Margaret is on her way to work at the CDC, walking instead of flying today so she can drink her coffee without spilling it, when she sees the cryptid. She's a truly far-out one, no limbs to speak of, just a long snaky body with a mirror for a face. Margaret smiles at her and goes to walk on by, but the cryptid slithers right at her all of a sudden and--hits?--Margaret with the giant mirror. Except she doesn't experience getting whacked with a sheet of glass.
"Yes, the couch is great. I'm going to make a thing, okay?" Margaret pauses a moment, then acquires a big fluffy blanket draped around her shoulders.
"That's really cool."
"Thanks. I can talk more about how it works in the morning."
"I'll get you a spare pillow."
When the spare pillow is gotten Bella trots up to her own room.
Now that there's nobody to be alarmed, Margaret takes off her wings again. This lets her sprout a little pitcher plant, minus the liquid parts, and fill it with pearls embedded in her scales and then removed by feel. When she's filled her container with variously sized perfectly round pearls in every color pearls come in and some they don't, she seals off the pitcher, picks it, goes back to her normal form and pajamas, and passes out with it tucked in a pocket.
In the morning Bella fixes scrambled egg (the egg is poured out of a carton, rather than being cracked into the pan) and porridge with nuts in it.
Mmm, porridge. Once she has the name for the scrambled eggs, she asks what they're made of.
"There's a Pokémon that makes things yea big -" She gestures; the egg is bigger than an ostrich's. "- called eggs." She points out the Pokémon depicted on the carton, with an egg peeking out of its pouch. "There is a white part and a yellow part inside but this is both mixed up."
"Some animals at home do that, but the eggs are much smaller." She gestures the size of a chicken egg. ("Animals" is a loanword from English, since this place doesn't have them.)
"Oh, and I made you a thing." She takes the plant-box out of her pocket, where she was careful not to delete it while converting her pajamas back to a dress, cuts the lid off with a fingernail and holds it out.
"A thing?" Bella takes it gingerly. "Those eggs don't sound very useful, you'd need more than one just to make breakfast for a single person."
"Inside the plant," she clarifies. "They're called 'pearls' in English. And yes, you need two or three, but chickens make a lot."
"I think Chansey do five or six a day." She inspects the pearls. "What are these? They're pretty."
"Pearls on Earth come from a kind of animal that lives in the water. That's why I can give them to you, things that are sort of alive don't stop when I stop having them. I thought maybe you can sell them, or just have them as a pretty thing." Given the eggs, she's glad the response wasn't, "oh, these, we have a Pokémon that makes huge ones that glow in the dark and are impossible to damage and they cost five cents apiece, but nice thought".
"I don't know how to sell shiny objects but maybe I can figure it out." She transfers them into a little plastic bag.
"Okay. You wanted to talk more about magic yesterday?"
"Yes, I want to know all about it! You can make shiny things, you have wings... you started out regular human?"
Margaret nods. "Magical girls need to stay in a . . . in the right kind of body. We can change however we want except we can't become very human. And if we become very not-human, like if I tried to make a plant and have wings and everything else at the same time, we are 'cryptids'. Cryptids, their, how do you say, their who they are gets really different, not human anymore. They don't talk, they do things and humans don't know why." She makes a piece of paper with some pictures of cryptids--a tiny fairy, a unicorn, that one ambulatory pile of flowers that was on the local news last month--and holds it up in one hand, and an image of a borderline magical girl with perfect skin and unearthly cheekbones and pointed ears and cat eyes in the other.
"So the magic happens to you and changes you this much -" she points at the cat-eyed girl - "and then you can do other stuff yourself?"
"No, it not change you, you have to change you. If you do nothing for days, or do too little, you stop have the magic. If you do at least this," she gestures with the cat-eyed girl, "you keep the magic and can't look all human again, but can keep changing. Some people stop wanting magic, can't change anymore."
"A doctor will probably laugh at me if I bring you in and say I want a blood transfusion," Bella grumbles.
"Yes, but can try it if you want. Oh, but it does things in your head! Important to say that. Changing more makes you like magic, like strange things, not like 'swarms'--I can talk swarms--makes you want to, um, I do not know the words. Want other magical girls." She cannot blush through her scales, but her body language suggests she would if she could.
"- want to, uh, kiss them?" She kisses her hand demonstratively.
"Yes, kiss them. And not other people. That's all the head changes, if I did not forget one."
"Why does it do that?"
She doesn't have the words for "scientist" and "church", hmmm. "Nobody is sure. Some people say, maybe magic is a person, and wants magical girls to be like them, but lots of people see a weird thing, say, might be a person, and lots of times they find out it is not."