"Ren'd be jealous. She considered Paris, when she decided she had to move to a major foreign city with her eight year old."

"No reason she couldn't come with."

"That'd be fun."

Their next joint practice session doesn't go amazing. Ichinoya complains nonstop about the weather conditions. Egawa and Hanyu keep talking telepathically to each other without looping in the rest of their squad and Kyubey refuses to override people's telepathic intentions about who they talk to, which Haru grudgingly admits would be the right principle for a telepathic relay to have in any other situation. The Nozakis and their friend are an hour late. Azumaya doesn't show up at all and Dobashi doesn't know where he is, hasn't seen him in two days. Ogura attempts to get into some kind of pissing contest with Ueda, who isn't escalating it but isn't doing anything to actually divert her from it either. The Minorikawas are by comparison bastions of professionalism but they seem kind of checked out, like they might still have tickets out of town in case they get cold feet day of.

This. Would be easier if I had those time-turner powers you thought I could have last loop 'round.

Self-duplicating ones? Yeah, I bet those would make a lot of things easier but herding cats would be high on the list.

...how unethical or unjustified would it be for me to try to dictionary crack them and find the best thing to say to get them to take this seriously right now.

I'm... trying to think of ways to ask them permission to do it... which might be possible but only if they were taking it seriously in the first place... we don't have the right to draft these people, is the thing...

No, but I'm not planning to like threaten them, just... find the best way to persuade them. Because, uh, I'll be real, if I gotta redo this loop my next best plan is spend several loops in a row befriending each and every one of them one by one until I know what makes them tick.

Uh, unless you think that's a bad idea?

...no, I think that makes sense, if - yeah. That'd be the next thing to do, unless the witch conveniently has a well-marked glowing weak spot you'll be able to drill right into given this advance knowledge, or something like that. But it's different doing it in short iterations, I think? I don't have a well thought out justification for that intuition.

I... Could I... I mean...

...you know, in those Groundhog Day stories...

...I really, really don't want to end up in one of them. If I can avoid it. And I don't know why this would be worse than the months but we all know that I'm ethically challenged. But I, I really, really don't want to end up in one of them.

Haru squeezes his hand. ...you can't decide to let the world go on un-time-traveled. That happened without you even really meaning for it to happen, and considering that Walpurgisnacht keeps getting bigger and killing more people every time and has no natural endpoint, it would have been the right call for almost every individual person on Earth even if you'd meant to do it. You can just at this point aim to leave the world with the best March it can have had. But I want - I want that to look like having the skills to do it and not like brute forcing your way through people whose risk assessment isn't like mine, whose interest in Tokyo remaining standing isn't like mine - we don't own these guys.

Squeeze. Okay. Okay.

We really need them to give it an honest try. I need to figure out—what to say—how to get them to take this seriously—how can they live their whole life in a city and never develop enough attachment to it to want to save its millions of inhabitants or, like, their mum or something...

Maybe those ones overextend themselves hunting and die.

Mental sigh. Fine. I'll... try to figure out something to say, see if I can get them to try to think for real about it, then let's go look for Azumaya.

You think we'd find him if Dobashi couldn't? We don't know his civilian haunts, his full name, anything but that he must sooner or later wind up in a witch and Dobashi knows that too.

I am beginning to take a radical 'if you want something done well you should do it yourself' approach to things, I'm not sure I trust Dobashi to have even tried to dowse for Azumaya, but finding people by their family names and general description is pretty centrally a kind of thing money can buy if we don't get anywhere tonight.

Okay. May as well hunt thereabouts as anywhere else.

Yeah.

Alright, time to face the music. Again. We've been facing many musics recently.

Yup.

The magicals are mostly where they left them except that Egawa and Hanyu went down to street level and detransformed to get tea and tiny overdecorated waffles.

Yutaka sighs mentally but goes to talk to all of them, though he doesn't gather them all up together when he does since it's easier to personalise pitches to smaller groups.

And once he's done with that they can go Toshimawards.

They find a witch, eventually, dowsing, tucked into an alley beside an apartment block. It's not a kind Yutaka's seen before, so maybe it's endemic to the Toshima neighborhood.

Inside it's full of stars - there's air, and they can breathe, but it's rareified like they're at the top of a mountain, and it's night-black wall-to-wall in there, and glowing fist-sized suns and marble-sized planets, with rings and moons and swirls of every beautiful color, float through it sparsely, ellipsing themselves around each other slowly and lazily. Haru reaches out to touch a blue star, cautiously; it's harmlessly cool and soft, feels like sticking his hand in an air dryer. He catches a ringed planet between his fingers. It's fragile and pinches away into nothingness.

"...this one's new," he says, looking around. "Pretty. It's not great that some witches are pretty." He offers Haru his pinky for the string.

Haru takes it in plenty of time for the timestop to arrest the motion of an incoming flying saucer, which is proportioned completely unsuitably for the celestial bodies - it's about a meter across and it's got little windows in which they can see little tentacled aliens in mottled green and purple. "I wish we could take pictures of them."