"See, this is how you know the evil aliens did not invent the wish thing."

"I sort of model them as bad enough at modeling people that it's plausible to me that this bug might have just not occurred to them while designing it but yeah."

"They're pretty stunningly manipulative when they don't make a bad first guess and have to recover from that."

"They dramatically failed to provide basic, non-incriminating information about magical girls until we extracted the information in a series of questions I later likened to pulling teeth."

"Bad first guess. Mine got a nearby girl to swing by the hospital and save my life and then led me down a lot of unproductive speculative rabbitholes and kept me mostly thinking about wish optimization and fobbed off most of what being a magical girl is like on, well, the girl. Kept me going all month."

"I was basically modeling them as 'cooperative, but also psychologically dissimilar enough to humanity that trusting them to have a good model of our best interests would be a bad idea.' Not terrible but sort of harder to recover from in a way than suspecting them of malice."

"Yeah. I think most of the girls they go for aren't terribly sophisticated in their fluff evaluation."

"They're adorable and give you nifty magic prizes. Sort of creepy how they don't blink though."

"Also if you damage them they're just solid red inside and a live one will come along and eat the wrecked one."

"Eat it?"

"Yep."

"They don't even have teeth."

"They're very soft."

"Well, that's an unpleasant set of mental images."

"Sorry."

"I'll be fine. By all accounts it's less unpleasant than the interior of a witch, just more surprising."

"There's a really pretty breed of witch out in the northwest all full of art. Positively gorgeous. That's the one that killed me."

"The one that probably killed me was kitchen-themed."

"Witch themes are strange."

"They are. I sort of wonder if they correlate to things about the magical girl they come from."

"I think so but I haven't got the data to be sure."

"Yeah, it's...the kind of thing that would be hard to study."

"It'd be easier if you could interview lots of girls but they tend to compete for territory."

"I can imagine. The fluff said a lot of them are nomadic, though."

"Some are. More on the scale of a county than interstate."