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The first day Bella spends out and about with her new who's-watching-me powers, she is rather alarmed.
Maybe she's just mistaken about how much time people spend looking at reasonably pretty eighteen-year-old girls. She kills a pentagon to try it on a nearby control - who's looking at that girl over there?
Fewer people. Fewer people are looking at that random girl, and less intently. They're looking at her familiarly - they know her - or casually - they're checking her out.
[I have a spy problem,] Bella says. She makes a faintly exaggerated show of snapping her fingers in frustration and turning around. She's going back to her room to get a mirror and bobby pins and barettes, so she can spy back on the pretense of checking her hair, without making it overwhelmingly obvious that she knows what's going on.
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self_composed
nonbird
[I'm not sure if my shoes count as 'me' enough, but if you tried, I suspect my shoes would walk out of the building without me, or something similarly unhelpful. It's very clear about the me not leaving part.]
self_composed
[Is it attached to the building? Could I vanish the structure and invalidate the wish, or put the walls on opposite sides of the continent each so you could go anywhere in North America...? Is the building itself protected?]
self_composed
[That makes sense.] Bella decides to wish for protection-from-yoinking; it fails for redundancy as expected but she's glad she checked.
nonbird
He's quiet for a minute.
Then: [The structure of the building definitely doesn't have anything to do with it. I'm not sure what does, but when it makes me not go outside, it's not referencing the building to decide what counts as outside it.]
Then: [The structure of the building definitely doesn't have anything to do with it. I'm not sure what does, but when it makes me not go outside, it's not referencing the building to decide what counts as outside it.]
self_composed
Bella keeps Alice posted.
[The floor area?] she asks Lazarus. [Could I put you above the building or under it, would that do anything interesting?]
[The floor area?] she asks Lazarus. [Could I put you above the building or under it, would that do anything interesting?]
edgeofyourseat
Alice has no good suggestions. Also, he's baking.
He finds the whole thing kind of hilarious, though.
He finds the whole thing kind of hilarious, though.
self_composed
[Well, could I move it? The volume?] Bella asks Lazarus. [Make it bigger, change its shape?]
nonbird
[I don't know how you would do that, if you did. It's not directly an object, that I can tell; it's just part of the structure of the wish. Can you change the structure of existing wishes like that?]
self_composed
[I can modify existing things that I did at least - like adding you to the brainphone network.]
nonbird
[Well... try it, I guess,] he says. [I don't have any special intuition about whether or not it will work. General pessimism suggests a no, but my pessimism isn't magical.]
self_composed
Bella tries to make the box bigger - by a continent, by a mile, by an inch, with a pentagon, with a hex.
[No good.]
[No good.]
self_composed
[That's a very strange thing. My best guess is that they have this place prepped, but not staffed unless they expect to yoink somebody, and they didn't expect to yoink you - in which case someone is on their way to visit you. I mean, it would probably not have been any harder to wish you dead than wish you yoinked, so I can only assume they want to talk to you.]
self_composed
[I can't wish you immune to mental tampering through the ward, right? Can I give you immunity-to-mental-tampering shoes, or something? It won't help that much, but at least if you keep your shoes on throughout whatever happens we'll know your brain was also left alone.]
self_composed
[No good,] she says, after trying it. [Does "your shoes" refer to "you" too much? Can you give me another way to pick out the shoes - or whatever article of apparel?]