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.
Bella fetches her items. She puts her hair up in a style she has previously rejected as falling apart too easily: that's the point, now. She pockets her compact mirror. She goes out again.
She feels a tendril of hair escape the bobby pin. She stops, pulls out the mirror, fixes it, and looks over her shoulder at the nearest spy. She memorizes his face. She pats her hair, puts away the mirror, and continues on her way.
[I don't know. Magical spying before I fizzled it. Happened to hear about the car crash and found my recovery suspicious. Thinks I'm too much of a polymath, with the flute and the soccer and the grades. Can see invisibility and spotted me flying around. Thinks Tegu is too good to be true.]
That prompts Alice to wonder about an invisibility arms race, and at what point the cycle of 'invisible' vs 'able to see invisible people' vs 'invisible even to people who can see invisible things' vs 'able to see extra-invisible people' would be halted by the natural limitations of hexagons, and how they might test that, and whether Bella has thought of it already. She probably has.
Pause. [No one appears to be stalking you, right? You're lairing and seeing people you already knew, not getting followed or anything?]
[I don't see people around a whole lot,] he says. [Not people I don't know, anyway. Mostly it's just mom and Hilary whenever I'm at the house. Well, and sometimes I wander around Stanford and wherever,] meaning the campus, the town, the surrounding area, and once in a while a nearby city, [but I'm invisible half the time and I haven't caught anybody staring at me either way. You want me to get a stalker radar, too?]
She makes it to class. She's going to be extra creeped out if there is a spy enrolled. Or teaching.
Even if half of the spies are false positives, there sure are a lot of them.
She leaaaans on that acting pentagon, and her fall-apart hairdo.
By the end of her second day with the disintegrating architecture on her head, she's actually gotten good enough at it to make it stay put through sheer practice, and anyway the spies have stopped looking at her quite so intently. She's not sure what to make of that.
She keeps Alice up to date, but says nothing in particular about it to Janine, Bridget, or any other acquired friends/contacts. She does acquiesce to another study session with Bridget, though, and appears with her book and her for-show notes.
And a day or two later, she sends Bella an email, CCed to someone with the unlikely username of "O-O-O" on a free email service.
Hi, Bella!
My friend finally caved. You can direct your nosy questions to her now. (Hi, Chris!)
Short story: I protect people.
There's a progression of longer and longer stories if you want more detail, but some of them are going to take a lot of explaining. I won't trust email for all of it. If you're the kind of person who likes to have the whole story (and I'm betting you are), we should definitely find a more secure way to talk.
You bet correctly. There's various forms of electronic encryption. I can also get anyplace in the South Bay pretty readily to talk in person, although it occurs to me that I have no idea where you live. Phones are generally insecure if someone's looking to spy on you, but harder to sift through with robots for general topics of interest because voice recognition is spotty. What's your preference?
"I pick someone, and they are protected until I decide otherwise," says Chris. "From pretty much anything you can name. Which is the part where it really gets interesting. Just so we're on the same page, if I say 'wishes', am I going to have to waste time explaining that to you or are you going to know what I'm talking about?"
"Not genies," says Chris. "Just wishes. Evidently you already believe in magic powers; well, there are some very lucky people whose magic powers let them grant wishes of varying sizes for themselves and others. Which I mention because my power protects against everything, including kinds of harm that can only be accomplished by magic. Like, say, mind control. As far as I know, there are no people running around with native mind control powers."
"There is no catalog," she says. "If you really want to buy some, and if the right people happen to think you're worth their time, I can put you in touch and you can ask them for a magic power and they will ask you for something in return. I don't know what; I've never bought any. But I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's probably beyond the means of your average Stanford undergrad."
"It came in when I was about six," she recalls. "I had a younger sister who ran into things a lot, and I worried about her, and then one day I could just tell she was okay. And the next time she got overexcited and had an unfortunate encounter with a door, I could tell she wasn't hurt. As for why it happens, your guess is probably only slightly worse than mine. They're rare enough that it's hard to see any kind of pattern."
"That's... interesting, but not exactly what I was asking. If he can play the accordion and no one notices, can he also turn on iTunes and have no one notice even though the computer is playing the music? What happens if he releases a cageful of excited hummingbirds into a room, do people start noticing them when they get a certain distance away or after a certain length of time or what? Can he steal objects - big obvious objects - without anyone paying attention? What if you're concentrating on the object at the time, what exactly happens to your attention or your cognition around it?"
"Why do you imagine I will know the answers to all these questions?" she wonders. "Just from knowing the guy, the rule of thumb seems to be that you notice whatever still makes sense without him in the picture. So, floating Sharpie drawing on your face: doesn't make sense. Accordion in a top hat on your couch playing itself: doesn't make sense. Sudden explosion of hummingbirds: granted, doesn't make much sense either, but once they're out of the cage they make just as much sense without him, so I bet you'd start noticing them at that point. And from experience, I can tell you that things don't appear out of thin air when he puts them down; it's like they were there all along and you only started paying attention a second ago. How that would interact with the hummingbirds is anyone's guess."
"If you grilled her like this, I'll bet you know a lot about what Bridget's does," Chris says amiably. "The precog doesn't like to have long conversations about her power. I gather she doesn't necessarily see the future, and her predictions sometimes change even without her doing anything about them."
"I guess that would be convincing, especially if you aren't predictable in what emails you send," Bella muses. "Can I talk to her, too? What about the unobtrusive guy?" She ramps up to 3x so she can think about how to phrase her next question without pausing: "And, hey, can the power-checking guy work over the phone or whatever? Even if he can't I wanna talk to him too, anyone with powers who'll let me."
"The unobtrusive guy has the power of ultimate shyness for a reason. I don't think you'd get along. And the precog, like I said, doesn't like to talk about it. Lazarus is always ready to talk your ear off about magic, though. Why, did you want him to check you for latent superpowers?"
"I imagine they'd be really latent. Everything you've mentioned seems to be the kind of thing you'd notice, right? So I doubt there'd be much point, but if he likes talking people's ears off about magic, I have a redundant ear handy. Can you give out his number or do you have to ask first?"
"Does his power work over the phone? I have this mental image of picking up while my roommate's around, and then flailing around and having to explain it if he says I have something," says Bella, chuckling softly. She's backed into a bit of a corner, but there's no way the personality she was revealing would pass up a chance to talk to any magic person at this point. Sigh.
"It's been a while, but as far as I can recall, by the time I noticed him he was already headed my way. He might even have come into the coffee shop specifically to talk to me; I didn't get around to asking. When I asked him why he wanted to know if I believed in magic, he said something along the lines of 'well, I noticed you have some'."
