"Have you taken her to a hospital?"
"No—this kid used the bathroom as an excuse, then slipped out through the restroom window. I waited and waited and she never came back. I was terrified, but thankfully one of Madoka's friends spotted her and brought her home."
"Sounds like a handful."
"I wouldn't call it that, exactly. Just this morning she was trying to learn how to cook so she could surprise us. I think it's more likely the hospital left a bad impression on her. Maybe something like—she went in for a checkup once and then got abandoned?"
"Hmm…" Junko sat in the living room, watching Yimi play with a little shovel in the garden.
"One of Madoka's friends must have bought that for her. We still haven't properly thanked them."
The toy shovel set was actually something Avdol had bought for Yimi back in the previous world. Homura was the one who'd brought her home. Incidentally, the little bucket didn't just have sand in it—Kyubey was buried in there too.
Junko crouched down beside her and studied her face for a long moment before smiling gently. "That expression says you've got something on your mind. Make sure you take a proper bath after playing in the dirt, okay?"
She might have been busy with work more often than not—sometimes staying out past dinner for late-night meetings or corporate socializing—but when it came to Madoka, she was still an excellent emotional guide. There were plenty of conversations Tomohisa simply couldn't navigate that only Junko could steer.
"I need to research… heat death." Even though it wasn't particularly relevant to her quest.
"Is the blanket we set up for you too warm? Now that you mention it, did you kick it off last night?" Of course no ordinary person would casually encounter that term.
"It's entropy increase, and then heat death." Yimi folded her arms across her chest. "The universe will end someday."
"?"
The unexpected topic left Junko momentarily wondering if she still hadn't sobered up from last night.
Normally, the kind of thing that made a kid this age emo wasn't the concept of entropy—it was realizing for the first time that death existed. Knowing that you'd die someday and being too upset to eat? You don't even know when that'll happen, so why worry about something that far off? And which cartoon taught her this word, anyway?
Junko patted her head. "That's not something you need to worry about. Do you know how big the universe is?"
"The universe holds the Earth, and the Earth is round!"
"And do you know how big the Earth is?"
"Really, really big." Yimi had seen the Earth from space before.
"Compared to the Earth, the universe is unimaginably huge. To the whole universe, the Earth isn't even the size of a cell… that word's a bit advanced for you too, huh? Let me put it differently—maybe not even the size of an ant."
"So something that far off isn't for us to worry about. Have you ever seen anyone fretting about the sun burning out? Or to bring it a bit closer—the end of the world, maybe. That's something our generation should probably think about, but even that isn't something one tiny person can change."
She didn't delve into the deeper connections behind it all. A kid wouldn't understand anyway.
Yimi looked at Junko in confusion. "The sun is only this big—why wouldn't you worry?"
She raised a hand to block it out and the sun vanished behind her palm. If the sun disappeared one day, she wouldn't even be comfortable napping during the daytime.
"Ha ha." Junko rubbed her head with a helpless laugh.
You little pipsqueak—you haven't even figured out how big the sun actually is and you're already worrying about the end of the universe?
"Is there anything you want to eat for lunch tomorrow?" Junko abruptly changed the subject.
"Fried fish cutlet."
"You want fried fish cutlet?" Junko nodded, then glanced at Tomohisa, who was busy with chores. "Nope—I'm going to have my husband make you stir-fried green peppers tomorrow!"
"Green peppers!" Yimi stared in shock at this diabolical woman.
"You don't want that? Then come give my shoulders a massage. I'm exhausted from working all day. How about it? Tomorrow's outcome is very easy to change, you know."
Junko settled onto the garden bench and patted the seat beside her. "While you're at it, let me tell you a story from another country. I think it's called 'The Man Who Worried the Sky Would Fall'?"
Junko was completely on a different wavelength from Yimi and failed to provide any actual guidance whatsoever.
…
After bathing together with Madoka, Yimi hopped onto her bed—but not before plucking an "orange" from Tomohisa's garden to continue her experiments with Miracle.
"So this is how you create Magical Girls?" Kyubey had crawled out of the dirt at some point and now perched on the balcony railing, staring at Yimi.
Yimi glanced at it, then burrowed under her blanket so it couldn't see.
"Besides Miracle, there's another power I've never encountered before. It's clearly from the mana lineage, which is quite rare." Being able to worry about something like heat death, the kinds of powers Kyubey had never seen were almost exclusively limited to those that constituted the very fabric of the universe.
"While you do possess the potential to create infinite energy, trying to generate enough in one go to resolve the entropy crisis of the entire universe is far too naive. It's like the most basic pool problem—water flowing in from one side and draining out the other. If the openings aren't proportional, you'll never achieve a stable equilibrium."
Yimi emerged from under her blanket and sat looking at Kyubey with her legs folded to the sides—this creature she planned to deep-fry tomorrow.
She crossed her arms with exaggerated seriousness. "I'm thinking about a problem."
"A problem?" Kyubey tilted its head.
Yimi tossed the "orange" upward and caught it neatly. "Why does it fall down?"
"A human named Newton thought about that very question centuries ago on this planet. It's because gravity exists on Earth."
"Gravity?"
"It's fairly basic physics. Just as throwing water onto a fire produces large quantities of steam, absorbing heat and lowering the temperature while simultaneously smothering the flames by cutting off their oxygen supply."
Yimi shook her head. Completely lost. "Then why can't fire set water on fire?"
"With ordinary water and fire, of course it can't—so long as their elements haven't changed. If water could be ignited, it would no longer be ordinary water. That's simply the most fundamental phenomenon in the universe."
Yimi still didn't understand. At her age, she couldn't articulate what she was trying to say.
What if it was just plain water and plain fire, but the plain fire ignited the water anyway? Or even more extreme—plain water "burned" on top of plain fire? Why couldn't things be that way?
Under Kyubey's watchful gaze, a pure-white muscular Stand materialized beside Yimi. It placed both hands—infused with Miracle—onto what Yimi believed was an orange but was actually a lemon.
"What's with you? We've barely talked and you're already calling me out to meet." Sayaka made a show of checking her wrist for a watch that wasn't there.
She still had plans with Hitomi—her other close friend—who said she had something to discuss.
"Just a conversation between Magical Girls." Homura answered without expression. "From what I recall, you were quite opposed to becoming one."
"None of your business…" Sayaka's face reddened and she turned her head away, mumbling: "Look, I contracted with Yimi. With her contract, you don't have to pay that kind of price."
"That price?" Homura furrowed her brow.
She already knows?
If it was true, she'd actually feel a bit depressed. In all those past loops, no matter how gently she'd tried to explain things, nobody ever believed her. Yet somehow a different person earned that trust so effortlessly?
"Do I really have to spell it out? It's…" Sayaka leaned close to Homura's ear and whispered.
"?"
"Ah! I've got somewhere to be—gotta run!" Sayaka bolted.
"?"
Homura stood there, baffled.
Her reaction aside, she hadn't understood a single thing Sayaka whispered. Her loops added up to years in total, but she'd only ever familiarized herself with the material from that one month of classes and hadn't researched much beyond that.
But whatever it was seemed to be the key reason people were reluctant to become Magical Girls. She'd need to write it down and look it up online when she got home.