"- hey, do you have an angle on this thing already?" says a voice at her elbow.

It's another magical girl, like her, though she's purple where Tara's blue.

She does not squeak. She's too busy to squeak. She spins and -- oh it's good to see someone else who can help.

And she was asked a question. "No! I can stop some of the damage but that's it. Do you? Have an angle?"

"No. I'm trying to figure something out. What've you observed so far?"

That's an entire car flying through the air, it's going to crash into that house there -- shield -- now it's not. "Um. Storm? Rain? Wind, it's the wind that's really a problem. I should have wished to stop it but I didn't, and it's too late now -- uh, you also got magic from the, the fuzzy little genie, right?"

"Yes - you wished that recently?"

"Just a few minutes ago, yes." There's probably a whole community of magical people, isn't there, and she's a newbie. She would have so many questions about that if the timing was better, but it's still very neat, even if this particular magical girl isn't treating the situation as the emergency it is.

"- what's your name? I'm Bella."

"I'm Tara." Shield. The genie had said something about specialties, right... "Can your magic not do anything about all this?"

"I am not a weather specialist. I’m trying to figure out how it got this bad."

"That sounds really important and I genuinely want to help with that, please do ask me about it, just, after the storm is over!"

Headshake. "I am in a time loop. It doesn't end."

She continues watching the storm, scanning for collisions that she could prevent, even though it feels pointless now. It was already starting to feel remarkably pointless, even before what the other girl - Bella - said. That's no reason to stop.

She's only just learned that magic exists at all. She might as well suppose it can do time travel, too. "Why? Or, you said you were trying to figure it out, sorry, what do you know?"

"It just keeps going west and getting bigger. - your gem is going dark, what are you doing -"

"-It wouldn't end, even without the loop?" She looks down at herself. Yes, her outfit has a gem positioned as a cloak clasp, mingled blue and black. "This? I'm not doing anything to it. What do you mean."

"Did it not tell - you have finite magic, represented by gem brightness, you're running out."

"No, he did mention running out, I just. Was in a hurry, and didn't ask a lot of questions. I don't – I don't know anything."

She hasn't been properly treating her magic as a scarce resource, has she. She wasn’t being wasteful with it, but now that she has even a sloppy way to see how much she’s used… she drops the shield on herself and flinches as she’s pelted with freezing rain. She can make her forcefields more precise if she tries for that, and leave them up as briefly as possible.

"If the cold hurts you turning down how much pain your body can send you is cheap. - you're technically your gem not your body now.

"Where would I find you, if I got here last week?"

She's... technically her gem, what... later. She can focus on the time loop, if it's real it's obviously the most important thing here. "My name is Tara Sanders, my address is –" she gives it – "I go to the high school a few blocks from here. When does the time loop end, how long do we have?"

Bella jots the address down, a purple bubble shielding it from the rain till it's stashed in her shield. "It ends when I go back. When it hits the Pacific, usually."

Okay, so. Not about to interrupt this conversation. She has time to ask questions.

She doesn't want to ask questions. She doesn't want to be out here in this storm trying to help people who are maybe just going to be rewound out of existence anyway. She doesn't want to do anything, right now, except curl up in a little ball and sob about all the horrible things she's learned today.

She casts another shield, redirecting a cascade of rubble. "You're doing the time loop on purpose, because of the storm? It's that bad?"

"I made my wish in a panic the middle of February after spending a month failing to think of one that was good enough. It was - it's not a storm, that's just the outwardly visible consequence. It's worse than the storm and it's the worst storm in history."

"We can be panic-wish buddies, yay," she mutters. "If it's not just a storm, if it's magic... did someone wish for this. Is that what this is."

"No, but I think I should tell you what it is a week ago and not right now."

"...That's fair, I guess. I mean. I don't know enough to know... whether it is or not.... Um. You are going to talk to me a week ago, though, right? Whatever this really is, I can help. I'll really definitely want to help."

