Edie plucks a pair of what look like sticks or wands from where they rest over the backs of her forearms, and joins the wide ends together. The combined stick glows pale blue, and then lengthens and widens into a silver staff with a dark blue gemstone set into one end. "Depending on your size limits you probably want to try doing it as sticks, but this is the Psyche Staff. It has an autonomous blast attack that you can activate by thinking at it, and it reduces energy costs for any magic that has anything to do with the mind, and it increases your resistance to mind-affecting spells."

"Size limits is 'can it fit through this circle'. Does it usually work for people with no magic? I might not count as having magic correctly."

"Even if you don't have any magic the blast and resistance should still work. Eventually if I don't recharge it it should run out of energy, but if you can just duplicate it maybe you can make a new full up one whenever."

"Well, batteries work that way, so we'll see." She takes the staff and pokes it at her shield.

The staff goes in.

And she pulls it out again.

"...I don't think that's quite the same thing."

"Rats. I can't get 'the original' out again, either, that's not how it works. You'll have another when you transform again, right? I didn't just wreck your magic weapon?"

"Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's been broken before. Well, at least you have a source of star sapphire, I guess, that's technically what the stone's made of. It's not relevant to me because the thing disappears every time I detransform, but you could probably pawn it or something."

"Pawning's only useful if I want cash, and I'm stocked on that, but I might be able to bribe other puella magi who like shiny rocks or something."

"True. I was thinking that it might help you diversify your serial number collection, but that's probably not a massive priority."

"Not really. It's not hard to rob an armored car if you have magic and can stop time. ...Yes I did watch Groundhog Day for inspiration."

"I haven't seem that movie, so I wasn't going to comment."

"It's actually really good. He got all depressed about it, though. Probably because he was stuck in one town and only had a day."

"...It actually wouldn't surprise me if I could leverage one or both of the mind spells into functionally bringing my sister with me, but if I couldn't do that I can't promise I wouldn't get depressed about a time loop. I can think of plenty of things to do with a town and a day, though, at least depending on the size of the town."

"I might get depressed about my time loop eventually, but I'm conservatively estimating that it'll take thousands of years. My ability to interact with my parents has... already taken a pretty serious hit... but I explained the whole thing to each of them a while back and they were understanding about the whole thing. I actually got their express permission to do all kinds of stuff I would have hesitated to do. My dad told me how to steal his gun, if I wind up in a position where I'm so low on magic I can't grab weapons out of my shield and I have to kill a monster by shooting at it in real time without transforming. It's sad that they're stuck with everyone else, but I'm an introverted only child without any really close friends so that's the biggest interpersonal problem I'm suffering. There's some other puella magi it would be great to bring with me, and I'm considering in the long term the option of cozying up to some prospectives and seeing if they can wish into my loop, but if something went wrong with that it'd be a disaster so I don't want to do it just for the in-the-know company."

"Heh. You know, I bet my parents would react similarly? I wouldn't describe myself as introverted, exactly, but I don't have a lot of close friends besides my sister. If I could bring her along it kinda sounds like we'd end up being a lot like you."

"And you'd have a reasonable shot at it if you had the mind magic in addition to whatever was looping you, sounds like."

"If it weren't for the risk of being erased at the end of the month, I'd be tempted to offer to follow you home and see if I could do anything about your apocalypse."

"...but you might be erased at the end of the month, and I didn't set this up to be a perfect run even if you could guarantee that it'd work," Bella says. "This is a fact-finding loop. I was in Buffalo on my way to Toronto, to see if I can find where the big witch is at this time. I'm pretty sure she has to already be a witch by the time I wake up in the hospital, I probably can't save her, but if I can nip her in the bud..."

"Alas. I wonder if you can find out who she was, even if you can't save her..."

"I guess an evil alien might know. You mean to notify her family or something? It's pretty likely she ate them early in the process."

"Or something. I've always...I told you sometimes we have to kill people, right? I promised myself a long time ago that I was never going to get to the point where I couldn't remember every single person I had killed, by real name if possible, not if there was anything I could do to help it. But your situation's different, it's just sort of my first instinct to try to find out as much about someone like that is possible."

"If I find out a way to un-witch a witch, that will become a huge priority instantly. Until then, I have to riddle them with bullets to recharge, protect bystanders from being driven to commit assorted lethal felonies, and demonstrate to other puella magi who might wind up being my only way out of my predicament and don't know the whole story yet that I am a badass they should not challenge to a fight to the death. I feel like knowing that Topiary Theme Witch used to be named Clarissa Pendleton or whatever might interfere with that."

"Yeah. Different situations. ...I feel vaguely insensitive for acting jealous of your costuming situation, earlier, your magic sounds less pleasant on more levels than it doesn't."