"Well, I recognize you too. I held the door for you to get our kind of magic because Edie was in the cells for distracting the General?"

"Hello again. This is slightly inconvenient, then, if time isn't paused. At least we have a back door, so I don't have to go out a window if I decide to leave the house before you're done in here."

"What typically makes the timepausing unreliable?"

Some effects synchronize time. When nothing of the kind can be found it is normally attributed to whatever force controls the door in the first place being capricious.

"...How long did you say it was since the last time we saw each other?"

"I stayed in Milliways for a couple months and then had most of a full loop duration, plus a little less than a day getting to Buffalo. Granted, my time sense in Milliways may have been off because I wasn't keeping a strict sleep schedule..."

"...That matches up pretty closely to how long it's been for me."

"I thought you said it'd been longer?"

"Four months as in four calendar months have happened, not that all of them had elapsed during that time. In terms of counting the days I think it was actually closer to three."

"Oh, huh."

"Given that my kind of magical girl powers are verifiably granted by a thing and don't have an obvious power source like human emotions I can't help but wonder if there's some kind of--persistent connection. That syncs time. D'you think I"m reaching?"

"Nnnnot necessarily. But this means it can sync time even while I'm screwing around with it."

"Is that a bad thing? As long as there aren't any other of my kind of magical girl in your world, anyway."

"Not necessarily, but it means I have to be exquisitely careful not to let any fluffs out of the world because I am exclusively traveling through time within it."

"Oooh, yeah, I can see how that would be a problem."

"Yeah. We're lucky the one didn't escape or try very hard when I brought it in."

"Yeah."

"No more experimenting on fluffs in Milliways."

"Agreed. Which probably means no more experimenting on fluffs for me, period."

"Yeah, I still don't know what would happen if you were in my world when I went back."

"I think we can all agree that it has a prohibitive failure mode, yeah."

Nod. "...I hope no one else from my world gets doors and is bringing people home. Eegh."

"That would be horrifying, but unless one of us discovers this happening it's not a terribly actionable horrible thing."