"Not precisely. I didn't have testing equipment, Xander used to throw baseballs and my reaction time was the limiting factor in figuring out exactly how far away I could operate. Uh, I have it memorized as 'about a block' but blocks are longer here. - oh, there's a thing I didn't mention but I don't think it matters, magical girls can sense swarms to pretty good precision, enough to aim with in the dark, at a range of a few blocks. You don't have 'em, so. This was used for testing outfit quality hypotheses with better precision, they'd catch a lot of bugs and space them out and see how far out their test girl could sense them before the bugs got lively enough to escape and had to be killed."

"That's interesting. I'm terribly glad we don't have them, though."

"Yes, not having them is generally the better deal."

"Do you know if in your timeline they show up only on Earth?"

"If they showed up at even a fraction of the rate on the Moon you'd have be able to see the resulting kaiju with the naked eye by the time we're from, since nobody would have been killing them up there. They haven't seen any on Mars with telescopes either. I don't remember if low pressure can kill them - they start out pretty fragile but maybe ones that appeared on a different celestial body would have different starting specs anyway. We don't have a way to rule out outsystem planets having them."

"Fascinating. That was everything I had in mind to ask you."

"My career path if I hadn't thought of anything more interesting or found any other leverage was seeing if I could be useful in arresting things like blood clots while conventional doctors did things that depended on those blood clots not having moved much - I think I could probably also kill tumors, if I knew enough about where they were - but I hadn't gotten that far, practicing medicine is regulatorily fraught in the US. I don't know if any problems of that nature are still an issue here or if it seems like a worthwhile application."

"I don't know about those specific medical applications but it seems likely to me that there are still medical applications, or medical research ones."

"Cool. When I have a less embarrassing command of Radchaai I can start looking into that. - Oh, also, I don't know if this is useful but the clothes thing lets me permanently vanish small objects. If I put something in a pocket and then don't have a pocket it's just gone."

"Huh! That seems potentially useful, though nothing springs to mind."

"It's not very much used at home either but some people find it reassuring that we can destroy as well as create matter rather than it being a one-way ratchet."

"Something that may be less salient in a world that's always had magic is that we expect to run out of the ability to do work someday, and have the whole universe die."

"Run out of ability to do work? - oh, uh, negentropy. The opposite of - inevitable breakdown of systems, the thing where there are systems left to break down."

"Yes, that's it. Without magic, you're out of everything eventually."

"I mean, I suppose it's possible that magical girls are actually eating stars in another galaxy and we never noticed."

"It is worth looking into, but on the face of it you're cause for optimism."

"I can't generate universe-entropy-nudging quantities of matter, but sure, in principle."

"I mean, it'd require some technologies we don't have yet, but in principle you could run trillions of lives off the spontaneous generation of fairly small amounts of matter."

"Organic matter. If I remove something inorganic -" She takes off a ring and drops it and it disintegrates into nothing as soon as it leaves her hand. She remakes it.

"If you're dropping it into black holes that doesn't matter very much, but point taken."

"- no, I mean, it's gone, it's not dust, they've checked, if I stepped into a sealed environment you were weighing and took off jewelry the sealed environment would get lighter."

"Sorry, I mean that the black hole won't mind that its diet is all pearls."

"Oh. Yes, that's true, they're omnivorous."

"Anyway, that's probably the thing that makes magic so exciting even if most of what it can do can also be done technologically."

"How would you run a civilization on a black hole powered by one magical girl's worth of pearls?"