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"I briefly considered her my nemesis," agrees Bella. "But now she works for me."

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...Sandy cracks up.

"Seriously? That's awesome."
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"Yes. Yes it is." She mentally consults the time; it is nowhere near her appointment with Anna. "What else would you like to know? Or tell me, for that matter? If you had as many wishes as you were willing to suffer through the requisite discomfort for, as opposed to the traditional three..." She shrugs. "What would you wish for?"

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He blows out a breath, and thinks about it.

"If I had unlimited magic to throw around... I'd want a planet," he decides. "I don't know whether I'd make it or find one I liked and move in. But I'd have my own planet, and I'd live there and just make stuff all the time." As an afterthought, "I'd give myself magic Internet, too. You can do that, right?"
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"Olympus has magic internet free to all residents with internet-friendly devices," agrees Bella. "It was easier to just make my own ISP than to figure out how to wire the place traditionally. I have not yet taken the step of installing a web browser in my brain, but it's occurred to me. A planet's kind of big for one person. Why a planet and not a moon or an asteroid?"

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"Because I'd want to make big things," he says, gesturing expansively. "Mountain ranges. Floating castles. There's only so many of those you can fit on a moon before it starts getting crowded."

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"I have a castle on the moon," muses Bella. "It doesn't float. It doesn't take up that much room, either."

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"I could start with a moon, I guess," he says. Half-smiling: "If you don't want me crowding up too much of your solar system with my crap."

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Bella waves a hand. "I'm going to colonize the entire galaxy. Giving one person who's helping me do that proprietorship of Mercury or permission to occupy some currently unoccupied solar orbital shell with a new planet isn't a big deal. If I hire you and you stay on long enough."

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"You know, I'm liking this job more and more," he says. "But I still wanna sleep on it."

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"Sure. Do you want me to take you home now?"

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"...Okay," he decides. "Sure. I can just email you if I think of any really urgent questions, right?"

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"Sure can," she agrees. And she teleports them back to his squalid little residence.

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He hasn't even sipped his orange juice, although it's still in his hand. He does that now.

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"Bye," she says, waving cheerfully, and she goes back to Marspire. There's a while to kill before Anna will be expecting her, and she blocked off this entire afternoon in expectation of Sandy's interview taking longer.

Usually she'd kill the spare hour flying or designing cities or something.

Today -

She takes a nap that is exactly one hour long.

In Alice's bed, in Alice's lair.

And then she wakes up and triangles her hair presentable and teleports invisibly to Montreal.
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Anna lives in a slightly better and considerably tidier apartment. When Bella arrives, she's just finishing a herringbone braid on her hair.

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Bella becomes visible. "Hi, Anna," she says.

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She drops the end of her braid.

"Whoa, warn a girl!" she exclaims, fumbling to pick it back up and tie it off. "...I mean hi."
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"My fault," says Bella. A triangle from biting the inside of her lip snugs the dropped bits and attachs the hairtie. "There you go. For future reference, what kind of warning do you want?"

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"...You could maybe knock," she says. "On the door."

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"I should probably pick up that habit," agrees Bella. "Will do. Ready to go to Mars?"

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Anna laughs, examines her magically tied hair, and nods. "Sure."

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Teleportation!

Bella explains the non-disclosure agreement just the same way as she did for Sandy.
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Anna regards her skeptically, then says, "...Okay..."

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And there goes the geas.

She makes a triangle. "This is a wishcoin," she says.
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