"It seems like the kind of thing they'd do."

"If Emily keeps getting the same outfit no matter what it suggests there's some process for picking costumes with a unique output that doesn't depend much on circumstance, which is interesting."

"True. Asking other magical girls how they feel about their outfits could go on the low-confidence list."

Bella pulls a little notebook out of her pocket - she's in plainclothes at the moment - and writes this down.

"I wonder if the transformation has a limit as to what counts as clothes."

"People wind up with accessories and stuff? Also it's always skirts. What do you have in mind?"

"No, I meant in terms of what you can transform away when you get your outfit," she explains.

"Oh. I've never managed to keep anything that was more stowed than 'in my hand'."

"It would probably be useful to test. If you could, say, put a mouse in suspended animation by putting it in your pocket and then transforming--I'm not immediately coming up with how that could be exploited but it seems like the kind of thing that could."

"Haven't tried anything alive. I can't think of exploit either but it wouldn't be hard to check."

"Most of the things I can think of would be more easily solved by more conventional applications of magic. Have you tested it with gems and seeds?"

"I can't transform a gem or seed away or put them in my shield."

"That's a pity. If someone's dangerously close to witching do you know if you can save them by destroying their body until you can get some more charge into their gem?"

"For some reason people find being disembodied jewels emotionally unpleasant."

"Ah. I was mostly hoping not having a brain to think with left them unconscious."

"No, which is convenient if your body gets destroyed and you need to make a new one."

"Emily still slept, though, when she was a magical girl long enough to do so. Could you knock them out as long as they still had a body?"

"Might work, haven't actually tried it."

"Okay. Probably not really important, but still potentially worth testing."

Write write.

"I'm really glad we get along so far. It would be less pleasant if the only two people with inter-loop continuity of existence couldn't comfortably interact."

"Yeah, that would be deeply unfortunate, but you seem great."

"Thanks. You seem very--you seem like the kind of person I'm glad to have running the whole 'saving the world' thing, and you're not unpleasant to talk to, but it's sort of hard to get a read on whether you're the kind of person I'd have gone out of my way to interact with if there were nothing at stake. But, you know, 'good in a crisis' is an objectively positive trait, so there's that."

"I got pretty lucky with the results of 'wish in a panic while the world was ending after spending a month dithering about what to wish for'."

"The immortality thing is also a pretty convenient result of a grief-stricken teenager with no context blurting out the first thing that came into her head."