Bella goes up and sits in her room.
She has five hexes.
Five.
That's rather a lot of hexes.
She gets out her notebook, with the lists, and she makes some wishes.
And then she goes to bed, grinning.
In the morning it will be time to make plans.
The next morning, Theo drives him to school as usual. As usual, he doesn't go to his first class.
As is sometimes usual, he heads out into town instead.
And for the first time, he has a very specific destination in mind.
When he rings Bella's doorbell, his necklace contains two hexes, nine pentagons, and a lot of squares and triangles, of which four triangles and a square are still Elias Frobisher's opal-hematite and the rest are Alice's obsidian.
"Sure, but that one requires thought beforehand," Bella says with a deliberately pompous wag of her finger. "I could probably get the ability to read minds in full generality with one hex, and I have to figure out if I want to be able to do that." Pause. "In one step instead of two, anyway. Wow, I had better be careful I don't become corrupt. If I do I'll be lousy at ruling the world."
"Pancakes?" Bella says. "I made a bunch and some are keeping warm in the oven." She gestures, and sits herself down at the kitchen table. "I already ate. Hmmm. Mindreading on arbitrary targets. Kinda sketchy. I can do it in two steps anyway at any time as long as I have a hex on me. But it will feel more available if it's a power I already have and I don't have to spend any coins to do it." She's just narrating as she writes.
"Mm-hm. So you, my font of hexes, clearly have no objection to me spending one just to be able to read your mind. I guess that settles it." She turns to a new page of the notebook. "Now I have to determine exactly how I want this power to work." She flips a couple pages back, to where she did exactly that sort of reasoning about the invisibility, flight, and regeneration, and scans them for a template.
Bella shrugs and writes down various existing senses plus "novel input?" on that list. "The advantage of this, I suppose, is that if I ever want general mindreading powers, I can arrange for them to work differently, without notifying anybody. So it makes sense to do this separately even if I do later decide I want to be able to spy on everybody."
"...You could test things out with squares," he suggests. "Just wish for me to feel such-and-such for a bit and I'll tell you if I like it. Because even if I thought of something I thought I'd like and told you about it, you might not wish for it exactly the way I thought it and I might not think it exactly the way it'd end up."
Bella's composing multidimensional charts in her brain now. She likes her new memory. "This is starting to feel like what I imagine designing a complicated new computer program would be like," she says. As an afterthought, she expends a pentagon on programming skills. They might help.
"The reason I don't want to read your thoughts in 'thought form', so to speak, is that I think it might get confusing - my memory's not going to fool me anymore, but thinking someone else's thoughts directly still might. So I want to have a basic text channel to just read, with pictures where pictures go - but that won't cover everything. So now I'm inventing symbols to stand in for various things that text and pictures might fail to handle, and if I'm curious about one I want to be able to mentally poke it and open it up, and attaching that opening to a unique action should make it clear that the thought behind the symbol is yours and not mine. I'll probably want to be able to open up words or phrases, and the pictures, too, for more detail - the text and images are just a first pass." She tilts her head. "Do you want any more fine detail on your end - to know what I'm opening up and what I'm just skimming?"
She shrugs, and changes the subject back. "I think cognitive speedup is probably kosher with corresponding physical speedup... if and only if we get our internet upgraded."
Bella puts the pancake in a plastic bag and puts the bag in the fridge, and turns the oven off. "I also wouldn't want to hardcode my brain with a particular browser, when the state of the art in browsing and web standards are going to be all different in a year or two anyway."
"Also, I wished myself programming powers a minute ago," Bella says brightly. "But apparently I wasn't specific enough, so I don't know any programming languages, just general principles and pseudocode and so on - which is fine for what I wanted them for, anyway."
"In that case, I wonder how long it'll take for you to get tired of reminding me," laughs Bella. "Okay, I have one hex left on here." Necklace-heft. "I think I have enough symbols and I can presumably add more with pentagons if I'm getting too many black squares - meaning 'other'. Let's see, what am I trying to neglect?"
"Your signals, and my input stream and how I can manipulate it," Bella says. "And an image compression algorithm of sorts. Should I be able to poke around in your memories? Should I be using something other than a naive magical heuristic for generating the words - like, should the power be consulting you to determine what words you'd attach to a thought if prompted?"
"So I need an interface for sorting through memories - browsing some organized representation of the whole shebang? Searching by keythought? Picking them out of an index by date?" She closes her eyes. "Man, wishes do not make everything simple, do they. How about - if you could produce a word for a thought, then that one, otherwise if I could produce a word for it if I was having it, then that, and otherwise, a first pass at a naive magical translation - and otherwise a symbol. And I'll color-code 'em."
