There is a sillhouette in the window.

...is that a cat? She gets up and walks over to the window to take a closer look.

It is not a cat!

Hello, it says telepathically.

...that is definitely not a cat.

"Hello?" she says back, out loud.

It trots back and forth along the windowsill like a cat that wants to come in. But is not otherwise a cat. May I come in?

The not-cat is talking in her head. It sounds like a person. Okay. This is probably the weirdest thing ever to happen to her, but why not. She nods and opens the window, careful to stand out of the way of the blast of cold air that comes in as she does.

In it hops. It flicks its tail. Thank you!

"You're welcome," she says, quickly closing the window once it's inside. "...Who are you?"

My name is Kyubey! What is your name?

"Shania. How are you talking in my head like that?"

It's magic that I have because I can't speak out loud. You can do it too, with me! You're a little bit magic.

Huh. She's not totally sure how to do it, but she tries to send her thoughts to Kyubey. Is this working?

Tail-flick. Yes!

This is so cool. She flops back onto her bed with a big grin on her face, rolling over to continue facing Kyubey. How do I have magic? How did I never know about it before, given that I have it?

It's only a little. To have more you would need to make a contract with me and become a magical girl.

A contract? What sort of contract?

Not a legal contract. You would only be agreeing to become a magical girl and fight evil witches, and in exchange you would get one wish.

"One wish?" she says aloud in surprise. "But..." Am I missing something? Or did you really just tell me I've got the power to give myself a wish? Or... wait, just to clarify, when you say a wish, do you mean, like, an any-one-thing-I-desire wish? Or something narrower than that?

I would grant the wish as part of the contract, it clarifies. You can wish for anything you like!

And what would fighting evil witches entail, exactly? Like, would I have magic for fighting them? What sort of magic do they have?

Magical girls have magic to fight witches and do other things, says Kyubey, nodding its fuzzy little head. Witches can hide themselves inside barriers so that normal people don't see them, and they have miasma that can make normal people violent or suicidal.

Shania sits up to face Kyubey more fully. Okay. So magic is good for fighting and other stuff. Witches have a bunch of stuff that works against normal people. Do magical girls not count as 'normal people' for this purpose? And, assuming they don't, what can witches do against us?

Magical girls are not normal people! Witches have deceptive shapes inside their barriers and are much stronger and faster than humans.

Okay. Sounds pretty doable. At least assuming my fighting magic is any good. Which I assume it will be? Because otherwise there wouldn't be any point in having it; I don't know how to fight at all right now, so I'm going to have to lean pretty exclusively on magic if I want to get anywhere with that. After a moment's pause, she adds, Also, about how much time will I need to spend on fighting witches? Would I be signing away all my free time if I took your contract?

How many witches you must fight depends on how much magic you want to use. If you never use it on anything else and are not inefficient in fighting them you will not need to fight a witch more often than once a week.

Nod. That's reasonable. I think. What else would there be to use it on, by the way? You mentioned uses other than fighting witches, and I assume the telepathy is one of those things. Is there anything else?

Different magical girls have different specialties depending on what they wish for, but all of them can do telekinesis, and healing, and transmutation, and other little tricks that they find all kinds of uses for!

Wait, am I supposed to wish for magic? I thought you said I could wish for anything I wanted. Or is it that I get those things regardless of whether I wish for magic, but other specialties only if I wish for them?

You can wish for anything you want, and will get magic regardless. You will get slightly different magic depending on what it is, even if it is not for magic at all.

Ah. Okay. She spends a moment thinking. So I'd get magic plus a wish in exchange for fighting witches. How dangerous are the witches? Like, without knowing what abilities I'll have exactly it's probably hard to know, but... wait, you mentioned different magical girls. So that makes it easier. How long do typical magical girls go without getting seriously injured? Seriously injured by standards that take into account healing magic being a thing, at least.

It's impossible to damage a magical girl's body so much that she can't recover if she has enough magic left!

Oh. Wow. So we can't be killed either? Or is it less that we can't be killed and more that killing us involves giving us enough injuries that we run out of magic before we can heal everything? How scarce is magic, I guess? I remember you said that I'd need to fight more witches if I wanted to use more magic. Is that the sort of thing I can go into debt on? If I'm missing a leg or something and don't have enough magic to grow it back, can I borrow extra magic from you and then make up for it with extra witches fought later, or would I just be stuck with one leg until after fighting enough witches to be able to heal it?

You can't go into magical debt. When you kill a witch, you get a way to restore your magic capacity, but it runs out after a few uses. Magical girls can be killed but it takes much more than killing a human would.

Okay. So avoid getting excessively damaged to the point where I don't have enough magic to fix everything. Got it. How often does that happen to magical girls, then?

Magical capacity varies a lot. Sometimes girls don't manage what they have well, but on a full capacity any one could restore herself from no body at all.

Shania shakes her head. That's not what I'm worried about. I'm worried about getting hurt or killed fighting witches, which... okay, so magical girls always fight witches, right? Because that's your contract and it's how we get magic? And unless the witches massively outnumber us, the remaining living ones are going to have learned some things about how to fight back. So they'll know to keep hitting us while we try to regenerate, rather than just doing a bunch of damage and then leaving. At least if they're fighting to kill. Do they not try to kill us when we fight them?

Witches don't really learn from experience. They do try to kill, but they're not very smart. Fights take place inside a witch's barrier, so the magical girl would have to be the one to leave if she wanted to end the fight.

Okay. So given those limits, then, the rate of witches managing to seriously hurt or kill one of us before we manage to run away? Or are you trying to imply that that literally never happens?

It sometimes happens. I'm not always there when a magical girl disappears, though.

