"Okay, at that point it sounds less like fault comes into it at all and more like a massive trainwreck."

"Ayep. It's sort of funny, I spent a month trying to come up with a really efficient wish that would come in under my energy budget and still cure cancer or something, and it didn't even occur to me that time travel was on the menu."

"I mean, it sounds like you're deleting everyone who exists at the end of the month and replacing them with someone new with all their memories as of a month ago, this is not the kind of thing you should normally be doing on purpose. Although I'll grant that a world-ending phenomenon is a good enough reason."

"I don't think 'someone new' is the right gloss on it. Like, memory erasure is absolutely happening and I'm not thrilled about that, but that's subtraction, not replacement, I don't have the creeping horrors that my dad is now Dad Replacement Number Eighty-Two or whatever number I'm on - I've kept track but I'd have to look it up. I would probably not have designed a time-travel wish this way, regardless, because I'm not sure that I'll break out of it properly if I do manage to save the world, although maybe I can establish a new checkpoint or something."

"I meant more in terms of the fact that you're a different person now than you were a month ago--that being intended as a general 'you,' not just you in particular, in this particular case I think it bears mentioning. Killing a month's worth of a person is absolutely better than letting all of them die, I don't actually think you're making the wrong choice even if it were an ongoing choice, but it's still killing a month's worth of person."

"I really object to this characterization. Deleting memories is bad all by itself, but it is not necessary to add extra loaded words like 'killing'."

"Sorry."

"Also, under normal circumstances I wouldn't kill any innocent bystanders in order to save others unless the balance were massively skewed the other way, but I will take an extra loop or ten if I manage to kill the big witch but only with more casualties than I feel like accepting, and describing this as 'killing seven billion people a little bit in order to save Vancouver' seems to make it more of a gray area than it really is. What I think of myself as doing is - the memories anybody but me was going to have of that month are gone. And they can only come away from this entire business with one set. My job is to optimize that set so it contains few dead people and little property damage and so I come out the end of it so superlatively competent that I can also then go on to dismantle the evil aliens' humans-as-power-source system."

"Fair enough. I think...with the way my world's magic works, and the things I've had to do with it, I've been attaching less emotion to the word 'kill' than I should be. I will work on that."

"...What, do you have nine lives?"

"Sometimes puella magi die in the despair monsters. The despair monsters all used to be puella magi, or budded off from something that did. Occasionally to blow off steam I shoot evil aliens, but they don't even care, they're a hive mind, they just bring in new bodies. I draw a pretty sharp line between that and things like 'let's describe this thing that has happened dozens of times as equivalent to seven billion partial civilian deaths'."

"I'm sorry. I...don't think I was really thinking on that scale. And sometimes I open my mouth and the wrong thing comes out."

"It's okay."

"She comes by it honestly too, they refuse to share details but apparently one time before we were born our parents almost divorced over Mom sticking her foot in her mouth in a really bad way over something that was important to Dad."

"I think it happens to everybody now and then."

"True enough, I guess."

"...So it must be nice, having something original like this happen. Or at least I'm assuming this is the first time you've found this place? Should I not be assuming that?"

"Yes, this is the first time I've found the place. I'm not sure if it's not just always behind that door at that time, though. I'm not usually in Buffalo. I'll definitely check again, of course. Bar will take magic counterfeit no problem and she sells everything. But I can't count on finding it later."

"Magic counterfeit?"

"So, in addition to the 'wake up in the hospital unharmed and magical on January 25', I have other powers - I can pause time and I can store anything that can fit in this shield on my arm. Things that go in the shield I can pull out again. Any number of times. They stick between loops. I've got all kinds of crap in here, including cash. Not a great range of serial numbers, but I've managed to get and 'dip' enough different Benjamins that they'll hold up to cursory inspection if I want something big-ticket and they check. Bar doesn't care, though, so I spent a while pulling wads of cash out and throwing them at her and now I have a huge tab. I probably won't need to actually buy anything, though. Things are mmmmostly only useful to me if I can keep them, and she doesn't charge if you return the stuff, so..."

"Oh, wow, that's fantastic. That sounds...can you copy magical objects or just mundane ones, do you know? I bet if you can copy magic stuff some of the things we have might be useful."

"I can't copy Grief Seeds. If I could my life would be a lot easier. I have to carry those the long way -" Her skirt pleats are hiding pockets. She pulls out a spiky little evil-looking thing. "And I can't store other puella magi's soul gems, which is terrible, because if I could I could bring some people looping with me, our magic suffices if charged up enough to build new bodies from scratch but it just doesn't work. Those are the only magical objects I have access to normally, and Bar can't sell magic stuff. Why, want something copied?"

"I wonder if you can copy anything our transformations come with...somehow I imagine that if we had anything like that an extra would probably go away when we detransformed, but if you could copy, say, the Psyche Staff, you might find it useful."

"Quite possibly. I'm happy to try."