Charlie wasn’t quite sure what to say. So she went on the attack. “I’ll say,” she said, tone and volume rising parallel to her growing incredulity. She jerked her hand back, and Mr B looked at her with something like disappointment. His button eyes were actually quite expressive, she noticed, which was probably the least insane thought she was going to have all night. “Although it’s not so much discussing as it is you explaining. Why are you –” oh, gosh, what was the word here? – “Sentient.” That was it. “Why can you talk, move under your own power, and so forth? Is this just more dream?” It wasn’t. She’d never had nesting lucid dreams and she wasn’t going to start with something this stupid.

“Why are you?” Oh, the nerve. It was actually a trite comeback, too. So the bear was sentient, but not very. Despite this, it was not a totally invalid rejoinder.

“I,” Charlie began.

But her loyal companion (whose loyalty had heretofore, she thought, been demonstrated by his ability to keep silent and stay in one place, which, come to think of it, was a meager kind of loyalty to expect) interrupted her. “It’s a pointless debate. I’m sure some of the others will be happy to get into it with you, I am not. The only reason anyone is sentient is novelty, and this is what I am here to protect and cultivate.”

That was….too many words. Too much concept. She was suddenly very hungry. “Others,” she said. It was all she could focus on.

“Yes. Other beings like myself, taking the form of a beloved toy, or a family pet, or –” Mr Bultitude clucked his tongue and cocked his head in thought. A tongue, Charlie noted with growing horror, that he didn’t have. His mouth hadn’t moved an inch this whole conversation. “Never mind. The specifics can be delved into at length some other time. Charlie, I need you to focus.”

Charlie was focusing. “Or a velociraptor,” she said.

“Scooter is a plastic model,” her stuffed teddy bear said. “Don’t let her fool you.”

“Fool me?” Were Scooter and Robin to be trusted?

“Hydrocarbons and modern manufacture are not a stable basis for –” a strangled noise of frustration. “God damn it.”

Well, that was a new one. A cussing bear. “Not something you want to get into?”

“Vanity should be earned, that’s all. Damn it. I don’t have time for this, Charlie. You do not have time for this.”

Charlie took a deep breath, and remembered her mother’s lessons on crisis management. The first step was to recognize you were in a crisis which needed to be managed: The sooner you did this, the better off you were. And, blast it all, she’d done quite badly at that, being caught off guard with philosophy of mind, of all things, instead of focusing on whatever it was she was supposed to be focusing on. “What do I have time for?” Absently, she reached into the bag and ate another chip.

“You’ve met Scooter and Robin.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah? That was real?”

“As real as this,” said her favorite stuffy from his perch on the arm of the couch. “I’m reviewing the logs right now. Carcosa, guns, bullets, all real.” His voice seemed to be permanently composed of a throaty growl, which she found quite charming, actually. There was a tube-amplified kind of warmth to it, and if she listened very closely a slight static hiss. This last bit was unnerving, but she assumed it was no big deal compared to the rest. “Robin is a magical girl. Scooter is a creature like me. They’re partners.”

That didn’t explain Carcosa. Carcosa! Wasn’t that in a book, or something?! Come to think of it, it explained less than nothing. “A magical girl,” she said.

“Have you ever felt like you wanted too much for the world to give it to you?”

Charlie chewed a potato chip, eyes wide.

“Have you ever felt so full of life that your body couldn’t contain it all?”

Charlie made a soft eep.

“Have you ever thought that your life would be better if it was a story?”

Charlie nodded enthusiastically.

“Some girls contain an entire world inside them. Joan of Arc, Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt. We live in a world defined by these girls and their dreams. Their power. Their potential.”

“But they weren’t magical. They weren’t witches. They were scientists. Or politicians. Or whatever Joan of Arc…was?”

Mr Bultitude gave her a withering stare.

“Okay, yes, I don’t know that for sure.” Charlie shook her head.

“You’re fourteen. You know nothing for sure. It’s all potential. Puella potentia, that’s the technical term.”

“That’s rude, okay. I know plenty for sure.”

“Yes.” He reclined on the arm of the couch and put both paws behind his head. “Like that bears don’t talk.”

“But that was true enough, because you never said anything before.”

“Correct. Questions pop. Potential is released. Answers form. You did not know until you found out.”

“So these magical girls are magical because of their potential? Stored energy?”

Mr B shook his head. “No. They’re magical because they’re magical. Do I really need to tell you why Marie Curie was magical? Must I justify myself to my candidate?”

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“Well, I mean, she didn’t make radioactivity exist. She discovered it, with science.”

“That is what history records. It can be difficult to trace the work of a girl, after her death. History records what she wanted to happen. But also Roentgen, a man, was playing with the same energies at the same time. You might well ask why you don’t remember him as the discoverer of radiation.”

Charlie blinked. “What she wanted to happen. After her death. Potential.” She wasn’t liking the pieces she was putting together.

Mr Bultitude nodded. “The potential takes the form of a contract between us. It is released at the moment of your death. Which, hopefully, with my assistance, will be when you’re old and grey.”

“And there are limitations to it?”

“Of course. For one, your dreams cannot overwrite the structure of the world substantially. It is how it is for a reason, and we’ve worked hard on that. If you wanted to, for example, turn the world into your favorite storybook – and we contract with a hundred of these a year, it seems –” he put a paw to his forehead and shook his head, in apparent frustration “-- then we’d spin that off into a pocket dimension.”

“Someone must have really liked the King In Yellow.”