Bella decides to try layering another hex's worth of oomph to her defense against magical spying. It goes, so it must have done something, but a third hex refuses to follow it, so that must be all she could do. "Okay. I think he's clearly going to be my new best friend, if he likes talking magic as much as you say, so go ahead and give him my number."
"But in the meantime," says Bella. "I bet you can tell me more about your power, even if you inexplicably haven't quizzed all your friends on theirs. Can you do more than one person at once? How do you know it protects against any given thing - have you tested it or do you 'just know'? Maybe it's an anti-obsessing-over-the-safety-of-loved-
"Mind control was a hypothetical example," Chris assures her. "I can tell you that whoever I'm protecting is at least as resilient as Bridget, plus immune to all the hostile magic we can think of. I could also tell you how we found that out, but I'm not going to give away all my secrets."
"Depends what you mean by 'other things'. I can tell who my power is pointing at, and I can tell when they would have gotten hurt if it wasn't, and I can tell whether or not I could cover somebody if I hypothetically tried. I couldn't cover you, for example; I just checked. No idea why."
"In people I've known for a while, it seems to correlate loosely with how much they like me. In strangers and recent acquaintances, anybody's guess. Lazarus makes noises about figuring it out sometimes, but he's not always as good with the details as he'd like to be."
So, a few days later, Bella gets an email from someone called L. Anson:
Hi!
A little bird told me you have questions about magic? She is a somewhat paranoid little bird sometimes, so she would probably rather we didn't mention her name, but I am neither paranoid nor little nor a bird so I have no problem talking magic over email.
Hello, nonbird! You must be Lazarus. I have all of the questions about magic and how people act around it. Do let me know if my questions begin to annoy you, but I'm led to believe that's unlikely. Here's some to start with; I don't know how much time you have and my impatience can put up a good fight against my curiosity sometimes.
- What "native" powers have you seen that the little bird didn't mention, assuming there are some? We covered Bridget and little bird herself and a precog and you and someone with an "unobtrusiveness" power.
- Are there patterns to where and when they appear? How many people have them in the general population?
- What's up with the storebought powers? Who's buying them, what are they paying, what kinds of powers do they tend to walk away with?
- How do you work? (I'm going to want similar detail about everybody, but I might as well start with you.) What's your range? Do you function through barriers, electronic media, etc.? What does it tell you exactly, do you have to turn it on or is it passive, does anything (like little bird's power?) block you or are you some sort of unstoppable force of divination...?
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me!
-Bella
I'm making all my friends call me Nonbird now. You have no idea what you've wrought.
To answer all your questions completely out of order:
I have a sense for powers the same way I have a sense of touch or taste or sight or sound or balance. It works in all directions and through barriers, up to the same range as sight and with about the same loss of detail over distance. I know where people with powers are when they're nearby, and most of the time I can figure out what they do if I look at them long enough. 'Look' is a metaphor, of course, I used to actually squint at people but it only helps psychologically.
I haven't gathered detailed statistics, but I live in a fairly big city and I can go as long as a month without seeing any new powers, so the overall percentage can't be that high. Everyone I've talked to who knows they have a power and remembers a time when they didn't has said it came in before they were ten; I'm in the 'can't remember a time when I didn't' category. It always seems to be relevant to them in some way, although it's not always obvious until you get to know them.
"Storebought" powers are interesting. I know one or two people with them, but they're even more secretive than the little bird; they haven't told me much and they probably don't want me to repeat any of it. I can talk about the powers in the abstract, though. They're very easy to tell apart from native powers, and it's usually easier for me to tell what they do without getting up close. I've seen a few 'in the wild', so to speak; there was a mint who rode two cars down from me on the subway once, who I never saw again, and someone who walked past me in a mall who had remote viewing.
To know if the little bird's power blocked me, I would have to have looked at someone she was covering who had a power. I haven't looked at someone she was covering, powers or no, so it's hard to say. At a guess, though, I'd bet she wouldn't. Her power is very protective, and mine isn't harmful.
On the other hand, Kolya's unobtrusiveness hides itself just as well as it hides the rest of him. When he has it turned up, I'm as oblivious to him as anybody.
You're welcome for your new nickname.
A "mint"? Like... the herb, or what?
"Most of the time"? When can you not, what goes wrong?
It being a sense sounds really interesting. Do you have magical aesthetics? Would it really annoy you if someone with a certain power moved in upstairs and just went on having it at all hours of the night? Do you sense your own power directly?
Do you go out a lot? That affects how much your big city is affecting what people you see; if you're a shut-in you have your neighbors and delivery people, not a huge sample size.
What do you mean by "relevant"?
Is it generally easy to get people to talk to you about their powers, once you walk up to them and ask if they believe in magic?
Knowing a dude who can be completely unobtrusive like that sounds really disconcerting.
"Most of the time": all powers vary in how hard to figure out they are. Nonnative are always easier than native, but besides that, it just seems to be a normal variance.
I sense my own power, yes. I've never seen a power that grated on me like you describe, but I guess it's theoretically possible. Some powers are definitely prettier than others.
A certain little bird was my biggest success story in walking up to a stranger and anouncing I could see their magic underwear (so to speak). Poor Kolya faded right out from in front of me and left me saying "...I should've expected that" to thin air.
It's not that bad, honestly. Whatever stories you might have been told, his pranking days were over before I met him.
Relevance: Like the little bird having a protective power and Kolya having an unobtrusiveness power and me having a nosy power. Native powers are always something the power-haver finds useful, or something that reflects their personality.
Shut-in: Nope! I sometimes go a day without leaving the apartment, but it's rare. I see plenty of people.
Mint: Did nobody tell you about wishcoins? Who have you been talking to about magic who didn't think that was the first thing to mention? Never mind, I can guess. Mints are where "storebought" powers come from. They're very distinctive. I've never seen a native mint, but they don't exactly look like other nonnative powers, either. Anyway, a mint is what I call someone who can make coins that grant wishes. I have a lot of theories about them, but I've never met one who felt like answering my questions, so my theories remain theories. I've seen the coins, though. Even used one once. They come in different shapes and colours and they disappear when you're done with them.
Always easier as in, the easiest-to-see native power is still harder to see than the hardest-to-see bought power?
Whose power is prettiest?
How'd you salvage the situation with Kolya?
Is there a good reason for you to have this particular nosy power, and not mindreading or something?
