconcerting to be moved around while time is stopped, is that okay?

Yes.

And the next thing Lúthien knows she is being set down from a bridal carry by the side of a gravel road. I don't remember if I introduced myself. I'm Bella. Bella vaults casually over the hood of the car; her buckler shield dilates and she pulls a key out of it and unlocks the vehicle.

You must have a lot of practice at that.

I have stolen this car a few times but I don't actually have that much practice at carrying people around while escaping the hospital! She pops the locks, demonstrates the use of the seatbelt. Hop in.

She is utterly fascinated and runs her hands over every available surface. This is magical. Wow.

Cars aren't magic. Most things are not magic unless you actually observe a girl, witch, or evil alien doing them.

You couldn't do this in a forge. Dwarves couldn't do this. How?

I don't personally know how to build a car, hasn't come up. She turns the key in the ignition and pulls out of the gravel drive. They're made in factories, probably mostly by robots in this era.

I don't know what those are either. Wow. We're going so fast!

We aren't even on the highway yet. Put your seatbelt on.

She does. This is so cool!

Glad you like it. I'm gonna drive into the middle of nowhere for a bit, should allow quite unsupervised singing.

Okay. The middle of nowhere?

Some bit of forest without anything in it.

Oh, okay. I was worried you meant like the edge of the world or something.

...this planet is a sphere.

Really? Weird.

Planets in general in this world are spheres, what are they where you're from? I read once that toruses could work, although they wouldn't naturally occur...

Well, ours wasn't naturally occurring, my mom and the other Powers made it. It's flat. What do you mean 'would work', would hold together without magic?

Yeah.

If I ever see her again I'll ask her why they didn't do it round. 

So you're basically a demigod?

Useless one, though. My world's at war and all I do are crops and happiness. I really hope my magic works here. The chance to actually make a difference -

...I get the feeling but it's not, you know, always super fun.

I do get to treat the wounded and notify the families of the dead and hold the funerals when people come back from the fighting. 

Fair enough.

Sorry, didn't mean to have a contest. 

It's all right.

Forks is kind of a middle of nowhere town and it doesn't take long to get even nowhereier for discreet singing. Bella pulls over onto the highway shoulder. Let's go a ways into the woods and see if you can sing my gem clean.

Okay!

Hike hike hike. Bella holds the arm with the shield on it such that she has a clear look at the diamond-shaped purple gem on her hand. This is like forty-five percent capacity ish. Do I need to do anything but listen?

If you watch I can also dance and then it'll go faster.

...okay. Is this enough space or should we find a clearer spot?

This'll do. I don't know the trees but I shouldn't need to. She looks around. They're healthy trees.

I don't see why they shouldn't be but I'm not sure why that's remarkable.

Sort of the first thing I notice? It matters back home, but for my mother's magic, not mine. Ready?

And she begins to sing. And the sound carries, stunningly so, and she starts to sway to it and then to move to it like it's pulling her off her feet, it might, it's that powerful, and she's grinning gleefully as she sings, happiness, happiness, happiness...

well that's intellectually terrifying but emotionally delightful

Isn't it!

yep that sure is what's going on

(and the gem on Bella's hand clears and pales and brightens and shines like a little purple star)

Hard to say if she's happy it worked or just happy because, you know, song - it affects her too - but that means it worked and they can save the world, she'd probably be pretty ecstatic anyway. 

She stops singing when its color and light stops changing.

That's really something, says Bella, taking a deep breath. Uh, and it worked. ...I forgot to have a recording going, you'll have to record it another time to test next time I'm run down.

Recording?

Uh, another not-magic-but-you-might-mistake-it thing, we've got stuff that can look at and listen to things and then reproduce them later.

Oh, cool, so then all the magical girls can have it and I won't need to run around singing nonstop!

Nor stay here if you'd rather go home, nods Bella, because I can keep objects between loops if I fit them in my shield.

I should go home, everyone will worry, except - 

what kind of magic do magical girls have, anyway? Once we've saved your world, any chance you could have a shot at mine?

