"Wish for or wish with?"

"Wish with. Wanna try? This one will only do itty-bitty things, like finishing up your braid for you," Bella says, sliding the triangle across the table.

"Nicely chosen experiment. Now, the reason that one only does little bitty things is because it's a triangle. There are also squares, pentagons, hexagons, seven-pointed stars, and I have exactly one eight-pointed three-dimensional thing that isn't particularly coinlike. Wishcoins are very convenient; the more points they've got, the more they can do. The inconvenient thing about them is where they come from." Pause, breath, eye contact. "Wishcoins are made of pain."

"Thaaaaaaat's creepy," says Anna.

"Yeah, I know, my original assessment was along the lines of 'these are fucked-up magic powers,'" Bella agrees. "It's not something I can edit, not even with a star. I cannot make it so that wishcoins are made out of sunshine. They're just made of pain. More pain, pointier coin. I can make triangles and squares. I can make pentagons if I have to. I made a hexagon once, and I wasn't in that situation on purpose. And I used to have help, who could manufacture stars for days on end if the situation called for it, but he has wandered into another dimension and I don't know whether to expect him back - but I have to assume he's gone. Hence, job posting."

"Job posting for... people who like pain?" she hazards. "Wow, okay, not something I ever thought would land me a job."

"I filtered for some other criteria too, but, yeah, that's the big one," says Bella. "I'd do it myself, but I have a native magic power - and native trumps wished and mine does not like the idea of my being adjusted that way."

"What other criteria?"

"You don't have a job that you like - I don't know whether you have none at all or just don't like the one you have. You aren't, at least in principle, anti-Empire-of-the-Stars or weirded out by magic. And according to a naive, loose, magically-handled definition of the terms, you are reasonably bright and decent."

"Depends on the coin," says Bella, spreading her hands. "I'm not going to sugar-coat it - for the big ones it's a lot. When I made the only hexagon I have ever made, I was hit by a van, broke most of the bones in my body, and might never have woken, let alone walked again, if my previous coinmaking helper hadn't patched me up. Stars are worse. It goes up exponentially per coin type in a unit I call 'triangles' because it's the minimum amount of pain to make one triangle - just a pinprick will do. So a square is what you get for anything in the range of ten to ninety-nine triangles."

"...What happens if I can't churn these things out like you need me to? Or are you that sure your magic note was on the ball?"

"Magic is pretty good about this sort of thing," Bella says. "And while I can't make myself the right amount of masochist, it is an achievable edit for brains that aren't walled in like mine. And if you don't work out for some other reason, no big deal, I send you your last paycheck and you can go home or live on Mars like a regular Martian or whatever, although any coins you do make would still have to be dealt with appropriately."

She raises her eyebrows. "Dealt with appropriately meaning...?"

"I don't really care if there are triangles floating around, as long as I don't have to deal with the PR issue of people knowing what constitutes them," says Bella, waving a hand. "Triangles aren't a big deal. Squares and up, though, can be, especially stars, which are mean and which you should not ever try to use. Martian ground rules prevent people from doing nasty things to each other, but there is a magic door to Earth right in the middle of this city. So I'd want to have the coins, or I'd want to be sure that you weren't giving them out like party favors and were using them responsibly. The last occupant of this position invited me to read his mind. I don't want to make that a condition of employment, but I do want to take the fact that I'm giving out phenomenal cosmic power very seriously."

"I am not super keen on you reading my mind," says Anna. "But I'm almost hesitant to ask what else you'd do to make sure I'm not, I don't know, handing out... pentagons?... on the sly."

"Geases like the nondisclosure agreement are an option," Bella says. "I'm open to suggestions."

"Ehhhhhh, geases against what," she says, looking uneasy.

"Letting coins you make leave your possession except in specified ways?" suggests Bella, shrugging. "The way I designed the power, I can release a geas - or even remove just parts of it, as long as the result is strictly less binding than the original - at any time, so there would be opportunities to revise it if it turned out to be inconvenient."

"That's probably okay," she decides after a moment.

Bella nods. "I don't expect most people to want 'mindreading subject' as part of their job description," she says ruefully. "Do you have more questions? Or anything you want to tell me? I'd let you keep some reasonable fraction of the hexes and smaller you made, if I hire you; what would you do with them?"

"Um... boring things," she says. "Make my life more comfortable."

Bella tilts her head, inviting elaboration.

"Like... stop buying clothes and groceries and getting my hair cut and whatever and just do all that by magic," she says. "And maybe move somewhere nicer, if I figured out some way to turn magic into money that's not totally sleazy, or you paid me really well."