...reminder that this is not your planet and I have no idea what you're talking about.

Okay. Our world has the Valar who created it and the Maiar who are the same kind of thing only smaller and then it has incarnates, who are people who have to keep a physical form all the time. The incarnates come in Elves, Men, and Dwarves, and I guess Ents which are talking trees. There might be others; I've never left Doriath. You're not an Elf. You might be a Man. I don't know what they look like because Doriath's borders are closed to them.

Being half-Maia makes me a lot stronger and more resilient and better at magic than any incarnates I've heard of, but unfortunately I don't have much useful magic it's all things like making crops grow and making people happy. And I've been working on sleep. 

Making people happy might actually be a very big deal if it will decontaminate a soul gem.

It might do that. At full power it can do a lot - like, you wouldn't want to be in my vicinity or you'll be giddy for a week kinds of a lot.

It might or might not be the right kind of thing. Despair will contaminate a gem and a sufficiently contaminated gem will make it difficult to impossible to be in a good mood; I have never actually seen mood alone improve a gem's condition. But magical mood improvement might conceivably do it and if you can do that you can short-circuit the entire witch ecology. When we kill a witch - a big witch - then we can collect something called a grief seed and offload accumulated gem dinge from magic use or negative affect. When the seed's filled up the evil aliens'll collect it; if they don't, and sometimes they deliberately just leave the seeds lying around for evil alien reasons, they hatch into more witches. Witches can also bud off junior versions of themselves called familiars which don't leave grief seeds unless they stick around long enough to kill a few people. And we can't just stop using magic: existing, at all, while being a puella magi takes magic. So there's a perpetual supply of witches and we can't drive them extinct or we'll just be the next generation. And you wind up with puella magi killing each other over territory in which to farm witches which I remind you kill people. If there were any other way to clear soul gems it could short-circuit the ecology.

All of that is really awful and I really hope my magic helps. How do we check?

My gem's not in bad shape but it's not at a hundred percent right now. You have to sing to do this?

Yeah. Magic songs don't work over osanwe. 

Is that your telepathy power? How does it work?

You aren't used to it? It's for sharing thoughts, emotions, memories, senses - 

No, we don't have that. Some puella magi have mind powers but I've never met one so - friendly.

If you don't have that are you in the habit of keeping private thoughts?

I am in the habit of thoughts being private by default.

So the way osanwe works is that if you know what you're doing you'll only share what you intend, but if you're not keeping a mental distinction between things you want to share and things you want to keep private, then they're all readable. Everyone I know learns to keep their thoughts private when they're really little but if people don't have osanwe here they won't be doing that...

You've been picking up on context too slowly to have been reading my mind very much; have you gotten anything that in retrospect it seems like I wasn't trying to say?

At the beginning you were coming through very panicky, that was probably osanwe? It might be that in your race thoughts are private by default, I don't know, I've never met anyone but Elves and Dwarves and Dwarves are immune to all mind-affecting magic.

I was not intending to project emotions at you. How do I make this distinction more consistently?

Most people come up with an intuitive metaphor? Like, my private thoughts happen in Menegroth, my public thoughts happen outside in the forest. And then you practice mentally placing thoughts privately until it's a habit and you do it by default, and then you deliberately put something public if you want to make it readable by anyone or you can sort of send it to people if you want to share it just with them, though if I'm the only person here with telepathy that distinction doesn't matter. 

Yeah, okay. Private thoughts tucked in her shield and public ones anywhere other than that. Bella tucks herself into her shield. Kindly do not read me more than you have to in order to get what I'm sending, and I'd be wary of even that if it weren't our only way around the language barrier. And don't read passersby unless it's an emergency. Okay, I'm devoting this loop to figuring you and your situation out. Since you are from another planet please tell me what your day-to-day needs for things in general are.

If it's only thirty days, uh, I'll need to sleep once or twice and drink most days and that's all. I'll be most functional if I can sleep five or six times and if I can eat and drink things. I eat berries and nuts and I drink wine and water, but that's just what's available in Doriath, I can eat anything an Elf can and if something of your world's was not edible for me I'd notice when I tried eating it. 

...okay, you will have a hard time getting wine without theft, there's an age limit on alcohol and you look young enough to have to produce proof of age to buy any, so ideally that's an option and not a necessity but I can steal you some pretty easily if you actually need it. Humans need to eat and drink a lot more frequently than that so even if you can only eat ten percent of the things I'm having you'll be fine. I can't think of any compelling reason to involve my parents in this loop so I'm inclined to steal a car and take you to Seattle. Seattle's got a potential magical girl who I think will wish what I tell her to if I sleep with her first, whether that's "wish you home" or "wish you into my loop so you can help", it'll depend whether your magic music works at all and if so whether it works recorded and whether you want to stay if it's a case of yes to the first and no to the second.

What.

...which of these things is throwing you, is it the grand theft auto or the dubious prostitution?

The latter. Even if I otherwise get erased from existence forever at the end of this time loop I wouldn't ask you to do that.

...well, that's very noble of you but it is also possible you have irreproducible magic that can save a lot of people from death-or-worse. Besides, she's a sweetie and the only reason I haven't gone for it before without even wanting something from her is because I have weird feelings about being forgotten after a reset.