"I'm so booooored!" Akko whined. No one paid any attention to her.

The girl kicked her legs back and forth in the large, not-quite-plush library chair. Since she had woken up from her nap, the nice older girls were all busy with boring adult stuff like reading and…paying taxes, or whatever it was adults did when they were being boring. Akko was never quite clear on what adults did, just that it was boring, and she wanted no part in it. Not ever.

It wasn't all bad at first; the spikey red-head (what was her name…Amana?) had flown with her on a broom. She actually flew! Not tumbled down the hill and into Ms. Watanabe's flower bed which was for some reason full of very spikey leaves and very pointy sticks, she actually flew through the sky like a real witch!

The nice warm mommy-girl (Jazz-min-ku?) made them fly slowly, though. That was sad. Akko wanted to go fast. Why couldn't she go fast? Adults were so boring.

She didn't know what the girl her age (Condanse?) was like, since she hadn't said a word. Always had her toy dolls with her, though. Those looked like fun. Would she share? Her mom always told her to share because sharing toys is what good girls do.

The creepy girl (Suzy?) was…still creepy. She didn't seem to do anything other than creep. Creep was what she did. Creep creepily.

The glasses girl (Lotty?) played with her a lot. Lotty didn't have a lot of stamina, so it was easy to outrun her.

The other two girls, Barbara (nailed it!) and Annie(?), were difficult to tell apart. Although the red-haired one's snoring made it super hard to take a nap. When had she fallen asleep? Were adults allowed to snore in the library? Apparently.

The pretty one (Dia-nee) kept her nose lodged firmly in a book no matter what Akko did to annoy her. She tried blowing in her ear, poking her, jumping up and down, but she wouldn't look up from the big, red book about…about…

"Uhm…Dia-nee?" Akko asked politely.

It took a moment for Dia-nee to respond as the older girl absorbed and processed the apparent nickname.

"Yes, Akko?"

"What…what does 'how-or-ologgy' mean?"

Diana stared rather vacantly, struggling slightly to decipher the word salad produced by the child. When she figured out that Akko had apparently read off the title of the Horology textbook Diana currently had in her lap, she thought about how best to answer her. The other girls tilted their heads out of their own books to stare at either Akko or Diana in curiosity or (in Sucy's case) mild amusement, depending on which they found more interesting.

"It…" Diana hesitated on her words. "…means the study of time."

"Woah…" Akko's eyes grew wide at the prospect. "Like, time travel?"

Horology, at least as it pertained to time travel, was a particularly dead-end field of study. It was dangerous to the point of being classified as forbidden, but that was because it had disastrous consequences if used incorrectly (as the group itself had learned some time ago) and it was notoriously difficult to do correctly. As a rule of thumb, one shouldn't be too concerned about traveling back in time to become one's own grandparent, unless one happened to specifically wake up one morning with a sudden and inexplicable desire to become one's own grandparent, and then proceeded to train diligently until they were capable of travelling back in time with the intention of becoming their own grandparent. And that honestly seemed much more like an issue to be discussed in therapy rather than in magical studies.

Most witches acknowledged that there wasn't much else to be learned on the subject: time either went forwards, backwards, or didn't move at all, it wasn't that difficult to understand. Sure, you could study individual situations and name the difference between a bootstrap paradox and a grandfather paradox, but how useful would that even be given that—assuming you had reached the point where knowing the difference between the two was even the slightest bit useful—you'd probably be in a whole new level of trouble anyway? That, plus the whole 'demon sealing away the power to prevent its misuse' aspect certainly put a damper on the more enthusiastic scholars. So naturally the whole field of study largely stagnated and died over time.

Or at least, it had, until a certain 6-year-old girl had appeared in the place of a 16-year-old girl, seemingly entirely by accident. Akko had a tendency to turn some of the more ironclad rules of magic into…guidelines, even before magic's resurgence, and that meant a lot of the more traditional ways of thinking were out the window.

As it stood, the book Diana had been reading was, in fact, largely useless (save for an interesting but ultimately pointless reference table for some of the more commonly-used temporal grammatical tenses, courtesy of one Dan Streetmentioner, a well-read wizard who studied Horology in the early 1800s or late 800s, it wasn't quite clear). Diana had, in fact, realized some time ago that the book wouldn't help with the group's plight, but had kept looking through it, just in case the Time Demon decided to take a brief vacation, or some ironclad rule of magic had decided to bend to the whims of one Atsuko Kagari.

So far, no such luck, but at this point Diana was a bit too frustrated to accept failure that readily, and had thus kept her nose buried in the book.

"N-not really," Diana lied, "more reading the future than anything else…"

That part wasn't untrue, just not accurate. Fortune telling was more a branch of Divination than Horology, but who was even cared about the distinction? Well, Diana did, but she sucked it up for Akko's sake.

But something caught Diana's attention more than the nuances of violating causality; her brow bent into a shape that could best be described as either 'contemplating the universe' or 'I just ate a particularly low-quality breakfast burrito'.

"Your English is…quite good for someone your age." Diana remarked.

"Engwish?" Akko sucked one of her fingers. Still a filthy habit, still difficult to break. "But…it's in Japanese?"

Diana blinked. She took a quick look at the cover of the book to double-check, followed by two more quick glances at the cover to make sure she wasn't crazy. As bland, stencil-like, and blocky as the title of the book was, it was definitely in English, not Japanese.

"Uhh…" Diana hesitated.

"A-Akko…" Lotte asked. "Are you…speaking Japanese right now?"

"Yeah." Akko gave a look as if this should have been obvious. "Why?"

"Uhhh…." Lotte began, but was cut off by Diana raising her finger.

"A-a moment, please, Akko." Diana said, then waved for the rest of the group. "Girls? Huddle."

They did so, much to Akko's mild confusion.

"So how are we getting out of this one?" Sucy asked.

"I say we just call it a translation spell," Amanda said, "keep things simple."

"Yes but why is there a translation spell active?" Diana asked, emphasizing that this was something she wanted to know herself and not just fleshing out the lie they were about to tell the little girl a few feet away. "None of us cast one. At least that I'm aware."

"M-maybe this is Akko's special talent?" Lotte suggested. "She did learn fish language in a day, maybe Akko's just really good with languages."

"Does it really work like that?" Barbara wondered.

"Who cares if it works like that," Amanda hissed, "she'll get suspicious if we keep huddling. Let's just say the school has one and call it a day."

"Fine," Diana grumbled, "but I still want an explanation."

"Yeah well," Sucy huffed, "start getting used to disappointment today."

The group broke the huddle, with Amanda coughing nonchalantly.

"T-there's a translation spell." Lotte announced, a bit too triumphantly.

She paused awkwardly.

"O-over the school," she added, "there's a translation spell. Over the school. It let's us understand you. I'm just going to stop talking now…"

The group waited patiently for the reaction. What would happen if Akko called their bluff? Would Akko start asking questions about how it worked? What would they say then? They waited with bated breath, expecting their web of lies to come crashing down on top of them…

"Oh." Akko said plainly. "Okay."

And with that she went back to dangling her feet.

The group stared, somewhat impolitely.

"I think we may have vastly over-estimated the intelligence of a 6-year-old Atsuko Kagari." Diana said, rubbing at an ache forming just over her nose.