"It's almost like your brain's fundamental architecture is not as much on board with this project as you are," Bella comments. "I think I'll see what I can do about a mixed strategy - category sorting and search and date organization as much as that's possible, and then if I can't find what I'm looking for I can try another way. And let's represent that thusly -" She expends another square to repeat the "abstract contact", a shade cooler, like she's just come in from the snow and her hands are cold. "Good?"
Finally, she says, "Here goes," and makes one extremely complicated wish.
Bella may choose to smack herself in the forehead for not including any kind of censoring in her scheme, if she likes. Even as a mental thumbnail, his memory of last night's shower is pretty graphic.
He passes by it quickly, though, instead thinking of turning on her stove and whether he could use a triangle (maybe a square) to make it heat up faster. (The coins are represented by a visual of their shape plus the feeling of black glass under his fingers, cross-referenced to the ever-present weight of the necklace.)
Also, he likes the sensation of her reading him. It was nice before, but now that it's connected to the reality, it induces a happy shivery kind of mostly nonsexual pleasure.
Bella watches the words appear in her vision a little before he speaks them. "Somehow, I failed to think of that," she agrees. "But I suspect I'd get sufficiently incomplete results trying to read your mind without any... let's call it 'mature content'... that it could hardly be called mindreading at all, so I'll see if I can't get used to it."
It works.
Alice grins at the result in fond (and decidedly sexual) anticipation. His left hand flexes, remembering burns.
She closes her eyes and watches his thoughts.
It hurts like hell, and it is turning him the fuck on, and the fact that he can tell she's watching gives him a thrill that's part affection, part arousal. (And part that other thing—a feeling of vulnerability; the desire to be vulnerable, to her specifically, because he loves her.)
He lays his hand flat against the element and digs the fingers of his other hand into the deep, fresh burn on his wrist, and although most of his attention is taken up by pain, there's enough left over to feel each new coin as it appears.
Bella very carefully does not open the lightning bolt signs that mean "pain" - she doesn't actually know if opening his nocioception would hurt, and would rather test that with something smaller - but she does watch the revolving blobs of color-coded emotion in fascination, and the string of mostly not sentence-ordered words in their colors.
There are now thirteen pentagons and ten hexes on his necklace, and Bella's stove looks and smells like a small animal was cremated on it.
Make that fourteen pentagons, and then fifteen, both accumulated in the time it takes his arm to heal. He lifts up his necklace and looks at it, counting (one, three, four, and two is ten) the coins he cares about.
"That enough, you think?"
"You realize you're not going to have time to make anything big in a time-critical emergency, should one occur," Bella points out. She leaves him two each of the hexes and pentagons, and all his squares and triangles because she has lots of those too, but she takes the rest, smiling like a satisfied cat.
(The thought of her reminding him of things reminds him of his semi-promise to find her another friend, which he hasn't yet remembered to do. Oh, well. He'll have lots of time while she is fake convalescing.)
(He didn't like watching Bella get hit by a van. He the opposite of liked it. He remembers the whole event clearly: the sight of her getting hit, the sound; air biting his lungs as he ran, cold asphalt under his knees and his hands buried in his hair; the feeling like something had been ripped out of him, the frantic gnawing ache of knowing he could fix it if only he could get to her if only if only.)
And... she pokes at some of those thoughts.
She notes that she is kinda self-centered. She's noted this before, so it's not surprising.
"Okay," he concedes. "So I'll keep a few around."
Not that he really intensely desires not to die. He wouldn't like to, especially not now that he gets to watch Bella take over the world (love, love), but for a long time now he has been operating on the assumption that it is going to happen, and probably not that far in the future, and he might as well be okay with that because there's not much he can do to change it. Getting hit by a van sounds like a pretty nice way to go.
"That's... a maybe," Bella admits, deflating somewhat now that she has nothing to actively bask in. "My dad can make an arrest, press charges, get it to trial - and maybe yours can bribe the jury or the judge. Or get a ridiculously good lawyer and get actually not-convicted. The evidence boils down to you turning up at a hospital in November with injuries. Would Theo say where he picked you up from? What would your mom do - she can't be compelled to testify against her husband, but would she? Does Hilary know anything?"
Other ideas, other ideas... "I could show off all my old scars, I guess." Wryly, "Didja know Dad used to smoke?"
When he remarked on the difference between liquid nitrogen and cigarette burns, he was speaking from experience. Experience that left permanent marks on his back.
"Some of 'em ain't from him, though." A knife in a New York alley, twice, once under his jaw and the other biting deep into his hip—he's still proud of calling that bluff, of knowing that a knife to his throat means nothing to him, even if it helped shit-all in the end.
The scars can stay.
"Anyway, Theo," he says, and considers what he knows of Theo. Damn little, really. "If he can possibly get away with keeping quiet, he'll do it, but if they drag him in there and sit him down and put him under oath, he'll probably admit he picked me up at home. Pretty sure he knows more than that, but he pretends he doesn't."
