'It's hard to explain how I destroy a grief seed without a lot of background understanding of magic that I'm not really qualified to impart,' Kyubey says.

'I mean, do you like feed it to a machine and press a button? Does it remove the - yuckiness - and purify the seed, or demolish it? Or do you like throw it in a black hole or something."

'It's more like feeding it into a magical device that destroys it.  Dropping a grief seed in a black hole would probably destroy it, but by using magic it's easier to be sure.'

'Alright! Is there anywhere I can learn more about magic?'

'There aren't really facilities set up to teach humans to do our kind of magic.  Learning about magic would take time away from hunting witches and training as a magical girl.  Plus, we have kind of a natural knack for it - it would be harder for you to do very much with it.'

'So there aren't, like, books?'

'Not ones in a language you could understand, no.'

'I couldn't learn the language? Or use translation software?'

'You could in theory, but it would be harder than learning just about any other language.  There's no translation software set up to translate between our language and English.  Even if you did, though, I don't think you could improve very much on the system we have.  It'd be better to focus on hunting witches.'

'I'm not hunting witches 24/7, I could study in my downtime. Even if it takes a while.'

'It would still split your focus, and like I said, I don't think it would help very much.  It could take years of study before you even understood how to do anything with it, and understanding is the easy part.'

'I mean, basically all it'd be taking away from is browsing the internet. And I'd like to know something about what I'm doing.'

'I'm happy to try to answer any questions you have, as much as I can!  But it's a complicated subject.  I'm not sure there are even any resources dedicated to teaching humans our language.'

'I can't think of any questions right now, but I'll let you know when I have some?'

'Okay!'

And she finishes handing off the grief seeds.

'See you later!'

He departs.

That conversation was... Weird.

She quietly relays the conversation to Kaylee during gym class Monday. "I'm not actually that super interested in learning magic, but that he kept trying to discourage me felt... Off," she says. "Also he has the weird hatch thing in his back that he puts the grief seeds in. Unless alien biology's really, really different, it didn't look organic."

"...yeah, that seems a bit... if he's just bad at this he probably wouldn't try that hard to turn you off to learning magic.  From the way you describe that conversation he seemed kind of - slippery."

"I know! He didn't even try to discourage me in a reasonable way, it all felt like excuses. And, like, magical girls learning magic would probably help. Even if we're so behind the aliens that it'd take us years and years, well - maybe we'd have a novel idea early on, we are different species so obviously we'd take different approaches, and there are human prodigies who could probably pick it up really fast."

She nods.  "That makes sense. I can't imagine what he could be hiding about magic in particular... was there anything else he was always weirdly evasive about?  He was always really down on magical girls working together..."

"...Details about his people maybe? I don't really remember much beyond that, though he was super evasive about the dangers of being a magical girl when we started out."

"Dangers of being a magical girl," she says, counting on her fingers, "details about magic, details about other Kyubeys, and he discouraged us from working together... that's... really really sketchy now that I say it out loud but I don't really see, like, an obvious pattern..."

"I mean, either he's really terrible at helping, or he wants us to get ourselves killed. Which would be bizarre, why invest effort and resources into us just to let us die?"

"I don't know.  I don't... understand any of this."