"I think it's all right if it's not the best order. Start at the beginning? And if it's too confusing I'll ask questions, and then I guess you'll know for... next time."

"Well, if I start at the beginning it'll sound like a great deal, hence why I am now a magical girl. So I do need to at least mention up front that you should not do that. Uh, Kyubey came to me while I was in the hospital, I'd been hit by a van. A magical girl healed me, I don't know if I would have recovered otherwise, and they talked to me about making a wish and getting magic to fight witches. Witches being these monsters that are responsible for many, possibly a majority, of murders, suicides, and accidental deaths taken as a class."

- Nod. "A majority... In a way that's kind of good news, if it's possible to get rid of witches eventually... but sorry, go on."

"I am going to ask you to write yourself a letter in such a way as to preclude you saying things like that because it's depressing. Uh, so I was at the time really jazzed about this, get magic powers including the kind that got me out of the hospital and fight horrible mind control monsters, sign me up, right? But I couldn't think of a good wish - you can't just get whatever, it's pretty freeform but there's a scope limit. I couldn't hit, like, malaria. I kept trying clever cheats, I was pestering Kyubey all month with ideas, like, do I have enough magical potential for this, for that, for this other idea. Which was good, because -

- you know the storm that just flattened Boston, d'you read the news enough to know -"

"...I heard something about that, yeah."

"It's a witch. A storm is just what it looks like. It's a bad storm but mostly because all of the - human-operated resilience - is wrecked by the witch part. You'd have had a lot more Boston left if a storm of that size that was really the weather hit it. Over the next month it chews its way west. It's really obviously not a natural once-in-ten-thousand-years phenomenon when it keeps going after the Great Lakes. It hits the West Coast - I live in Washington - and by then it's so big, and I ask Kyubey about it, and -

"- I'm really not sure chronological order is the best way to tell this but it's worth a try, I guess. Kyubey says it may well end the world, and that it's too late to stop it. And in a panic, I wish.

"That whole month I never even asked, if time travel was on the table. But I woke up in the hospital, before the other magical girl came by to heal me and give me the pitch, in perfect health."

She will refrain from saying anything depressingly optimistic about this. Even with a month of warning, the world-ending monster is obviously a hard problem that Bella hasn't been able to solve. She nods.

"So - I usually take a lot of notes, and I can in fact bring stuff back in time with me which is why I'm going to ask you to write yourself a note, but I don't have any about the first time around for obvious reasons. That's all pure memory. I have a lot better for everything after that. Like... why little fuzzy genies would go around granting wishes to turn people into magical girls. They say they want people to fight the witches, but what's their angle - well, it turns out, they're representatives of an alien civilization that doesn't have emotions, emotions are themselves inherently magical, they're taking a cut, every time, when we make wishes and then again later -

"- when we turn into witches."

"Oh." That sure would explain why Bella told her not to make a wish. "Everyone who ever takes one of the wishes, or just - enough to keep it going?"