"Hi. Um. Where is this, this is not the Golden Diamond General's throne room."

"Technically the door out of the Golden Dragon General's throne room. Paused, huh. That's good. Resuming synchronicity so soon out of falling out of it would have been...difficult. At best."

"Is that the thing where a moment ago you were one person?"

"Yeah. The Ironheart Lady. Not that easy to keep up, but way harder after we've just stopped."

"I assume this serves a purpose other than not having to sit next to anyone on the bus?"

"Our magic's a lot stronger when it's smushed together like that. Necessary when you're fighting someone as strong as the Gem Guardians."

"We've already dealt with the Black Opal Guardian, the Green Garnet Guardian, and the White Sapphire Guardian, but of course the guy with 'General' in his name is a lot more of a problem."

"Predictable enough. So you're also magic?"

"...Yes? Did the absurd outfits not give it away? Yours is pretty tasteful, congrats on that by the way."

"I didn't design it, but they seem to come out more or less agreeably to their owners and I could tweak it if I wanted. Where did yours come from?"

"...Somewhere they're not guaranteed to be agreeable to their owners. I'd imagined you were a run of the mill magical girl but I suppose not, huh, if this is an interdimensional bar."

"We're widely considered lucky our skirts are long enough we're not in significant danger of exposing ourselves anytime we do anything remotely acrobatic."

"I mean, I am a magical girl - I usually use the Latin, puella magi - and my costume is not unusual for my variety, but yes, I am not your kind of magical girl. What would happen if you tried to fix your costumes? Add leggings or something?"

"If we really wanted to don leggings every time we transformed, then as long as we never had to transform in an emergency situation it would probably work, but then when we detransformed we would be wearing leggings over whatever civilian garb we had been wearing."

"Can you change your name, too, that would be even better."

"My name? My name's the same as it ever was."

"...You don't have a magical girl name?"

"No. Do you have a secret identity deal going on...?"

"Yeah. But even if we didn't want to keep our real names secret, the transformation comes with a name," she sighs. "They're mostly not any good."

"Oh. I don't need to say anything in particular to get into costume. Although one time I did let the media notice me and showboated a little to see what happened. I had them calling me 'Gem', which was not very creative."

"Better than 'Psychic Maiden Cerebella' or 'Iron Maiden Magnetar'."

"And that would be the other reason to do Synchronicity."

"Is that the magically-enforced name of the - hybrid you?"

"No, Synchronicity is the name of the magical maneuver that produces her. The magically enforced name is Lady Ironheart."

"That's not as bad..."

"Exactly."

"What does your magic do besides... combine you? Which sounds fantastically uncomfortable to me but must not be that bad if the improved name compensates."

"Lots of things. Most but not all of them combat focused. Basically you say a usually but not always ridiculous phrase, sometimes accompanied by some kind of silly gesture, and a magic thing happens. And you just sort of...know the magic things you have available, and every now and then you get a new one."

"Huh. My magic is pretty freeform but I have usage limits. When do you get new spells?"

"Usually when you've just achieved some kind of personal milestone. So, when you've just defeated a big enemy, sure, but also when you resolve a recurring interpersonal issue or had some kind of important epiphany or something."

"Interesting incentive structure. What spells have you got?"

"...Perfect Scream, Third Eye Annhilation Beam, Third Eye Burning Sear, Synchronicity, Si Vales Valeo, Mind Mirror, Psionic Blast, Axiomatic Restoration, Ironwill Shield, Wings of the Mind's Eye, Mind Palace Gateway, and Soul Aria."

"...I was mostly curious about what they did, but that's interesting in its own right."

"Third Eye Annhilation Beam, Third Eye Burning Sear and Psionic Blast are basically the same thing in descending power level. Perfect Scream does brain damage. Synchronicity is the obvious. Si Vales Valeo is sympathetic healing. Axiomatic Restoration restores objects or systems to a state of lower entropy. Wings of the Mind's Eye gives me, well, wings. Ironwill Shield is a shield. Soul Aria is projective empathy of varied intensity depending on what I intend when I cast it. Mind Palace Gateway and Mind Mirror are really really obvious when I cast them, I promise, and they...do have applications besides mind reading. But they also allow for mind reading."

"Mind Mirror creates a planar surface with a representation of someone's mind on it, and anyone who steps through gets a more...close look at the relevant mental activity. Mind Palace Gateway is similar, but it stays interpretive and you can also move stuff around. If it's your own mind you automatically interpret what everything means; if it's not then you're just in a palace-like area. With stuff that may or may not make sense depending on how well you know the person. I've only ever used either spell on myself--they're really good for introspection--or on my sister. Who consented in advance."

"It's true, I did."

"But I generally warn people in case I get possessed or something, that's not very common but some very evil people have been known to be able to do that, so they can stop me if I do something like that while I'm not in my right mind."

"Okay, sounds good. ...I kind of want your introspective spells, but they're not the sort of thing my magic lends itself to."

"...I mean, I could make a mirror or something pointed so neither of us could see it and you could go inside, but I wouldn't blame you a bit for not wanting to trust me that far."

"Is 'you being able to see the mirror' actually the limiting factor, and how hard is it to affect the outside world from inside a mirror?"

