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Bella's on her way to kill a witch.
It usually hits Port Angeles, inspires arson, and then if allowed spins off a familiar that does the same in Forks. She's tracked it back far enough that she can reliably head it off before it makes that fellow set that apartment building on fire as long as she hops in the car without doing her hospital exit paperwork. If she's lucky, this time she's early enough to nab it before it lights up the bakery, too.
...The fuck is that? It's not usually there.
onceandforall
"Thanks for the advice. If I'm not here when you come back, I'll be there." And then he drops into a hatch on the ship, disappearing from all her senses.
onceandforall
She gets back in her car, continues to Port Angeles, calls the fire department, kills the witch, stops by the mall and briefly borrows a heavy silver necklace and a titanium glasses frame and then puts them back, and then drives to where she found the crashed ship. If he's not there, she continues to the suggested out-of-the-way area.
Nick's ship is no longer there. There's a police cordon around the whole area, though. One of them tells her that this is the site of a 'major accident' and to move along, please.
onceandforall
These aren't the Forks police; they're probably from Port Angeles. She has no pull with them. She moves along, to the other location.
And Nick's ship is there. This time without the crater and destroyed trees. If she's currently using the scanner, it informs her that she is being scanned.
onceandforall
"Yup. I have them socked away safely. The process by which I'll get them back will constitute part of my evidence for the end of the world, incidentally."
onceandforall
And then she does a rather cute little dance, and then instead of jeans and a t-shirt she's wearing a dress and tights, and there's a buckler shield on her left wrist.
"I have magic powers," she explains, reaching into the shield, which opens to admit her hand. She pulls out a necklace, and then another one just like it.
"I have magic powers," she explains, reaching into the shield, which opens to admit her hand. She pulls out a necklace, and then another one just like it.
He sighs. "'Magic' is not unique to this dimension. I have seen inexplicable abilities before, though not this exact type. Did that shield materialize objects out of nothing? Is it a [wormhole/portal/pocket dimension]? But the fact that magic exists here at all makes me much more ready to believe you about the end of the world. Most dimensions with magic are a lot more... Volatile. I still want the full explanation, please."
onceandforall
"Yeah, you'll get the whole explanation, but materials first. Say when," she says, producing another necklace and a set of the glasses frames and then alternating.
"...These objects are all exactly identical. Down to the molecule. You have a post-scarcity machine!"
onceandforall
"I really don't. I'm the only person who can use it and it only works on things yea big and I have to literally reach into it every time. I could keep a handful of people in extremely samey comfort without any furniture, I guess, but it is not a post-scarcity machine."
"Still, this is great. No wonder you didn't seem worried about how much silver I wanted. A deal is a deal, so I'll still give you all the tech you wanted even if I was a bit decieved. I'll invent you some things and let you keep some more tech if you duplicate a few other things for me in addition to the metal. Would you like to see the inside of my ship? If you produce these things directly into the metal-purifier you'll be done faster."
So he leads her inside the ship. Her scanner shuts down completely as soon as she enters the threshold. The interior of the ship is nice enough - narrow corridors, but the rooms they open into are spacious and cleanly designed. He leads her through a kitchen, past a room almost completely taken up by some kind of giant engine, and into a workshop. And here's the metal-purifier! As she drops necklaces and glasses-frames into it, it starts extruding long cylinders various metals from an array of holes on the side - mostly silver but also some of what are probably the alloyed impurities in the necklace.
"I'd still like the whole end-of-the-world story, if you don't mind."
"I'd still like the whole end-of-the-world story, if you don't mind."
onceandforall
"So, my main magical power is not actually matter duplication. That's a side effect. My main power is time travel. I've done the period starting this morning and continuing to about a month from now several dozen times, now, and the world keeps ending. I'm working on it. But, your spaceship is not usually at the side of that road, nor the police cordon that replaced it, so you're only in this loop and you'd better get out before I reset again."
"I have never encountered time travel before. This is - troubling. Is it at least turing-compatible time travel, such that the world has the exact same starting conditions whenever you reset? And what exactly keeps destroying the world? I might help stop it, or more likely, give you tools to do it."
onceandforall
"I'm not sure what you mean by Turing compatibility, and I sure hope the entire universe isn't playing out start to this morning every single time, but this morning is the same except for me whenever I wake up. I'm sure hoping your tools will help - it's an unusually large form of a common monster."
"I think I need to know more about this 'monster'. Anything labelled 'monster' is probably unusually dangerous."
onceandforall
"They're called witches. The evil fluffy aliens I mentioned eventually coughed up the information that witches're ex-puella-magi, puella magi being my brand of person with magic powers - if we overtax our resources we turn into witches. Somebody witched real bad, and I haven't found where the witch is before it's at world-destroying size, yet - it ought to be causing enormous swaths of mental health problems but it seems to be dormant until it swallows the Pacific Northwest. I'm very irritated with it."
onceandforall
"Yes, which is very unfortunate because puella magi need a byproduct of witch hunting in order not to become witches. So if I ever managed to save all the psychotically depressed people who are witch victims I would then have to figure out how to kill myself without resetting before I turned into another witch."