Mr B sighed. “I hear she’s a queen now. I hope she’s doing better than she was.”

“You contract with a lot of sane and normal people then? Square, clean cut types?” Charlie laughed shakily.

“We contract, Charlie Foxtrot, with people who do not run screaming from the room in terror when their stuffed bear says hello.”

Wait, that was an option? What kind of buttoned-up housewife would do something so lame? “Well, I think I see your point,” she granted, after a short silence.

“Quite so.” Mr Bultitude looked very pleased with himself. “Again, it’s all about novelty. Are you familiar with theoretical physics regarding the late, late future of the observable universe?”

“I can’t say that I am,” said Charlie, who was fourteen and possibly understood some of what those words meant.

“Of course not.” Mr B jabbed himself in the forehead with his paw, a kind of attempt at a facepalm, and Charlie would have giggled except for what he said next. “Those haven’t been invented yet.”

“All right then,” Charlie said, as levelly as she could muster.

“Anyway. There’s several billion years between the extinction of life as you know it and heat death, where the universe cools and kind of sorts into large blocks, layers, a kind of geological stratification of space-time itself. This has been regarded by the Heresiarchs of Tlon as very boring. I believe the technical term they use is ‘lame’. The Bible calls it the Sea of Glass, among other metaphors. It’s the primary subject of the book of Revelation.”

Charlie ignored the Biblical lesson, filing it away for later. “The Hairzy-what-now?”

“The Heresiarchs. Of Tlon,” Mr Bultitude said, staring at her. “We’ll get to that. Don’t worry about it. The point is, we want to make this epoch as short as we can. Fit more stories in. More fun. More consciousness. This period of the universe will be extremely hostile to consciousness, and our ultimate goal is to replace it with pure consciousness altogether. That’s very much besides the point, though.”

It was, but it also seemed very relevant. Charlie didn’t press. “What is the point?”

“That conscious beings and the stories they tell are worth fighting for. Worth dying for. We cannot die, so we seek out those who can, and those who agree with our mission. We’ve found that across history the majority of these are young girls, hence the form and appellation magical girl.”

“So I fight and die…”

He nodded.

She was doing one of those and she was going to do the second at some point anyway. “Robin made one of these contracts?”

“Yes. I suspect you two will see each other again, if you should contract as well.”

“Who do I fight against?”

“The enemies of novelty. Sameness. Stasis. Convention. They sleep, we dream.”

That sounded entirely nebulous. She wasn’t sure she could go shooting guns at people who were boring, even if they deserved it. “Bigots, for example.”

The bear clucked his non-existent tongue again. His mouth remained the same threaded frown it had always been. “We’ve found that it’s best to let girls define these things for themselves. We don’t want to shape culture, we want girls to shape culture.”

“But that’s bullshit,” she said. “Sorry, but I mean, how have girls been shaping culture this whole time? Isn’t it, you know, the other way around?”

“A complicated question with many partial answers,” Mr B said. “You’ll find many of them as you grow. For now, it should give you some idea of how strong your enemy is.”

She nodded. It made sense. She wanted it to make more, but she’d have to figure it out as she went. “The presence in my dreams. The sleep paralysis. Is it another girl? Like an evil girl?”

His cloth face seemed to pale. “I’m not sure.”

“Yikes.”

“Succinctly put, yes.” He sighed. “Not even the Heresiarchs themselves are omniscient. We’re not able to determine some parts of a girl’s story until they happen. This may be like that.”

“That’s…not inspiring a lot of confidence.”

“I’m not the one you need confidence in. You are, Charlie.”

She supposed he had a point. “But you said there wasn’t a lot of time. Because of this…presence? Or something else?”

He sighed again. “Mostly the presence. Something is after you, yes. Now that you’re aware, it will attack you more directly. Conversely, though, you also can move more openly…if you contract. It wanted to harm you before you were able to do that, I’ve prevented it.”

“Move more openly.” She was being pressed to make a decision. Promised the moon. It would seem like a scam, if it wasn’t being delivered by a talking teddy bear! There was something to it all. And besides, she wanted it to be true. Some part of her childhood that hadn’t left yet thought it sounded great, despite the apparent danger.

“To Carcosa, for instance. Or Timbuktu, if you prefer. I will open portals as needed.”

“And I get magical powers? To fight.”

He shook his head. “Potential, again. You fight conventionally, with whatever weapons and tactics you prefer. You may find that the number of available options surprises you.”

“I’ve had quite enough surprises for one day.” It was her turn to sigh.

“Very well.” Was that…amusement? “One last thing.”

She sat up. Her heart was pounding. “Yeah?”

“The strength of your dream is entirely dependent on the virtue of your life. Call it novelty or courage or virtue, all the same to us. So live well, Charlie Foxtrot.”

“I hadn’t planned on doing anything else. It’s like Mom always says. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

“Indeed,” he growled. “Do we have a contract?”

She nodded, bouncing her knee. “We do.”

“Good. For reference purposes,” he cleared his throat. “The full meaning of which will become clear in due time – my full and correct name is Bentley Q Bultitude.”

“Bentley Q? Is there not another B in there?”

“There was. I got tired of it.” He waved a paw.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Of course it does. Just not the sense you’re used to.”

She blinked. “All right, I suppose…”

There was a stillness in the air as she waited for his response. Almost a minute passed. “Bentley? Hey, little guy. You still there?”

But the inanimate teddy bear, flopping limply against the back of the couch, had nothing to say.