"...I'm sorry. I keep forgetting important things and I don't know why."

"It's okay. I'll keep a handle on it. And your dad should have mentioned this, too, it's not all you. And I would have asked but he surprised me, which is not your fault. Anything else I should know?"

"Not off the top of my head. Give me five minutes to think about it."

"Okay."

"...Okay," she says after a few minutes. "If for some reason you're ever in my world, some magic users can tell various ways if you're a sorcerer or not, and some villains prefer to target them specifically--usually 'join me or die' kinds of things. Don't try healing someone with a spell you're not sure you have down unless it's enough of an emergency that fucking them up even worse won't make much of a difference. A sorcerer spell, I mean, so far as I can tell magical girl spells don't have failure modes like that. In fact, don't do any spells you're not sure you have down unless damaging the target is an acceptable outcome. You can practice spells in your head without actually casting them. If you have a spell down but you think you'll have it down even better later you might want to wait--fixing something perfectly that's been fixed imperfectly is much, much harder than fixing something from normal broken."

Bella writes all this down.

"For some reason being a magical girl is significantly harder to fuck up than either of the other kinds of magic; I'm pretty sure I didn't fail to warn you about anything on that front, at least."

"I haven't run into any problems with it."

"It's pretty unambiguously great!"

"No evil fluffs or anything!"

"None whatsoever."

"Just a tacky aesthetic and a personal milestone quota."

"I blame Naoko Takeuchi, myself."

"Huh?"

"She wrote Sailor Moon. The magical girl genre predates the appearance of actual magical girls, which some people have suggested means that magical girl anime is somehow at fault for the kitschy designs."

"Ah. Well, at least it's not restricted to sailor suits per se. Although I guess mine could pass for one."

"No, they all had white bodysuits to go with their colorful skirts."

"Did they? I'm not up on my reading, I guess."

"Well, it's been more relevant to me for longer!"

"What, really? I've been looping for a few years, when did you get your magic?"

"Well, I only got it a few years ago, but I always suspected I would. You didn't know magical girls existed until not too long before you became one!"

"Okay, that's true. Is Sailor Moon basically required reading in your world?"

"Not usually, I don't think, but I was always a very extracurricular sort of kid. My parents would probably have homeschooled my sister and I if I didn't insist on sticking around to, well, try and fix the system from inside. And Emily insisted on sticking with me."

"Did you get anywhere on fixing the system from the inside? I'd think that's the sort of thing you'd need a non-student vantage point to accomplish."

"Yeah, but five year old me didn't get that. I didn't get any institutional problems fixed, but I did put the fear of me into a lot of bullies, so I at least made the experience less unpleasant for some other kids."