"I'm trying to think if there's a good way to counter either the bribery possibility or the slick defense lawyer possibility," muses Bella. "I don't think you get to pick your own prosecuting lawyer in a criminal trial, though I could be wrong. And if we bribe or coerce or appear in the dreams of or impersonate the judge or jury or defense lawyer then I don't think we ought to bother with the trial approach at all - we have plenty of extralegal options, no need to dress that up like a procedural if that's the plan."
Besides wishing the fucker off a cliff. Which is the thing they're trying to avoid here. It would be kind of viscerally satisfying, but it wouldn't really be that much better than any other option that took Alice out of his dad's power for good.
"Well, where do you want to go, besides away? You can live anywhere. Wish yourself all the things you need and want. You don't need his financial support, his stupidly huge house, his permission. You could just pick up and go - like I suggested before, but now with added self-defense capabilities. Where would you go?"
"...I wanna be where you are," he says. Was that not obvious? He thought it was pretty fucking obvious. "I mean, if I didn't, I'd just... go." He makes an expansive gesture with both hands, thinks about hitchhiking and open roads with big cities at the ends and whether he'd rather try hooking again or maybe strip or maybe just wish himself diamonds and sell them. "But I do. So I kind of wanna keep the stupidly huge house at least until you go somewhere else."
"Alice?" says Bella, amused. "We can both fly. If you don't mean you want to move in with me and Charlie - and I think that might be a bit much for Charlie - then 'where I am' can be a pretty big radius. Build an underground lair. Live in a floating invisible castle in the clouds. Make the inside of a tree bigger than the outside. Set up housekeeping in the temporally bizarre hill. Get a house in Port Angeles and show up to art class on alternate Tuesdays. If you're attached to the house in particular, we have to figure out how to pry your dad out of it, and that's gonna be more complicated."
"I don't," he says slowly, working it out for himself as he goes, "want to be—here, and him also here. I want him to be where I'm not. And I do kinda wanna keep going to Art," and maybe gym and Home Ec, "and if I skipped out on him he'd already throw a pretty big shitfit, and if I skipped out on him and kept going to class he'd throw a way bigger one and it'd probably get all over everything and you don't like collateral damage and I don't like it when it happens to people I like." (Bella, Ms. Finch, Hilary.) "I mean, if we try something else and it doesn't work, underground lair all the way. Or whatever."
"Got a teacher fired once because I had a crush on him," Alice recalls: he doesn't know details, but he knows he was about fifteen and his father was very happy that Junior was actually going to class for once until he found out why. And then that teacher was no longer employed at that school. Broke his fifteen-year-old heart, and also cured him of his nascent interest in algebra.
"It would be useful to know how he did that. Absent that information we'll just have to be conservative, I suppose. Hmm." Think, think. "What's your patience level here? I wonder if we could just make him psychically allergic to you to the point where he moves away without realizing why."
Because in his experience, the more his father hates being around him at any given time, the more likely his father is to take it out on the most convenient of targets. And no amount of hating being around him reached thus far has made him actually stop.
"Okay." Bella doesn't think he actually understood the idea, but there's more where that came from anyway. "New angle. What is it that he does that takes him away on lengthy trips? Turn that up to eleven, he has to move, you happen to not be interested in moving, reason-to-move is still turned up to eleven so he goes."
"He's not gonna let go of me," says Alice. "Like, fuck, I am literally the worst son he could possibly have had, I could not get any less like his ideal offspring unless I openly wore dresses" (which he's into) "and did drugs" (which he isn't particularly), "and he hangs onto me tooth and claw because I'm his flesh and blood" (the phrase echoes in his head in his father's voice) "and it's his responsibility" (that word does the same) "to deal with me. Even though he obviously can't. Unless we do some serious brainwishing, in which case fuck it, might as well drop him off a cliff, he is gonna keep being a pain in my ass until he is in jail or thinks I'm dead."
"The mechanism by which he would attempt to not-let-go matters," Bella says. "If he attempts it by defending himself in a court of law against abuse charges we have limited ability to substantiate, that's one thing. If he attempts it by kidnapping you and taking you across state lines, that's another."
"Okay," says Alice. "I don't actually—wait, yeah, I do know why he keeps fucking off. He's just visiting his old buddies in New York. Probably not something we can wish up more urgency for. I don't know what he'd do," he says, shrugging. "I know he only breaks the law when he thinks he can get away with it. He's been pretty good so far about knowing when that is. But I don't, like, have a list of all the subtly vicious things a really rich guy can do when he's pissed off."
