"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'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."

"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."

"Witches cause mental health problems?"

"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."

"I take it you can't duplicate whatever you get out of hunting witches. Hm. Did you try my scanner on a witch yet, to see if it gives you any special insight? Unlikely but possible."

"It was - slightly helpful. It'll probably get more so when I've had more practice finding witches with it."

"I think the next step is to try all the other scanners I have - on you, on witches, on whatever fuel you get from them. If you're lucky, puella magi and witches emit or interact with some kind of noticable, detectable particle or radiation."

"Well, I killed the witch that I knew how to find today, but I can find another one this evening, and another one tomorrow noon, if I want them. And this one dropped a grief seed." She produces a spiky evil-looking object. "Which I can use to clear my - it's called a 'soul gem' - a few times, and then I drop it off with an evil alien, who uses it as a power source, which is better than the alternative of letting it develop back into a witch."

"And where do the evil aliens come into the picture? They eat witches. Puella magi turn into witches. Do they make puella magi as some kind of perverse farming?"

"Yes. Yes they do. They have no idea where I came from because they only had to make me once."

She continues to make silver.

"You want me to dupe those too?"

"If you don't mind. You could keep some, but unless you have a fusion engine I'm not sure they'll be much use to you. Maybe if I built you a shuttle to fly around this planet, but that'd take weeks and you don't have that long."

"It's not a matter of keeping some. If it's not in my shield, in my brain, or in my soul gem, it doesn't come back - if it's ever entered my shield I can take out as many of it as I want. If you let me dupe it, I have infinity of it forever. And a shuttle won't fit in my shield."

"That reminds me, you wanted some armasail. Armasail is really weird, it isn't even properly a material if you think about it from a physics point of view, but I promised to show you some. If you can duplicate it, that'd be almost as surprising as time travel existing in the first place."

"Why wouldn't I be able to, exactly?"

"It's... Not really here. What I call armasail is, or seems like, a tiny piece of something incomprehensibly vast. It acts almost as if all armasail everywhere, in every dimension, is the exact same fundamental particle spread over billions of trillions of manifestations. It'd take more science than you know to explain why we think that, but that's what makes it so impossibly durable - to destroy armasail, you have to destroy all the armasail, in all the dimensions, of which there are theoretically infinity."

"Interesting. I really want some, but if it won't go in the shield I probably can't keep it."

She scoops it up and then transfers it as best she can to her right hand so she can put it in the shield, or try, anyway.