How big's the city? Better yet, what city? Have you traveled much, does it vary regionally or anything? Besides announcing that you know, what do you usually do when you spot somebody with a power - do you ever want to become a substitute teacher of sixth-graders and patrol the country and whisk away the ones with magic to your very own Hogwarts?
The little bird mentioned wishes but didn't use the word "mint", I think I'd have remembered that. What are your theories? What shapes and colors; do those matter? What kind did you get? What did you do with it - do you have a storebought power too?
Yep.
Kolya's. But no, in all seriousness, there's no one power that stands out as obviously the prettiest in the world.
He followed me home. I promise it was cuter and less creepy than it sounds.
I've lived in a few, actually. I met Chris in New York. As far as I can tell, there aren't especially more or less powers in any one place I've been.
I have never wanted to found Hogwarts before...
Oh, don't get me started on mints. Or do, if you really really want to. But they're almost a subject unto themselves, and I know less about them than I do about the rest of magic combined but I definitely think there's more to know about them than there is about the rest of magic combined. And that's the kind of sentence they reduce me to.
So no speculations about why this nosy power and not another?
Who has an ugly power? (Are people offended if you tell them they have ugly powers?)
I think I feel like getting you started on mints. What would you have asked that fellow on the train? What have you figured out despite such uncooperativeness? How do they make the coins - at some kind of fixed rate? Performing some kind of action? You didn't tell me about what kind of wish you made either, is it private?
I don't even know what you look like (except that you are a nonbird) and I'm still forming a clear mental picture of you informing an eleven year old boy, "You're a wizard, Harry."
According to Kolya, I am, quote, "a six-four scarecrow with a nose like an ice pick and hands like two halves of a bleached spider", end quote. I don't know what that's going to do to your mental picture, but there you have it.
Whoops, forgot about the nosiness. I've thought about it, but I couldn't tell you exactly why it fits. It just does.
I've never told anybody they have an ugly power. I'm not sure anybody really does. They range from neutral to kind of pretty.
Okay, I'll start you off with the list of things I've observed directly about wishcoins, because it's much shorter:
I've seen triangular coins, square coins, and a five-sided coin. I spent a square one to fix the way my jaw used to click when I yawned and it hasn't done it since. Some of the coins were sea-green and translucent, and some of them were dark purple and opaque.
I've 'seen' three mints in my life, and only met one of them face to face. That's where I got the square. The mint who gave it to me was really intent about me keeping secret pretty much everything about our meeting, and didn't tell me much anyway, but that's where I learned that wishcoins are where nonnative powers come from. Not that I couldn't have guessed that.
I think I can 'see' coins the same way I see powers. They're much subtler, though. If I'm right, then I think the colour of a coin represents who made it, because those sea-green coins 'looked' like the power of the mint who had them.
Anything beyond that is rampant speculation.
So I suppose you have a missing finger on each hand then?
What about other people - why does Kolya have his brand of unobtrusiveness and not, like, outright invisibility? Or hiding in a pocket dimension?
Wishing for your jaw not to click seems like a kind of silly wish. Why did you pick that? Was the coin designed to only do that wish, or that kind of thing?
Tell me about your speculations! You've had more time to form them than I have.
No one ever said Kolya was good at math.
I'm not sure I can explain this to someone who doesn't have one themselves, but as far as I can tell, everyone's power is the kind of thing it makes sense to them to have. That's just intuition, though. For all I know it could be random and we could all just be reading too much into it, like horoscopes. Or having the power could make you the kind of person who would have it instead of the other way around.
Not sure I can get into the whys. Let's say it was supposed to be trivial and leave it at that.
Speculations:
I think the number of sides on a coin is an indicator of power. More sides means it can do bigger or more complicated things.
If mints are where nonnative powers come from, there has to have been a native mint at some point, doesn't there? But I've never seen one. I can't figure out why.
I said nonnative powers are easier to figure out than native ones, and that's almost always true. Mints are the exception. Or I think they are, anyway. They're a lot more complicated than any other power, but at the same time in some ways they're simpler.
There's some element of interpretation involved whenever I figure out a power. I don't just directly perceive how they work.
I've figured some things out about minting that I'm not sure I really believe. They're kind of unnerving.
Yeah, I was thinking maybe horoscopes, but your way would be interesting too. Do you know any nonmagical people who it's really obvious what they'd have if they had anything?
>They're a lot more complicated than any other power, but at the same time in some ways they're simpler.
You're gonna have to expand that sentence for me a little. I cannot read your mind, natively or otherwise!
>There's some element of interpretation involved whenever I figure out a power. I don't just directly perceive how they work.
What's that like? Is it like... learning to read, or something else?
>I've figured some things out about minting that I'm not sure I really believe. They're kind of unnerving.
Oh, you can't just leave me hanging like that, come on.
Okay, think of the difference between this picture and this picture. Which one is simpler? Which one is more complicated? Most powers are more like the first one; there's patterns there, but it takes some looking before you start to understand them. Mints are like the second one. It's big and simple and obvious at first glance, and then you look closer and there are all these intricate details.
I wish we could have this conversation over coffee or something. I'm much better at explaining things when I can wave my hands around. Although I guess I'd have a harder time Googling suitable examples. Making explanatory gestures to my computer screen just looks silly and makes it hard to type, though.
Okay, I'll tell you what I think I figured out as soon as I figure out a way to put it into words without creeping myself out.
Well, a mere phone conversation would satisfy the "don't have to type" criterion, I guess? I believe you have my number if that would suit. As of this moment I can expect to be alone in my room for an hour; after that my roommate may reappear and I'd have to find someplace else to go, but I could manage it.
But you haven't told me what creepy thing you learned about the mints! Or the one about what interpreting powers is like. I generate more questions mostly by seeing what the answers to what I already asked are.
Okay okay... what was removing the jaw-clicking like? What did you do? Did it feel like anything?
Could you get ahold of any of the mints you've met if you really wanted to?
If you were a mint, what experiments would you want to do to figure out about it?
I forgot about interpreting powers. I was going to add it to the paragraph about the difference between mints and everyone else. Actually, I think that's what's got me going on about explanatory hand gestures in the first place, not that they'd help. It's hard to describe. I'll think about it; ask me again later if I forget again.
It didn't feel like anything. I just thought a wish and the coin disappeared and then I yawned and there was no click.
If I really, really wanted to, I could probably find the sea-green one again. I don't want to that badly. Especially because I'd just be in for another round of mystery theatre.
I don't want to be a mint. If I knew a cooperative mint, I'd want to study their coins and ask them how their power works and maybe but probably not watch them use it.
