There's a man with red-tinged blond hair, dressed in slightly singed clothes, perched in a crouch on top of a boulder and sulking.

He glances over at her when she falls into the clearing beside him, purple eyes narrowing and sulk sharpening into a scowl.

He then huffs and snaps his head to look away.

Whoops castle's gone.

The sudden loss of mana inflow is much like falling down a flight of twelve-dimensional stairs, but this feeling is promptly replaced by the much more important problem that there is someone being sad within her line of sight. 

Maya floats up to eye level and smiles a toothy, sunny smile. "Can I help you with anything?" 

He growls, the sound odd, like he's not used to human vocal cords, and then coughs. "Not unless you can resurrect the dead."

Ah yes, human vocal cords are the worst. She tried them once and couldn't talk at all for a week.

The little teal humanoid dragon wags her scaly tail, embroidered red silk robe rustling softly in the gentle rush of air that's holding her up. "I totally can do that!" Thoughtful pause. "Well. With a lot more mana than I currently have." 

That pulls him up short. His gaze snaps to her. "What's the cost?"

Maya contemplates her massively depleted resource reserve for a moment. " ... patience and a whole lotta rocks," she diagnoses. "Especially if the person is not very recently dead or is very magic. How come you look like you were recently on fire?" 

"Recently is a complicated question, and because I was."

"Ah yes, time shenanigans and flammable clothes, terrible combination." Nod, nod. 

She wants to hear all about it, because people are so interesting and have interesting problems and she can often help, but many years of her primary income being séances has taught her that your recent trauma involving the death of a loved one sounds fascinating tell me all about it is, you know, kind of a rude thing to say. If Kurama has any ability whatsoever to read body language, though, he can probably tell. 

Bipeds have the bizarrest body language so he actually can't tell.

"What do you know about time shenanigans?"

"Not as much as I'd like?" She scoots over about a foot and another of herself flickers into existence, and as she glances at the sun to mark the time of its appearance, the second Maya settles to the ground by a nearby tree and begins to meditate. "Still not sure why time gems aren't a paradox, for example. The problem is that step one of figuring out how time works is usually to end up back in time as a tiny baby wizard without any of the books you need to figure out how time works, see." 

"Well, I'm the first known case of time travel in this world. Fucking woohoo."

"Oh! That is very cool but also I am sure very stressful." Sympathetic nod. "Not on purpose?" 

"Not on my behalf."

"And having time travel done to you by somebody else is kind of like surprise glitter," supposes Maya, "in that I would find that fun and probably you did not so much. Unfortunately as far as I know there is not a way to un-time-travel except insofar as eventually time goes forward again?" 

"Kind of the whole point was for that specific future to stop existing."

"Oh. Well that's good, then? Unnnnless you also have, like, giant invisible time elementals that insist on everything happening the same every time." 

"Don't think we do. But the people there won't ever exist, now."

Maya hadn't really thought of that. She contemplates it seriously for a long moment, spiky brow-ridge furrowed with concern. "That is not very good, no," she agrees solemnly. "Maybe enough time and spirit and void together could get them back? But that sounds very complicated and as you can see from my unplanned arrival I am not so great with the void mana at this time." 

"Only care about one of them."

"Probably still really hard but in my experience most things can be achieved eventually if you try hard enough! Is this the same one you were asking about earlier or is bring-back-the-dead a separate problem from bring-back-the-unhappened-future-person?" 

"Same problem."

Nod, nod. "Okay, in that case I revise my estimate of what it'll take, you will need patience and many rocks and a source of time and void manas which I unfortunately do not biogenerate and probably then additional patience. In the meantime though maybe there is something else I can do to help? What was the problem with the unhappened timeline that you're here to fix?" 

"...There's a problem with a group trying to take over the world in the next decade, like fucking idiots - the problem I was supposed to fix is thirty years in the future, though; I got overshot."

"Oh dear. Well on the bright side that means waiting for things to take time will be okay! What do they want to take over the world for, that never helps."  

"They want to force people to stop fighting, I think."

"Hm. There are worse motivations I suppose," Maya allows, "but it has in practice many problems." 

"Like trying to use an enslaved person as a super weapon to force... Something nonsensical about making people understand each other's pain."

Concerned squint. "That would not have been among my first several guesses but wow, yes, that is indeed a problem. What are the obstacles to rescuing the person?" 