"Yeah. I'm following its trail, it's hard to tell from news reports alone where it is itself versus weather that's caused by the other weather because normal people can't see the actual witch. - it's called a witch, that's not the thing I didn't want to say."

"Okay. That makes sense." As long as she'll have a chance to find out what's going on next time, that's what matters. Nothing else really matters now, does it, not in this loop.

"Are you still using magic right now?"

"...Not as much, but yes? I can't just... not do anything."

"Not literally nothing, but you’re darkening faster than that."

Yeah. She's watching her gem, now, and she can tell she doesn't have much left. "– Look, you seem like you know what you're talking about, and probably none of this matters, but – I'm sorry but I don't know you, and I'm not going to just stand here and let people get hurt." Her voice catches on that last. People are getting hurt anyway, she can't stop it, nothing she does could ever be enough –

A wave surges down the flooded street, crested with debris, heading straight for someone's house. She blocks it almost on reflex, and it crashes against her shield instead –

Bella hesitates, only a moment.

It's a week ago.

She gets out of the hospital and stows away on a plane.

And then she has to find the address in question.

It's a small, unremarkable house in the suburbs. There is, of course, no sign of any storm damage.

Naturally.

Knock knock.

It's not long before the door is opened by someone who is not Tara. He blinks inquisitively at her.

"Hi, I'm looking for Tara, do I have the right house?"

"Oh, sure, one sec - Tara, it's for you!"

And shortly, here she is. "Hi?"

"Hi Tara! I bet you don't remember my name, I'm Bella, can I tell you a thing?" Gesture into the outside world in general for a walk. It's not awful weather for January, yet.

She doesn't think this person is in any of her classes, and she doesn't have any idea what she might want to tell her... but, well, it seems easy enough to find out.

"...Okay." Coat, shoes, a wave to her dad, and then she's outside. "Um, I don't recognize you, though, sorry."

"Yeah, I know. I'm in a time loop. We did not have a lot of time to talk, last time, so I do not have a note from you to yourself or anything, sorry."

Apparently she did have some sort of guess about what to expect, insofar as 'Not This' counts.

"Do you have. Any other evidence."

"I can do magic. Is there a good place where it won't be terribly conspicuous? I can do this without going fully into costume -" A ring on her hand turns into a Christmas-ornament-sized purple cabochon in an elaborate setting.

Huh. Well, 'going into costume' does sound pretty conspicuous. "Let's just go inside, actually, and to my room? My dad won't bother us."

"Sure." Ring enrings again.

They are indeed unbothered; once they're inside Tara calls out "Dad, this is Bella, we'll be in my room," and receives an acknowledgement. Then they can go to her room, and the door can be closed behind them. On second thought, she closes the curtains, too.

Bella transforms. Jeans, long sleeved T-shirt, and sweater disappear in favor of pleats and leggings, in white and gray with purple accents.

This would be a really surprising way for her to be going crazy.

"Is that an illusion or is it really swapping out your clothes somehow? What else can you do? How did you get magic in the first place, is it something that can be learned?"

"It really swaps my clothes and I swap them back when I'm done being in costume. I can do - lotsa random little things -" She picks up the nearest book with telekinesis, spins it around in midair. "Sometimes something turns out to be unexpectedly expensive. Everybody with magic gets powers themed after what they wished for from - you called it a 'fuzzy little genie', last time around, its name is Kyubey. So I can stop time, in addition to resetting to the start of my loop, but most magical girls can't do time things or can't do them very much. Please do not try to find a Kyubey right now."

"A fuzzy little magic-granting genie. Huh." She reaches out to poke the floating book. Yep, that's a book. "Okay, so... why should I not try to find it? Are these the cursed kind of wishes that inevitably get twisted into something terrible?"

"Kind of. It's more complicated than that." Sigh. "I haven't tried to explain this to you before, so I don't know the best order to do it in."

