"I'm okay with cheating it out of wishes without the actual potential for fuel. Well, theoretically, in practice it's probably not worth the risk."

"Well, the wishes are real, granted without malicious interpretation, and generally pretty damn good. The problem is then your soul is moved into a gem which you must sustain with the byproducts of killing witches, who are ex-magical-girls."

"Yeah, 'not getting a spell to clean out the soul gem fast enough' is the risk in question. Unless you wanted to hang out in Milliways cleaning 'em for us until we managed."

"I don't know how long that might be..."

"Neither do I. I'm not desperate to be your kind of magical girl, just acknowledging the possibility. ...Although if we wanted to make her both kinds of magical girl I suspect that doing yours first would be the better idea. I don't think it's a coincidence that you got what you got first and not something, I don't know, time-related."

"Yeah, it was a little convenient. I - okay, the concern I have is, this is how you did with these powers and these problems. What if you acquire more powers but then also your problems get worse?"

"...I mean, you probably wouldn't have had a problem with my sister if you'd met her instead, except insofar as she's been condoning my behavior by not forcing me to stop somehow and/or leaving. It seems to me like the problem is less quantity of power and more type, so as long as I don't just get more telepathy I'm not sure it's relevant. And, also, falling too far into the despair pits, but I know to guard against that this time."

"If you turn into my kind of magical girl, despair will turn you into a witch. It can work real fast if you're paying attention to how sad you are and not how badly your gem needs clearing."

"...Is witch the kind of monster that eats your world."

"Yeah, but usually they don't get that big."

"Yes but let's not turn me into a despair-monster, that seems like a bad idea. Being two kinds of magic would be nice but I am not, actually, making bad enough choices as a result of trauma not to realize how much of a risk there is of that going badly."

"You won't get an argument from me."

"Did I know that?" Cerebella asks. "If I did I forgot, sorry."

"I don't recall if I brought it up. It would have been on the warning list if you'd been seriously considering taking the fluff's offer."

"I'm not despairing of anything in particular so if I thought I was particularly close to a spell I might be tempted, but, no."

"I'm just glad I'm not particularly subject to ennui. I can come back from dying but I didn't find that out on purpose and I likewise don't plan to experiment with whether I can come back from witching."

"Good plan. Well, you're now significantly less likely to find that out by accident..."

"Yeah. It's a good spell. I got some really unprecedented reactions when I showed it off last loop."

"Ooh, like what?"

"Couple girls in Toronto who normally won't give me the time of day wanted to be best friends, that sort of thing."

"Makes sense. Did the fluff react to it in any meaningful way?"

"I'm not sure yet if the fluff was reacting to that or to remembering having interacted with you, but I did have a bit of an exciting end-of-loop."

"...Good exciting or bad exciting?"

"Bad, but informative, at least potentially if I spend long enough testing guesses."

"What happened?"