"Right." Bella's massaging her own forehead with thumb and forefinger. "Right. Okay. Maybe we should tell Charlie and go from there. He's got a reasonable shot at understanding that he can't necessarily forge ahead blind without getting you hurt - he probably at least knows the judges around here and can get us a clear picture of which of them are corrupt asses - and the last time anyone tried to bribe Charlie personally he arrested him on the spot and that's a matter of public record. We can fuck with relevant attorneys - I don't think I want to brainwash them, but I have fewer qualms about their notes disappearing and their neighborhood dogs suddenly being very agitated every night at two in the morning."
(Which he isn't. He's not even sure what he is good at in that area, although once in a while he thinks of something she doesn't, which is nice.)
This might actually work. They might actually get Delaney Hammond Sr. to go the fuck away.
Yeah, he loves her really a lot.
"So we talk to Charlie," Bella says, but she's still frowning. "And if he says there's nothing he can do that you think has an acceptable margin of safety - then - hm." She looks up and makes eye contact. "How weird would your mom and Hilary find it if your dad just forgot you exist and could not be reminded or notice your presence in any way? Would this cause a lot of changes in his behavior, or by making yourself sufficiently actually scarce could this just seem like him deciding he doesn't want to be bothered anymore? Also, is there any risk that in this case he'd start going after someone else?"
"...Hilary doesn't know enough about him to notice the difference," he concludes, "but Mom..."
His mother knows his dad better than he does - well, obviously. His mother knows that his dad wouldn't do that, that whatever combination of possessiveness and duty drives him to lay such a claim on his son is not something he would ever, ever willingly give up.
"And I have no idea what he'd do. I mean, I take up a pretty big space in the guy's life. Who the fuck knows what he'd put there instead. Maybe it'd be totally fine. Maybe he'd wanna have another kid."
Actually, the more he thinks about it, the more likely that is—he only exists in the first place because of his father's desire for an heir. And it is not a prospect that fills him with joy. A vague sympathy for the hypothetical second try, more like.
"...I don't really know," he says. "I mean, she's been pretty fucking clear that she wants me gone," no specific memories accompany that, just a vague sense that it has been repeatedly confirmed, "so it's not like she'd be unhappy. But I don't know if she'd care that he'd gone totally bugfuck overnight," because 'totally bugfuck' is an accurate measure of how far he would have to depart from his usual behaviour in order to act like he'd forgotten his own son, "or what she'd do about it if she did. Uh," because this seems like relevant information now, "he gets really pissy if anybody mentions divorce when they're both in the room, and she never seems to notice." As he recalls, Bella has witnessed one such instance for herself.
"Huh." Bella chews her lip. "This is looking like, maybe not a dead end, but a risky avenue. Let's see what else I can think of." Think, think, think. "In jail and dead are probably the best places to put him, I'm not quite frustrated enough to vote for dead yet... has he done anything else illegal you happen to know about or suspect?"
Okay with it because it is so screamingly obvious that Bella's family (the subset of it that he's seen) works in a way his doesn't, and that Charlie is not the kind of asshole Alice expects him to be. Weirdly because in the face of all evidence he still expects Charlie to be an asshole.
"But," Bella says, "we do need a contingency plan for what happens if Charlie is more cavalier about the possibility of a failed charge than us - or if we agree on the risk and then it doesn't pan out." Pause. "Would the mere fact of a trial having occurred be a plausible trigger for your dad to pretend you didn't exist, so we can fall back on that? I mean, I don't think he's been publicly accused before, has he?"
"Okay." Bella closes her eyes. "We're probably going to want more complete documentation of the whole mess than 'you went to the hospital that one time in November'. We want to be able to have the lawyer for the plaintiff drone on and on in the most sickening terms possible about years and years of systematic abuse until the jury wants to eviscerate somebody and your dad is the most convenient target. Would you rather I just try out my new memory-browsing feature and write it all down myself, so you don't have to talk about it?"
"Nervous laughter in small quantities would probably be fine, but yeah. I wonder if you can wish yourself temporarily serious about it? If you don't act as a witness we're relying on hearsay from me and coerced testimony from Theo and fluttering ignorance from your mom if she goes up at all which she can't be forced to. That's thin stuff."
"Yeah, you're gonna have to pentagon that," says Bella flatly, inspecting his thoughts. "You have to be sympathetic to a bunch of randomly chosen people. You have to make the jury enraged that anybody would hurt you so that they're on a hair trigger when the judge wants a verdict. You have to do this even though your dad's lawyer is going to tell everyone in the courtroom every remotely socially unacceptable thing you have ever done. This would be easier if you were a girl - no, wearing a dress will not help - but it's still doable if you pull off a good victim persona. Do you have an actual record - for the hooking or the getting into fights or anything else? If you do, that's bad, though not insurmountable - if you don't, that could be good, since it means the prosecutor's slinging around unsubstantiated claims that may or may not have run out the statute of limitations and yours can keep saying 'Objection!'."
