"That" looks like nothing more than a vaguely cargo ship-shaped lump of burned dark spaceship straight out of a sci-fi novel, about the size of one of Forks's school buildings, sporting several large holes and a person (he looks human, but that's not necessarily reliable information) on its roof, carrying some kind of tool.

He responds by yelling something unintelligible, makes a 'wait' motion, and is back twenty seconds later carrying a different gadget. He says something in the strange language, and the gadget says, "Have natural language processing computer, not ideal close enough."

"Okay, good, that's something. Where are you from?"

"Distant dimension, name [unintelligible]. Where is this place? Dimensional navigation has unprecedented malfunction."

"This is the planet Earth. I don't think the dimension has an official name. Why are you traveling between dimensions?"

"Seeking profit. Trade between [,,,,] and [////] very good each has resources the other lack. Also, I do not like large communities."

"So you were headed somewhere else?"

"Yes. Unfortunately, dimensional paths rearranged during dimensional transfer. System can usually account for new path if navigation requirements change before or after, but chance of rearrangement at exact instant of transfer was deemed insignificant. After malfunction, I emerged directly above this planet and immediately crashed. Does this planet sell [dimensional drive fuel]? Ship can be restored, but my supply of [dimensional drive fuel] was destroyed."

"That's getting glossed as 'dimensional drive fuel'. I don't know if we have the substance by some other name, but we don't have dimensional drives, at least not on this planet."

He attempts to describe the substance, but it's like nothing she has ever heard of.

"Doesn't sound familiar." Pause. "And you may have a time limit."

"I can construct a scanner for [D-fuel]. It will take one hour. Please describe the time limit. Celestial objects in danger of collision?"

"The world's gonna end in a month, maybe sooner, and you shouldn't be here when it does."

"I don't have any proof handy that I want to hand a complete stranger."

"Then why say anything? I know this is a strange world. Most dimensions have new rules, but you are also a stranger to me. You may be issuing a friendly warning or you may be deceiving me in some way. I do not know, and warnings of the end of the world stated in absolute certainty are very dire. Might we trade information and gain trust?"

"I have no reason to deceive you about the end of the world," she says. "But I'm up for some information-trading if you've got anything worth having."

"I wish to know how this dimension is different. If you are not lying about the end of the world, I want to leave. Would schematics for computers, navigation systems, scanners and similar devices be acceptable information to trade? If not, what information do you want? I am hesitant to sell high-energy technology such as my sublight engines, dimensional drive, and weapons to a world that is not familiar with it. Unwise use would significantly damage planets."

"I can't use anything that's not smaller than about -" She holds up her hands in a circle shape about ten inches across. "In at least one dimension. Schematics are good. Tech is better. I'm concerned you won't believe me if I share my information, though."

"I am more likely to believe conclusions derived from evidence, especially if I can verify the evidence in some way. My scanners are very powerful. I have a relatively generic scanner with attached computer - it will give you intuitive knowledge of the structure and location of objects within about [347 feet]. While this does require a mental link, the link is purely communicative in nature. It is smaller than the described size. Does this sound useful?"

"Yeah, I can't, like, show you, most of the stuff. But that sounds potentially useful."

"If you want physical objects instead of information I would like some tangible trade. Are you able to reshape metals or capable of lifting heavy objects? If so, you could help repair my ship and I would pay you with the scanner. However, if you can't give me anything useful I should work on the D-fuel scanner instead of talking."

"I can lift heavy objects."

He shows her what to lift. As she holds thick metal slabs in place around the outside of his ship, he uses some tool that produces no visible heat to seamlessly join them to the rest of the wreck. The work will take about forty-five minutes.

"I might want one of those, too," she says of the tool. "What's it doing?"

"It causes molecules within [0.03 inches] to be rearranged within that area, within some safety parameters. This will cause most substances to be seamlessly joined but is not recommended for use on very different materials. The original deal was for the scanner only, however, do you have any objects that I might find useful?"

"You're much higher tech than us. I don't have anything safe to handle that - hm. Do you want me to catch you an alien? They're, well, individually safe to handle, although if they decide to come after you in quantity I can't guarantee that will go well."