It's pretty freeform but it has to fit within the gem capacity. ...I guess if you were actively singing at me it'd be more a matter of my ability to concentrate on doing magic and whatever the actual recharge versus expenditure rate was? I'm not aware of limits other than efficiency and total capacity, there could easily be some, those are usually pretty sharply limiting. Most puella magi cannot stop time like me because it would be so inefficient if they tried it it'd witch them on the spot, not because that's a special thing only I get to do.

If there's a short window to send me home I guess I'll go once you have your recordings - as many as you need, or can you have them copied? - but if there's not, I want to stay here and once we've fixed your world figure out whether we could take on Morgoth. And then you could come with me and do that.

I don't really know how the loop will work for edge cases involving other worlds and stuff. I can copy the recording infinitely. If you were not going to wish into the loop you'd need to be out by the end of the month, because if I reset without you it seems likely that you'd just - cease to exist - but if you're looping with me you'd probably be at least as portable as I am, from there, so if we get past the point where the witch eats the world and maybe address the evil aliens I would be happy to go save another planet.

Great! Then let's try to get me looping with you. Even though I don't think I could cease to exist.

Okay. How old are you and does that song work reflexively?

It works on me, yeah, and like five hundred?

Well, you are probably way too old to become a magical girl.

There's an age limit? What is it? Are our years even the same length?

Year's three hundred sixty five days, and you can't make a wish past age eighteen, something about girls under that age having more fuel-grade emotions for the evil aliens or something. It's always girls, too. But it might be different for your species? If you can even be potentiated relevantly at all.

Well, I'm happy to try. When I was eighteen of our years I was knee-high.

Are you currently an adolescent or an adult for a - demigod demiwhateverelse?

I'm the only one. But probably an adult. Elves are fully grown at a hundred and Maiar don't have maturation exactly and are all as old as the world.

Then you are likely too old to become a magical girl yourself unless something species-specific is going on. I'm assuming if you bothered to write a happiness song your people do normally have emotions, though, so be on the lookout for fluffy white telepaths yea big with unblinking red eyes who want you to make a wish, just in case.

Okay. I've never heard of them but it could just be they can't get into Doriath, most things can't get into Doriath and evil things especially can't.

"Evil" is really an oversimplification. And most people can't see them. I'm not sure if any puella magi or potential can, or if they can be selective, or selective with potentials but not actives - I have to be a little careful what questions I ask them. They don't lie, or even refuse to answer questions, but sometimes they get an idea of what my deal is and then I have to reset in a hurry.

How did you find out the world was about to end? The first time, I mean?

Well, there I was, watching it end. And I still had my wish. I'd been dithering for the whole month about what to wish - it can't be literally anything, people have different amounts of potential and mine was midgrade, I couldn't cure cancer or anything - and I wished I could go back and try again. Next thing I knew I was in the hospital in suspiciously good health for having been hit by a van.

Cancer? The person you're going to ask to wish for me to stay in the time loop, what potential does she have?

Cancer's a disease. She's got about my level of potential so I'm pretty sure she can pull it off.

Oh. We don't have disease in Doriath either. Are we leaving right away or can I hang out with these trees for a while?

We don't need to be in a huge hurry but should get back on the road within the hour, especially since I'll want to stop for lunch. Doriath sounds... different.

Very different, and I've never left it. I can't usually even leave Menegroth without an escort. This is a bit overwhelming.

She walks over to a tree, throws her arms around it, and starts humming to it.

...what exactly are you doing with the tree?

Making it healthier? After a hundred years I would know it well enough it could warn me of coming intruders or something, but that's not very useful with one forest that's not even on the borders of your kingdom, and I don't have a hundred years for it anyway, it's just habit. And comforting. 

...how would a tree warn you of intruders? Also this isn't a kingdom, it's a democracy.

I can send you the sensation that the trees were sending me when the snake thing that sent me here landed in the forest? And what's a democracy?

Adult citizens vote on people to assume executive and other roles in the government for specified terms of office, majority rules. I'm mostly wondering how, since a tree doesn't have any senses let alone discriminatory power, it could serve as a warning system.