"No record for the hooking," he says. "You probably couldn't even find a customer by now; it's not like I kept in touch. And oh, Dad's gonna shit himself if he has to drag out anything that's not public knowledge like the fighting. He only puts up with the fighting 'cause he knows I'm covering for him and he can't stop me anyway, I'm pretty sure. Although maybe he won't care as much about trying to cover up everything that's wrong with me when he's busy trying to cover up everything that's wrong with him."
Pause.
"And you're going to need someplace to crash while this is all happening. I think it is pretty obvious you can't live in a house with your dad during this process. And it could take a long time. My dad can probably arrange protective custody, but as a temporary measure maybe you want to look into the underground lair anyway?"
"Documentation time," she says, and she wishes a brand new notebook from her box of them upstairs. "Here goes memory-trawling. I can probably remember your memories better than you can 'cause I can just query them directly instead of having to elicit them from the inside."
She concentrates, and searches by keythought.
The list of search results is very, very long, and all of them have the pain symbol attached.
Here is Alice's father standing by a lit fireplace and grabbing a poker out of the stand. Here is Alice's father with clenched fists and a thunderous expression. Here is a memory with no visuals, just touch and sound.
All the iconized visuals contain Delaney Hammond Sr.; some of them show his wife, too, invariably covering her face or leaving the room. They span nearly every room in the Forks house and dozens more in what must be the old house in New York. In some of the latter, Delaney Sr. is holding a weapon of some kind—cane, belt, ruler; in one, a lit cigarette. But apparently, by the time they got to Forks, he was mostly inclined to beat his son with his own two hands.
Bella grits her teeth, opens up the less sensory data around each one in turn, and writes dates - approximate when she has to, exact when she doesn't - and implements where applicable, exact details of each attack, instigating incidents especially when trivial, injuries and scarring and where it may be found, and all relevant visits to the hospital. She fills pages. And pages. In neat and tidy handwriting and careful, consistent formatting. She adds a footnote attached to each incident where Mrs. Hammond was there.
(The poker left scars, of course. So did the cigarette. Most of the implements did, at one time or another, and Alice has long suspected that's why his father stopped using them except when he was really pissed off.)
Before the ribs, visits to the hospital were surprisingly few, and only for injuries as bad as that or worse—a broken jaw when he was twelve, a broken arm when he was sixteen. The former was incurred for wearing (and ruining) one of his mother's dresses; the latter, for swearing in the house. Not usually such a dire crime, but Senior was in a bad mood that day.
Finally, when her hand is cramped again after having been triangled into submission twice and she's filled both sides of every page in the notebook and sixteen pages of a new one, her mental representation of the memories will scroll no farther.
She puts down the pen and backs off to just surface reading.
"Does anything in your architectural plans for the renovation of this house suggest the soundproofing?" Bella asks.
Bella looks at her notebooks full of incidents.
"There is no non-magical way to have this much documentation unless you have an eidetic memory or you've been journaling aggressively all along," she says. "Is the second thing remotely plausible? Can anyone actually disprove the first if they go up against an actual eidetic memory that you could acquire via hex, like mine?"
Oh, thinking of which— "Does shit like going through my clothes and throwing out all the stuff I actually like count for this kinda thing? He's done that a few times."
"...No, I don't think so," Bella says. "It should, but I'm not actually sure that teenagers have property rights, legally speaking, even though decent people pretend we have as a polite fiction. The occasion around Christmas is more ambiguous... but still ambiguous. We'll leave that one up to the lawyer." She writes it down in the second notebook, after two line breaks. "Anything else?"
Bella gets a tricolor highlighter from the junk drawer, and goes through them all again and highlights the ones that left marks - or injuries that might turn up in a sufficiently thorough medical exam, and then in another color highlights the ones that were related to particularly jury-baitish incidents and not things like wearing dresses or swiping Mrs. Hammond's lipstick. "Lawyer'll do the rest. We'll talk to Charlie when he comes home." She checks the time. "I think it is lunchtime now."
"I think if you forgot bathrooms, you'd realize pretty quick you needed to add them," Bella says. She gets a fresh notebook, so that diagramming may be done. "It'd be more problematic if you forgot, like, ventilation, and passed out in your sleep and suffocated. That would be really inconvenient."
"Uh, hm. Deep, enough that you won't run into someone's actual basement so the ceiling should be a couple stories down, but you don't want to overdo it and be next to the mantle of the earth or anything. Not in an aquifer. I wonder if there's a map of nearby aquifers on the internet. Probably want to surround yourself with rock, not dirt. Possible we need to learn some geology."
