He takes and eats this one too, thoughtful.

She does this a few more times, then tries doing the language thing again. "One peanut", "two peanuts", "my peanut", "your peanut".

He shakes his head and gestures at her in annoyance, though he keeps taking peanuts.

Okay fine, food now languages later. Maybe they can get by with mime until somebody rescues them, not that she's got all that much hope of rescue. She'll just keep going until she's out of peanuts or Daz evinces interest in doing something else.

After his twentieth peanut, Daz pauses, closes his eyes, furrows his brow -

- and a person coalesces out of thin fucking air. They're a naked girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen, perfectly healthy, dark-skinned and solemn.

"What was it you were hoping to say?" she asks Margaret.

"How did you do that without being a magical girl??" she asks. It's sort of addressed to both of them.

"I'm afraid I don't know what that is," says the girl. Daz doesn't seem to be paying close attention. He's busy eating peanuts.

"How did you . . . Where did you . . . Ugh, too many questions at once. Can you just explain from your own perspective who you are and where you were a minute ago and how you came to be standing here now?" Margaret asks the woman Daz seems to have teleported in.

"...I wasn't anywhere a minute ago, I'm new," she says. "I'm Sovi."

"Hi Sovi, I'm Margaret. So you just . . . popped into existence a minute ago, already fluent in English without having learned it anywhere? What else do you know?"

"I know Daz's language and the other things it occurred to him to have me know."

"So Daz created you . . . Do you know how he did it? Does he have any other magic? Do you?"

"The thing we want to know is what are you and where did you get the food?"

"I'm a magical girl. I'm from Earth, which it's starting to look like you aren't. I got the food by, um, magical girls can change their bodies a bunch of different ways. I can make plants grow out of my arms and get fruits and nuts and so forth that way."

"What's Earth?"

"It's the planet I was on before I got sent here in a magical accident. It's mostly populated by people who look more like you and Daz than like me."

Sovi starts explaining to Daz in his language.

She has a bunch more questions, but she can wait. Once she seems to be done, she asks, "Do you know what Daz was afraid of, earlier? Is it just that he'd never seen someone who looked like me before?"

"That and until it was obvious you had plant food you might have been planning to eat him."

"I--what--no--no. Ew. How long has he been stranded here that that's where his mind went first?"

She could really do without all these mental images from past prion disease research right now.

"He's been here since he was made," says Sovi.

"Yikes. So, what do we do now? I don't suppose either of you know which way to the nearest civilization?"

"No, and you'd have to build a boat, there's not really civilization on this round," says Sovi.

"What's a round, and do you know where we'd want to go in a boat if we had one?" She might be able to build a raft, if this is an island and the mainland is close by, but she doesn't know anything about construction.