Well, I suppose it's possible that the trees in Doriath are a different kind but I think if I worked with this forest for a hundred years it'd do just fine...

They don't even have nervous systems! Are you making trees sentient? That sounds like a terrible idea.

The trees in Doriath don't turn into Ents if you care for them enough, they just learn to communicate to you what they need, like if they're sick or injured, and what you need, like if there's danger. 

I don't know what an Ent is. Am I not successfully communicating the nature of my confusion?

You said to mostly not listen to you, and I'm not used to doing that? It's a little hard? Ents are trees which are people. You're worried this tree'll turn into a person but it won't, not even if I spend a hundred years getting to know it.

I'm not particularly worried the tree will turn into a person, I'm confused about how the tree is supposed to know if it's injured without nerves to detect injury or a brain to contain knowledge, and how it would detect intruders without eyes to see them or, again, a brain to identify them.

Magic?

Yeah, I just want to know what the moving parts of the magic are. You make it sound like the tree, qua tree, will do a lot of the work, rather than 'I'm designating this tree as a location for an intruder-detecting spell'.

My magic doesn't work that way. There's songs, which are sort of precise in the way you're thinking of, but the magic my mother does is much more about imbuing her territory with her so that it knows her and she can make it thrive and know everything that's happening in it. Maybe the answer to your question is that I put myself into the trees? But there's a lot of myself, so it's not like I'd run out.

Okay, that more or less answers what I want to know. Lemme know when you're done hugging the tree. Bella's got notebooking to do.

She'll take around twenty more minutes. It's very reassuring, being around trees again. She's about scared and delighted in equal mix and she's with this girl who casually mentioned she was going to sleep with a girl to get her wished into the timestream and trees are nice. Trees are great.

I'm ready to go.

Right then. Hang on, give me a sec to change, my non-puella-magi outfit is still 'hospital gown' default.

Bella scampers off into the underbrush and comes back a minute later wearing jeans and a t-shirt and sneakers instead of her fancy outfit. Her glowing gem is reduced to a tiny gemchip in a ring on her finger, she's holding a hospital gown and a wad of rectangular green paper and her car keys, and she leads Lúthien back to the car.

Her clothes are super weird, but she is not rude enough to comment or even stare. Much. She manages the seatbelt without help this time.

I don't think I have anything that'd fit you or I'd suggest you wear something less conspicuous yourself, Bella remarks, pulling back onto the highway.

I can make myself something but I've never seen fabrics like that and wouldn't know how to work with them.

I've got some variety but it is mostly denim and stretch cotton, and in clothes form not in bolts of fabric. You probably won't get stopped but you might get stared at. - Don't telepathy random people they'll be alarmed.

Okay. Can you teach me some phrases in your language so if they ask me things I don't have to answer in mine?

Sure. What do you want to say besides 'I don't speak English'? Which is - "I don't speak English."

"I don't speak English," she repeats carefully. Maybe 'where is Bella?' If we've gotten separated?

Don't pronounce that too well, or people will think you're lying; if you have an accent they can imagine you're from China or something. Most people won't know me by name and I'm pretty generic-looking in civvies... what's your telepathy range?

All of Doriath. The distance we travelled from the hospital here, definitely. Probably more than that but I'm not sure, haven't had much occasion to try - it'll also improve as I get to know you better.

Okay, so even describing me probably isn't going to help you find me if we get split up. Maybe something to authorize me to speak for you if somebody wants to confirm that you're not just confused or something.

Oh, yeah, good idea.

Like, 'my friend over there will explain' or something? How d'you want to put it?

You know what would sound normal to people from your world. That works for me. 

So Bella translates "my friend over there will explain" and for good measure "I'm just waiting for my friend, thank you".

Thank you!

You're welcome!

Where are we going now?

Seattle. It's a big city and the magical girls there don't try to kill me and it's where that potential who keeps having a crush on me lives. There's some witches there I can guaranteed kill, although I guess I don't need to prioritize grief seeds anymore. It's a long drive so I will pull over in a bit for lunch, I can get you food too.