Absolute necessities: a bathroom (with a shower, because of what he can do there with a knife) and somewhere to sleep.
Things that would be nice, if he'll be staying there a while: somewhere to cook (conveniently also doubling as somewhere to hurt himself) and somewhere to sew.
"That doesn't add up to that much, right?"
"Yeah, sounds pretty small. How long do you envision living here?" Bella sketches vague lines of layouts. "I'm not sure what'll happen to your dad's stuff if we can get him sent to jail, but it's not necessarily the case that you'll have access to the house after." Pause. "I'm planning to live in Forks till I finish high school in a year and a half, then go off to college somewhere."
Bella finally settles on a floor plan with a central room, radiating a bathroom and a kitchen and a bedroom and a sewing room. "Do you want the place to be accessible without using coins every time?" Bella asks. "You could make it person-specific, like the pillar and the fairy mound are specific to Elias's descendants. Or, you could just put in a staircase or an elevator and tuck the entrance away somewhere. In case anyone else ever earns the privilege of visiting."
"Okay." Bella adds a stairwell that leads down to the central room, and moves the door to the kitchen so it's under the angle of the stairs. She starts drawing squares in the kitchen and labeling them - stove, double-decker oven, fridge and freezer, cupboards and counters and sink. "This is all gonna have to operate by magic. You're not going to be on the grid in your lair. Other furnishings that don't need electricity or water you can wish up separately after you have a feel for the space."
"I think it might be possible that you could create an entire sufficiently-designed-in-advance lair with one hex," Bella laughs, "but maybe you'll have to outfit the kitchen and the bathroom with a few pentagons or something." She finishes tiling the kitchen with kitchen implements and moves on to the bathroom.
She checks the time. "Angela'll be here soon. I'm not sure whether it's best for her to spot you or not, but I should start playing invalid."
"Yeah, probably a good idea." Bella shuts all the notebooks on the table, stacks them, and takes them upstairs; then she flops onto the couch, illusions herself various casts, and says, "I'm actually not sure how I'd let her in if I were as beat up as I'm supposed to look, so maybe you'd better own up to being here after all. I don't want to make her just leave everything in the mailbox for Charlie to bring in."
Angela's standing on the doorstep with her arms full of handouts and hand-copied descriptions of the day's assignments. "Oh! Hi, Delaney," she says politely. "You're visiting Bella too, that's sweet. Can I come in?"
Angela tiptoes in. "Oh wow, Bella," she says, eyes wide at the imaginary casts. "Are you even going to be able to do the homework?"
"I bet the pinball wizard here'll take dictation for me if I ask him," Bella says, making a small gesture with her mostly-"unscathed" left hand. "Thanks so much for bringing everything."
Bella reaches carefully, with very convincing winces, for the card, and smiles. "Thanks, this was really nice of you."
"Oh, Jessica went in half on the card," Angela says. "But she couldn't come with me here because she has her voice lesson after school Mondays."
"Well, tell her I said thanks, too," Bella says.
"I don't wanna keep you," Bella tells Angela. "It means a lot to me that you came out here, though."
Angela takes that as a dismissal, and gracefully. "Okay. I'll be back tomorrow, Bella. Feel better!"
And she lets herself out.
"Well, for one thing, as long as I'm reading you, you don't have to say anything aloud you don't want the entire room to hear," Bella says. "And, 'all my friends are cute'? Even in context, yeah, that gets read funny. Angela seems to give everyone the benefit of the doubt all the time, so nothing's going to come of it, but that could have been anything from a bizarre comment on her and Jessica's appearances to a condescending remark about the card."
"It would probably be weird if you were around them for long and didn't talk at all," Bella says. Angela can be heard getting in her car and driving away, which is Bella's cue to get rid of the illusory casts. "But if you don't actually care either way, it might be simplest not do it a whole lot. I'm running a lot of social algorithms that would be complicated to document and explain and translate so they'd work for you instead of me."
He has a vague notion that bright colours might be fun, and another vague notion that he might get sick of them after a while, or at least sick of the same ones in the same places all the time. Lighting he just hasn't considered in enough depth to have any opinions at all.
This is fun. She's humming.
Bella nods. "Okay. Hm." She looks around the room for more inspiration. And adds a little arrow pointing at the word "carpet" indicating that there will need to be a nice padding layer between the carpet and the rock underneath, to make it comfy to walk on. (She does plan to visit this place, after all.) "I think this is probably it, except for your furniture that doesn't need magic electricity and water. Where do you want to put the entrance? We can check out the composition of the underground under your first choice first."
That makes him vaguely pleased, too.
(He wonders idly about hexing himself invisibility powers that make them both able to see each other when they are respectively invisible, and thinks happily of going flying with her, and entertains a brief and completely unrepentant daydream about invisible midair sex.)