Because: The creepy thing about mints is how they make coins. I think it has to do with pain somehow. See? I'm creeping myself out already. I think coins are made out of a mint's pain. Why do I think that?
Wow, that's got to be the most fucked up magic power ever. Can't they buy a nicer minting power where they can make coins out of sunshine or something instead?
Why do you think that?
Mints are also the only true duplicate power I've ever seen. That might have something to do with it. Maybe there's only one way to be a mint.
Well, that goes back to what interpreting powers is like.
This is a bad way to put it, but I can't think of any better ones: The way a power 'looks' always has some qualities that make me think of things that are like how the power works. The little bird's power looks strong and solid and, I don't know, outward? It just looks like the kind of thing that's for protecting people. And Kolya's power looks shy and like it wants to be hiding behind something at all times. My power has an outwardness to it, too, but it's not exactly the same outwardness. And it's kind of angular and all-over-the-place, like sugar crystals. (Trying to describe powers in terms of the regular senses is usually doomed to failure, but once in a while I get good analogies referencing shape or size. A certain someone's is exactly person-sized, for example, although that has nothing to do with the size it appears to have in the physical world, because all powers are also the shape and size of the people who have them. But on a different level, they meaningfully aren't. Confused yet?)
So: the mint power 'looks' like a thing that turns pain into wishes.
I repeat: most fucked up power ever.
Maybe it's a conspiracy and the native mint does it differently but only sells this kind of minting to limit others' power! Wait, that's technically not a conspiracy, it only calls for one person. But you know what I mean.
I am a little confused, but maybe not as confused as you fear? I understand you're trying to talk about an extra sense with a language designed around its absence.
What else do you know about the wishes? What does "complexity" or "size" mean in terms of whether a wish needs one kind of coin or another? Is there any reason for people to be associated with the colors they are or does that seem random?
Bella's pretty sure it's not a conspiracy. She tried hexing herself a better wishcoining power once, even though Elias said it wouldn't work in his book. It didn't work.
I don't know a lot about the wishes. And like I said, I haven't exactly seen enough colour combinations to have a good theory. That one mint didn't particularly seem like a sea-green person or anything.
I don't really know what complexity or size mean other than the obvious. Well, I guess "the obvious" isn't necessarily all that obvious. Bigger-and-more-complicated wishes are wishes that accomplish more things, or more of a thing. If I'd wanted to, I don't know, fix a broken arm as well as my clicky jaw, that might have taken a coin with one more side. Or even a broken arm instead of my clicky jaw. But I don't have any more than the vaguest possible sense of how the size of a wish actually relates to the number of sides it needs. For that matter, I don't know how many sides a coin can have. Maybe it stops at five, or maybe it keeps going up indefinitely and the most powerful coins just look like circles.
Have you met Bridget before? It occurs to me that I have no idea - I quizzed her extensively and she always had explanations for how she knew everything, she never said "Lazarus told me that I could do X" or anything. It just seems like you could develop a lot more usefulness if you had more of a sample size to look at properly, and she might not object, though I'd have to ask.
I dunno. What do you do with your time, anyway, nonbird, since you don't run Hogwarts?
[This guy seems like the best chance I have of finding out what the hell is the matter with stars - directly, or indirectly by getting him to find mints until he finds one who knows,] Bella remarks. [I'm considering dropping secrecy around him after I know him a bit better. He may wish to perform sinister experiments on you.]
He wouldn't mind frying his brain in the process, either—it sounds like pretty much the best way to go that he can think of—but he'd mind that she minded, kind of.
[Would I like his sinister experiments? I bet I'd like his sinister experiments. I wonder if he's cute.]
Bridget's the physicist, isn't she? Dr. Banner? I've seen her, but not talked to her extensively. Her power is interesting. You'd think it would look like the little bird's, but it doesn't at all, even though there's some overlap in effect.
I have a boring nonmagical job where I do boring nonmagical things. I also like wandering around watching strangers do things. I'm told this is a creepy hobby.
Yes, she's a physicist. That's funny that her power doesn't resemble little bird's - can you describe the differences via poorly-suited metaphor in uncooperative words, please?
Boring nonmagical job sounds like the worst thing. In particular, it sounds boring.
I think people-watching is a thing. I mean, there's a word for it. And it makes sense in your case.
> can you describe the differences via poorly-suited metaphor in uncooperative words, please?
Oh, yes, that's my favourite. :P
They do the same thing, or part of the same thing, but they do it in very different ways. The little bird's power is very outward, like I said; it goes outward from her to the person she's protecting and then looks outward again to guard them. Bridget's power is very, very inward. It works on her, not on the world around her. And it's big and small at the same time, like there's really three times as much Bridget as the world gets to see, trying to press itself down into just slightly less space than she nominally occupies. (Powers looking a little smaller than their people isn't unique—Kolya's does it too—but I've never seen one be simultaneously bigger like that.)
Bridget's power just working on her makes sense to me. She was kind enough to let me try to break her wrist. It didn't go. Nothing happened to me, her wrist just wasn't a breakable thing. I'd be vaguely curious what would happen if I made an attempt at attacking the little bird's niece - I imagine her wrist wouldn't break either, but it might not-break in an interestingly different way.
How long have you known all these various magical people?
He has no idea if he could follow such a rule, but he wants to know the answer nevertheless. And for the record, Bella can do all the sexy experimenting she wants with whoever she wants and Alice will have no problem with that at all.
Bella considers this. [I suppose that given sufficient magic making the excess complications of diseases and babies not-a-problem, the only thing that has me worried is that someone else will do their equivalent of calling you a freak, and then I have to share not just my boyfriend but also my pet masochist, and then I have to keep that person happy or run the risk of turning them into my archenemy and not having my advantage. But that could happen without sexy experiments, too, perhaps just as easily considering the timeline with you and me. So it makes more sense to focus on mitigating the possibility that I will wind up sharing you with an archenemy than just naively banning sinister experimentation with magic-detectors who may or may not be cute and expecting that to solve the quandary.]
Why not? It wouldn't work any more than it did on Bridget. And I'd ask first. Ethical experimental procedures, and all. I don't know little bird's niece, of course, but if I met her why not inquire?
Sure, but when did you meet Kolya?
He's not sure it's as much of a problem as Bella makes it out to be, though. If Freddie Mercury rose from the dead tomorrow and tried to recruit him to conquer the world at the head of a horde of fabulous zombies, he would probably side with Bella in the ensuing conflict, despite the self-evident awesomeness of Freddie Mercury with a zombie horde.