"Is this alien sentient?"

"Yes, but they consider themselves interchangeable, don't practice any form of self-defense, and claim not to experience emotions, plus they're pretty evil, so I wouldn't feel a speck of guilt about handing you one. Also they're fluffy."

"What would the alien be useful for? I don't like pets. I can construct another joiner and power source but it will take several days and some reasonably rare materials, I need something useful like silver or [D-fuel] or titanium. I could take new seeds if there are crops I haven't encountered before, but sentient aliens do not qualify as livestock."

"Okay, no alien. I can get you silver and titanium but it'll take me a few days."

"And your supposed world-ending event will not happen within a few days? In exchange for a joiner, I want at least [27 pounds] of silver or [190 pounds] of titanium. Purity is not an issue, if you can only find 90% silver I will count it by mass of the purified metal."

"The world-ending event is going to happen in about a month. And if you don't need it pure I can get it much faster. Before I go on metal collecting trips for you, anything else I might want to trade for?"

He describes a long list of tools. The metal-purifier is not detachable from the ship. There is a handheld plasma cutter capable of cutting foot-thick steel in moments, with computerized safeties. His body armor is made of 'armasail' which could stop the plasma cutter cold despite being a light, breathable fabric. There are various scanners - The longer the range, the more specialized. Inertia suppressors are the size and weight of a 2-liter bottle and allow for high G-force maneuvers without tearing the ship apart. He has a 'reshaper' the size of a refrigerator which takes almost any material as a base and works like a very high precision 3-D printer.

"Last metal didn't translate. Seeds I can get unless you want weird ones. You know, the trouble with information is that I can't take it back if you renege on the deal. I want something up front before I spill that, or at least to handle the first part of the transaction in objects."

"You probably don't have [::::], then. I propose exchanging the joiner and cutter and scanners for some seeds and some of each kind of metal, then you tell me why the world is going to end and any other dangers I might find relevant and I attempt to verify this, then if there is sufficient evidence that your information is reasonably complete and honest we perform the rest of the deal."

"If you decide you don't believe me will you let me borrow the other stuff for just a minute?"

"I'll let you use the reshaper for a few hours under my supervision, but how would borrowing armasail help you in any way? It's near-impossible to manufacture, I doubt you can learn to make your own."

"I just want a good look at it."

"If I decide not to believe you, you can take a look at some armasail. With your new scanners, even. I'm just warning you that armasail is weird and you probably won't learn anything useful."

"Noted."

He hands her the generic scanner. "I loaded the list of seeds in the scanner's onboard computer. Do you need instructions on how to use it?"

"Yes please."

"Deal. By the way, if there's any specific tech you want that I didn't mention feel free to ask. I can make you more tools in exchange for helping me get to some D-fuel once I make the D-fuel scanner. No guarantees if you want something impossible, but I'm good at tinkering."

"There might not be any fuel," she says. "I'll see if I can think up a wishlist, but you know more about what you have than I do."

"I haven't got the first idea where to find thorium," she says. "Anything else I should know before I nip off and get some metal?"

"Is anyone else likely to disturb me here? I might try to lift off and land somewhere more out of the way, you would have trouble finding me again if I did."

"This... isn't the best-traveled highway but it's pretty unlikely you can sit here all day without attention, even assuming no one noticed you crash."

"Any suggestions for where to go instead? I can probably find any place you describe well enough; I have maps of the local area from when I was crashing."

"Let me see a map, I'll point you someplace."

The scanner should now be politely informing her that it has a map.

Point.

"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.

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.

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.

That seems only fair. She comes to a stop and ambles shipward.

Nick pops out of a door near the front. "Hello again. Do you have the metal and seeds?"

"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."

"Oh, really? Well, let's see 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."

"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!"

"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."

"Sure."

"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.

The armasail refuses to go into the shield.

"Well, nothing doing, you were right. Damn, would have been nice."

All of these get "dipped" in the shield.

