Alice has already escaped the house (by waving to Hilary on his way out the kitchen door) and is napping in his big cuddly armchair.

Bella sits on the arm of the chair and pokes him in the forehead.

"Mrr?" he says, and opens his eyes. "Oh!" Yaaaaaaaawn. "G'morning, Bella."

Bella kisses him and turns on her read. "Morning. How're you?"

"I am awesome," he says, wrapping an arm around her waist in a snuggly fashion and idly wndering if she would like to be in his lap.

"You might flail around and dump me on the floor, so I'd sooner not get comfy," Bella remarks.

"You sure? Because I went ahead and did-not-install a ceiling," she says with a small smile. "Who knows what will happen."

"It works in fake units I made up, where one fake unit is the minimum amount of pain required to make a triangle," Bella says chattily. "We can figure out how many it takes to make a square, pentagon, hex, star, etcetera. Heck, for all we know there are more kinds of coins up beyond that which no one has ever made because no one had a pet masochist quite like you. Octagons or cubes or something."

This time, the pleasant shivery feeling comes with an actual pleasant shiver. "Ooh, fun."

"Are you going to be able to tell me to stop," Bella asks, "if that's what you want to do - or even *think* it coherently - or should we have some kind of programmed plan of what's going to happen over what time period in case you can't?"

"Well, I mean—you can see if I like things or not, right? So if my lightning bolt looks happy, keep going, and if it doesn't, don't."

"And what about mixed feelings? Because those happen too."

Alice grins. "Aww, tickles," he says; it doesn't, technically, but it's a delicate enough sensation that it almost feels like it should.

Bella cranks it up to ten, which is just barely on the threshold of square-making. "Thirty-one flavors. Well, more than that, but Baskin Robbins has more than thirty-one too, they just rotate." And she spins through them all, one second at a time.

He bites his lip and squirms happily. "Oooh, that's nice."

By that time he has stopped biting his lip, and stopped hugging Bella, and is lounging in the chair with his eyes closed, not moving much and enjoying himself thoroughly.

Bella bends to plant a kiss on his forehead, and keeps climbing. She makes sure to have half an eye on the affect around his thoughts, though.

Bright white almost without exception, certainly around both the pain and Bella wherever they may appear. He tips his head back and smiles up at her without opening his eyes.

Climb, climb, climb. Bella expects a star based on this pattern right... about... now.

"There's a star," Bella murmurs, petting his hair. "Want to keep going?"

"Yeah," he sighs, leaning into her hand again. He loves her. He really, really loves her.

Bella twines her fingers into his hair. Whether he'll be able to hear her, she's not sure, but she says anyway: "More?"

He hears her. He recognizes that there is a sound; after a moment, he even correctly attaches her voice to the target of all this love he's feeling, to the same source as the distantly perceptible sensation of her hand in his hair. But he stops short of perceiving the word as a word; by the time he's done observing that he loves the person who said it, it's passed out of working memory, too far for him to retrieve.

Alice shivers. He doesn't quite kiss back, but he recognizes the kiss and responds with affection and a little thrill of I-can't-believe-this excitement.

He shivers some more. It's been steady enough for long enough that each tiny increase is almost a separate sensation in itself, like someone brushing their fingertips across all his nerves at once.

His tongue flicks out over his lips, once, then again. He runs his hand slowly along the arm of the chair—the one Bella isn't sitting on.

He doesn't. It's a physical sensation he is capable of perceiving; it satisfied a vague and undirected urge to... feel... something. There might be more to it, that he would understand if so much of his attention was not still taken up with hurting.

She holds where it is when she first notices that (14,209) and watches, ready to back down or cut off the pain entirely if that seems appropriate. And she pets his hair. And she watches his face...

Bella drops the pain to zero as soon as the affect changes; this isn't exactly what she was supposed to do, but they didn't cover this exact contingency.

"Sh-sh-sh," Bella soothes, scraping her nails along his scalp lightly. Her other hand wraps around his wrist. "You okay?"

She hugs him tight. "Okay, you're okay." Scritch-scritch-scritch.

"I love you," he mumbles into her shirt; the words are completely unintelligible out loud, but perfectly clear in his head.

She kisses the crown of his head. "You certainly do."