Okay. I don't need food if it's any trouble.

It's not, I have all the counterfeit money time travel powers can buy. Selection will be slightly limited at a rest stop but I'm going for the one with the Cinnabon so there's that.

If you say so!

Cinnabons are good! And there'll be candy and chips and burgers and ice cream. If you're dubious about those, there will probably be nuts, not sure about berries.

No, I want to try your world's foods, not rudely stick to mine! I will need recommendations but I will happily have Cinnabons. 

All right, I can get you some of whatever I'm having then.

Cars are so weird. Roads are so weird. This world is so weird. She's more on the happy side of terrified and happy but that could still be the song wearing off.

I'd suggest putting music on but you're better at singing than anybody on the radio and I'm sure there are other things I should be explaining about stuff, just don't know what.

I can sing something non-magical if you want music? What happens if I sing at a witch, or can they not be turned back into people? How come none have eaten the world before?

They don't usually get that big, there's plenty of magical girls. I'm not sure how the big one did it. You should definitely try singing at a witch in case that helps! And you are totally welcome to sing.

So she'll sing! Something nonmagical but very beautiful, about Doriath before the war, when there was no need to guard the borders.

You've got such a gorgeous voice.

Thank you! The Ainur made the world by singing, in the first place. We speak of the music of Creation.

I'm not sure how one could sing a world into existence, but your world seems to have very different magic from mine.

Yeah, even the Valar can't turn back time. Or maybe it's just that they wouldn't - no offense, but it's kind of like erasing people -

I don't like it either, but a month isn't long enough for whether or not someone exists at all to change. Everybody but me's going to come out of this whole mess with one set of memories about this month. My job is to make sure they're a set that doesn't involve getting eaten at the end.

I think you're doing the right thing. But the Valar are more powerful and so have more options so probably wouldn't do this even if they could.

Good for them.

You're doing great. And we'll get a recording soon and then you'll win. 

If it works. Probably better not to do the retest while I'm driving though, don't wanna crash.

Definitely not. It should work, I can't think why it wouldn't. 

And then you will have a very interesting story for all your friends in Doriath.

My parents won't let me out of Menegroth for a thousand years, but yeah.

...that's a really long time to ground you for getting shunted into an alternate universe and helping save a world.

My dad is really overprotective and really paranoid. 

That sucks.

I mean. It's not like it's not sort of justified, imagine if the Enemy got me. People are dying, I feel silly being mad about being stuck in the palace.

I don't actually know anything about the Enemy, Bella reminds her.

Right. He captures Elven cities and slowly tortures everyone to death for fun, and forces them to bear him children he can use as his slaves, and he also has mind-control powers the extent of which we don't really understand. So it'd be bad. If he caught me. 

...yes it would. I can't actually decide if this makes it a better or worse idea for you to make a wish if it turns out you can.

If it's the only way to get your kind of powers in my world, I think I had better do it. I won't take chances on getting captured, I like my world and don't want to be tortured into going mad and destroying it. 

The problem is puella magi come with their own 'go mad, destroy' failure mode. If something happens like 'you can't sing your own soul gem clear' or whatever, there's no other puella magi in your world to stop you. It's possible to kill witches without using puella magi magic but you have to find them and most people can't see them.

Right.

So then maybe the way to go is to have someone else wish you back with me to save my world once we've saved yours.

Yeah. Although saving mine is a multi-step process. There's the world-eating witch and then there's the evil aliens. I do not know how hard to expect the evil aliens to be to get rid of, unless it turns out they'll go away if I just give them a copy of your song recorded or something anticlimactic like that.

Can I read their minds? Would it help?

...yeah, go ahead and read their minds if you can perceive them at all, that might help a lot depending. They're a sort of hive mind, if I kill one another will replace it, they don't even care, so you might get more of a brainful than you're expecting, be advised.

Okay. Worst thing happens is it's too much and I have to stop listening, assuming they don't have osanwe natively.

