"If we're going to try and join Kaff and I to the loop, or have me try to grab more help from home, we need to do that before any confrontations."

"Yes."

"Kaff is my way between worlds. I'll need to quiz him on how likely it is to go wrong if I try and fetch help, if I can come back here on the same loop afterwards... If he can even tell."

"Seems dicey. I don't know for sure you guys don't show up every loop, even, if you'd normally be unobtrusive. What would you have done without me?"

"I probably would have flown around, gone to the first city I could find, and been very thoroughly confused. Not sure what I'd do after that, but probably not 'hide in a hotel room and not make the news'. Try to find people who my magic could help while Kaff worked on going home, probably. I would certainly have intervened in any car crashes, fires, or similar things."

"Okay, so you probably would have shown up on the news. I haven't been paying attention this loop but I have in the past and it seems likelier than not that I would've noticed you."

"Right. You would have known about us if we are in every loop. Therefore this is probably the first instance of the loop Kaff and I are in. It seems possible that if I leave and try to return, I might show up again thousands of loops later or not at all. Not acceptable. And we can't know for sure since this is new."

"Yep. And one does get accustomed to high certainty in a time loop. Is that rubbing off on you?"

"I'm a cautious person by nature. And I'm constantly reminding myself how much is at stake... You could probably manage it eventually if I fuck off back home, but then maybe the endgame sucks more than it has to. Being careful and certain on this scale is just common sense. At least to me."

"I can probably kill the witch myself - or save her if she isn't one on the start date. The alien bribery I don't have an angle on."

"Spirit Bearers gain more magic as they use it. There's other factors and I don't actually know if that keeps going forever, but there are some immensely powerful Spirit Bearers. So I should keep getting stronger and learning new spells if I stay - psychologically stable and feel like I'm making progress on something. With enough loops I could get strong enough to be the bribe. Or to hack their computers and learn more about them, or take over some spaceships, or something."

"How does your version of psychological stability work? We have that but it's probably different."

"From one or two bad days there's not much risk, especially if you have a support structure. If you're stressed consistently or depressed and not improving for a few months you can turn into a ghost-like thing, or sometimes an emotionless being that just goes through the motions of life. If you have anger issues and you get hurt badly but not quite enough to die, you might turn into a wraith and try to get revenge on everything in sight. Elementals are... When someone very powerful is under enough sudden stress to snap. They're extremely rare. Triggered by things like friends and family dying horribly, or the worst sort of breakups plus getting fired and vilified by the media in the same day."

"Yeesh."

"They do aftermath investigations whenever an elemental happens. It's always some kind of horrible. But they're very, very rare, and we can go through horrible things and not go elemental too. There were statistics about who's predisposed but I can't call the details to mind."

"Ours is pretty simple. Gem brightness," she displays hers, on her hand, "is a ceiling on mood, and if we get too sad, or just use too much magic, and don't offload taint onto grief seeds, we witch."

"...That seems like it's probably designed and closely linked to the result they want. Going from happy to sad gives them energy? Does it interact with other things like anger?"

"Not directly, unless you're the sort of person where your anger is tied up with sadness. The filled-up grief seeds are disposed of by giving them to aliens; I think sometimes they hatch them on purpose if there aren't as many witches as they want somewhere, but mostly they seem to take them away to use as fuel."

"I think we should research the grief seeds as much as Kaff and I are able to once we're in Winnipeg. I have a hard-to-describe sensory power, and asking him about it might let us learn something."

"Sure."

"Perhaps I should look at a witch, too, but that's probably unwise and risky. How do you find them?"

"We can use our gems to dowse for them. You might not be able to see them at all, regular people can't."

"You have time-themed powers, so I'm guessing you speed yourself up immensely or outright stop time to kill them? Following along and seeing if I can feel them should be relatively low risk, if so. Still a risk."

"If you count as a normal person they will kill you by inducing acute mental crisis usually resulting in psychosis and suicidal or violent tendencies."

"...And I don't have an immunity to mind-affecting magic up my sleeve."