[So... you're pretty sure that I win in any of various contests between me and miscellaneous others you could fall in love with?] Bella asks. [Just because I showed up first or what? How do you know? I think you and I are both already protected against various direct attacks I'd try if I were my nemesis, but not against just plain mind-changing...]
He can't even imagine the qualities someone would need to have before that person being themselves would be as intrinsically fascinating to him as Bella being Bella.
But why do you think that?
I'm curious about correlations between how long you've known someone and how much you know about their power. And, there seems to be this whole network of magic people that I just stumbled across and I want to know how long it's existed.
Sure it is. It's not a club or a political party or even a circle of friends, but it's certainly a network.
Have you met little bird's niece?
Also, he is kind of really distracted by Bella saying the words I'd want you dead. That gives him all kinds of lovely feelings.
[I'm not yet certain I can't change it. Or mitigate the downside potential, or cut the chances,] she says instead.
Why not?
Bella is getting the creeping suspicion that Chris's niece isn't just Chris's niece. Lazarus knows enough to make him nervous, and what he knows isn't much.
She emails Bridget.
Have you met her niece?
She'll assume that Bridget knows there's only one mutually salient "her" with a niece worth asking about.
She spends a pentagon. She doesn't know if his email is being watched, but whoever her nemesis might be can hire a dozen people to spy on her on campus; they can hire one decent cracker.
[Boo.]
[Ooh, my turn to answer questions,] laughs Bella. [First of all - you're not going to run off and tell the little bird, or anyone, that I said hi, are you? Or rather, that I said "boo"? Because you're right. She's kinda scary. Someone has been watching me, by suspiciously numerous proxies, and I don't know if it's her or someone else but I'd rather not chance her finding out. But I don't think you're working for whoever - a smart spooky force with you working for them would give you a lot more information to work with, I think. It would just be terribly inconvenient if you chose now to sign on with whoever wants so badly to spy on me.]
[The pain thing is totally a thing,] Bella says. [Wishing for it to be sunshine instead does not work. The mint who gave you the square was a cheat if he was trying to get any substantial concession for it; you can get one of those by just biting the inside of your cheek decently hard, they're cheap. Well, not you, but mints. My coins are glowy and red, if you want to know. More sides do mean more power. There are triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, and seven-pointed stars. I don't know about anything beyond that. Stars are overkill for all practical purposes I have encountered thus far. More pain equals a "bigger" coin - I came up with a scale for it, and each tier of coin is a new power of ten. One through nine gets you a triangle, ten through ninety-nine gets a square, and so on.]
[This part involves the biggest secret to my success, so to speak,] Bella says seriously. [I also don't know how closely you're being supervised - I don't know why the folks spying on me aren't using your valuable powers, but if they have a fraction of a brain they are paying attention to you. You can't do anything weird. You can't tell anyone, even Kolya, till I've had a chance to evaluate him myself. Capisce?]
[My boyfriend is the most masochistic masochist ever,] Bella says. [I've only ever made one hex. It made him a mint. He can make even stars all by himself - you know, recreationally - but I also hexed up a power that lets me help him out, and it comes with the units, where one unit is the bare minimum of pain to make a triangle.] Pause. [He has expressed an interest in having sinister experiments performed on him, by the way. I don't know if that would be discomfiting more than it would be curiosity-satisfying.]
[That was my phrase, actually. Whatever kind of sinister experiments would be informative for your magic-sense. Information is useful. I do not understand why you have not been eaten by a shadowy magical conspiracy already. Wanna be in mine? I'm nice, I promise.] Pause. [We could also make this a conference call if you'd like to talk to him directly.]
[I want to take over the world,] Bella says. [And make it behave itself. For example, at some point, when I can either do it inconspicuously or no longer need to be discreet, I intend to eradicate malaria. I'm lying low for the time being specifically because I don't know where all the world's mints and natively magic people are or what they are doing, but whatever they are doing does not meet my exacting standards.]
[He doesn't really have a non-recreational setting. I can make small ones non-recreationally if that would be more comfortable for you, though. What does your current boring job involve? I can help you with a cover story so Kolya doesn't wonder what you're up to - you can "apply for a job" that requires you to "sign a lot of confidentiality agreements". And then if you'd rather hang out with my conspiracy than do what you're doing, the "job" can hire you and require relocation.] Quotation marks appear in the text channel where appropriate.
[Yes! Yes I did. Designing powers is fun,] Bella says. [Bring him with you if you like and can explain why and he wants to come, we have access to money to provide from your fictitious job with a secretive wee startup and it's not like it would be hard to get more.]
[That's probably fine eventually, I just have to be comfortable with telling him too before he gets all up in my secrets,] Bella says. [I would also really not like him to be able to unobtrusiveness at me, so I would want your help designing a workaround.]
Pentagon goes. Checking, checking...
[Ours is in an unobtrusive wall in a stairwell, so we can see if anyone's coming. It's invisible to most people, and doesn't admit sound or strangers, and so on,] Bella adds. [So you could put it anywhere there's space to walk. It wouldn't even have to be in a surface; you won't go through by accident even if it's in the middle of your living room.]
[Except insofar as the wishes constitute natural experiments, not much - it may vary with coin size, and while I can be moderately frivolous with hexes, I wouldn't like to be caught short of them if something unwelcome were to happen unexpectedly. I have made many wishes in the course of things and have a decent feel for what they'll do, though.]
[As in, if I want to use one, I use one - I just prefer to be decently sure that I want to use one. Triangles do tiny things. Flick lightswitches across the room, hurry along kitchen tasks like boiling water, banish itches in inconvenient locations in the middle of your back, whatever. I'll give you a bagful as a signing bonus into the conspiracy if you like. You could probably do creative productive things if you wanted, with a triangle - I'd use one to pull a fire alarm anonymously if I wanted a building evacuated, for instance. Squares are next up and if I were dealing with coin scarcity I'd use more of them than anything else. They can conjure inherently nonmagical medium-sized physical objects, perform tasks a grade up from triangle sorts of things, grant temporary nonmagical skills - it's disconcerting as hell when those go away though - and make illusions that stay put till you want them gone. Pentagons are good for permanent nonmagical skills, like my languages and stuff, and they can also conjure modestly magical objects, like my kickass motorcycle or appliances that don't need electricity. Hexes are good for permanent magical superpowers - stuff the X-Men could do, except it's worth being careful in design - and big, complicated makings-of-stuff, like doors that lead hundreds or thousands of miles away.]