She slides down into his lap and issues another kiss, aimed at his temple.

"It was several," Bella says. "You actually slowed way down after a while, couldn't concentrate - best speed, for if and when that's the point, was around 11,000 - but it was several stars. I'll take 'em, but I still don't dare use 'em." Square and they're hers. She swipes most of the new hexes too.

"Mm? Oh." He thinks about it. "...Yeah, it was... I mean, almost like I couldn't feel anything anymore, you know? You might wanna take me down slower next time."

"Can do," she says agreeably.

"I don't have to ramp it up gradually at all. I can put it wherever I want whenever I want," Bella says. "But I wanted an idea of how you'd react to it with a slope first, so I didn't swat you with something you absolutely can't handle."

"Say when," says Bella, snuggling contently.

"What did you think would happen?" Bella asks.

"For a long while it was like you were just - enthralled, not reacting, just attending very carefully."

"...mmm. Yeah, kinda," he says, thinking back.

Bella has no other comments at this time. Snuggle snuggle.

"Only maybe?"

Bella kisses his forehead and slides off his lap. She stands well away; he might kick her or something. "Start with ten K, minimum star threshold?"

"Sure," he says serenely.

She hits him with it without further warning. Flavor of the hour: crushing, as under water pressure.

Bella backs off to five thousand, then two and a half, then one thousand, then five hundred, and keeps halving till she's at fifty and cuts off outright. "That was weird. For a moment there was just - no affect, around the pain, not even an indifferent or ambivalent one." She tilts her head. "Would you be able to keep doing whatever you were doing, if I interrupted you like that?"

"Shit no," he says, grinning and opening his eyes. "Right at the start I was hurting too much to notice I hurt. It was like I just turned off and came back a second later. If I'd been standing up I woulda fallen over."

"Okay. You have an off switch. Good for you," says Bella, laughing slightly.

"It occurs to me that we probably don't want to have off switches that other people can reach," Bella muses, approaching the chair again and plopping herself back into his lap. "Random other wishcoiners. We need defensive powers before we meet any."

"Yep," Alice agrees. He isn't even thinking about it, serenely confident that Bella will figure it out to her satisfaction eventually.

"Okay," says Alice. "So... there's still a way to check if you're immune to mental spying."

"Right. And just to make sure that's a thing pentagons can do in general..." She quits the read. "Pick a word, say when." Bella readies a pentagon.

"Huh," says Alice. "Weird. Suits you, though."

"Well, sure, but why would I just have a random magic power? Did Elias wish for it for his descendants or something?" Bella wonders aloud. "Do a lot of people have random innate powers?"

"Not a clue," says Alice, serenely. "It'd be pretty hard to check, I guess, if they're all weird little subtle things like that."

"Huh. Well, yours worked." She wishes for the immunities for magical tampering. They go just fine. "Poof," she announces.

Alice giggles. "Poof!"

"You sometimes come up with stuff I don't. Anything we wouldn't like that would fall outside of the categories of physical attack, the mental stuff, and miscellaneous magical stuff against us or our coin stashes?"

"...Wait, did you just wish me immune to, like, getting beat up?"

"With the use of magic. If someone punches you in the face, that still happens. They just can't wish for you to suddenly not have an arm anymore or whatever."

"Oh. Okay. Good. In that case, nah."

"Mkay. We'll call this good unless we come up with something else then." Snuggle snuggle.

"Well, yes, presumably it would grow back via regen if I left a wound, and could be wished back if I didn't. Do you really want to do that right now?" Bella asks archly. "What a busy morning."

She shrugs. She wishes away the one on the far side of her, and does leave a wound, because otherwise his regen probably won't take care of it and it would be weirdly anticlimactic that way. Triangles can handle bloodstains.

She kisses his temple by way of reply. She doesn't watch, but she's still reading him.

Before it comes into contact with her, she does triangle away all the blood. There's a lot. But then she is quite happy to hug him back.

Bella does not object to this in the least. She blocked off the entire morning; there's at least an hour left.

"I'm trying to think if I have any characteristics you don't love me for," Bella mumbles.

They are a little more intense than usual, at least for Alice. He keeps thinking back to his recent positive experiences with overwhelming agony.

Bella being enthusiastic makes everything better, in a general sense and also specifically at this very moment.