"If you haven't walked through the mirror, you can't get any feedback from it aside from what you can see. And you can't, exactly, it's...why don't I show you with my mind, I've checked to my satisfaction that most of what's visible from the surface is opaque if you don't know me."

"Okay, sure."

"If you go in, can you, say, reach out and close a curtain...?"

"Close a curtain?"

"If I borrow a drape or something from Bar could I put it over my mirror, duck through, tug it closed, wander around, and come out? So nobody would accidentally stare into a me-mirror."

"Yeah, you could do that."

"Okay, I think I want to try it more than I am spooked by the idea of someone looking at a mysterious City of Bella, or whatever I get if I'm not a city. And if this winds up being cover for any non-privacy-related unpleasantness Bar assures me that security here is really good at its job, just FYI."

"Noted. I am not, for example, suggesting you use the Mind Palace Gateway, like, at all."

"That one's riskier?"

"If you move stuff around in there, it stays moved. So, for example, if you went into that scene you just saw and removed my mental representation of you, I would immediately lose all memory if interacting with you until it got put back. As far as I know nothing you can do with it is irreversible, but still, that is not the kind of thing you want to trust a stranger with."

And Edie--very carefully, so as not to let herself or Emily get a glimpse--makes a mirror.

Which Bella drapes, and then hops into.

There isn't any particular time dilation effect between the outside and inside of the mirror, so however long Bella decides to poke around they'll end up waiting.

At some point during this interval, Emily discovers that Bar does the first drink free!

"Nah. Casting spells takes some energy, but maintaining a long-term one doesn't do much of anything. It really is an experience, isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah, I could probably wander in there for days if I didn't need to be out of here in a week."

"...Why a week, in particular?"

"My magic, and also just my baseline existence even if I don't do anything, takes a finite resource. I can't replenish it in here. If I keep it way down, I will have enough leeway to get out, collect more valuable prizes, and recharge. If I wind up in some kind of bar emergency or really, really want to push it, I still need enough that I can go out and - this is going to sound very strange, it's mostly okay and there's an explanation but not a succinct one - if I run too low on magic to be able to take the steps necessary to get more, I need to exit the bar and commit suicide."

"...What good does suicide do you? I'm not doubting you, here, but you've got me curious."

"I'm in a time loop. Which doesn't usually have Milliways in it, so I'm going to milk the place for all it's worth. I didn't find out that my loop resets if I die on purpose, but it does. From where I currently am, the nearest place to get more magic recharging swag is from some monsters I don't have down pat yet - I'm in a city I don't usually visit on a standard run - so I'd have to use some magic to beat them up. If I reset, that doesn't reset my magic, but as long as I have an hour of baseline operation I can steal a recharge object from another puella magi while she's sleeping. If I have four hours I can get to Seattle and find a monster I've fought often enough to reliably kill with no magic, and if I fuck up that option I can still go the theft route."

"Aha. That seems...profoundly disturbing, but in a way that's inarguably not your fault."

"Oh, the fact that I'm in a time loop could easily be construed as my fault."

"Oh?"

"So, puella magi happen when a fluffy alien offers a teenage girl a wish. The wish must be within a certain power limit, but it's still a wish, pretty legit, very appealing, most people don't make good use of them but that's not actually the fluffy aliens' fault. In exchange for your wish you become a magical girl, which has some side effects that people really overreact to - to wit, I am not actually the physical body you see before you, I'm this jewel on my hand, here, operating the body by magic - and some side effects that really ought to be printed on the fucking label. The fluffy aliens are evil, puella magi who run out of magic or get too emotionally fucked up turn into the aforementioned monsters with valuable prizes, and the aliens are running the entire gig because they can get negentropy out of human emotion and this is the most efficient way to do it if you happen to be evil."

"...Okay, I can definitely see where the argument comes from that this is your fault, but I also see that the blame is much more accurately laid at the feet of the fluffy aliens."

"I'm pretty sure they don't handle the detail on the wish execution finely enough to actually have decided to put me in a time loop. I mean, for one thing that would be strategic insanity on their part - they're not looping, only I am, and I now hate them. They're not stupid. Magical girls get bonus magic themed around whatever we wish for. And I watched the biggest fucking witch of all time eat large portions of the world as an appetizer, and I didn't have enough wish to wish her gone - but I figured she had to have been smaller, before - so I wished for another chance to fix it. Only, my magic time travels with me, so there goes my wish, all used up. I have to do it the hard way. It's not that bad, really, between magic and the delight of modern aircraft I have the whole planet to play in before the world ends if I want to take a loop off learning to dictionary-attack the sucker."

"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."

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."

"It's really cool magic. I resent the fuck out of the evil aliens, because they are manipulative little shits, but they put together a keen benefits package. I can transmute stuff and telekinesis stuff and turn pain off or down and jump around like a video game character and shoot energy beams. The magical ecosystem in which I am now participating is fucked, but all I have to do to fix that is defeat or possibly compromise in some way with an evil alien civilization."

"I really wish I didn't have to worry about getting deleted. I bet using the mind magic on one of the aliens would be massively useful."

"If it worked. Like I said, hive mind, might mess up your spell."

"Or it might give us access to everything their civilization knows. Either way we'll never know, I guess, because deletion risk is indeed a thing."

"Yeah."

"I don't suppose there's any chance you could call one from the door...?"