Nah, their telepathy is different. And I am nearly positive they can't read anything that isn't sent to them.

Then I can see if I can get anything by reading them.

Sure. I can find one in Seattle.

How long will it take us to get to Seattle?

Few hours. My hometown isn't really near anything, Seattle's across the whole state.

I'm happy to sing some more.

And she does.

Pretty!

Soon enough Bella pulls into a rest stop. It has a Cinnabon and a newsstand sort of shop with snackfood and candy and a Burger King and a KFC and a frozen yogurt place.

She has literally never seen so many kinds of food in her life, and says so.

...remind me to take you to an actual grocery store sometime. Anything in particular catching your eye?

How could it? There are so many! I'll get the things you recommended.

Okay then.

So Bella gets them both chicken and biscuits and Cinnabons.

This food is so weird!!! In a nice way, though. Just. Weird. Doesn't even look like food.

You don't have chicken and baked goods? asks Bella.

Chickens wouldn't live in a forested area like Doriath, I don't think. We bake things for special occasions but they don't look much like this.

Huh. Anyway, I've got a ton of food in my shield but it's not that good at keeping hot stuff hot, so when I go to Seattle first thing I usually stop here.

Cinnabons are kind of great. I'll suggest them back home.

Cinnabon is a brand name. The generic is 'cinnamon bun'.

Okay. Brand name?

There's an organization of people who manage cinnamon bun shops and all their shops make the buns the same way. Buns made that way by these people are Cinnabons.

Okay. That is another difference between our worlds. I don't think anyone does it that way back home.

The advantage is that I could fly a thousand miles away and find another Cinnabon and know exactly what I was getting, Bella says. But there's also non-chain restaurants where there's only one of them.

And restaurants are places that give away food?

...they sell it.

And that is?

So, I gave the cashiers some of these green papers. These are issued by the government and made so they're very hard to duplicate unless, unbeknownst to the government, one is magic. They represent quantities of money; it can also be represented other ways. You acquire money by charging for goods or services, and then you spend it on other people's goods and services.

Weird. We just take things if we want them.

What if more people want things than there are of the thing?

Then it'd be a good thing to make more of!

Sure, but what if whoever made it is sick of making the thing?

They could teach someone, or people could give them gifts, or everyone can just wait a while, or trade with people who already have it.

So, we basically work on the bribe-them-with-gifts model, but instead of 'here, I got you this gift', it's 'here, I got you this amount of numerically represented value you can use to buy whatever you most want'. Nobody's life ambition is cashiering at a Cinnabon, but if people want Cinnabons, somebody's gotta do it.

I think I get what you mean. Sounds like it adds a lot of intermediate steps, but I guess your world has an awful lot more stuff in it.

Sounds like, yeah, if you were impressed with the food selection at a highway rest stop.

Well, Doriath's spent the last two hundred years under siege.

That'd definitely cut into your variety of consumer goods, yep.

And we trade with the Dwarves and with the Noldor but only a little because the Noldor are Doomed and Dwarves want a lot in exchange, more than we have.

Doomed?

Keep in mind that we only got one version of the story, because they're not allowed into Doriath. But they decided they wanted to come to our continent from the Valar's continent, and they were in a hurry and they didn't want to build boats, so they stormed a harbor and threw people off the boats into the sea and then people tried to stop them from taking the boats and they got away with the boats but they killed more than ten thousand people. And the Valar were furious and prophecied that only evil would come of their deeds, and that's the Doom. 

...prophesied this prescriptively or descriptively?

It's the Noldor who told us all this, the Valar have been securing their continent and the Sun and the Moon and they didn't tell my mother anything. So I am not sure. And they're the Valar, they can see outside time, so there's not really any difference. You can't see things you'd have the power to change. 

Well, I suppose in that case it could be interpreted as a polite warning. Why did the Noldor want to be on your continent?

They didn't want to answer to the Valar, wanted to be in charge. And they'd sworn a terrible oath to kill anyone who stole their jewelry and the Enemy stole their jewelry. 

...okay then.