"I think it's all right if it's not the best order. Start at the beginning? And if it's too confusing I'll ask questions, and then I guess you'll know for... next time."

"Well, if I start at the beginning it'll sound like a great deal, hence why I am now a magical girl. So I do need to at least mention up front that you should not do that. Uh, Kyubey came to me while I was in the hospital, I'd been hit by a van. A magical girl healed me, I don't know if I would have recovered otherwise, and they talked to me about making a wish and getting magic to fight witches. Witches being these monsters that are responsible for many, possibly a majority, of murders, suicides, and accidental deaths taken as a class."

- Nod. "A majority... In a way that's kind of good news, if it's possible to get rid of witches eventually... but sorry, go on."

"I am going to ask you to write yourself a letter in such a way as to preclude you saying things like that because it's depressing. Uh, so I was at the time really jazzed about this, get magic powers including the kind that got me out of the hospital and fight horrible mind control monsters, sign me up, right? But I couldn't think of a good wish - you can't just get whatever, it's pretty freeform but there's a scope limit. I couldn't hit, like, malaria. I kept trying clever cheats, I was pestering Kyubey all month with ideas, like, do I have enough magical potential for this, for that, for this other idea. Which was good, because -

- you know the storm that just flattened Boston, d'you read the news enough to know -"

"...I heard something about that, yeah."

"It's a witch. A storm is just what it looks like. It's a bad storm but mostly because all of the - human-operated resilience - is wrecked by the witch part. You'd have had a lot more Boston left if a storm of that size that was really the weather hit it. Over the next month it chews its way west. It's really obviously not a natural once-in-ten-thousand-years phenomenon when it keeps going after the Great Lakes. It hits the West Coast - I live in Washington - and by then it's so big, and I ask Kyubey about it, and -

"- I'm really not sure chronological order is the best way to tell this but it's worth a try, I guess. Kyubey says it may well end the world, and that it's too late to stop it. And in a panic, I wish.

"That whole month I never even asked, if time travel was on the table. But I woke up in the hospital, before the other magical girl came by to heal me and give me the pitch, in perfect health."

She will refrain from saying anything depressingly optimistic about this. Even with a month of warning, the world-ending monster is obviously a hard problem that Bella hasn't been able to solve. She nods.

"So - I usually take a lot of notes, and I can in fact bring stuff back in time with me which is why I'm going to ask you to write yourself a note, but I don't have any about the first time around for obvious reasons. That's all pure memory. I have a lot better for everything after that. Like... why little fuzzy genies would go around granting wishes to turn people into magical girls. They say they want people to fight the witches, but what's their angle - well, it turns out, they're representatives of an alien civilization that doesn't have emotions, emotions are themselves inherently magical, they're taking a cut, every time, when we make wishes and then again later -

"- when we turn into witches."

"Oh." That sure would explain why Bella told her not to make a wish. "Everyone who ever takes one of the wishes, or just - enough to keep it going?"

"It's possible to die without turning into a witch, if your gem shatters. I have tried this - not on purpose - and it resets me. You witch if your gem gets too dark; gem brightness is a ceiling on your mood, it can dim if you're too depressed, and it dims when you use magic. You cannot use no magic if you're a magical girl because we are technically housed in the gems themselves and tele-operating our bodies and this tele-operation uses a tiny trickle of magic and not having a body is reliably pretty depressing so you can't just skip it and live a life of private contemplation in a museum somewhere. You can recharge your magic by killing a mature witch and taking the 'grief seed' it leaves behind. I say 'mature' because there are immature ones - they bud - which don't drop loot. And new ones do not mature without killing people."

"So magical girls have to kill witches, but they can't actually get rid of them because then they'd turn into one themselves and start the whole thing over again, and - aauugh?? Augh! ...If I learn about this a bunch more times it'll be augh every time, won't it, that's... a thing. That will happen."

"Yeah."