"...You know I might be able to? Heck, evil-alien-relayed-telepathy doesn't even cost charge. And I could fill up a grief seed and throw it at the furball - they serve as a magic waste disposal system, part of how they collect their energy gains, if we don't give them the grief seeds when they're full they hatch into witches - and then I wouldn't have to spend my time in here carefully distributing my offload between the two of them so as to avoid hatching a witch in Milliways. ...I have considered hatching a witch in Milliways on purpose because supposedly Security here can handle anything, but I am not resolved that this is a good idea and anyway if I give up one seed I can still hatch the other. ...that's beside the point. You want a fluffy alien to interrogate?"

"It sounds like the most helpful thing I could do at this point."

"No. They hang around existing magical girls like me too, on request or just to be annoying, and you might not even have the potential for it, I don't know. Besides, they're physically harmless as long as you know their tricks, I'll pick it up and close the door and then I can put it wherever you need it to be. ...I should clarify that they are absolutely physically harmless to you two and the issue is that if I let it touch my soul gem it can hurt me that way unless I have pain off."

"Aha. Okay, good to know."

"Oh, also you might not be able to see it."

"...Oh?"

"They're invisible to most people most of the time. I'm not sure if it's an always-on effect so that only girls they could offer wishes to or who've taken same can see them, or if it's selective, but one can be sitting on my head in Times Square and nobody compliments me on my hat."

"Huh. Well, that might interfere with the spell somewhat, but it doesn't actually require line of sight or anything..."

"Yeah - here it comes."

"...You're so fluffy."

"D'you wanna pet it?"

"You know what, sure."

Bella holds the furball in her direction. It is quite docile about allowing pets. It is very very soft.

So soft! If Emily has any mixed feelings about petting the evil alien her sister is about to perform mind magic on it doesn't show.

And...Mind Mirror.

Hmm. Well, still waters run deep sometimes. She steps through.

This unit is cut off from the network. There are any number of possible reasons for this. It is standing by and executing standard protocols for a mixed group of existing puella magi and potentials, mostly consisting of being cute and fluffy, upselling the potentials on contracts but letting whichever existing puella magi made contact do some of the sales pitch because she's less inhibited at human interaction. It does not know which puella magi this is but that is reasonable because it is cut off from the network. It cannot execute contracts in this state, but it has enough onboard memory to know that if it convinces one or both potentials to accept one it will have to lead them out the door. It doesn't have enough onboard processing power to figure out a plausible explanation for that which doesn't involve it being cut off from the network, and "I am part of a network" is buried several layers deep in the hierarchy of information it can distribute. (It will not lie, nor outright refuse to answer questions, but it's quite artful in understatement and implication and misdirection.) It is short on information in general and may have to answer some questions it could normally answer with variants on "I don't know". The potentials have tier 3 magical potentiation (high end of average), according to its indistinct sense for these things, but it doesn't know in this body what sort of wishes that would open up.

Edie steps out again. "Bella, it's cut off from the rest of them while the door's closed. Can you open the door?"

"Yeah." She hands Emily the alien and opens the door.

And Edie steps back into the mirror.

"Bella, is it a problem if I end up giving the fluff arbitrary information?"

"I can nix this go as soon as I leave the bar, but will you know if it decides to send another girl here to beat us up, or pull out more less fluffy resources?"

"I'm getting realtime on it getting information from what I'm saying, so probably."

It is not sure what 'nix this go' means. It comes up with guesses. It sounds like the unknown puella magi thinks she has a way to counter some projected action of the network. That is interesting. It comes up with guesses. It will hold off on actions that will provoke whatever she thinks she can do, until later.

"So what's tier three potential like in terms of possible wishes?"

You can wish for anything you like. Whatever you most want, says the furball.

"They have a policy about not telling you what anybody else wished for or giving suggestions."

"Ah. Hmm..." She thinks for a minute. "Emily, I'm casting the Gate. Lemme put a Si Vales on you so I can signal you if you need to remove something and you can go in, alright?"

"I'm holding the fluff," she points out, but comes over so Edie can put a silvery dot on her forehead.

"I can hold the fluff, if you bring it over."

Emily hands her the fluff.

And Edie creates something that looks an awful lot like the Mind Mirror, but instead of a mirror it's an ornate marble doorway.

The fluff sits unprotesting in the crook of Bella's arm.

And Emily goes through the doorway.

"If my sister or I wished to be able to make doors to this place whenever we wanted, would that be a valid wish?"

I'm not sure! Some things about wishes are mysterious even to me, says the fluff. I can't guarantee that it would work.

"What happens if I try it and it doesn't work?"

Then you will need to make a different wish and you will not have very long to decide.

"So if I try to make a wish and it doesn't work I'm still stuck making a wish and a contract."

Usually I can tell whether you could succeed at a wish or not. If you want to try the one you just said, you should have a backup wish just in case.

"I'm not sure I want to make a wish if neither my sister or I can get that one. We don't have witches where I'm from and I don't want to be stuck away from home."

"I'd offer to send you home with a full grief seed to hatch, but hatched witches do not grow enough to restock you unless they have people to gobble up, probably a bad tradeoff - and also now that I think of it it's possible that your existing magic will interact badly with you being a soul gem operating your body indirectly."