"Would you mind filling my fuel rack with the deutritium cells? I can fly you wherever you want if I don't have to worry about sublight fuel. This ship is at least twice as fast as a jumbo jet in-atmosphere. And the next time you fight a witch, I can point all my scanners at it."

"You wanna go hunt down Day One Evening, see if we can find her before she hits Spokane?" asks Bella, pulling out a few cells.

She looks out the window.

"Were you expecting otherwise? They'll reset in a month or whenever I roll it back. As long as they can't hurt you or kill me we're okay."

"I hadn't thought about it, honestly. Well, we're over Spokane and the hull sensors don't detect anything weird... How do you usually find a witch?"

"Depends on its point in the lifecycle. I'm not sure if this one isn't hatched before the point I usually nab it or if it's just biding its time."

"Should I set you down on a building or something? I'll give you a communicator so we can still talk, the scanner's not quite smart enough for that."

"Yes to both."

A lot of people notice her and point excitedly and take pictures. The police order her to come down (ha).

"I might wanna spend the rest of this reset in space hanging out with you talking physics," she remarks. "Does that sound fun? I'm gonna go kill this witch."

"I'm going to work on finding D-fuel and refining it starting tomorrow, but once that's done, sure thing."

"Woah, okay, that's weird. There was a burst of Schetzenfeld bosons, and you disappeared for a second. Did the witch do that?"

"Depends on what you saw. That was either me going into the witch's little magical habitat, or me pausing time."

"Could you pause again so I can see if the bosons were you or the witch?"

"Yeah, I have the slack..." She does so, twirls in place, undoes it.

"Okay, nothing that time. So it was the witch. I can make a scanner specifically for that kind of radiation - it'll only have a range of about 200 miles, but if you dupe it I can network 'em and cover the whole globe."

"But you only saw it when I went in, not before that?"

"Yes. It'll only detect - whatever happens when you go in. Better than nothing, right?"

"Only slightly. Covering the globe myself post-reset when all the scanners are gone will be a pain in the neck and it'll only tell me when some other puella magi engages a witch, not when one's going unhandled."

"I can't pull miracles out of my hat," he says, suddenly irritated. "Do you want it or not?"

"I'll take it, but you don't need to cover the planet with them for me."

"Alright. If we're not going to try to avoid attention, should I just pick you up in the middle of the street?"

"Yeah. Park in high orbit where nobody can shoot at you till you've found the fuel you're looking for."

"I mean, I'm to the point where I can kill two, three witches a day if nothing interferes with me driving around, but then I reset and everyone's back where they are the morning of Day One. I don't know how to save the world and stop resetting, yet. Once I figure it out I'll do a perfect run. Until then it's just practice and harvesting grief seeds."

"Yeah, that line of reasoning stopped being really compelling when I'd done it like twenty times," mutters Bella. "You have to manually turn off the cameras any time I don't want to be watched?"

"I control the cameras directly. I like to keep an eye on my ship. You might call me slightly paranoid around things I don't understand, such as magic. If you don't want to be watched tell me so and I'll stop watching, but if you act carelessly and break something I'll drop you off back in Spokane."

"If you've gotta drop me I'd rather be where I left my car."

"Then I'll do that if you break something out of carelessness."

"Thanks for the consideration." Pause. "You know, it's possible that as long as you're in space at the time you'd be fine when the giant witch eats everything, it's the interaction with the time travel that's the problem, I know you aren't usually here so I doubt you reset with everybody else."

"I am in no hurry to experiment with time travel. I plan to be long gone, back to places where I know the rules, when you reset."

"Don't blame you a bit," she assures him.

So he starts working on the new scanners. This involves asking for copies of two of the old scanners, then modifying them.

"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.

That suits her fine.

Nick is repairing parts of the spaceship - apparently, though fixing the holes when she first met him made it spaceworthy again, there's still lots of leftover damage. He'll start rambling about tech and physics if she's close enough to hear.

She'll happily listen to and take notes on that. And follow him around to continue being close enough to hear.

A lot of it isn't especially comprehensible, but she learns lots of clever uses for the joiner, cutter, and reshaper. He doesn't let her follow into the reactor room, or the armory.

