"I don't feel too young at all."

"Well, there you go.  Some Kyubeys I've heard will go as young as ten or eleven, which I'd say definitely is too young, but - I think people underestimate kids sometimes."

"...It's young. I wished at that age, and so did my best friend, and we - weren't even slightly prepared. Kids should get to be kids, and - kids don't have the best control over their magic."

" - shit.  Are you - do you still work with the Kyubey who - wished you - that young?"

"He's the same one I work with now. He wasn't like Lianne and Kaylee's, he told us about most of the dangers upfront, we just didn't listen."

She nods.  "Shit.  I'm - sorry."  She doesn't ask about the best friend.  She can fill in the blanks.

"I don't think they mean anything bad by it, but - they're zealous about fighting witches, and according to my Kyubey, pre-adolescents in their species are actually able to be trusted with magic, so I don't think they're properly modeling how youth impacts humans."

"That - that's horrible. ...What happened?"

(She's not so good at filling in the blanks.)

"My friend, Tess, didn't have good control of their magic, and - events happened, and they fell into a despair spiral and lost control."

"...Shit."

"I'm so sorry."

"It happened a long time ago, now. I'm - mostly over it."

"I can see why you'd be concerned about people wishing too young, though."

"Yeah. I don't trust Kyubey to make maturity calls accurately."

She nods.

"Anyways... Do you mind sharing how you've been tracking large witches, Tobi? It might be useful if we ever decide to broaden our scope some."

"Tag's got a whole system.  The overview is - he's got this huge setup of, like, news alerts from big cities all around the continental US, and web crawlers or whatever, looking for the kinds of stuff witches tend to cause - violent crime and murder and suicide and disappearances.  Plus he knows a guy who's got an internship at the FBI who can sometimes get more up-to-date crime statistics for some city or other than they release to the public.  Just have him say, you know, so and so wants such and such data for some shit I don't know about.  So, occasionally you'll get a big witch that kind of wanders - mostly they stay in one place but sometimes you'll get one that likes to trek from city to city.  And they don't like to stay in the wilderness too long, so they tend to go from one big city to another nearby one.  So if you see an inexplicable spike in crime in one city, and then an inexplicable spike in crime in the next one over, and so on, that's a hint that maybe there's a big witch on the move.  And if it looks like it's moving in a predictable way, Tag lets me know and I head out to the next city in the line, and then I just look around for the biggest witches I can find.  And once I've taken those down, we wait and see if the spikes in crime keep happening, and if they don't, mission accomplished."

"Might not be ideal for us, we're too stationary at the moment," she admits. "Do you mind letting us know if any big witches start heading our way, though? And you can let us know if there's one that's big enough to give you pause, and we'll see about joining you. I definitely can, for the others it might depend on school schedules."

"Sure thing."

"I'm graduating this year, so I'll be able to help out more in the future, too."

"Oh cool, congrats."  She raises an imaginary glass.

"Thanks! Yeah, I'm super excited. Freedom, here I come."

"It's another year before I get to graduate, I can't wait to be out of grade school. Like, I'm probably gonna take classes parttime at Jackson State, but that shouldn't get in the way too much."