"Here's the thing," Homura said, again. Yet again. The words were starting to lose meaning. Here's the thing...heresthething...heerzthuthing...herzthhhng gg...
The girl snapped her fingers in Homura's face, summoning her from space. "The thing?" she asked, impatiently.
"Yeah..." Homura muttered. "Okay. Magic is real. I'm about to tell you magical things. Before that, I'm going to show you some magic to prove it."
The girl blinked. Apparently she hadn't expected that. It was Homura's first time with this one, so she didn't know how much proof would be necessary. She'd start with a teleport. Homura turned her control wheel 90 degrees, so the sand in the hourglass was still. The world turned gray. The hallway became stiller. It had been still already, but now she had removed even the little movements that she only understood subconsciously. Homura marched to the other side of the hall, sighed, and unclunked the wheel, restoring color and normalcy.
The girl gave a silent gasp and swiveled her head immediately. She walked toward Homura and said, "how does that work?"
Homura held up her wheel. She'd learned it didn't do any good to start business before the current girl got to admire her equipment.
"An hourglass - oh, it's time! You didn't teleport, you just froze me!"
Homura stared.
"Can you go backwards? Does it reset time? Branch off a timeline? Does it just all match up like Harry Potter? Why are you looking at me like that?"
Nobody figured that out so quickly.
"Nobody figures that out so quickly," Homura said numbly. Something different hadn't happened in so long - it was like she'd been frozen, and now thawed, and feeling was leeching back into her fingers.
"Huh. So what else can you do?" Nanase asked eagerly.
Homura strode back across the hall and, while the girl's attention was on her larger movement, slipped the wheel behind her back to turn it in secret. In the gray world, she clamped a little bomb to the ceiling behind Nanase and hopped back to where she'd stopped time. She was grinning as she restarted the falling of sands.
Nanase said, "you shifted a little, you did something," just before the bomb went off. She turned to stare up at the blackened and destroyed tiles. "Wow. Who's going to pay for that?"
"It doesn't matter," Homura said.
Nanase eyed the control wheel. "Can - er, can I try?"
"As it happens - yes. In a way. Not with this." She stowed her wheel out of sight, suddenly feeling protective of it.
"I am something called a 'magical girl'," she explained, "which means I made a contract and got magic powers, and a wish. The other side of the contract is that I have to fight witches."
The girl's first question was: "A contract with who?" A suspicious type, then. Homura found herself wondering what sort of magic she would have. To answer the question, Homura jerked her head to the side, signaling for Kyubey to emerge from hiding.
"This is Kyubey."
"Hi!" smiled Kyubey.
"It is part of an alien species called Incubators. They are mostly on our side, but can't be trusted because they don't share human morality. I can explain more about it later."
Nanase was staring at the creature intently.
"How do the rings float like that?" she asked.
"Best not to question it," smiled Kyubey.
"So I could make my own contract?"
"Yes," said Homura. "Your wish must be within reason - the magnitude of your normal destiny is the magnitude of your wish, so a future president would get a very powerful wish, but a schoolgirl not so much. Your own wish still has a lot of potential, though. What's your heart's desire?"
Nanase thought. "Within reason - so, things like world peace are out?"
"Right," Homura confirmed. "Really, at your level, you can only manage something for yourself. Or...maybe for a friend. Not something big and altruistic."
This was the routine. It was almost sad how easy it was to convince someone to make a contract, when there was nobody nagging them not to. You just had to mention the right things at the right times. It wasn't lying - it was manipulation.
"Okay," Nanase said, "I'll think about that one. What's a witch?"
Nanase was screaming.
Sometimes, during this step, the witch killed the girl. If that happened, Homura rewound. This had the exact same effect she was going for anyway, but she didn't like that option. She didn't like watching the girl die, and she expected she would like it even less if she had to watch it many times. Plus, she thought it might be immoral to let it happen even if she was going to write over the timeline afterward.
Homura turned her control wheel 90 degrees. The pocket hell turned gray. Homura ran along the spine of a huge book, its cover sticking slightly to her feet, and leapt over a fence of seven magic wands, all emitting sparks that were frozen in the air. She landed on a pair of round, cracked glasses and the impact cracked them even more, so that the piece she was on tilted down and sent her sliding into the frame. She launched herself over the edge and onto another copy of the same book, whose sticky black surface was streaming up Nanase's legs to hold her in place.
Unsheathing her emergency dirk, Homura sent the wheel back to normal and began to hack at the book cover. Runes swirled past her head, no doubt providing the name of the witch or her minions. Nanase ceased screaming immediately, clenching her jaw to stop herself. The book must be hurting her. Homura sliced away the last of the tendrils and the girl stumbled back, almost to the edge.
The witch was a tangle of rustling black-red hair, slithering like a snake past the blood-painted runes and frozen-stiff human and animal bodies that adorned the walls. It surged toward them and Homura clicked out of time again. Jumping around the sparks from wands she threaded a path through the air. She left weapons balanced and lodged, all pointed inward, an obliterative orchestra.
