Does that work? Okay -

Hall of mirrors, populated by knee-high ambulatory lipstick containers prowling around in flocks, the center so fractured with reflections that it's almost impossible to take a step without walking into an eyebrow pencil or a mascara wand thrust jaggedly out from between the fragments, the witch a porcelain doll with no face reaching out with oversize hands -

An aquarium, with all the fish painted on the sides and the tanks full of not still water but sourceless rainstorms, anemones threatening at every bend, everything cold and sounds distant and vision distorted with ripples and murk until an eel pops out from nowhere -

A wardrobe with sweaters that strangle and hangers that bite, each dress prettier than the last but sized to fit someone with impossible shapes - this one with a skirt ten feet long, this one with its sleeves pointed inward instead of out, this one with a balloon of fabric at the waist and barely enough room in the chest for a hand puppet, and the dressmaker's dummy in the middle of the heaps of shoes and drifts of blouses attacks -

Cages, echoing with the barks of dogs and mews of cats that aren't there, the familiars only stiff silent plushes with unblinking button eyes and the gravity inconsistent with sterile vets' offices glued to the walls and a cemetery that goes on forever marked with illegible names vaulted overhead, and syringes spring out of nowhere while a battered stuffed dog that bleeds real blood trots at the heels of a silhouette holding a scalpel -

Yikes. 

Okay.

It's not very pretty. There's a pretty one in Vancouver and that's how I found out I reset if I die, actually, but usually they're not pretty.

They're horrible. That was kind of terrifying.

...it's good you reset if you die. You mean you didn't realize it was a witch because she was pretty?

No, I knew it was a witch, but I couldn't tell what to shoot - it was too hard to distinguish between harmless decor and stuff that was trying to kill me. I shot a lot of things and then unpaused and then I was dead.

Stained glass and gold-dripping racks of jewelry and chandeliers dangling from painted ceilings throwing a million shapes of light onto inlaid tile floors and curtains that billow in unfelt wind and she shoots the marble sculptures and fills the drapes with bullet holes and when she comes to a stop by a bench opposite a wall crowded with abstract paintings in ornate frames she feels teeth on her wrist and can barely flick her eyes to her hand before her gem shatters -

I really want to give you a hug but I don't want to do the mixed signals thing.

If they kill you by attacking the gem, what would they even be trying to do to me?

Oh, they don't specifically attack my gem, that was a coincidence, I've picked up other kinds of injuries, but those I can heal, and I can turn pain down or off, baseline puella magi power. My hand was just what the furniture was near. I'm more careful now.

Okay. Maybe we shouldn't go witchhunting until I'm in the time loop, if it resets if you die.

I'm pretty confident about the Seattle witches but it's not a zero-risk operation, even throwing the recording at one.

So we'll wait one more day. It's okay.

Nod.

All of you are so young.

Well, yeah, humans die of old age generally well before hitting one century, let alone five, of course we seem young by comparison.

Elves try really hard to keep children from war. They don't even have them at all in dangerous times. The Noldor haven't had any in three hundred years. 

Humans have an ideal of keeping younger kids out of wars but it doesn't play nice with the fluffs' modus operandi and even without that consideration there are places where child soldiers are a thing - and the "child" cutoff is about age eighteen; even in a more civilized country an eighteen year old can legally enlist in the army.

I'm sorry that saving the whole world falls to you.

Well, you know, if it had to fall to someone I think I'm a decent pick.

You seem like a really good one. And it fell to my mother, back home, and there's no one better and I still wish there hadn't needed to be anyone at all.

Yeah, that'd be nice.

So.

Do you have any leads on finding the witch who ends the world?

I think she comes west along the US/Canada border at least during the last week, but I haven't yet found her before she's too big to hide in her maze, and that's the part where the world ends.

How does it happen?

To people who can't see her it just looks like a storm. A huge, unreasonably destructive lightning-spewing hurricane with no eye, that leaves more people maimed and dead and disappeared than it should while it's building and just keeps getting worse. One time I arranged to be in Australia when it happened and it bought me another six hours of watching people kill themselves and each other in stupidly powerful globe-spanning witch miasma before the ocean swallowed the continent. I can see her, though, not just the storm. She's got a theme but if the other witches freaked you out I'm just gonna skip it, but - I think a lot of the people who wind up inside her barrier before are still alive later and they've just been sort of kept - it's hard to get close, I don't dare risk turning into a witch myself -

So yeah, I'm hoping to find her when she's smaller. And if your singing can de-witch people so much the better.