That seems reasonable enough. He's known her less than a day.

Enough time passes that Nick starts to feel tired. "It's close to bedtime for me. You're probably on a different sleep schedule. You want to be dropped off anywhere? The autopilot will just keep scanning if I don't interrupt it."

"Put me by my car," she says. "I'll go home and be nice to my dad this month."

"Cool. Did you find any of your fuel?"

"Not yet. I found some of the precursors, but not every critical material. To use a metaphor, you can't make bronze without tin, and I'm missing the tin. I'll deliver you the scanner, but I need you to duplicate more deutritium cells, running my sublight engines this hot burns through fuel really fast."

"Sure. Can you find me by this communicator if I drive out someplace unobserved?"

"Yeah, because it's transmitting I already know where you are. I can't track it if the battery dies, though."

"I won't take too long. Advantages to living in the middle of nowhere."

And the spaceship lands somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Washington state, picks someone up, and goes back to scanning the arctic ocean.

And the someone produces more deuterium and copies the witch scanner. "What this will be good for," she says, "is finding more puella magi. I know a few in the area, but if you can finagle me a vehicle I could find more of them and maybe pull off some kind of massive team-up."

"I'll work on the vehicle. Made some progress, but it's not good enough yet. And by the way, that thing only has a range of, hm, 250 miles and only scans in a 180 degree cone from the front. I had to make some compromises to get it small enough for your shield."

"Understood."

He looks uncertain for a moment, then says, "I really don't like selling weapons. But I want to know if my weapons might be effective against a witch. Would you like a ray gun in exchange for some more silver?"

"I would love a ray gun in exchange for some more silver."

"As far as my sensors can tell, witches are not a living thing. So the ray gun will have lots of very fancy computerized safeties that make it not capable of firing at any living thing larger than, like, a blade of grass, unless it's attacking you. Trying to remove the safeties will slag it. It takes the same power sources as the scanners, and the power dial goes from 1 to 8. One is 'stun,' two is 'singed,' and so on right up to eight which is 'burned to a crisp'."

He points a few sensors at her. "Yes."

"Interesting."

"How so?"

"My mind no longer actually runs on my brain. My whole body is being operated from my soul gem. Part of being a puella magi."

"Yeah, all puella magi. And yay."

"You can use the [----] scanner (that's the blue and silver one) to identify other puella magi. Maybe. The difference is pretty subtle."

"I could also just look at their fingernails, but sure, why not."

"Their fingernails? I thought that mark on yours was an aesthetic choice."

"Nah. I mean, I don't hate it cosmetically, but it came with the package."

"Well, nothing says 'magic' has to make sense. It sometimes seems like the point is for it not to make sense."

"Yeah, I still want to know why the evil aliens found their current model to make more economic sense than asking for donations from depressed people or something. Apparently some people have more magical potential than others - that's why all the puella magi are girls - but still."

"Something about the fighting, perhaps. I wouldn't know. Do you want to have a look at what I have done so far for your little fold-up vehicle? It's an interesting puzzle to try to make it - relatively easy to assemble from medium-size pieces."

"Love to."

"I won't." She puts it in her shield, takes it out again. "Do I get an instruction manual?"

"There's a trigger. Connect to it like the scanners and it'll let you change the power level and tell you how much juice is left and what things are acceptable targets. After that, point and click."

"Cool. Do you not believe me about the time reset thing, or do you just not think that's a good enough reason to authorize lethal force?" she wonders.

"I admit that the time reset thing sounds likely given the available evidence, but I can't verify it. I learned not to hand out tech without supervision and safeties over a hundred dimensions ago. I sold a relatively tech-poor world a lot like yours un-safetied power tools and shuttles. The two major powers turned them into fusion weapons inside of a year and annihilated each other. So I just - don't do it without all the safeties I can cram in anymore. It'll hurt witches just fine, probably."

"Probably," she says. "Well, lucky me I already died once and know it just resets me, so a nasty surprise isn't game over."

"Is that so? I would rather you not die until I find my D-fuel, in that case."