"If I could make sure they only fed on people like the Golden Diamond General I think it would be a pretty great tradeoff, but I don't think that's workable. And I have no idea how the magics would interact, yeah. So maybe not the best idea, but if there was some way of guaranteeing it would work out..."

"It's not exactly a humane death, I'm not sure how well witches do in captivity in general, and they need several people per grief seed and one seed will only keep you going for a few days of normal amounts of magic use."

"That seems like a really inefficient system. I wonder if it would be possible to make you into one of my kind of magical girl...if they interact destructively then it should just not work."

"How confident are you in that 'should'? Because if it sticks..."

"I mean, even if it turned out that you had to fuel my kind of magic with your soul gem thing too, it's perfectly possible to just not use any magic at all."

"Yeah, but I mean, what if it breaks my soul gem, or it turns out that it does take soul gem magic and it insta-drains me down to witching levels the first time I try anything, or the costumes annihilate each other and transforming means an antimatter explosion the size of the sun, or... You know what I mean? I would like to proceed only with strong theoretical models predicting no disaster."

"I'm having a hard time imagining why it would do any of those things, but it's your decision."

"I basically just need to know a whole lot more about how it works."

"Oh...well, basically if you want power hard enough for a good enough reason, and you have enough 'potential', then you have a subjectively variable objectively instantaneous hallucination where you get evaluated and asked about the consequences of power and whatnot and then at the end it gives you the option to become a magical girl--or boy, sometimes, but that's less common--or not."

"Does whatever system is doing the asking seem to be intelligent?"

"Intelligent..ish? Like, it's computer system intelligent, it can find these people in the first place, but it has no compunctions empowering people who want to do diametrically opposing 'good things' with their powers, like, I know of more than one fundie magical girl who got power on the basis of her faith but also more than one militant atheist."

"Okay. If I can't get power under this system it'll be because it's racist against people from other worlds, but it's not necessarily bright enough to tell me if it'll make me explode. Great."

"Not everyone from our world has the potential. It's possible that people who are not you from your world could do it even if you couldn't. And it's...hmm. It's good at mapping physical consequences? That's a bad way of putting it. When I was having my hallucination I saw...potential things that could happen as a result of having powers, not exactly precog but vaguely similar?"

"That's promising."

"Like, if precog is 'thus and such will happen if you don't act on this vision' or 'these particular actions will have these particular results,' this was more like 'this is a genre of thing you can do if you accept power and make the right subsequent choices'."

"But the thing would probably be precise enough to indicate if I'd wind up dead?"

"Yeah."

And Edie crosses over to the marble doorway to fetch her sister out.

"That thing's brainspace is weirdly orderly."

"Probably has to be so all its component parts can find everything."

"Probably. Anyway, it's safe to chuck the fluff out in the snow now."

"That... would tend to be a problem. I mean, you said the vision was instant...? Alternately, hold the door and taunt the villain in here and make Security deal with it."

"...That is actually a really good idea!"

"I volunteer to hold the door, as opposed to playing bait."

"And I'd rather not run down my charge if it's all the same to you so I'll stand out of sight of the door and hope you don't need me."

"Sounds about right. Oh, hang on, let me detransform and retransform so I can have the Psyche Staff." Between one breath and the next, her outfit is covered with shimmering lights, and then she is wearing a perfectly ordinary t-shirt (for a band Bella does not recognize) and jeans. She grimaces.

Then, taking a deep breath, she places the first two fingers of her right hand against her temple, props the left one on her hip, assumes a cheerful expression, and exclaims, "Truth and Beauty of a Magical Mind, Activate! Fervor and Will of an Impassioned Soul, Come Forth!" Her body is enveloped in the same lights that had accompanied her return to normal, she lifts up off the ground, and spins in place while waves of stronger light pass over her body, leaving her magical girl outfit in place of her street clothes behind them. The lights vanish, and she drops to the floor in a crouch, before rising to her feet and pointing imperiously at nothing in particular. "In the name of Love and Equity, I arrive to right the wrongs of a distorted heart! The Psychic Maiden, Cerebella is here!"

"...It's not as much of a liability as it looks like. I'm nigh-indestructible while I'm glowing like that. But it is not the most dignified thing ever, no."

"Oh, I meant purely for embarrassment reasons." Bella goes over to the fireplace, out of sight of the door.

"It's less embarrassing when there's a whole community of other people similarly afflicted, but yeah." She plucks the sticks from her forearms and makes the Psyche Staff.

And Emily opens the door.

And Edie dashes through, firing a blast from her staff almost as soon as she's through. A few minutes later, after some careful maneuvering, she tumbles through the door again, with a man in heavy golden armor bearing down on her with an improbably sized, improbably made-of-gold-looking sword that is prevented from carving her in half by the Psyche Staff being held in both of her hands. It's holding up admirably under the strain.

And Emily closes the door.

"No ma'am. Ask Bar."

Emily very firmly represses the urge to make an Innocent Face. Nothing is more suspicious than an Innocent Face.

The witchy person goes up to Bar, asks for her statement, gravely reads the napkins she receives, and then trusses up the villain with magical ropes and floats him. Edie she wakes up with a wand-tap and "ennervate", but regardless she says, "That's an hour subjective for you, young lady, bringing outside grievances into the bar. Him I'll hold until you've left, but don't you do that again. Follow me."