[Well,] Bella said. [If I were older, I hope you'd expect me to have made commensurate progress in the shadowy conspiracy department? I'd be very skeptical of someone who was thirty, had ambitions to take over the world, and hadn't made any noticeable progress yet. I can at least claim to have gotten out of high school early, discovered a magical network, begun to poach it, and made inroads into various circles full of people with various forms of power who could be helpful or inconvenient depending. At age eighteen.]
[Because it is not being operated suitably,] Bella says. [Did I not cover that? Even without magic, a lot of the problems might have been soluble. You don't see people coming down with smallpox anymore; average wealth keeps going up; we have made limited but nonzero progress on going into space - I would've just pushed on things that needed pushing.]
[Is there only one such place?] Bella says, getting up to head for the unobtrusive stairwell in her own building. [Also, is Kolya home? I presume I'll be lit up like a billboard to you even if I arrive invisible, but I'm still not down with the "unobtrusiveness" thing.]
[Extremely,] says Lazarus. He stares for a moment longer at the visually unremarkable location of invisible Bella on the other side of the door, then looks away. [For that matter, I can see the door. It's kind of... cute? And you're a little overwhelming, to be honest. The stack of powers is very analogous-to-bright. Oh, and you've got a native one under there, that's nice. Did you mention that? I forget.]
The apartment is small and moderately cluttered, mainly with loose books. Some of them are on furniture; others are being used as furniture. The couch has two free cushions and one pile of mixed fiction and non-. There is a bookshelf, but it is over capacity and then some.
He makes an 'oh, dear' sort of face.
[That one. The this-must-be-what-you-meant-by-helping-
[I am shiny,] Bella remarks. [That's about all I could make heads or tails of.]
[Okay, so that's not going to get anywhere unless I figure out a clever magical translation mechanism. Maybe I should just wish up a facsimile of your power, but it's clearly very complicated and you've got relevant experience and nativ-itude with it - for example, you can see my anti-magical-spying power apparently - so I think I'd rather just retain your services directly.]
[So, speaking of retaining you, you now have a magic door in your building that leads to my dorm,] Bella says. [Provided I can either become comfortable spilling the beans to Kolya or you're pretty sure he will not attempt to follow you - he can't get through the door, but he could see you disappear - you wanna job?]
[You can email him to tell him I've been magically kidnapped if you're prepared to answer all his questions about why and how and general fussing. Also, apparently I've been rendered imperceptible and un-wish-on-able except to... one or a few people, I'm not sure, I can just tell there's an exception. I guess brainphone doesn't count.]
She brings Alice up to speed in a rapid-fire summary with half her overclocked brain while she slips through the magic door back to Stanford.
[Yes, but the spot check would have detected magical spying... But if they were only spot checking you I could have easily missed them. And then they wouldn't have been able to see you when I was in the room with you and they panicked and yoinked. Ack, I'm sorry.]
[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.]
[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.]
Wish.
Poof.
[Done.]
Feeling like a bit of an anticlimax, Bella sets herself at x2 and goes to check her email, turning over what she'd do if she wanted to keep someone in a box and how she could thwart herself.
Someone using Lazarus's email account has replied to the tail end of their conversation. That someone is probably not Lazarus, because the email was sent two minutes ago, while Lazarus was wandering around an empty warehouse.
The message reads as follows:
WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HIM???
She writes back, carefully. The email exchange contained no evidence of Bella herself having magic - but it's probably still the most suspicious thing in Lazarus's inbox.
You must be Kolya. I didn't do anything with Lazarus. What makes you think I did?
I don't know who might have done that.It's not helpful, but keeping Kolya focused on replying to emails instead of making an obvious - visible - fuss seems like a good plan.
[No specific thing you can't tell him if it seems like he ought to know, at this point - he already knows something's going on and thinks I'm involved - but I'd rather be present in the conversation if you want to tell him everything instead of just calming him down.]
And a moment later: [Kolya? It's me.]
The third party to the call yelps wordlessly.
[Yes, I know, magic mental phone,] says Lazarus. [It's very weird. I'm with you there.]
[Where are you,] says a quiet, woeful voice presumably belonging to Kolya.
[Well, I'm not sure,] Lazarus admits. [But I'm more or less safe for the moment. And it's not Bella's fault, exactly.]
[You're so reassuring,] sniffs Kolya. [How is it inexactly her fault?]
[Kind of a long story,] says Lazarus.
[FYI, not a private conversation,] Bella inserts. [My apologies for my inexact fault. Someone has been spying on Lazarus - what I think happened is that when I came for a visit, they couldn't do that anymore because I'm all wrapped up in defensive magic, and they yoinked him to find out what was going on.]
[Yes, this is all bad. By the way, Kolya, you're now immune to coin-based magical attempts to mess with you, including via further yoinking - but I don't want to assume their resources are all magical. There might be folks on their way to you too. You may wish to consider being hidey - and that might not do the trick if they know about you, such as via Chris's involvement, and flood the apartment with chloroform or something. So you might also want to consider being in a place you have never previously visited.]
[Lazarus, I'm beginning to wonder where, geographically, you are. Are there windows - is it night or day?] Bella asks. [Is there writing on the boxes and so on? What's the temperature like, and is there any AC or heating on that you can determine? Humidity, audible wildlife outside, traffic noises?]
[Day,] says Lazarus. [No writing on the boxes, but the emergency exit signs are in English. Temperature's a little cold, I can't tell about climate control but I'm guessing no. No audible wildlife. Maybe some traffic? But not close. So I guess I'm not that far from home. I could even still be in Toronto. ...I can think of a way you could locate me more precisely, but I'm not sure you'd like it.]
[Un-yoinked here meaning everything from me teleporting you out, to you walking out the door,] Bella says. [That's very annoying. If they know you're an important resource why didn't they kidnap you already, or make friendly overtures like I did inside of a few days of meeting you?]
[Little things. Not necessarily useless things. Flick a switch you can't reach. Distract somebody with an itch someplace they can't reach. You could probably pry a nail out of a crate with one. You could set a very small fire - which you'd want to make sure wouldn't turn into a not very small fire, since you can't escape at the moment. Anything you could do by yourself in five to ten minutes without magic, you can probably do it with a triangle instantaneously - with exceptions, like, I don't think triangles can talk. They'll heal little bruises and scratches.]
[I don't remember exact details; it was a while ago, and she was being very mysterious about where she found this guy. But she knows I like magic and she wanted to know what I thought. Of him, of their operation, I'm not sure. I confessed to being a little creeped out and she never mentioned him again.]
