Being a magical girl can be dangerous. Sometimes they compete with each other for territory, and often they find that they are lonely, but you have each other as friends.

"Compete with each other for territory because... witches are a limited resource?" she guesses. "Where do witches come from, anyway?"

Witches are born from the despair in people's hearts. Tail-flick.

"Which is why they go around making people kill themselves and similar, I guess?"

They also feed on negative emotion, agrees Kyubey.

"What kind of mortality rate are we looking at for magical girls? ...Is there a less stupid name for magical girls?"

Puella magi is the Latin, it suggests. Well, some of them last for a very long time, if they're clever about how they use their magic. It all depends a lot on strategy and talent. A reckless puella magi who finds herself far away from more witches to hunt, or picks fights with other magical girls that she can't win and then won't back down, or who has very little ability in combat and winds up fighting a powerful witch alone, is going to be in trouble. But a careful puella magi will live much longer than a normal human.

"Ghyslaine is over two hundred," murmurs Solvei. "How many of them last that long?"

She's very unusual, says Kyubey. She didn't get cocky after she was a little experienced and she chooses places to live that other magical girls don't want, like here.

"And she doesn't have any magical friends because she's horrible," says Solvei. "It's probably even easier to pull something like that off with allies."

Probably! agrees Kyubey. Working together would let you share resources when one of you had bad luck and defend each other from witches and other puella magi.

"Yeah."

"But only once we pick wishes. Why aren't you allowed to suggest things?" Bella asks the fluffball.

Only you know what you most want. If you took my suggestion you might regret it later, and also a wish you feel strongly about will help your Soul Gem glow brightly.

"And a brightly glowing Soul Gem means...?"

A puella magi's soul gem is the source of all of her magic and is what makes her different from normal humans. The brighter it is, the more magic she can do.

"Huh. So it's important to wish for something you feel strongly about," she muses.

"I mean, that's sort of folded into 'you only get one', unless 'feel strongly about' means on like an emotional level."

That is what it means, says Kyubey. Human emotions are very important to magic.

...Solvei smiles.

"What're you thinking?"

"That I'm good at having strong feelings."

"Useful. ...What do you think you might wish for?"

"Not sure yet. Have to think about it. Probably not Stasya Koskin. Unless maybe I can give her magic powers and she can kill Ghys for me."

"Well?" Bella asks Kyubey.