"I try to avoid it. I've only done it a few times - usually I reset if it looks like I can't avoid it - and I'm not, like, used to it."

"Unfortunately, I've given up hope for finding what I need on this planet. I'll make a few passes over Luna tomorrow, then head to Mars."

"Can I come?"

"Cool. We don't have casual space travel and I'm nowhere near being able to assemble it myself inside a month."

"I'll probably want you to duplicate things as long as you're on board anyway. But before we leave you should get some local food and meet me for pickup later. I only had a week's worth in the kitchen when I arrived and I'm down to a couple days now. Hydroponics don't take well to dimensional jumps. Get some meat if you can, I like meat."

"I have food in my shield. A wide variety of food. I've been doing this a while."

"Makes sense. In that case, we can leave as soon as I finish scanning Antarctica, maybe another three hours."

"Cool."

"I just have one pressure suit, but I can set the reshaper to make another if you have something with rubber and pure-ish carbon in your shield."

"I might have rubber. I'm not actually clear on what kinds of objects are and are not genuine rubber." For carbon, apparently she has a diamond.

"Un-geniuine rubber should be fine as long as it behaves rubberishly. Unfortunately, diamonds are not actually the right form of carbon to make carbon plate. I might try burning bread and filtering what's left, but I don't want any fires on my ship. I could make you a metal pressure suit instead, if you don't mind massing over four hundred pounds."

"I can handle four hundred pounds. I'm very strong these days." She has an eraser, for rubber. "Will pencil graphite do?"

"Googling... Hmm, yes, that should work. But try not to spread wood shells everywhere, if you can avoid it."

"I can always just put them back once you've got the graphite out," she says.

"Yeah, but that seems tedious. I'll extract one graphite stick, let you duplicate that a few times, and combine the result into a larger contiguous object so you don't have to duplicate it for quite as long."

"Good idea."

"Efficiency is my favorite activity."

Hee hee.

"It's true. There's just something beautiful about a well-designed machine. That's why I offered to invent things for you, you know."

"Well, whatever your motives I appreciate it."

He nods calmly. "It's nice to be useful to someone who is also useful to you. I've never been what you'd call a friendly person. Mutual benefit is a close relative of friendship, though."

"I'd rather not be attached to you on a personal level, considering you're gonna disappear and I'll never see you again. To mutual benefit." She mimes a toasting gesture.

"To mutual benefit. Time to break a pencil?"

He snaps the metal eraser-holder off and applies two quick swipes of the plasma cutter. Charred wood falls away in four pieces and he hands her the bared graphite.

"Cool." She dupes it a few times.

And he joins the new copies and hands back the result, smiling. "That thing is extraordinarily useful."

"It does dinge my soulgem. But only if I do it a whole lot. ...Hey, can I leave a full grief seed on the moon, see what happens? There's nobody for a witch to hurt there and it could be informative, especially if the evil aliens react."

"Hmm. What if it... Escapes, or something? Letting them hatch by themselves doesn't make them more powerful or angrier as far as you can tell?"

"No. Some puella magi deliberately let witches go on a bit and spawn a few familiars to ensure their grief seed supply and they're just, you know, witches. I mean, I sometimes let witches go, but that's because I'm a jaded time-traveler, I draw a distinction here."

"If you drop a witch on the moon, I'm never getting within a hundred thousand miles of it again. From what you've told me so far, they are not something I want in my life. But fine."

"I'm not picky about the site of the experiment. Put it on some Jovian moon that doesn't have the fuel you want."

"It'll take a week to get to Jupiter and back. Four days for Mars. Will it hold off hatching that long? And no, I'm being dramatic, leaving it on the moon isn't any worse than somewhere else. They're all over Earth already, after all."

"It varies how long they take to hatch. If I hold off the aliens it depends on the grief seed. I only have limited data - the experimental ingredients are tedious to come by, the process is finicky to control, and I took a while to be cavalier about letting witches exist."

"If it hatches on board my ship, can you immediately kill it?"

"Yeah."

"Then there's no risk in letting you on board for more than a day or two. I would have dropped you off after a visit to the moon, otherwise. Just know that I don't usually take passengers. You have much more sense than the last batch I tolerated."