We've only heard their side of the story. And only some of them. Most of them aren't allowed in Doriath because of the massacre and because they're kind of rude and very arrogant and make my father nervous.

I keep hearing that various people are not allowed in Doriath. It's amazing you get any news at all.

Remember what I said about my father being overprotective and paranoid? And the Enemy having unknown mind control abilities?

Yeah.

Once the war's over we'll let everyone in. I can't wait. Except maybe the Noldorin leaders who gave the orders for the massacre, we might never ever invite them to dinner.

Seems reasonable.

Several of my cousins died in it. Dad's little brother ruled the harbor kingdom. I've never met them but it still hurts. 

I'm sorry.

I also kind of selfishly resent them for it because it made my father so sad and angry when he heard, and that makes him less reasonable.

How does that manifest?

He, uh, kicked out all the Noldor including some of my cousins' children who I really liked, and then banned the speaking of their language.

...their language? What's that have to do with anything?

I mean. I don't agree very much with my father. But the Noldor had come over and declared large sections of the continent their kingdoms, and the locals their subjects - they were very nice about it, they could defend people against the Enemy, people were happy to call them Kings in exchange for safety - and they grew up in Valinor, you know, most Elves are nomadic and the Noldor have stone and metalworking, most Elves remember their history in song and the Noldor invented a way of putting words on paper, they have sophisticated magic and good weapons and armor - it was very asymmetrical. And the King's ban meant that at least they have to conduct all of the business of their new courts in a language that their new subjects speak. So I think it had some good effects.

Okay, but why is anybody obeying the ban on the language?

Their new subjects obey it because they respect my father, and they obey it because otherwise their new subjects would refuse to associate with them.

Huh. I suppose it's not the weirdest thing ever proposed as colonialism harm-reduction.

Colonialism harm-reduction?

The whole 'better educated more advanced people move in and lord it over everyone' thing is called colonialism, it happens here. If a third party obliges the colonists to work in the language of the colonized that could indeed do something to mitigate some of the effects people object to.

I will tell him you said so.

It occurs to me apropos of nothing that your voice carries well enough and your singing's exceptional enough that it might not be a good idea to record you in a city. I can pull over in a bit and record you there, then test the recording next time I'm run down.

Okay!

So Bella pulls onto a side road and transforms (it involves doing a little dance and sparkling) and takes a video camera out of her shield and demonstrates its function to Lúthien.

The transformation is kind of amazing! The video camera is kind of amazing! She beams adoringly at Bella. Then she sings.

Which is absolutely lovely and all faithfully recorded.

Yay!

"Okay. I should have some visible dinge in the gem in a couple days even if I don't use much magic," says Bella, tucking the camera away and detransforming again, "so I can check it then."

Or you could show me all your cool magic and we could test it sooner!

What do you want to see?

Dunno, what all can you do?

Stop time, which you've seen. Store stuff in my shield and then copy it infinitely, which you've also seen. Telekinesis and energy bolts and various feats of gymnastics I could never in a million years have pulled off baseline. Various other freeform stuff - I did magic so the monitors on me in the hospital wouldn't tell anybody I was fixed up and cause them to come running, for instance.

Telekinesis and energy bolts?

Well, if I'm deliberately trying to run the gem down...

The car flares with purple light and lifts into the air and spins and sets itself down again. A rock flings itself skyward and Bella points at it and zaps it with more purple and it fractures into pieces.

Wow!!!!

I can't actually fly, even with teekay, but - She leaps into the air, flips, kicks off a purple diamond of light that exists only long enough to let her propel herself up, bounces higher and higher and then sort of surfs back down on a less stationary version of same. Can do that.

That's amazing. I wish I wasn't probably too old.

We can check, especially if I'm wrong about Raine being up for suggestions on how to use her wish. Just requires serious delicacy.

Raine's your, um, friend?

Yeah. If I go to Seattle this early, she's not a magical girl yet, if I go in two weeks she's a puella magi and wished for a girl in her class to notice her and it didn't work out like she hoped and she's really mopey, if I go at the end of a loop she's a witch.

It happens that fast?

