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Cam studies. He studies madly. The next week elapses with him having very little sense of individual days. He doesn't want anyone to know anything special is up, so he goes to a movie with Renée and to a friend's house after school to play Nintendo games and Charlie gets his weekly phone call and he shows up to his classes and gets his homework adequately done. But other than that he studies. He wants to be fluent in this thing inside three months if possible. It's easier than Spanish, he's motivated, he can use it in everyday conversations as he asks passing animals and convenient plants how smart they are (dogs: smarter than goats; squirrels: about goat level; his friend's hamster: dumb as a rock; shrubs: way dumber than trees; indoor potted rosemary: just a step above grass) and chats with Grace, he's basically dropping himself in an immersion course with some inconvenient English here and there so he can interact with humans. He thinks three months is ambitious but reasonable.
He's not actually doing that many spells. He does wheedle tofu into tastiness on a nightly basis, and when he feels a cold coming on he looks up a spell about that, but he wants to know what he's doing before he gets going on what he most wants to be doing, because he wants to be doing big things. He swore to oppose death. He meant that.
Today he is preparing to oppose death in his backyard. It's threatening rain and he doesn't want to be all the way down the street with Leafy if the clouds open up. The jerk tree doesn't talk to him if he doesn't talk to it and it's perfectly serviceable as something to sit under, anyway.
lifes_sake
lifes_sake
"That number would in fact be mildly interesting since I could extrapolate it for grassroots activism later depending on how things go. But I don't mean, like, grass, though, grass is stupid, I mean people. By which term I include trees and so on, as of a week ago. And if you tell me we need death to power evolution my opinion of your creativity is going to take a nosedive; evolution happens when things run around dying and breeding and nobody's minding the store."
lifes_sake
"Well, somebody should be minding the store, give me a key to the metaphorical store and I will mind the store."
lifes_sake
"I'm almost guaranteed to get around to it if left to my own devices!" Cam replies, equally brightly.
lifes_sake
"That's the one where you make me some unspecified kind of immortal, and I do think about alternatives to entropy and don't do some underspecified class of other things, and if alternatives to entropy provably don't exist, some unspecified form of rethinking happens?" Cam inquires.
lifes_sake
"Does that apply solely to things I might do by magic? Does it prevent me from talking to anyone or anything? Are you personally monitoring all forms of death such that if I save a drowning toddler at some point this will constitute breaking the agreement or is that out of the bounds of what you have in mind and it only counts if I do something on a large scale? What about large-scale things that have nothing to do with magic, like, I don't know, making a lot of money and giving plenty of it to an organization that fights iodine deficiency in the Third World? Can I make tradeoffs that technically decrease net life as counted in individual organisms in order to help organisms that I consider more valuable and still be cooperating - like, some people have lawns, even around here, this is wasteful anyway, if I start anti-lawn campaigns and lots of stupid grass dies does that give me permission to magically help research on cancer in humans? Maybe I could skip the grass part if the cancer research is going to kill enough mice?"
lifes_sake
"Yes," says Cam. "We also still haven't addressed the question of whether I can believe any answers you supply, but I'm asking anyway."
lifes_sake
"Are you going to specify the offer in enough detail and with enough verifiable sincerity that I can evaluate it, or not?"