"...Yes ma'am, sorry ma'am," she says, sounding respectful and genuinely contrite. She follows docilely.

The Security lady puts her and the villain in separate cells in a holding area, otherwise empty. It is boring in there. She sits behind a desk, props her feet up, and reads a magazine entitled Witch Weekly.

"I didn't know there was a separate rule about that," Bella apologizes. "Probably should have run this plan past Bar first."

"Probably. But, hey, you've still got me to hold the door, so..."

"Yeah. Would you?"

"Edie wouldn't want her hour's imprisonment to be in vain." She opens the door.

Bella steps through.

Her brand new magic sense informs her that she has a spell available. It feels...cleansing, somehow. Does she want to cast it?

When she nudges the spell with her mind, the incantation bubbles to her lips as naturally and irresistibly as the transformation phrase had.

"I have no idea what that did! But congratulations, I guess. Nifty outfit, at any rate."

"Also, hi, I'm back, time apparently flows at different rates in different parts of Milliways."

"Welcome back. I am apparently Salvation Jewel Princess, which could have been worse, and it makes my costume look like glossy wrapping paper but doesn't do anything unfortunate to my modesty, and I can clear my soul gem with a spell, holy fuck."

"...And this restores your magic like the evil seed things do?"

"Yes. And the evil seed things are why we can't just wipe out all the witches. I mean, this is still going to be stupidly hard to do, aforementioned world-ending witch, etcetera, but a lot of puella magi actively let witches grow and bud because that is how we get the evil seed things is killing witches after, and only after, they are big enough. If I can learn to do this for other people, if I can do it enough times a day and spend most of my life on airplanes making sure everybody gets a turn - we don't need witches which means we don't need random human witch fertilizer committing suicide and murder and arson and industrial sabotage which means girls who are currently puella magi and not witches yet can just stay that way. ...I may not have actually mentioned that if we run totally out of charge this provokes the turning into a witch thing? I can completely bypass the intended life-cycle. Stick it to those evil fucking furballs."

"That is fantastic."

"Yes!"

"You know...if you really, really want a particular kind of spell, and you think about it a lot, and especially if you manage to have one of your milestones be related to it, you can get spells that are particularly useful instead of just thematically appropriate. So you could maybe learn to teleport."

"Well, that'd save me a lot in airline miles, now, wouldn't it. How about magical translation, is that on the menu?"

"I don't see why not. I haven't heard of anyone doing that in particular off the top of my head but there are spells that give you information about things."

"...Magical translation seems readily possible and nobody's picked it up? Really?"

"I'm not saying no one has, I'm saying I haven't met anyone who mentioned having it. Not quite the same thing."

"Yeah, I guess it wouldn't necessarily stand out enough that you'd have heard of, it's not flashy. Any tips on spell aiming?"

"Want it. Attach an emotional significance to it, that is, not just objectively prefer it. Spend a little time every now and then thinking about how it would fit into whatever themes your magic seems to have. Consistently getting into situations where it would have been useful to have it helps but I can't particularly recommend it even so. I heard of a girl in Thule or Sweden or something, somewhere Scandinavianish anyway, who managed to attach enough emotional significance to a chain of spells that getting each one supplied the necessary personal achievement to get the next, but no one's been able to replicate it since."

"I mean, if I want translation there are all kinds of situations where it would be really useful but I can get by without if I have to. And I can work up a good mad about having to be on an airplane easy."

"Sounds like fun. ...I do still have to figure out how to save the world. I now have an idea what I'll do with it after I've managed, but while being able to cleanse my soul gem means that I can fight the Walpurgisnacht - technical term for a really big witch - for hours and hours, I can still only do that if it doesn't physically crush my gem and send me back to my reset point. I have some downtime while looping and might get introspection sooner than 'when I've got a stable system'. Although who knows, I can stay in Milliways for a decade if I want now, maybe I'll come home with even more cool magic powers sufficient to one-hit-kill the thing."

"Well, I don't know what you've been doing so far this loop, it might be better to start over the once to erase any ordinarily poor life choices you made under the assumption that you wouldn't have to deal with them, but yeah."

"I did stow away on a plane. But I didn't get caught. I'd reset to avoid the fluffs knowing things I don't care to share with them, though. And then I still have to find out where the blasted thing is before it comes down the western seaboard. It'd be faster to track down if I could bring people with me and divide the work. Be nice to do that for other reasons too. Two loops ago a puella magi in, where was I, Calgary, she hit on me, and, like - I have explained how I feel about all this looping but even if I explained it to her and she was cool about it, that would be extra layers of weird. Being forgotten."

"Yeah, that...that doesn't sound like fun. So you like girls?"

"Yep. This was very exciting to the high schoolers in the small town where I live. A real live lesbian, wow."

Sporfle.

"Funny coincidence. ...It's only magical girls, your way, not boys, right?"

"Sometimes the girls are transgender? But yeah, everybody answers to 'she'. The fluffs don't know why but girls seem to have more, I don't know, energy-efficient emotional processing or something. Why?"

"My system admits to both genders, although girls are more common, and I'm bisexual, your system only has girls and you're a lesbian."

