"Okay. I can stay over either way then. I'll tell Ren."

He wiggles a bit. It's kind of a sad wiggle but it's a wiggle.

Pet pet.

They had an early dinner and came straight back so they can still snuggle a little bit, but not very long, and then they need to—well, Yutaka will need to do something about the mildly ruined rug, but that can be later, now they need to get dressed.

Haru's going to not worry about the rug because Yutaka keeps assuring him that he is richer than God and probably God can afford rugs. Clothes: on. Time to go kidnap a bunch of children and induct them into a cult, or something.

Since Haru isn't a magical boy yet it's not efficient for him to come with Yutaka on his kidnapping mission, so Yutaka drives him to the park where they're having their meetup with the kids and Kyūbey and then he goes off to fetch them. From Haru's perspective, the kids all appear at once in the park; from each kid's perspective, they are invited into time stop by Yutaka and then he offers them their pick of how they want to be carried on a roof-hopping jaunt across Tokyo.

Kyubey sits on Haru's head. The kids mostly go for riding piggyback. The eleven year old specifies that they do that on Naruto.

......................................................k.

Since they still want to minimise the potential for panicked parents, at the end they're all holding a long piece of string, Kyūbey included, so that they can have their little conversation in as little time sidereal as they can.

Kyubey is not impeded in communicating at all by holding a piece of the string in its mouth. Hello Chiyako, hello Megumi, hello - It greets them all by name.

"Hi everybody, it's nice to meet you. I'm Swan Masaharu. Did my friend here already explain how we're gonna try and save Tokyo?"

Welp, time to scare these kids shitless. They've all got bits and pieces of the story, but Yutaka tells it from the start.

He's from the future. He's from the future twice. At the end of the month, Tokyo is destroyed. A monster so big everyone thinks it's a cataclysmic typhoon shows up out of nowhere, it plucks buildings out of the ground and throws them around like they're Pocky sticks, and it destroys everything. He has pictures of what Haiti looked like after the witch attacked it fifteen years ago. It destroyed Tokyo once, when they didn't know it was coming and were unprepared. It destroyed Tokyo a second time, when they did know it was coming and they tried to get every magical person in the Greater Tokyo Area and the help from the JMA (although he doesn't mention that that didn't really pan out last time). Haru here died both times. Yukata almost died both times, and only came back in time because of his wish.

But his wish isn't going to be enough. He can go back as many times as he wants, but unless they can actually find something to do about the witch, it will just keep destroying Tokyo over and over and over. Everyone's going to die. Their parents, their siblings, their friends, their dogs, their cats, their hamsters, everyone.

They need help. They need everyone to really, really wish to save everyone.

"We need your help."

"I'll wish with you," says Haru, "but I can't do it all by myself, and I know a lot of you are really too young to have to deal with this but most people don't have magical potential and can't make a wish at all, and you can. And Yamanaka Junko-san, she's magic too, and she's going to help us make sure you're all okay after you're magic -"

"Junko-chan's magic?" squeals a fifteen-year-old-girl.

"She is! She's magic and she's really nice and she'll help you out, because you need to harvest magic from monsters to keep your own magic working right once you've made your wish but it's dangerous and we don't want any of you getting hurt. So if we can all want it enough, all want to get rid of that big monster hard enough, we'll take care of that for you till you're ready on your own, okay?"

Solemn little faces mostly nod. The eight year old is picking his nose.

Yutaka's right next to Haru so he places one hand behind Haru's bicep in a sign they arranged in advance so that they both release their ends of the string and then it's just the two of them in time stop.

"If I wanted to convince each of them to take this seriously," he says, looking at the ground between them, "I'd sit with them and I'd ask who it is they like the most in the world. And I'd listen to them tell me about that person, or people. And then I'd try to get them to imagine, in detail, never seeing that person again. Them dead and gone. I'd do that for each and every one of these kids. That might get them to really feel enough about it.

"I don't know how to make the whole group feel enough about it, and I don't know if that'll scale to feeling enough about—all of Tokyo—and—I—"

"Well, if we can't pull it off, but we're close, then you have a little time this go-round, and - lots more next time."

You're not close.

"- the hell we're not, how are we not close -"

I can't explain it, only observe it.

"...how... not close are we. Are we the kind of not close where if I—did try that—we could get close—or—"

"Yeah, Kyubey, give us numbers."

Numbers lose a lot of -

"Last loop I got you to give me numbers. Let's just pretend I did that this time."

If we say that the product of the strength of your desire for this wish and your innate magical potential is 6, then Chiyako is a 2, and -

It has numbers for every one of them. The eight year old is actually the highest reading besides Haru's, at a 4.

- and to kill Walpurgisnacht will call for a sum of 483.

"You are fucking with me right now Kyūbey."