"News," Charlie echoes.

"Yeah. So, uh, this is - a puchuu - I haven't named it, apparently they don't have names per se - and it wants to give me magic powers!"

"Charmed," says Charlie.

"Hello! I'm not sure how much Miss Bella wants me to explain, chuu?" It ear-flicks.

"It talks."

"Yes, that is how it offered me the magic powers. Uh, I'm going to go for it, I talked to an active magical girl to confirm and it sounds really awesome. There is some... superheroics going on. I may enter dangerous situations that are in need of magic. But also I will not age and if I die I will, eventually, pop back up again, so I think it's a good deal."

Charlie looks skeptically at the puchuu, which isn't saying anything.

"You can tell him whatever," Bella tells the puchuu.

"There are monsters that want nothing more than to destroy civilization itself! They would cause a lot of harm if left unchecked, and puchuu aren't good at fighting them directly, just finding them! So we need girls with potential to help make sure they don't cause problems. Miss Bella is going to have psychic powers, to defend her mind and those of her friends, too. There are a lot of puchuu, and we've been doing this for a long time, even in ancient times. It's a puchuu's job to support magical girls, since they're helping us out so much! Miss Bella has already talked to another magical girl, and I think she'll be happier as one because it lets her do interesting and important things. We can also help her get into university, and even pay her for the work with magic coins that grant minor wishes."

"Girls? Specifically?"

"Mostly girls, about nineteen out of twenty. We don't really understand why, the system is very old and from a parallel Earth. But reliable."

"A parallel Earth."

"There's a lot of those, but they're hard to get to."

"I want to tell Mom too but like, probably in person, I don't think the phone would really work," Bella says.

He hugs his daughter. "You pop up again if you get - hurt?"

"She will. There are ways to make it faster, but she will eventually return no matter what."

"It's a pretty good deal, and it'd be a better one if I weren't signing up to, uh, go fight a vampire, but, like, given that the vampire already existed..."

"A vampire."

"It might not be a vampire. It would be better if it's just evil magi or something."

"How is that better?"

"Vampires are some of the worst monsters to have doing things. They actually plan ahead for how to hurt people instead of doing it incidentally to some other goal, or randomly with whatever idea is most obvious."

"Why do they do that, anyway?"

"It's not always clear, but just like some magic is associated with positive emotions, there's magic associated with negative emotions too. Vampires are immense concentrations of dark magic, like most monsters."

"I don't suppose there's any realistic possibility of interrogating them."

"If the others weaken it enough, you might be able to disable a vampire non-lethally... And then we could put up defenses to hold it when it wakes up again. It would try very hard to escape and might have contingency plans, though. It would be pretty risky."