Sure. But your best estimate? I'm trying to figure out how much taking your contract is going to mess with my life expectancy, here. Like, I understand that you don't have perfect data, I understand that it varies a lot from girl to girl depending on how competent we are, but you're being really vague even given that. Like, should I expect not to live to age twenty if I take your contract? Or is it more like only a small fraction of magical girls get killed by witches, and the rest do all the magic-management stuff you keep emphasizing and come out fine?

Some magical girls live much longer than normal humans! Magic can stop you from aging. Being killed by a witch is not the thing that is most likely to kill a magical girl.

Okay. Great. So I'm just going to assume that most magical girls die young, then, because you're being way too evasive about this. What's the most common thing to kill magical girls, if not witches?

Mismanaging their magic.

Is that a separate cause of death from witches? What else is out there that can kill us when our magic levels are too low? Or, wait, are you saying that we die directly from running out of magic, even without external dangers?

Yes.

Okay then. Any other causes of death that are disproportionately likely among magical girls, or is it just those two?

Deaths resulting from violence or magic loss are it.

Okay then. Do you have a way to tell in advance how much magic capacity I'm going to have?

Not precisely, but it has to do with how strongly you feel about your wish.

In which direction?

A wish you care about more will yield stronger magic.

So it's possible to get it to be clear about things after all, then. Good to know.

Okay. So my wish controls both what magic I get and how strong it is, plus... I assume I get the wish itself too? Like, actually get the thing I wish for in reality, not just magic based on it?

Yes.

She pulls her blanket back up around herself and begins thinking. What does she care about most strongly? Right now, the thing she's most focused on is getting magic, but she doesn't think it's quite accurate to say that she cares about it so much as she is very interested in it. What was she thinking about before Kyubey showed up? Looking back... the cold is terrible. True, but not the sort of thing she wants to waste a wish on. Novels and games, no, those are short-term fun but not much more than that. Living on her own and never having to deal with her parents again? Much closer, probably something that she can muster a decent amount of feeling about, but... she has potentially forever to do that. As much as Kyubey might expect her to get killed within a couple years, she knows better than that. If nothing else, she can just wish to be unable to die. Or... no, that's a stupid way to do it. Not when both of the causes of death Kyubey mentioned are dependent on loss of magic. In fact, now that she thinks about it, wouldn't the obvious wish just be for unlimited magic?

Wait a minute. No. She's thinking about this all wrong. Why, if magical girls exist and can do all these things, hasn't she heard of them? Witches might be able to hide themselves from normal people, but Kyubey didn't mention magical girls being able to do that. Which means there's some sort of extra filter here that she's not thinking about.

Turning back to Kyubey, she asks, So why haven't we taken over the world yet? Not, like, as a group, but if magical girls are so hard to kill, why aren't there any countries ruled by unaging god-empresses? Girls who wished to be the untopplable rulers of the world, and never got toppled? Girls who wished that nobody else be able to take them down, even by wishing for it? Because those things haven't obviously happened, but nothing you've told me has pointed towards any sort of filter either to prevent those things from happening or to prevent people from noticing if they did happen.

Some wishes are too much for the girls who want to wish them. You can wish for anything but you might not have enough potential to power the wish completely. I will warn you if you want to wish for something you cannot feel strongly enough about to get. It would be very difficult to wish to rule the world successfully and would involve a lot of mind control.

What about more generally? Like, forget about wishes. Magical girls have magic. I assume not everyone actively tries to hide it. So why haven't I heard about them? Why hasn't anyone come out and told the world that magic is real? Why hasn't anyone won that one prize for demonstrating convincingly non-fake magic? Even if people mostly want to stay hidden for some reason, why hasn't anyone failed to notice a camera around and healed themselves or used telekinesis on video? Is there already mind control going on to prevent people from noticing?

I'm not sure. I never asked any magical girls why they don't do that.

Okay. And there's no way to kill a magical girl who still has magic? We can just keep healing ourselves until we run out and die, even if our brains are gone? Actually, wait, how does that even work? Do we just automatically regenerate our brains whenever they're too obliterated for us to consciously choose to heal ourselves?

Magical girls think with their souls, not their brains. They can die if their souls are destroyed.

We were wrong about brains being where thinking happens? Or, wait, of course we were. That should have been obvious after the telepathy. Another mystery on the why-isn't-this-well-known pile, but I can work with that. So bodies are expendable but souls aren't. Okay.

Do people lose their magic when their souls are destroyed? Because, if so, I'm pretty sure I know what I want to wish for.

When the soul is destroyed there is nothing to hold the magic anymore and the magical girl dies. What do you want to wish?

I want to wish to always have magic, no matter how much I use, until such as a time as I choose not to. Which, if I'm understanding you right, ought to have a side effect of keeping my soul intact until the same point in time, since my soul being destroyed would make me stop having magic.

That wish is impossible; it would break the laws of magic.

Okay. That's inconvenient, but okay. Can you tell me what the laws of magic are before I try again? Because most of my other ideas are pretty similar to the first one, and I'd rather not have to trial-and-error it if they're all going to end up failing for the same reason.

It could depend a lot on your exact words. Magic cannot create more magic.

I can work with that, I think. Actually, that brings up something I should probably have asked earlier, now that I think about it. What happens if someone wishes for something which would be impossible if they keep acting like they usually do, but possible if they act like a totally different person? Would the wish change their personality to be compatible with the thing they wished for, or would it just fail? Assuming that changing their personality isn't directly part of the wish itself, I mean.

I'm not sure what you mean!

Like, suppose I wished to create magic every time I voluntarily went outside. Would the wish just not work, or would it work but also prevent me from ever actually going outside?

I would not grant that wish.

Are the rules for what wishes you won't grant equivalent to the rules of magic, or is it a personal-discretion thing on your part?

I won't grant wishes that you don't have the potential for or that would undermine your contract.