"...The whole thing's complicated, but - a thousand years ago the Ten Tails attacked the world in conjunction with or under the control of this one alien girl. Alien girl's sons beat up her and the Ten Tails, and one of those sons split the Ten Tails into nine other beings. The dickwads in question think they can recombine those nine into the Ten Tails, which they can, and they think this is a good idea, because they're fucking idiots."

"Gosh. Do you know whether they prefer being one person or nine people? That seems like a separate problem from the attempted use of the recombined person as a superweapon which does seem incredibly ill-advised." 

" - Prefer being nine people. The Ten Tails wasn't very person-y."

Nod, nod. "I am, you understand, a little suspicious of claims of persons being not so persony?" Her distinctly inhuman ears twitch illustratively. "But if all the people who used to be it think so then that's a compelling case." 

"I think it's generally the consensus."

"Consensuses are good! That makes it easier for everyone to be happy." 

"Guess so."

"People should be happy or else what is even the point of anything. So! What can I do to help with this, are these people currently kidnapped and need rescuing or are they at home and need protecting?" 

"...It's really complicated. Most of - them - are currently energy magically sealed inside someone else. The assholes are trying to kidnap the hosts and extract the people. I don't really know how to actually explain sealing to someone who doesn't have chakra and seals..."

"That does sound both complicated and bad," nod. "Since I do not have any of this 'chakra' resource though, probably it is not very important that I understand exactly how and why it works, just what results it produces? If my magic interacts with yours at all I expect it will be further downstream." 

"Possibly."

"We can revisit if it turns out to be important. Step one protect the potential kidnap victims, step two figure out how to safely extricate the trapped people?" 

(A short distance away, the meditating second Maya is slowly accumulating a pile of multicolored, faintly glowing gemstones conjured from nowhere.) 

"I guess so. Why are you being so - helpful?"

"My teacher when I was small," or smaller, anyway, "used to say that choosing to be a wizard in a place means choosing to be the person whose job it is to help."  

"Shinobi - local human magic users - don't think that."

"Not any of them?" 

"...The person I miss did."

Awww. Aww. Gotta fix the tragedy so this nice person can be less sad. "That is way more impressive if they came up with the idea all by themself, gosh."  

"He's a really impressive person, yeah."

Yessss he went for is instead of was, she has successfully assured him that eventually his missing person will re-happen! De-unhappen? Hm. 

"He sounds great! I am excited to get to meet him." 

"He - really likes meeting people. So I think he'd like that."

Cute cute cute. "Okay, so where first? Do you have a map or something, I do not know your geography even a litt - ah yes that is why I am communing with the ground over there isn't it. One second." She wiggles in midair and steps sideways out of reality, disappearing with a shimmer. 

The other Maya who has been quietly sitting over there for the duration of this conversation hops up, gathers her pile of shiny rocks into her pockets, and zooms back up to where the other one was standing. "Okay, now I know slightly more geography but the ground can't tell me about country borders and stuff?" 

".......I have never paid any attention whatsoever to human countries."

"Ah. In that case at some point I guess I will eat a book about it." Unconcerned shrug. 

"...Eat a book?"

"Yeah! In my world the way you can tell you've grown up from a hedge wizard into an adept is when you have managed to cram enough memorized nonsense into your head manually that you learn to just," finger snap, "yoink a whole book without actually reading all its individual words." 

"Huh."

"...Honestly I also don't know how books work."

This is the enormous gasp, not of someone who is offended, but of someone who is really excited to get to explain her favorite thing. 

"Books are the most useful thing humans have ever invented!! It is like, so, you know how if you want to learn a thing and don't know how you basically have to wait patiently while somebody else decides when they have time to tell you the thing, and even when you like the person it's sort of inconvenient and horrible? If they instead put all the words they would have said on paper, and bind up the paper into a nice sturdy organized pile, then if you have a copy of the book you can have all those words whenever you want." 

"Can't you just do the thing where you see someone in the between place, and they just give you the knowledge, though? That sounds easier."

Headtilt. "The... spirit plane, you mean, or something like it? In my world seances are only useful for extracting information from people who are dead." 

"Uh. No. The place you go to talk to other people in their heads?"

Long pause. "................. iiiiiis everyone in your world telepathic because in my world they are not." 

" - My kind of person is, and Naruto sometimes was, and that girl definitely was... I haven't met a lot of humans, though..."