"There are straight puella magi. And bisexual ones. No correlation, far as I know. Although I've had straight ones tell me they're jealous because they're spending half their energy budget protecting their boyfriends from the various hazards of being nonmagical."

"Oh, I did say it was a funny coincidence. Emily's straight too."

"Emily being my name, were we ever properly introduced? And she's Edie, and also incompetently trying to flirt with you."

"...I'm Bella. Aaaand I'm legally seventeen, mentally like twenty-three, have spent the last several years in a time loop, and have not picked up the skill of flirting in that time."

"...As an interested party who is not going to forget you in less than a month, would you like to practice flirting and possibly related activities?"

"I wish I could say that's the worst pickup line I've ever heard," she mutters under her breath.

"Don't knock it, it's working," Bella says to Emily. "And yes let's. ...Here we are in a bar. I could buy you a drink. I mean, Bar will give you a drink for free, but if you continued to be thirsty after that."

"I actually had my free drink while you were wandering around in the Mind Mirror. That--sounds lovely."

"Cool, um, preferences?"

"Uh, not actually alcohol, I like things more on the chocolate-nut-caramel side of the flavor spectrum more than fruity things?"

"Sounds lovely."

Beam! Sip. Shy blushing.

Blushing is a two-person activity today, apparently. "...I'm trying to think of things to say and all I've got is shop talk."

"Magic is fun? Magic is cool? I mean, it could be worse, I at least also know magic stuff, it's not like you'd that one guy who keeps nattering about his job to a bored but polite captive audience."

"Yeah. Magic is fun and cool. For example, fun fact, I do a backflip as part of my new transformation sequence, I can totally do that, but back when I actually inhabited my body instead of just using it as a mannequin for my shiny purple self I could barely walk without falling over. I can dance now, if I want, it's great."

"Dancing is fun! I'm not as...enthusiastic about it as Emily is, I know how to waltz and a couple of other things, she knows everything I do and also imitates music videos like Caramelldansen and Moskau, but it's definitely fun. The transformation sequence would let you do a backflip unimpeded even if you were otherwise half-paralyzed, though, it's funny like that. And being transformed gives you nice boosts to most physical things like strength and so on but also including reflexes."

"Huh, if I were paralyzed, would I just - backflip then go back to being paralyzed after I was all shinied up?"

"Like, by half-paralyzed I mean you can move, it's just sluggish and difficult. I haven't actually met but have read about this one girl who's paraplegic and her costume and therefore transformation sequence involve ribbons she's telekinetic with wrapped around her legs and lower torso."

"Sounds... convenient, sort of. Can't be healed or doesn't want to?"

"Magic that can affect injuries as old, delicate and scarred-over as a several years old shattered vertebra is pretty rare. I think her reaction to being offered it was something like 'shut up and heal someone who doesn't have teekay ribbons to let them walk'."

"Yeah, I guess that's fair."

"I was reading about her because she's pretty involved with social activism dealing with ableism. There are a lot of magical girl social activists, but not we're not really organized...I'm planning on working on that, when I'm a little older and more likely to be taken seriously."

"Oh, yeah, you work in public! I sometimes go public just because I don't have to deal with long-term consequences and it's more convenient than being inconspicuous, but in my world most people can't see the aliens and don't know that puella magi or witches exist. Witches hide themselves in little pocket dimensions and the effects get written off as psychotic breaks or depression, occasionally mass hallucinations."

"That sounds annoying. And like it would make it that much harder to do your jobs."

"We can dowse for witches and civilian help wouldn't really do anything - someone in witch thrall isn't going to stop and consider that maybe the problem is magical in nature and not that they need to set fire to the convenience store just because they had a previous understanding of the existence of magic. So I'm not sure it actually does make it harder."

"I guess if you can dowse for them it's not such a difference. I was imagining something like safety pamphlets warning people about early warning signs of witch presence and the number for the local Puella Magi hotline and what have you."

"It's not really an 'early warning sign' thing. It's got you or it hasn't; if it's got somebody near you it's probably got you too. I guess it'd be handy on the occasions the witches park in buildings that are in use? It's usually creepy abandoned warehouses and alleys and construction sites and stuff but sometimes there's one in a nursing home or a hospital, and if those are on sprawly campuses the witch might be nibbling on patients and leaving the front desk receptionist for dessert."

"Ick. Okay, yeah, I was imagining 'if your neighbor is exhibiting these signs a witch might have got him' kind of thing, but I guess I don't know that much about how witches work."

"Sometimes familiars are kind of subtle? Those are budded-off witches that won't yield grief seeds if you kill them, they don't grow until they've eaten a few people and they can sometimes take a while to do that and could be subtle. Most puella magi don't even bother killing them because fighting costs magic and risks getting killed and you don't get your spiky little prize at the end. If I learn to teleport and clean other people's soul gems and we start trying to earnestly eradicate the species, maybe it'd be useful to have a way to find familiars when they're just chewing on one dude and the main symptom is that he quit showing up to work and keeps calling his sister and hanging up on her."

"And at that point, you need to weigh the number of familiars against the number of people who could get hurt in the metaphorical witch hunts that a literal witch hunt would cause."

"Yeah. I mean, optimistically people would believe us about the parameters involved - witched people have no magic powers, tie them up and you'll be fine, when the little tattoo-y thing on them is gone they're out of the woods - but realistically? Not so much."