"I can read it from my letter, I guess, and - learn everything like that at once. So you're looping because of the world-ending witch, and each loop is a month and this is the first time you've really talked to me - how did you find me in the first place? ...How many loops has it been, for you?"

"If you count my first time through the month as zero, this is twenty-one. Not all of those were a whole month, though, like when I died, or reset for whatever other reason. I found you by tracing the big world-eater witch here. It's hard to sort out from news reports where it is precisely because the reports are all about stuff that could be the leading edge or a coincidental smaller witch making a big splash or something. You were there, when I found it, trying to shield stuff from falling trees and everything, I think you must have made some defense-themed wish, and you happened to say when I was asking you questions that you were new. Enough that I could find you first, this time."

Oh. Of course that's what she would do, if a world-ending monster was attacking and she didn't know anything else.

Twenty-one loops. Even at less than a whole month each, Bella has probably been doing this for more than a year.

"I'm glad you did," she says softly. "Do you want a hug?"

"Yeah. A hug would be nice."

Hug. She won't be able to remember Bella from loop to loop, but at least she can hug her.

Hug.

"I don't know if it's realistic to hold out for breaking the whole magical ecology, but - I bet there's a wish, or a small number of them if I can find more people like you, who can handle the big one all together. If you wanna save the world."

"I wanna save the world," she confirms. "If I can just wish it away right now, without any more loops – that would be. Good. I should probably do that. Even if we'd still be stuck in the magical ecology afterward. Can we check if it would work, without trying it?"

"Yeah. Only by involving Kyubey, though."

"...Right, that makes sense. Does Kyubey do things more direct than granting wishes?"

"Sometimes. I have never caught it - outright lying - and it doesn't even refuse totally to answer questions, as a rule - but it obviously doesn't go around giving everybody the whole spiel I just gave you. Some girls have one as a mascot that they hang out with all the time and that's a lever. I suspect sometimes they deliberately hatch witches, but I don't actually have a better safe disposal method for a used-up grief seed than giving it to a Kyubey."

"– Wait, is Kyubey the species or a name? Also, you've made it pretty clear that they're terrible, but deliberately hatching witches? Terrible."

"It's a hive mind."

"Ah. Okay. So if wishing it away wouldn't work, it sounds... not very safe to find a Kyubey and say 'excuse me, could I hypothetically stop this specific witch I have no way of knowing about? No? Okay, nevermind, go away and don't ask any awkward questions please'?"

"You could try claiming you talked to someone who saw it in Boston, but you want your story straight first."

"I. Am unfortunately terrible at lying. But I could just say that a magical girl saw the witch that hit Boston and told me about it, and if it asks then – I say I don't think there's anything else it needs to know about you? ...I'm assuming it would be bad if it knew about you at all, maybe it would be fine actually. But it sounds like you don't think so."

"Sometimes I talk to a Kyubey. And I have no evidence besides that time travel is possible that they could be doing it too. But I don't trust them. And they can tell I'm a magical girl but don't remember granting me a wish, so they'd know something was up."

"So I should maybe write myself a letter first. Just in case."

"If you would. Do you have other questions first?"

"I will probably think of some as soon as I say I don't, but... not immediately at least. Um, I think it'll take... ten or twenty minutes? To write? And obviously you don't have to wait right here till I'm done but it's fine if you do, I'm not kicking you out."

"I don't have anywhere else to be." She finds a place to sit where she's not hovering right over Tara's shoulder, and pulls a paperback out of her shield.

...Nifty.

She gets out paper and pen, and writes.

Her future self will have nothing but this letter to go on. She should put everything in here that she knows, everything she isn’t sure about yet, the answers to any questions she thinks up.

…

"To my utter lack of surprise I did think of a question. Why is it magical girls? Is it literally just girls?"

"It is literally just girls - sometimes people who wish to become girls - and this is because Kyubey thinks it improves total uptake with certain remuneratively emotionally volatile sorts of girls by more than it costs in uncontracted boys."

"...Okay. Sure, why not."