[Okay. So there's a local mint who Chris knows. He can at least make pentagons; it's possible to overshoot, if you're not using my favored methods, and wind up with something bigger than you meant to, so even if he doesn't aim for hexes he's probably made some. Good to know.]
He hesitates.
[And... I think, while I was there, I saw the mint who makes the dark purple coins. They were on a different floor and too far away for me to be sure about the coins part, especially because I wasn't even sure coins were identifiable that way, but they were definitely a mint.]
[Chris knows one. She probably knows the other one. You haven't met many mints just randomly walking around so this isn't likely to be a coincidence. Chris knows you - and would have had the wherewithal to spot-check spy on you. Chris doesn't go around with persistent magic powers besides her native one, though?]
Bella paces, back in her room; Janine is still away. [Now, wait, this is interesting. If they don't really want you for themselves - but they desperately don't want me to have you - so much so that they freak out and burn a really expensive coin to get you really stuck - why might that be? What's something I would behave that way around... If there were another masochist on the level of my boyfriend running around, then, I think, I might act like that. I don't need another one, but I'd sure want to know if someone I didn't like and anticipated opposing was going for one; I might yoink first and ask questions later, and if I didn't have a lot of spare coins I might not show up immediately to explain myself because I'd have to get there on the bus or whatever. Something valuable but redundant to them, that's what you are. But you aren't a mint. You wouldn't be an especially good one. You are good at finding things out.]
Bella paces. She thinks.
[If my inferences hold... then... you know - or can find out via your power - something that they already know, and consider a very important secret.]
[My boyfriend, my pet masochist, my font of hexes, my extremely fantastically convenient mint-in-cahoots,] Bella says. [He wants Lazarus to perform sinister experiments on him. Lazarus, any guesses about what the secret might be? Something innocuous-seeming, maybe.]
[Here's how I found out about magic: I literally fell into a hideout that a distant ancestor of mine magicked up to only admit his descendants. In this hidey-hole was one hexagon, and a book. The hexagon made me a mint; the book explained what the hell was going on. The book says stars are dangerous. I have stars, I can get more stars if I want them - and I don't dare make a wish on them because I don't know why they are dangerous, or how, let alone how to get around it. Maybe they think that if you stare at a star long enough, you'll know how to operate one. Jeez. Maybe they know how to work stars - but they don't have a pet masochist like I have. And haven't used their pentagons to make one, so if I'm smart I will not piss them off overmuch because that they could likely do any time it occurred to them, and it may if they're desperate.]
Yeah, I heard she's a PhD, like you. Do you know her well at all?Bella is not sure how to get from here to more substantive questions.
"Nope," she says. "But I know some people. You remember I told you I've been whisked off to a lab once? Well, Chris's niece was responsible for getting me out. She has her hands on a lot of strings. And once in a while she has a use for a physicist, or someone who can't get hurt, or someone who has a semi-legitimate reason to take an undergraduate biology class at Stanford." Bridget shrugs. "I was supposed to get to know you well enough to have a good guess whether or not you'd like to join up, and then if it seemed like a yes, ask. Except that there's been some kind of unspecified disaster and now I'm just supposed to come clean."
[Bridget's in the sinister organization,] she reports detachedly, to Alice and Lazarus both.
"I knew it was weird that you were in that class. I knew it."
She swallows; if she freaks out she'll stay freaked out for an inconveniently long time. She can not-freak-out if she wants; she has that power. She can be collected and figure out how to move forward. If she runs at 3x and doesn't let any of her tripled mind vote to scream at her "friend".
"Join up with what?"
"I have yet to come up with a way to explain it that doesn't sound incredibly shady," she says wryly, "but it isn't really all that shady. Libby collects useful people she's on friendly terms with, and then once in a while she asks one of them for a favour. She looks out for us, too. See above regarding me not getting whisked off to a lab again. The reason it's such a big secret is because things like her ability to make sure nobody tries to do science to me would take a big hit if it was common knowledge that she was doing it at all. Well, that and the magic."
"Sure," says Bridget. "Depending what exactly you want to do. But just as an example, even if I somehow had the wish power and could somehow make coins with it, I probably couldn't keep myself out of the hands of unscrupulous experimenters nearly as well as I can by asking Libby to keep an eye out."
"And 'Libby' is not the type to... say... put you back in a lab if you should displease her in some way," Bella says. "Or to have put you in one in the first place so she could rescue you. Or to take undue advantage of her power in any coercive way. Is that the story?"
"I was getting at how she treats people who are not yet hers - or who used to be hers," Bella says. "How sure are you she didn't put you in the lab? I mean, it was pretty effective at buying your loyalty, and you're making it sound like the kind of situation she could manufacture. How sure are you that she wouldn't squirrel you away in one if you felt like defecting?"
"I generally don't ask," says Bridget. "And I'm pretty sure she tries to recruit every recruitable magical person she can find, just because having us on her side is preferable to the other option. But I still don't actually know that you're magical. Also, spying implies I was reporting on you in some way, which I haven't been unless you count a few iterations of 'have you broken it to her yet?' and one of 'is she dead?' And no, I didn't ask what that one was about, either."
"Maybe you weren't sending her detailed reports, but -" Bella's not going to reveal that she knows she was being otherwise stared at - "you set out to meet me because someone else took an interest in me without - I assume? - having ever met me in person. It's not like Libby decided to introduce us because she's pals with us both and thought we'd get along. How are you characterizing her motives as anything other than spying, even if it happens that the only question she asked you is whether I died?"
"I thought you said she wanted to see if I was recruitable," Bella says, staccato. "If - I don't know, the NSA, thought that I had good grades and maybe I would be useful to them and they decided to tap my phone in order to find out if I have problematic personal associations without telling me any of this was going on? That'd also be spying."
"It's a secret organization," says Bridget. "With very few exceptions, nobody gets to hear it exists until we're already pretty sure they'd want to join. You're one of those exceptions now, apparently; you weren't one a month ago. So, yes, seeing if you're recruitable was a prerequisite to trying to recruit you."
"It's like gossip, except for a sinister organization instead of a mere social group," Bella says. "Perhaps this straddles the line. Is the disaster the thing that you don't know any details about that caused her to tell you to come clean, or the fact that I think I have been spied on? Because the fact that Libby mishandled me once" (and Lazarus once, but Bridget doesn't know about that, does she?) "doesn't necessarily mean we can't work together - I just would need to know more."