"And you just know that every hate group that doesn't decide you're the enemy instead would use 'I thought I saw one of those tattoo things' as a new excuse for violence against their preferred targets."

"Yep. Witch had him and he was holding bleach and ammonia, no helping it, of course the witch's kiss is gone now he's dead."

"I think the reason I have so much mind magic is because I got my powers because I was pissed off at--well. Everyone and everything with a bare few exceptions, at the time, but mostly people like that. And you can make people stop doing terrible things, but the only way to make it stick is--to make them not want to." She's very quiet for a minute. "Some of the things I saw in my visions--I never would. Never. But I wanted to." Shame creeps into her voice. "I saw it and I wanted it and when I realized it made me feel sick."

"Ouch. That's... yeah. Points for resisting temptation?"

"Yeah. I just don't...I don't like feeling like the kind of person who wants things like that."

"Well. And you aren't. If, all things considered, that was what you wanted, you'd go around actually doing it; or you would actively and specifically resent things getting in your way. ...If your mental architecture's like mine, anyway. Like, all things considered, I probably don't want to take over the world, because many people are very attached to the ways their parts of it are currently being run and I want to respect those preferences even if they seem really stupid. But that's me wanting it. I am the boss of me. It is not... if you will pardon me for saying so - somebody else's implanted desire. I get to add it all up myself and so do you."

"I think there's different levels of wanting things. I absolutely want to change people's minds about things. I want to do this by being a really effective activist. But the emotional reaction I have towards wanting people to just stop is a lot stronger than the one I have towards activism. And activism is hard, and sometimes it doesn't work, and I think if I managed to eliminate the desire to mind-control entirely it could upset some stuff that's doing important work. But it's not a want on the same level as wanting to do well on a test or even wanting to have ice cream, it's a want on the same level as wanting to punch some smug asshole in the face. It's not what I would choose, but the urge is there."

"My visceral reaction to mind control in particular is thoroughly negative, which is why I went with the 'taking over the world' analogy. Might not be the right analogy because it has more steps. I dunno, I guess I feel like 'punch that smug asshole'-level urges are color commentary and ultimately don't matter very much? I don't punch smug assholes. I could totally get away with it and I don't punch smug assholes. I am a person who does not punch smug assholes, and that's important, and the fact that it has ever occurred to me to do so is... garnish on the plate of my life. It's just there, you don't actually eat it."

"It is sometimes an act of will for me to not punch smug assholes. But I don't do it, and I don't do mind control, and that's not going to change. It's just occasionally a source of concern." shrug. "I'll work it out to my satisfaction at some point. I'm just not quite there yet."

"Fair enough. How old are you, anyway?"

"Eighteen in August. It's June right now, for me."

"I have been in January and February for ages. I'm consistently confused about how to construe my age. Like, there's an extent to which I am still seventeen and will stay that way until I de-loop, because I'm physically so and that is the amount of calendar time that has passed since my birthday and no one has observed the milestones of me turning any other ages and I haven't, of course, had a birthday. But on the other hand I'm not actually going to get physically older unless I feel like it, puella magi needn't age - and subjectively I'm solidly into my twenties now."

"I think you're close enough for it not to count as creepy."

"That's good. I'll have a bit of an awkward time later on if I pop out of my time loop feeling like I'm a couple centuries old, but hey, at least I'm gay and other immortals are in my dating pool."

"I think there's a point past which it stops being creepy for you to date people way older than you are, but looking forty or fifty would probably not be as fun as looking early twenties. And then you'd have the problem of your significant others periodically dying on you anyway."

"Not necessarily, because I can now cleanse my soul gem without grief seeds and puella magi can de-age regular humans if we want! ...Also, I'm crossing my fingers that I'll be able to set new reset points besides the one I currently have, somehow, eventually. Like, do a perfect run, save the world, new reset point is February 27, keep saving the game occasionally so to speak, back up if the aliens do something awful or somebody assassinates me or if someone dies on me."

"Oh, cool, I didn't realize you could de-age people, I think there's like two magical girls who can do that back home. Man, I cannot tell you how many times I have wished life came with save points."

"I'm not positive I'll be able to move or add new points to my reset power, because I worded my wish kinda awkwardly and under pressure, but maybe I'll be able to get my new magic powers to do it."

"It wouldn't surprise me. Magic demonstrably does not care about things like not embarrassing you, but it can be remarkably convenient otherwise."

"My transformation sequence isn't that bad. Like, I'll still probably pause time to do it, but more because it would prompt really awkward questions from a 'how did you get extra magic powers' perspective."

"I think most people's transformation sequences are more appealing to them than most other people's transformation sequences."

Bella looks at Emily. "You saw mine, did it seem awful?"

"Not especially? I'm the wrong person to ask, I've seen enough people transform I'm kind of desensitized to it. A little awkward, maybe."

"Oh well."

"I'm pretty sure I don't have as much acrobatics in mine because I'm more of a standing gesturing and denouncing kind of person."

Giggle. "Do you want to see mine? It seems fair. ...How do I even detransform?"

"Um...yeah, it wasn't as obvious the first time. You know how it feels like you're a hollow vessel filled with magic? Let go of that. And sure, I'd love to see it."

giggle. "Yeah, I definitely see what Emily was saying about it looking a little awkward. But that's not bad at all compared to some of the sequences we've seen. Four stars."

