"If your grandparents come find you does that help us at all or..."

"Probably but not necessarily immediately?"

"Okay."

"I think the--distance--between where I came from and here, and where you came from and here, are probably approximately the same sort of thing? And I expect if they found me that would imply a more general ability to cause transit across those kinds of distances, but that wouldn't tell us--where--you're from relative to here?"

"I guess not, yeah. Unless we left some kind of trail or something."

"Yeah. So, like, even if you've mastered the art of intercontinental sailing to get from Eurasia to America, that doesn't tell you how to get to Australia, but you can probably find Australia if you keep looking."

"Do you have a ballpark guess how long they'd take to find you?"

"...Long enough that I'm more hopeful about being able to figure it out myself. I thank my human mother and my human blood on a regular basis for the fact that I'm meaningfully agentic on human timescales."

"Well, how long would it take you?"

"That really depends on how hard a problem it is! Which I don't know! --But I'm not, uh, totally optimistic, on it being less than a year, I've been working on the well problem on and off for about that long and haven't made a real dent in it. Uh, wells are connected to the dead guy who sorta ascended to evil godhood when he was incompetently murdered, I think I mentioned incompetent murder causing problems already."

"You mention lots of things and it's hard to keep track but that sounds familiar."

"It's hard for me to keep track sometimes and it's my life."

"Ain't that just the way. I can't remember what I had for breakfast last Tuesday."

"I'm theoretically more powerful than him even post-evil apotheosis but, uh, I am also nineteen, so."

"What does 'theoretically more powerful than' mean here?"

"--It means I'm higher on the Chain than he is and that's not just an arbitrary racist designation, it does reflect something real in power level. But there's a difference between raw potential and the ability to use it and he's thousands of years old."

"...Magical girls get more powerful when we're prettier, but that's along a single power-set. I'm not sure what 'more powerful' is supposed to mean when it's not within a single powerset. Like, I can stop larger objects when I'm nicer-looking but I don't know how to compare my power level straight across with someone who can, say, control plants, and how much magic we can do is the only way of benchmarking how prettier the magic thinks we are anyway. Do you just mean if you and he got into a glowing contest you'd win, or what?"

"I mean, he doesn't glow. But--mm, you could say that one magical girl was prettier and consequently probably more powerful than another, right, even if figuring out which one was actually more powerful was complicated by their different powersets?"

"In the sense that if I look at two magical girls and one is wearing jeans and acne and the other is wearing florals and a ballgown the latter is definitely achieving a greater fraction of whatever her personal power can offer her. But that doesn't mean the first one couldn't have energy bolts and the second one couldn't have an uncontrollable divination power."

"Well, on a concrete level, if he and I get in a Correspondence fight and we both yell the same magic word at each other, I'll win."

"Okay, cool. You can, what, yell louder?"

"It's not exactly about actual physical loudness but to a first approximation yeah."

"You can yell more emphatically!"

"Pretty much!"

"Once more, with feeling. What kinda magic words work when you say them instead of when they're on stuff?"