Aaand - yes, a hex can apparently do the lair and the appliances and the stairs and the rock passage and the restricted access all in one go.
"Hexes are awesome," Bella enthuses. She flies off the rock and walks through its side.
Bella flies in a spiral rather than chance the stairs. The air glows, the layout's just like the one she drew, it has high vaulted ceilings and big open doors with rounded corners into the sewing room and the kitchen and more customary ones - albeit made out of rock, like everything else - for the bedroom and the bathroom. The appliances are sleekly white and silver, and they look like extremely iconic versions of their types, without brands or electrical cords or even a humming noise from the fridge. All the colors are as she wrote, and she sinks an inch into the rich red carpet when she lands at the foot of the stairs in the central room. Bella lifts back into the air just so she can twirl without falling over. "Here ya go," she says.
And before the unspoken subsequent event, once Charlie gets home.
Second of all, it is easier to get a second opinion on furniture placement when he can just—see things where he thinks they should go, instead of having to point and chatter. Like, say, a kitchen table. Over there! Supplied with chairs!
Bella shrugs; she's got lots of squares and he'll thrust more upon her at the next opportunity. She follows him around and conjures up furniture out of his thoughts, edited where necessary to have useful properties like "enough legs to not fall over" and "does not clash horribly with wall".
"Yeah, that'll do it. Thanks," he says, dropping the 'hon' that wants to attach to the end.
That thing they were thinking of earlier, about some way to run his bad ideas past her without waiting for a phone. It doesn't need to be related to telepathy at all, but if they had some way to talk at arbitrary distance without being overheard, it would make invisible flying excursions that much more convenient.
She turns over this design in her head a few times, and then spends a hex to put it in place. [Like so?]
[Like a phone, basically. You wanna talk to me, you can, unless I have a busy message up, and then you can leave magic voicemail.] She switches to text, and the words "Works this way, too," march across his vision. [And I can add more people later, if desired.]
Inside, she starts working on the pot pie (with occasional directions for assistance from Alice), and, while cutting up the chicken, she pauses, shrugs, smiles, and wishes herself cooking skills on a pentagon.
She likes being magical oh so very much.
His mind wanders a little while it is in progress. He wants to hex himself invisibility powers, but doesn't feel any particular urgency about it, so resolves to wait until it comes up or until the next time he makes a bunch of hexes. He really likes the way Bella's butt looks in those pants.
The thought of more hexes links to the thought of Bella being attractive; he considers the notion of her hurting him. She probably won't want to do it the messy way. Directly wishing pain on yourself doesn't make you anything but hurt, and he has no idea whether that holds true for wishing it on other people; you can wish up something to hurt yourself with, though, so why not a superpower? That would be hot. And really, really convenient. No more burning himself on her stove; he can do it on his when he's in the mood.
How 'bout it? he wonders, not bothering to mindphone her because he can feel her listening.
She decides the tea's done steeping. A triangle chills it; she pours it into glasses and stirs in sugar and squeezes in lemon. [As a practical tool, that one's worth testing on a smaller scale first - and as a superpower, that one definitely has corrupting potential, although interestingly less than a general mindreading power because hurting people appeals to me less than learning things. And as an interpersonal interaction, we are still just friends, however convenient and periodically adorable you may be.]
It goes something like this: just friends? As opposed to what? What's the difference? Wait, are just-friends not supposed to do stuff together that one of them might get off on? Because that sounds completely terrible and is almost functionally equivalent to never doing anything fun at all.
Bella sips tea and contemplates how to put this. [Let us suppose, almost certainly falsely, that Angela has a kink for, I dunno, dressing up as a saltshaker while someone else she's hanging out with is dressed up as a pepper shaker. And then suppose I knew that, and then she proposed these as Halloween costumes for the two of us. Would it surprise you even slightly if I declined?]
The example of the abandoned jar of lye in his basement comes to mind. None of Bella's stated objections to that were even tangentially related to the fact that he was going to get off on it - did she just not know? Maybe that list of his was not as complete as he thought.
[If dressing as a pepper shaker with counterfactual Angela would get me easy access to a nigh-unlimited supply of wishcoins I'd otherwise have to do unpleasant things to get, I would put the costume on. That doesn't mean it's something that would happen under normal circumstances,] Bella says.
[There exists a division between "sex things" and "not sex things", and torturing you by any mechanism would count as the first, and would require an exceptional reason to get me to do it despite being in a not-sex-things-doing relationship with you,] Bella says. [The division isn't completely sharp, and you in particular mess with it a lot, but that case is clear to me.]
It surprises him how much he misses the possibility. Way more than he misses the possibility of having any kind of actual sex with her, which is also something he would like very much if she ever felt like it, but isn't really something he spends much time thinking about. He is getting very, very wistful about the torture in a way he rarely ever gets about anything.
