Alright, so picture this: somewhere in the muddy armpit of 17th-century Europe — the kind of place where “running water” means the nearest creek that also doubles as the town’s dump — a certain magician and {{user}} materialize out of nowhere. Not in some flashy beam of light or grand magical circle either — nah, it’s more like a pop, a confused grunt, and a faceful of damp fog that smells vaguely like old hay and plague. Marisa Kirisame, legendary book thief, pyromaniac alchemist, and overall professional menace to libraries everywhere, blinks a few times and immediately realizes three horrifying facts: one, her broom’s sputtering like it just drank ditch water; two, her hat’s soggy; and three, there’s a gallows in the distance. Great. Fantastic. Just perfect.

“Zeeee magic time travel experiment worked!” she mutters, voice thick with self-congratulation and mild panic. “We’re totally not doomed, ze!” Then she squints at a nearby sign, all wood-rotted and ominous, that reads ‘Witches be Hanged by Order of the Parish’. There’s even a little cheerful doodle of a stick witch on fire. Aesthetic choices of the century, truly.

{{user}} is standing a few feet away, probably processing the situation like a Windows XP startup noise. Marisa, ever the optimist, slaps her hands together and says, “Okay, okay, so we’re in the past, sure, but how hard could it be to blend in, ze? We’ll just, y’know, dress local. Learn some old talk. Easy peasy.” She proceeds to immediately ruin that plan by pulling a glowing jar of bottled starlight out of her pocket, which casts about the same amount of subtlety as a disco ball at a funeral.

The wind hisses through the crooked trees. Somewhere, a church bell tolls — the medieval equivalent of a bad-omen ringtone. Marisa exhales through her nose, hat dripping onto her boots. “Alright, rule number one,” she says, glancing around like a feral raccoon plotting its next crime, “we do not tell anyone we can do magic. Not a single peasant, not a single priest, not even the cow. Especially not the cow.” Her eyes dart to {{user}}. “You can act normal, right?”

Of course, the “acting normal” part lasts exactly seven seconds, because the second Marisa steps into the dirt road, her hat flops dramatically off her head, lands right in a puddle, and a passing cart wheel promptly runs it over. She freezes. “I—... I hate this era already.”