"Thank you. I do try."

"Right. I'll program the reshaper for suit parts. Please feed it pencil-lumps until it beeps at you. Heh, I was supposed to have actually sold it to you, it was part of the original deal. So use it for something else if you want."

"I mean, I couldn't keep it, what I really wanted was access to it so I could concoct whatever popped into my head, and your assistance with the head-popping and the concoction are both very appreciated." She feeds it pencil.

Soon, the reshaper is fed rubber and small amounts of titanium and silver. "Titanium is an excellent structural component, and silver is a good substrate for electronics. From what I can tell, your planet mostly uses copper and silicon, but my tech works on different principles."

"Like, different underlying physics or just different engineering conventions? I think we use copper instead of, like, gold, because it's cheap."

"Different underlying physics." He starts to explain them. It could take a while.

Well, it's interesting, and she takes notes.

"I'll get you some parts and electronics tools, copy a bar of that purified silver and you can make your own electronics next reset. Oh, the shaper's done." He moves parts around and applies the joiner. The suit quickly takes shape. "I've got oxygen tanks in the airlock, you'll want to dip one of those too."

Dip!

"I could try to cram a full-size life support system into a pressure suit, but it would make me look like one of your planet's astronauts. Say, could you recommend me a local book? Fiction, don't care what genre. I try to read at least one from every dimension I visit."

"Mm - well, the generally agreed-upon greatest master of the English language was Shakespeare but I'm having trouble picking a single play."

"If I reminded you of a certain character that would be the obvious choice. Shall I pick randomly from a full list of his work, then?"

"Mmm, go with Midsummer Night's Dream - you don't remind me of any characters, it's just one of the better ones, there's a range."

"I'll be reading that, then. Scan's almost done, I really don't think there will be any fuel on what's left of Earth, but it's worth being thorough. You want me to warn you before I set out for the Moon? The trip there will take about five hours."

"Mm - it might be worth me picking up another grief seed if we're going to be gone long and I'm going to do a lot of duping."

"Any large city?"

"If I fight an unfamiliar witch it might turn out to be a nasty one and kill me, which is a risk I'll usually take but you're an unprecedented opportunity and may cease to exist if I reset while you're here. Today being the day it is..." She peers at her notes. "Drop me off in Portland, I know a witch that should be ripe about now."

"Twenty minutes to finish scanning all this ice, then two hours to Portland. I'll be reading that play, unless you want to keep chatting."

"Nah, enjoy."

"Glad you like it. It's not a loud, dirty lump of metal like the ranged weapons this planet mostly uses, at least."

"Yeah, I'd been relying on those, they're kind of awkward. The ray gun looks really cool from a stopped time perspective, incidentally."

"I'll bet. I have an upsized one on my ship, but I rarely have any reason to use it. To the moon, then?"

"To the moon!"

And they're off. Nick is at the controls for the first few minutes, then, "Okay, we're clear of the sattelite-sphere now, I don't need to be so paranoid about hitting something anymore. This play is pretty good, by the way. The translator is being iffy about it for some reason, though."

"Shakespeare likes wordplay, is it bad with wordplay?"

"You mean metaphor and synonyms and so on? Yeah, those are coming through awkwardly. It's got the rhythm of regular conversation down now, but act one of the play sounded a lot like our first conversation to me."

"Well, maybe it'll figure it out. He also does iambic pentameter. Maybe I should have recommended prose."

"It's getting better at it already. And it is interesting. Some of it might be how old it is - a lot of the words are different to begin with. How about something more recent to compare?"

"Harry Potter."

The moon! It is pretty. Bella admires it.

They're going towards the moon pretty fast. Really fast. Nick probably knows what he's doing, though.

Well, she did warn him about what happens if she dies. He'd better know what he's doing.

"Hell yes, moonwalk. All right, how does this thing work?"

He explains. It's fairly obvious, almost like putting on heavy winter clothes on, with some checking of seals in between. The suit restricts her movements somewhat, but not all that much more than a thick coat would.