She writes. She puts tentative numbers on things. Some of her thoughts become clearer, and she has some new ones. She writes those down too.

The letter she ends up with isn’t very organized – she keeps thinking of new things to add – but, well. Maybe she’ll have the chance to iterate.

“Okay. How do we find a Kyubey.”

"Well, I'd like to go 'like this' only telepathically, but Kyubey is the telepathic relay so we can't do that unless we're okay with it listening in. I believe it to be a faithful relay apart from the eavesdropping. At any rate that's how to do it, do you want one right now?"

"– No, sorry, another question first. Are witches still people at all. If they used to be magical girls. Do they have the memories, or personalities, or – what are they like."

"Dunno what it's like to be one but they don't do anything obviously communicative."

"When I talk to Kyubey, I want to ask if I can wish to turn the Boston one into a magical girl. I don't have to say back into a magical girl, but. It will probably guess that I know."

"Yeah. I can be in a spot with good visibility and jump back if I get swarmed."

A smile. "Thank you."

"If you don't - get swarmed - but Kyubey says the wish won't work, will it leave without me making a wish? So we can plan more?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Then I think we should go telepathy up a genie."

"Do you have a good rooftop in mind? For in case? And the letter for me to stash all ready?"

"Yeah -" she's made her final additions to the letter; she folds it and hands it over. "The roofs are pretty sameish... um, I can go to the street corner and you can be across from me? Or should it be more hidden, will Kyubey attract attention?"

"Normal people can’t see it."

"Oh. ...Well that's kind of spooky. Er, I'll be able to see it, right?"

"You should be, yeah."

"Yay for my conversation partner not being invisible. And I just kind of yell with my mind, and it will hear me and come see what's going on?"

"Yeah. It's not even yelling, it's very easy once you know you can. To the best of my knowledge it can only get directed messages and can't just read thoughts."

"Oh good, I - did kind of figure you'd have, uh, mentioned that. Well. Let's go, then."

Bella detransforms, follows her out of the house, transforms again, and takes up a spot behind a chimney on a roof.

And Tara politely and non-yellingly calls out with her mind. Kyubey? Can we talk, please?

I'll be right there, hang on just a moment please!

She had been expecting a reply but it's still really - something, to have a new voice in her head. Okay, thank you!

And then, riding atop a passing car, is a Kyubey, and it leaps down to the pavement and canters up to her. I came as quick as I could!

Oh that's a fuzzy little genie, gosh, cute. Too bad it's apparently also totally amoral. Hi! I heard you grant wishes sometimes, is that right?

Sometimes, if the right person wishes for something with all of her heart. It comes to a stop quite close to her shoe and sits.

It's tempting to try to pet it but that seems, like, rude. Am I a right person? Could I make a wish and get magic?

I think you are. What is it you might like to wish for?

Well, that depends. I also heard there are monsters, witches, that go around killing people. Is that true?

Yes. Magical girls who have made wishes bring their hope with them as a weapon in the fight against the witches!

The thing is, that doesn't sound like a bad pitch at all. She can totally imagine it working on her if she hadn't talked to Bella. - She should be speaking out loud in case Bella has magic hearing or something.

"I do think I want to fight witches. Especially the really dangerous ones. There's - do you know Boston? It was just almost destroyed by a witch, and I really want to do something about that witch in particular, if you can tell me whether I could wish for that."

I know Boston.

That witch is very strong. It might be possible to defeat it, but your wish will not do it alone.

"Why not? I mean, is there something I could do - is it too far away, would it be easier if I was closer to it?"

That doesn't matter, but it's a very big, very strong witch, and that does.

"Hypothetically, would it work if I wished to shrink it so it was only as big and strong as an average witch? What if I wished to destroy it, or kill it, or to have the power to destroy or kill it?"

No. None of those.

At this point she's assuming the answer will be no, but she has to ask. "What if I wished to turn it into a magical girl?"

No, not that either.