Time began again, and the conductor continued to move. Volley after volley of shots exploded from their instruments and the music thudded into the conductor, shredding and burning the red and black hair away. A huge, jagged red scar presented itself, and Homura primed her final shot, and the conductor was hit and split in every direction, the scar multiplying and breaking apart. Melting castle walls and burning books surrounded them, and the blood runes disappeared like they were swirling down the drain. The labyrinth died.
Nanase fell to her knees, scraping them on the ground. "Oh my god. Oh my god. It's real."
Homura let her magical girl outfit vanish and her regular one appear.
"That is what we fight," she said.
In fact, Homura had fought this particular witch many, many times. She's delivered that line almost as many times. She'd ripped away the hair and revealed the scar so many times that she'd acquired an almost subconscious understanding of what might have happened to the thing back when it was a girl. But she didn't think about that.
"There were people in there," said Nanase.
"I'm going to do it." Of course she was.
"Are you sure?" Homura asked, because it was what the girl expected. Of course she was sure. She said she'd do it, didn't she?
"...Yeah. I am. I saw those frozen people in the labyrinth. I want to save people from that." Nanase looked up across the kotatsu with shining eyes. She was beautiful in that instant, her body radiating waves of compassion like a nuclear reactor (she was equally volatile, as well).
"Alright," Homura said, and Kyubey appeared on cue.
"Except," said Nanase. Homura froze.
"Except," said Nanase, "I have one more question."
Pinpricks of warmth spread over Homura's body, like reverse goosebumps, quite apart from the warming blanket-table. "Yeah?" she asked, mouth dry. For the first time in almost forever, she didn't know what was coming next. Her world was shifting sideways like a theme park ride.
"How many times have you done this?" said Nanase.
The world took a dive to the left. Homura was hanging upside-down, and her waist-length hair flapped below her.
"Because," Nanase said, "I can tell you're going through a routine. It's like you know just what's going to happen, and you know just what you're going to do, too. And since you do time stuff...I wonder if you've done this before...with me, specifically?"
"No," Homura breathed, "not with you." She felt like her braids were back, and her glasses, and she was waking up for the first ever loop. The girl could read her, and she didn't even have powers. She didn't know what to do.
"What does that mean, then?" asked Nanase. "What's your story?"
And then she had to tell her. Her story was pounding on her lips like it sensed the opportunity for freedom, except it had been all along and she hadn't acknowledged it. She opened her mouth and it spun out and Homura told her everything.
She told her about the timelines that could be bound around a person and give her the power to make a huge wish. She told her how that wish could change the universe, sacrificing the wisher in the process. She told her about the Incubators' evil quest for emotional energy, and the legions of girls, timeline-ensnared, who under Homura's guidance had wished away the Incubators' emotion-collecting monstrosities, only for each one to be replaced by something more cruel, until finally Homura had decided to bring back the witches and try to work within the system.
"I thought, maybe, if the Incubators always had a new monster, then instead of destroying the monster, we could defang it - help them get their energy from something that didn't hurt anyone. From laughter instead of screams. And by the way, no, you can't wish away the Incubators themselves. It's not allowed."
She told her how she'd invented new magics and sciences, overturned existence again and again, all so that no one ever again had to feel the way she did. And then she told her about the girl who existed, now, as nothing more than an ache in Homura's heart that never went away. At the end of this part, she was close to tears, and Nanase was looking at her with pity.
"Homura, you bitch," said Kyubey. Huge red holes appeared in Homura's torso. Mouth gaping, she slumped forward onto the table. "You complete bitch."
Nanase leapt up from under the kotatsu. "What did you do?" she shrieked.
"You're just like me, you know. You bitch. You're doing just what we do." Kyubey's mouth hadn't changed from its now-horrifying smile. The mouth didn't even move when it spoke. Homura's arm was shuddering weakly.
"She's not like you! She's doing it for a better future!" Nanase was shaking, her whole body vibrating completely out of her control. She was so, so out of her depth.
"Wrong," said Kyubey. "This idea of laughter-instead-of-screams only came after she gave up on completely denying us our resources, or even destroying us." It padded past Homura's form and up to Nanase's feet. "Face it. You'll do whatever you can to protect the human race. Just like we do for our own race."
"But you're the bullies," Nanase said, "you attacked first. I'm not sure if you're even people..." Her thoughts twisted, mixing red and blue. Was it right to destroy every Incubator in order to save many humans? Her knees were clicking together. Homura was bleeding onto the heated blanket.
Kyubey looked her in the eye. She saw no self behind its eyes. They were beads, buttons, stickers. Did that mean it had no self?
"You trick, and lie, and manipulate," Nanase sobbed, "and you kill. You literally want to harvest emotional turmoil. That can't be -"
Homura's hand found her wheel, and spun it around, and the sand reversed direction.