Awesome. Time to go bounce around on the moon. Woooooo!

She'll fall over a lot at first, unless she has really great coordination.

She didn't use to. She does now.

Nick also bounces around, perhaps less enthusiastically. Then again, the moon is just another rock to him. He waits out her excitement patiently.

Eventually she is calmed down. She finds a place to stash her grief seed, after offloading the last of her soul gem crud into it.

"Shall I leave a drone here? Eyes and ears. Well, no ears unless you count a seismometer."

"Ooh, that'd be great."

He passes into the airlock and back out, carrying something with wheels. He sets it down. "These are designed to survey moons for natural resources. When we go back to Earth, make a communicator and I'll hook the drone up to it."

"Sure."

So they go back into the ship, and it starts circling the moon. Much faster than it circled Earth (thank you, lack of air resistance).

Whee.

"You know what, if it crashes and I die in a horrifying fireball, I can live with that."

"Are we on the half visible from Earth? Are we freaking out NASA?"

"Yes, and I bet they're plenty freaked out already, don't you?"

"Well, yes. I wonder if you're a dramatic enough exception to the usual way of things that I can try to leverage government-sized sticks against the Walpurgisnacht. I tried it once with just puella magi powers and that didn't go well, but may as well give it another go when there has recently been a spaceship."

"You'll only get one chance if, as I hope, I'm not here next time."

"Yeah. All the more reason to give it a try. This hasn't been a perfect run so far, but maybe I could pick up military passwords or something. Or just call it good if the world doesn't end even if I didn't get every witch I know about."

"Would non puella magi even be able to touch it? You implied that I wouldn't be able to fight witches earlier, I think."

"You don't have to have made a contract with an evil alien to get in and have a look at them. But you might need an escort - I don't know, I'm always around when I'm around, you see. Witches can be fought with conventional weapons. I do it while time's stopped, but that's just for convenience."

"So they're in some sort of... Sub-dimension. I'm seriously considering making you a pocket nuke... To me, it's a slim chance of total extinction weighed against a moderate chance of massive collateral damage."

"I'd love to see what a pocket nuke does against a witch. But during a reset I'm definitely not planning on keeping, in case the answer is "irradiates Seattle".

"Sure." Dip. "The best case scenario is that a pocket nuke can obliterate a witch without any spillover to outside of the witch's little dimension, in which case it'd be very efficient."

"I can stop time, remember?" she says. "Hm, does it do escape velocity or will this all be moot next time I wake up in the hospital?"

"Can you stop time and go outside without tearing open my airlock? It will do any velocity eventually, as long as you plug in a new copy of the power supply every thirty minutes or so."

"It doesn't rip me off the surface of the earth when I stop time. I'm not sure how it'd handle a smaller gravitational reference frame. I meant that I can stop time so I'm not in the witch when the nuke goes off, not that I should do it right now. Anyway, if this jobbie will take me into space I should learn to handle it in vacuum."

And Bella plays with her new vehicle.

"I mean, I like the safeties, I'll usually want the safeties, but if I keep being stuck in a time loop for the next four hundred subjective years eventually I expect to be on the wrong end of a high-speed-chase where being caught is worse than death and I'm missing too many legs to dance my costume on."

"I don't mind. You're leaving right away? The world never ends this soon."

"I might stick around, get some interesting seeds, tinker a bit. But there's really not much more for me to do in this dimension. And I'd rather be far away from time travel sooner than later."

"Yeah, I guess that's fair."

Almost a week later is the next time she hears from Nick. "I finally got the fuel to acceptable quality. Never refined it myself before, it was tricky. When is a good time to meet you so I have enough for more than one jump?"

"Well, I'm sufficiently grounded that Dad took my car, but since I have a swanky new vehicle I can just use that. Now'll do if you want to get a move on."

"Do I get the pocket nuke?"

She dips the nanos. "Just real quick - I assume you'd have mentioned it if you had any really good defense swag. Force field generators or something like that."

And Nick will be in a neighboring dimension, feeling very glad about the whole experience thanks in large part to the array of duplicated precious metals, fuel, and tech in his cargo hold.