"Oooh. How fast can it go?"

"I don't know, I haven't built it yet. Faster than a car. It'd fly."

"Keen. I've stowed away on planes a few times but getting around without doing that will substantially increase how long I can spend in Groundhog Month without going nuts."

"What is a... Groundhog? I can't access the internet from here."

"Groundhogs are an animal. Groundhog Day is a movie about a man who gets stuck repeating the same day over and over. I have a month, but the principle's otherwise similar."

"I mean, if I go to Australia I can kill witches in Australia. They're a worldwide phenomenon," Bella says. "They don't seem to get literally everybody - it's not, everyone in a fifty foot radius gets together and drinks bleach, it's, one percent of people in a larger radius get together and drink bleach - or set things on fire or all jump off a bridge or one time in Phoenix I found a witch who had them all knife-fighting each other, that was interesting. I'm not sure how the one percent is chosen - it doesn't seem to be all or even mostly people with preexisting depressive or violent symptoms, sometimes perfectly healthy people get grabbed. If I kill a witch while it's got somebody the somebody's always very confused afterwards, snaps right out of it."

"I think I want to avoid ever meeting one of the evil aliens who make witches. I can probably fly around the world scanning for fuel without finding a witch or evil alien, right?"

"Yeah, although when I fill my grief seeds up I do need to drop them off with an evil alien so they don't spawn a witch in your ship - they're not that hard to find, just put me in any populated area, they're slightly telepathic and will come if I tell 'em it's dinnertime."

"How do these - seeds power your magic? This seems like a very well designed system for producing dead humans and alien-food, but do you have some insight into the mechanics of it?"

"Not that much. To get much information about anything I have to play dumb with an alien and let it subtly boss me around for most of a month and then ask it questions at more or less dramatic moments, it's tedious and means I can't get much else done that reset, and I can't verify most of it. I think they can transform human emotions into a kind of generic energy. When we turn into puella magi, we get a wish, which they accomplish with an up-front investment, and I'm not sure if they have any way to skim a little off the top of the resulting pleasedness; but then we have to kill witches and fill up the grief seeds. The soul gems accumulate junk from using magic, but also from being in bad moods, and there's a feedback loop. I seem much less affected - not zero, if I cut it really close it's not going to be a fun day, but if I hang out with other puella magi for a reset I can just sneak a peek at their gems and have a good idea how they're doing, whereas I'm pretty functional down to very dark colors. I'm not sure if the grief seeds are just a storage mechanism or also a way for the witched girls to pay a last tithe to the aliens. Witching happens if the soul gems get too corrupted - if we die any other way, no witch, so it's not a perfectly efficient system."

"You can push the 'junk' into grief seeds? And your plan for the monster is to kill whoever witched into it before they can? Normally I'd be against murder, but this is a pretty clear case of 'for the good of the many'."

"It's possible she witches before my reset point and just bides her time for a month. In which case my plan is 'get really, really good at killing witches and then kill her no matter how big she is'. But yes, you get the idea. Though if I do find her and it turns out there's enough lead time I might be able to save her with a well-timed application of a fresh grief seed. It doesn't solve the underlying ecological problem, of course."

"I think you'd need to get some kind of leverage over the aliens to kill the system. Figure out why they're doing this."

"Yeah. I'm working on that. I hate the little bastards and I'm not a great actress, though."

"Next reset, try all the scanners on them. Most of them have computers with analysis programs, they could come up with something useful. For now, though, I'm going to go cruise in a grid pattern about 80 miles above the planet, see if I can't find some D-fuel."

"Sure. ...What are you going to do if we just don't have any?"

"Try some other planets."

"Ooh, cool."

"And moons?"

She watches the scenery go by, intermittently, and takes notes.

Nothing except for high-speed passes over different sections of the planet happens for a long while.