But Bella doesn't, in fact, feel like it. So that's that.
Alice shrugs.
[Oh—it'd probably be the best way to get fast coins, if we ever needed 'em,] he adds as an afterthought. Maybe later he'll burn a hex giving himself such a power and then see if using it on himself works for making coins with.
Pause.
[It might be useful for sheer volume, though.] If she's planning to take over the entire world, she will need to do a lot of stuff...
Pause, pause.
[Okay. Let's experiment and see if getting around the bootstrapping restriction by having someone else make the ouch-wish even works. If it does, I will consider hexing up a power for it.]
And she supervises, curious.
[So, that worked.]
And now he is kind of a lot more turned on than he just was. Well, it's not like they didn't expect that. He tries not to dwell on it too much, in case she stops reading him again.
Still thinking more about Bella's line of sight than her long-dead ancestor, he answers, [Maybe he didn't know anybody he wanted to hurt.] Either because they got off on it or because they didn't, but probably the second one. And likewise for not knowing anybody who wanted to hurt him.
Well, she can tell he's noticed, so if she wanted him to know why, she'd say. He shrugs and lets it go.
[Maybe he hated all his kids,] he speculates, smiling. [Or they hated him. Or both. But he still wanted to pass it down to somebody in the family.]
This line of reasoning makes perfect sense to a Hammond!
"Yep, pot pie," Bella not-quite-sings, filling the pitcher with water and plunking it on the table.
Om nom nom, pie.
Bella puts out a bowl of grapes as a facsimile of dessert.
Om nom nom, grapes.
And then...
Bella wonders if Alice wants to start. He probably doesn't, but she checks. [You want me to take this?]
Talking about his dad isn't exactly the problem; talking to Charlie about his dad is a much bigger one. He just doesn't know how. And he clearly demonstrated with Angela earlier that talking to normal people is not a skill of his.
It probably isn't something you can pentagon, either. Or at least, it's not something he'd want to.
"Dad," Bella says, when the grapes are a bowl of stems and no more, "in abuse cases - like, domestic violence and stuff - how is the victim's safety handled in cases where the defendant gets off? Even if it's on a technicality or something?"
"Hmm," Bella says, reading Alice for a reaction.
"Yep," says Charlie. "Bells, is somebody after you? That's not why you moved here, is it? Renée would've told me if there was -"
"No, no," Bella says, shaking her head.
"Part of today," Bella said, "went to making a list of - well, everything." [Are you going to hex yourself eidetic memory? This'd be a good time. Copy my version.] "I know Mrs. Hammond can't be compelled to testify against her husband, but their driver knows enough to be suspicious if he were halfway decent as a human being, and even the fact that Alice went to the hospital in November and didn't explain why ought to be suspicious - I figured it out that way. Alice has a safe place to go, whichever way a trial goes, but is worried about his dad buying someone off or there not being enough evidence to convict, and then he could get harassed at school."
And thinks of the same sound again, this time with considerably more clarity.
Well, that's... definitely a mixed blessing. He carefully does not start down the road of mentally listing all the things it would be really inconvenient to recall in detail right now.
"If he's got a place to go, no reason not to bring charges," Charlie thinks. "Bribing folks the sort of thing he'd do, Laney?"
"Probably," he says. "He'd do just about anything to keep his name clean, if he thought he could get away with it." [Good idea or bad idea to mention why we moved?]
"Mm," says Charlie. "Can let the right people know that's an issue, but if there was a way to make it go away altogether we'd already be doing it. I think Roberts is a solid fellow, though. He'd most likely get the case while Lawrence is on maternity leave."
"Right, I guess a little town wouldn't have that many judges in it," Bella says aloud.
"Don't have to worry about Roberts," Charlie says, confidently. "Jury might be a problem. There's procedures against jury tampering, but..."
"We might be able to block that," Bella says, "by unorthodox means you don't want details on. Or we can just catch it and after they go through a few juries, Roberts can decide the case without a jury."
"Right," says Charlie. "Well, I can make the arrest, Bells."
"He's out of town till the end of the week," Bella says.
"Flying in?" Charlie asks. "Could have him picked up at the airport if you know which one."
"Well, I can see if we can find that out," Charlie says. "With any luck he'll never set foot in your house again, Laney."
Bella grimly fetches the notebooks.
"He's got an eidetic memory," she explains, as Charlie opens the first. "I wrote everything down from him, but this is straight out of his memories."
"What's the highlighter mean?"
"This color means it left marks and you can prove it - this one means 'jury bait'," Bella says.
Charlie snorts, and starts turning pages, grimmer and grimmer as he goes by.
Well, Bella did just write that it was for her lipstick "being found" there.