If you're in a bad enough mood, yep. Self-perpetuates. It sort of ratchets down. I'm really unusually resistant to the mood-altering effects of having a dark gem.

Using a wish to try to get a girl to be interested in you is kind of awful.

Raine doesn't do it particularly creepily as it goes - I mean, it's not an efficient use of a wish but practically nobody manages "efficient". There's girls who go for, like, actual mind-control, "I wish for that boy to love me forever", there's a girl in Vancouver who's got this I guess you have to call him her boyfriend but eugh... Raine didn't want that, she just wanted to stand out, look shiny, have a chance. Which would have been doable with absolutely baseline magical girl powers anyway no matter what she wished for, but like I said no one manages "efficient".

My parents' marriage - 

-uh. 

It was the first time my mother'd ever interacted with an Elf. Elves were new and she was billions of years old and she looked at him and she fell in love and so she tried to be - cute, pretty, interesting, 'stand out, look shiny' isn't a bad word for it - and he was so enchanted he stared at her in rapture for two hundred years while the trees grew tall around them. And she was staring back equally enchanted of course but. Still.

...well, the object of Raine's affection doesn't like girls and Raine doesn't default to wishing she would, so it doesn't work like that in her case. Uh. Two hundred years? Really?

His people were really worried for him.

...it sounds like you have probably already thought of the obvious comments on that. Anyway, I'm not endorsing Default Raine's life choices. They're fucked up. But she's mostly sweet and even in loops where she has a crush on me she's never tried to wish I'd fall in love with her.

And it's not like anyone deserves to turn into a witch just because they like girls, especially if the girl didn't even like her back.

Especially?

I mean, even if she had done something wrong she wouldn't deserve to be a witch, but she didn't even do anything.

I'm not sure I follow you.

I guess if you've never heard of the Valar no one might have said? Like at Cuivienen no one'd told us? Girls aren't supposed to sleep with girls, you're supposed to just wait and get married. To a boy.

...uh.

It was really hard on a lot of people when the Valar told us.

Is this an opinion you are sufficiently committed to that I should not argue about it.

I am not really the person you'd need to argue with. If you want to come to my world and go argue it with the Valar after we've figured out how to stop the Enemy maybe they'd listen to you. Probably not though. 

...I mean, where I'd start would be, 'okay, so somebody powerful told you that, why did you then proceed to believe them'. But I am capable of dropping it.

They created the world, they know everything about it, even lots of things that are way beyond our understanding like how the stars stay in the sky and how to bring back the dead. If they say something it's likelier that it's beyond our understanding than that they just decided it with no reason. Also if two girls sleep together they don't get married and if a boy and a girl do, they do get married, that's just a fact.

...by 'married' what are you referring to?

...the soul bond?

Humans don't have that.

Really? Weird. It's supposed to be nice.

It actually sounds kind of creepy to me, but at any rate we don't have it regardless of participant gender. Also, we know how our stars stay up, and the evil aliens know how to bring back the dead because that is a thing a wish can do but they're still, you know, evil aliens, and the thing they want us to do is have fuel-grade emotional whiplash between wish and witching so they can use us to stave off entropy, but the fact that they also have access to some information about resurrecting the dead doesn't make what they want right or even vaguely okay.

No, it doesn't. The Valar are usually right though so when they don't make any sense it's likelier there's a reason. The Noldor might even know what it is, we kind of declined to learn things from the Valar.

Isn't your mom, like, pals with the Valar? Or was it more of a purely professional world-creation-choir arrangement?

They haven't communicated anything to her in hundreds of years. She tried to reach them when the war started, and only heard from them later that Valinor'd been destroyed and they were protecting it and the Sun and Moon. I guess she could ask them 'why is sex only for marriage does something bad happen or is it just wrong' but if she could get a question to them I think she'd go with 'how can we tell if an escapee of Angband will go crazy and stab everyone'.

