"I'm not saying no one has, I'm saying I haven't met anyone who mentioned having it. Not quite the same thing."

"Yeah, I guess it wouldn't necessarily stand out enough that you'd have heard of, it's not flashy. Any tips on spell aiming?"

"Want it. Attach an emotional significance to it, that is, not just objectively prefer it. Spend a little time every now and then thinking about how it would fit into whatever themes your magic seems to have. Consistently getting into situations where it would have been useful to have it helps but I can't particularly recommend it even so. I heard of a girl in Thule or Sweden or something, somewhere Scandinavianish anyway, who managed to attach enough emotional significance to a chain of spells that getting each one supplied the necessary personal achievement to get the next, but no one's been able to replicate it since."

"I mean, if I want translation there are all kinds of situations where it would be really useful but I can get by without if I have to. And I can work up a good mad about having to be on an airplane easy."

"Sounds like fun. ...I do still have to figure out how to save the world. I now have an idea what I'll do with it after I've managed, but while being able to cleanse my soul gem means that I can fight the Walpurgisnacht - technical term for a really big witch - for hours and hours, I can still only do that if it doesn't physically crush my gem and send me back to my reset point. I have some downtime while looping and might get introspection sooner than 'when I've got a stable system'. Although who knows, I can stay in Milliways for a decade if I want now, maybe I'll come home with even more cool magic powers sufficient to one-hit-kill the thing."

"Well, I don't know what you've been doing so far this loop, it might be better to start over the once to erase any ordinarily poor life choices you made under the assumption that you wouldn't have to deal with them, but yeah."

"I did stow away on a plane. But I didn't get caught. I'd reset to avoid the fluffs knowing things I don't care to share with them, though. And then I still have to find out where the blasted thing is before it comes down the western seaboard. It'd be faster to track down if I could bring people with me and divide the work. Be nice to do that for other reasons too. Two loops ago a puella magi in, where was I, Calgary, she hit on me, and, like - I have explained how I feel about all this looping but even if I explained it to her and she was cool about it, that would be extra layers of weird. Being forgotten."

"Yeah, that...that doesn't sound like fun. So you like girls?"

"Yep. This was very exciting to the high schoolers in the small town where I live. A real live lesbian, wow."

Sporfle.

"Funny coincidence. ...It's only magical girls, your way, not boys, right?"

"Sometimes the girls are transgender? But yeah, everybody answers to 'she'. The fluffs don't know why but girls seem to have more, I don't know, energy-efficient emotional processing or something. Why?"

"My system admits to both genders, although girls are more common, and I'm bisexual, your system only has girls and you're a lesbian."

"There are straight puella magi. And bisexual ones. No correlation, far as I know. Although I've had straight ones tell me they're jealous because they're spending half their energy budget protecting their boyfriends from the various hazards of being nonmagical."

"Oh, I did say it was a funny coincidence. Emily's straight too."

"Emily being my name, were we ever properly introduced? And she's Edie, and also incompetently trying to flirt with you."

"...I'm Bella. Aaaand I'm legally seventeen, mentally like twenty-three, have spent the last several years in a time loop, and have not picked up the skill of flirting in that time."

"...As an interested party who is not going to forget you in less than a month, would you like to practice flirting and possibly related activities?"

"I wish I could say that's the worst pickup line I've ever heard," she mutters under her breath.

"Don't knock it, it's working," Bella says to Emily. "And yes let's. ...Here we are in a bar. I could buy you a drink. I mean, Bar will give you a drink for free, but if you continued to be thirsty after that."

"I actually had my free drink while you were wandering around in the Mind Mirror. That--sounds lovely."

"Cool, um, preferences?"

"Uh, not actually alcohol, I like things more on the chocolate-nut-caramel side of the flavor spectrum more than fruity things?"