[And,] Bella adds to her brainphone conference call, [Chris's niece Libby runs the sinister organization, or at least has Bridget as a direct report and keeps mum about upper levels.]
"I may be paranoid, but I didn't expect you to be indestructible, and even after learning you were indestructible I did not expect you to be a spy," Bella says. "To my chagrin, I have been operating under the assumption that there was nothing more of significance to you that might need drawing out. Why would I have sent a mugger-creep even if I had the wherewithal to command mugger-creeps? And if she's looking out for you against mugger-creeps why did a mugger-creep shoot you?"
"I've talked to Lazarus - Chris introduced us. Lazarus says wishcoins are made out of pain. If Libby finds wishcoiners interesting, it's because she wants to hurt them and extract some benefit from that. Or talk them into hurting themselves, I suppose. As long as she finds wishcoiners more interesting than comparable nonmagical people, it boils down to that."
"Nowhere specific. It just doesn't seem all that benign to me. Gains from trade are a thing - but I'm not sure how much of that to expect to see here. Because I don't know what's on offer or what's being asked, but it sure sounds like Libby expects it to involve me being in a hell of a lot of pain, if I'm interesting because she thinks I'm a wishcoiner."
"She asks people not to do things as often as she asks them to do things," says Bridget. "She might, hypothetically, if you don't end up deciding you want nothing to do with us, just ask you to let her know what you're up to in a general sense and once in a while change what you're doing so you don't interfere with someone else. And then once in a while you can ask her to change what someone else is doing so it doesn't interfere with you. My impression is that the reason she's so keen to figure out strange wishcoiners is because they have the potential to cause a lot of trouble and she wants to avoid that, not because she has magic she wants them to do."
"I suppose that makes sense," Bella acknowledges. "Keeping people from running into each other sounds like a worthwhile service. But I'm getting the impression that she's not usually very forthcoming with information, which I think I would find infuriating in any significant dose."
"I've managed not to do it so far," says Bridget. "I keep secrets that I know I should keep. But if I knew a lot more than I do about Libby and her people, I might be telling you things right now that you're not supposed to know. And I'm not nearly as curious as you are, so I don't want to know those things enough for it to be worth the risk."
"Can I ask you," Bella says, "not to mention to Libby any personal details - like, anything I've mentioned in passing about members of my family, or my boyfriend, or even Janine or anybody? I am still rather paranoid about this whole thing and I don't want mysterious badnesses happening to people I like if Libby and I should happen to fail to get along."
"One of the recent ones was about disappearing things," she recalls. "As in, an object suddenly replaced by vacuum. I advised her not to do it, especially if there was an open container involved. I'm pretty sure the relativistic baseball question was recreational, but I might as well point out to you that it is a bad idea to accelerate any solid object to a significant fraction of c within the Earth's atmosphere."
[Conference call,] Bella says musically, including Lazarus and Alice both. [Alice, this is Lazarus, he who may perform sinister experiments on you if we can ever get him out of the box. Lazarus, your would-be test subject if you can ever get over your squeamishness.]
[Let me put it this way: Lazarus, when Alice found out about Bridget's power, his first instinct was to be very sorry for her, because she's missing out on his favorite thing. Alice: I have already been asked not to describe any "unsanitary" methods by which you could generate large coins.]
[I have formed the background expectation that you will be around, and have a basically serviceable model of what that should mean to me,] Bella says. [If you disappeared, this would be alarming and require mental adjustment. I'm calling that being-used-to-you.]
[Ooh, carrot cake,] Bella comments. [Lazarus, we could teleport you something to eat, right? Assuming you eat neatly without the benefit of a plate and pretend to be hungry when Libby-or-whoever fetches you there should be no associated informational giveaway.]
"I don't actually know that she's dangerous," she says, "but more to the point, I don't know that she's not. And it's important to know that, because if you spend enough time with her, you could end up teaching her very dangerous things. Not even necessarily on purpose. But let's just say: there are some kinds of magic that, carelessly or maliciously handled, could lead to the destruction of all life on Earth. I would rather keep them in as few hands as possible."
"I'd also like to point out that I haven't destroyed the planet so far," Libby adds. "Nor do I intend to. I like this planet. But I can't really be sure of whether or not some teenager I've never met can handle that responsibility, and needless to say, I'm erring on the side of caution here."
[She's being civil, for a kidnapper,] Bella says instead, trying to sound humorless yet not amusingly deadpan.
[See if she'll give you a hexagon to use on defensive magic - maybe ask for one for Kolya too, I don't know how many she has but it should be a smaller number - so that I can't do anything too bad to you, har har, and assure her you don't want the world exploded, and ask if you can leave?] Bella suggests.
"I don't exactly have stacks of coins to play with," she says. "And, no offense, I'm not sure you have the experience to protect yourself if I gave you the magic. And even if I send you home protected against mind control, there's no guarantee she won't try a more primitive kind of coercion."
[Does your antimagic ward protect you from further spot-checking of the kind that let them determine my location last time?] Bella inquires. [I should probably not show up in your apartment again, because as your enchanted watch shows there are ways around it - they could just look in the window - but we could meet in places they don't know to expect you to appear, if they can't look at you anymore. Also, you may want to call Kolya back from wherever he's escaping to.]
[You had a look at my powers. Did they look suitable to you?] Bella asks. [You could also continue using the watch for mental defensive purposes. Libby didn't seem to notice it. But we're not short enough on hexes that you have to if you'd rather not depend on an accessory.]
[Hmm.] Bella considers. [You can see magic through the magic door just fine. I could leave a star by the exit in Alice's lair, the door to which is just around the corner from the door to your building, and you could hang around near the door but not go through it and inspect from there. Nothing much for spies to see, and I think we have to expect them to look or I doubt Libby would have been so willing to keep you unwishable. Would that do the trick, do you think?]
[I am typically reasonable, yes. If we assume Libby does not casually teleport when she doesn't have to, I have a minimum of several hours before she appears near me. She could, however, also choose to phone or email me. Can I interest you in a hex for a lovely new power, please?]
[You must be hard to get Christmas presents for. I think we've covered what you can do with triangles and squares - you still have some triangles, I think. Pentagons do nonmagical skills, spectacular motorcycles and other sundry objects, etcetera. Hexes will do stuff like lairs, magic doors, that sort of thing.]
[Alice has a lair that he lives in most of the time. I made it with a hex. Me and him are the only people who can get into it. I'd add you, if it were safe for you to become invisible.] Bella makes a small face. [The hex did the layout, the entrance, the air filtration, the climate control, and the lighting all in one go.]