Not an unreasonable priority. But humans don't have the soulbond thing, or Valar, or a general sex-before-marriage prohibition that is built into anything except cultural scaffolding about wanting to avoid unplanned children, and here, thinking it's wrong for girls to sleep with each other - or boys - is associated with a memeplex that props up a lot of abuse and violence. I am sure you do not mean to sound like the sort of people who I am sometimes vaguely worried may throw rocks at me, but - if you wind up picking up English, you might not want to tell gay people they should stop that, or they will expect that you are the sort of person who would throw rocks at them.

I'm sorry if I scared you. I'm not going to throw rocks at anyone. It should have occurred to me that just because it's wrong for us doesn't even mean it's wrong for you.

You didn't scare me, I've got a fairly thick skin and time-stopping powers, just advising you on interacting with others. I'm not sure I want to just claim human exceptionalism on this one and have done, the Valar sound kind of dubious to me, but I guess it'll do for the moment.

It'd be nice if they were wrong. About us. I just can't decide they're wrong because it inconveniences me.

I'm not saying, 'now that you have seen an example of resurrection of the dead orchestrated by obviously evil entities whose ethical opinions are worthless, you should celebrate with lesbianism'! I'm saying that regardless of whether you feel personally inconvenienced or not the argument as presented doesn't hold together. You don't have to, like, care.

That's not what I meant. But okay.

What'd you mean?

I mean that it's really easy to imagine myself deciding there's nothing wrong with it even if there is, just because it'd make me happy. So I want to think about it longer and maybe when I haven't been singing a lot.

That's totally reasonable. Avoiding motivated reasoning is probably important even if the conclusion you want to not be motivated towards is one I happen to like.

Anyway there are people who'd say of course your friend turned into a witch because there was something wrong with her to begin with. Maybe those are the sort of people who throw rocks in your world.

Sounds likely. "Throw rocks" is a metaphor, mostly, sometimes it's yelling and holding up nasty signage, sometimes it's rounding up all the gay people and herding them into death camps, sometimes it's passing laws saying that I'm never allowed to marry anyone I could ever love - we do marriage, just not with a soul part - there's a variety.

We don't do death camps. Is that a thing going on? Do we need to fix that after we've fixed witches?

Historical thing. Although there are some countries where homosexuality is punishable by death they are not being that systematic.

And you don't have the Valar to bring back the dead.

Nope. I want to pry the wish generation mechanic out of the evil aliens' fluffy little cold dead paws.

Good idea.

Thank you, came up with it myself.

She energy blasts some more rocks. She refills the car's gas tank by magic. Gonna see if I can recharge off the recording now.

Good luck.

Thanks.

And she pulls out the video camera and watches the song-and-dance routine.

Yesssssss! It works, it's glowing!

Bella giggles with helpless delight on two counts.

So now you can give them to everybody??

I've got a few options - approach will depend on evil alien reaction and on whether it does anything to witches or just to unwitched girls. But yes, it's pretty trivial to copy and distribute this except in a few places and if I put the effort in I can do it there too.

I'm so glad.

So this does mean you can go home on Raine's wish, unless you just want to stay for some reason.

I don't know. I need to eventually go home. Do you think this is my one shot?

No, Raine'll be there next loop and next and so on unless I somehow really screw up asking her. And even if her wish winds up with her looping too we can find somebody else like her with some looking.

Then I'll stay. If I'm getting in your way I'm happy to spend loops in the forest or something but I want to help and I don't want to go home until you can come with me.

Okay then. I'm pretty sure I can finesse Raine.

Back into the car she hops.

Thank you. She gets in the car as well. 

Vroom. I am so glad you got swooped into my universe. My hospital room even, you could have landed in Siberia or something.

And then I'd probably just have wandered around for a month and then who knows. Maybe the snake sent me somewhere I was needed, since that's what I always wished for. 

Maybe. It's a little convenient. Although 'snake' seems a weird method of providence.

I'll grant you that.

Well, I'm glad to be here.

And I am absolutely thrilled to have you and it is not just because of the aftereffects of your singing!

Thanks. And thanks for the food. Is that Seattle?

Coming up, yep. We can find a hotel and corner Raine in the morning.