Bella takes a bow. "Do I even want to know what the worst ones are like?"

"Musical Star Prism has a three-minute long one that makes terrible puns on musical terminology."

"Oh dear. That sounds really inconvenient."

"It kind of is! I assume so, anyway, she doesn't spend a lot of time actively griping about it."

"I mean, if I were a villain fighting a girl with a three-minute-long transformation sequence, I would make sure I had contingency plans that took less than three minutes to set up."

"If a magical girl is transforming anywhere near the villain, she's probably doing something wrong. Standard operating procedure is to be in skirts well in advance of any actual fighting."

"Oh, fair enough. Is there any limit to how long you can sustain the transformation?"

"No. Synchronicity's difficult because it breaks if the two minds start deviating from each other too much. Sustaining a transformation can be tricky before you get in the habit of not letting go of the power unless you mean too, but it's not like casting spells where you're going to tire yourself out."

"How much does one tire oneself out casting spells...? If I have to teleport all over the globe all the time to break the puella magi dependence on witches..."

"It's like having a new muscle, basically. How much you can do depends on how much you metaphorically work out."

"Is there an upper limit and/or metaphorical steroids?"

"Not as far as I know. To either of them, that is. There are metaphorical muscle soothers, I've seen spells that work like that."

"Oh well. I'll deal. I've got all the time in the world."

"Yeah."

"What's the story behind the guy who's currently cooling his heels in Security, anyway?"

"Magical Girls aren't the only kind of magic in our world. There are magicians, who use formulas and things to harness raw magical force, and artifact users, who get specific powersets from specific magical objects. The Gem Guardians, of whom the Golden Diamond General is the strongest, are a quartet of artifact users who are the lieutenant of a magician who calls himself the Obsidian Magus, which just goes to show it's not just magical girls who are over-the-top about these kinds of things. I'm not sure what it is he's trying to accomplish, exactly, but I think it involves a lot of really unethical magic science." She sighs. "The Black Opal Guardian--wasn't there willingly."

"Oh dear. ...Where do the artifacts come from?"

"Every now and then a set or a lone one turns up from some kind of ruins or something. No one really knows where they come from originally."

"Weird. ...What happened to the Black Opal Guardian?"

"We didn't have to kill her. They arrested her. She let me do some mind magic to prove she wasn't working for the Obsidian Magus willingly, so I'm going to testify on her behalf at the trial."

"It's admissible in court and everything?"

"If it's ever learned I magically perjured myself under oath the consequences are really, really nasty. But yes, the result of information-gathering magical girl spells, consensual application of mindreading counted therein, have been admissible as witness testimony since 2005."

"...What year is it by you?"

"2017."

"My loop's in 2005."

"Huh. Well, it's not that surprising that Milliways can pull people from different years."

"Not at all, I knew that, I just hadn't realized you were close but not that close."

"I'm trying to remember 2005 but most of what I can recall isn't directly relatable to the year."

"And I mean, you would have been six, which is a little weird all by itself."

"Not that I imagine you need the reminder but if you have a six-year-old me in your world don't flirt with her."

"I won't. If you have a thirty-year old me in yours... go for it if you feel like it, I guess?"

"Pfff. Maybe when I'm older."

"Entirely fair."

"Given what I know of you, if there's a thirty-year-old version of you in my world I've probably heard of her. Just not as Bella, and she wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with jewels."

"I wasn't gonna say it... but yeah I was thinking that."

"Well, of course."

Giggle. "I am a motivated and power-hungry beastie."

"Power to help people is the best thing. If your hypothetical alt hasn't heard of me by the time I'm thirty I'll be disappointed in myself."

"Fighting villains and, you said social activism, right, what kind?"

"Most kinds, if I can help it. I'm most personally perturbed by LGBTQA-etc. issues for the obvious reasons, and antisemitism because I'm Jewish, but that doesn't mean that other issues aren't just as important. I want to try organizing magical girl activists involved with individual issues into an intersectional organization that seeks across-the-board improvement of treatment of people who aren't white male Protestant etcetera."

"What are the added bonuses of having magical girls in particular work on it? Are you, like, role models with action figures who can get on Sesame Street, or are there people with spells that apply really well to some kind of direct action...?"

"Mostly the former, but there's also the added factor that magical girl spells can be really hard to replicate. Impossible if you're not one, and even most magical girls don't have the dedication to orchestrate what spells they get. So any given magical girl who plays her cards right has a lot of resources to work with, without the caveat that people with resources like that usually come with that they came from privileged backgrounds to begin with to have gotten that far."

"Ooh. This might or might not be what you meant but what I'm hearing is 'if a magical girl plays her cards right she can be very, very rich'."

"Oh, yeah. Not just that, but if you play your cards right...it takes time, it's not strange that I have the usual wealth for my native socioeconomic class at seventeen going on eighteen, but yes."

"I could, even sans counterfeiting, make a lot of money with magic, but we're all hidey. Maybe that'll change."

"I'd keep hiding the gem-cleaning spell from the fluff a while longer, if you can do that without causing anyone to get unnecessarily hurt, but overall I've found the benefits of public magical girling in my world have significantly outweighed the disadvantages."