+Morning!+ says Brilliance, brightly. +I went world-hunting. Found a buncha places with pretty decently similar atmosphere and gravity.+

+Oh, swell! Can check those out after school, practice all kinds of stuff. Hey, how'd you come by your name?+

+I picked it,+ he says. +'Cause I like it.+

+It's a good name.+ Off they go to school. Bella doesn't really consider taking him along; they can talk from that far away.

+Can't wait to get away from me, huh?+ he jokes.

+What, you want to hang out in my pocket all day?+

+Sure, why not?+

+Can you catch up to the truck or should I ask Lexi to turn around?+

"Aaah! Make it not do that!" exclaims Lexi, and her control of the vehicle falters briefly.

"Lexi. Brilliance is a he," Bella says. "I realize you didn't personally get to see the human form, but still. Brilliance, kindly don't abruptly teleport in front of unwarned people." She puts him in her pocket.

He shivers a little once he's there.

+You okay?+

+Kind of no?+ he says. +I'll be fine in a while. I think.+

+Can I help?+

+I asked you not to,+ Bella points out. +If you decided that appearing at us whenever you felt like it even if we didn't want you to was your prerogative I'd have to figure something else out, but I'm definitely not leaping straight to forceful options.+

+Yeah.+ He sighs. +Yeah, I know.+

Bella hesitates, then awkwardly pats her pocket.

Bella is not really good at interpreting glitter-language. +You glittered,+ she says blankly.

+Yeah,+ he says. +It's like - the device version of smiling, I guess.+

+Aww!+

He laughs softly - over magephone, not out loud.

+Please don't be conspicuous at school, by the way, I might tell Charlie about you at some point but probably not all my classmates.+

+I can do stealth!+ he says. +I've been doing stealth for a while.+

+...When you say you've been doing it for a while I start wondering if this is another thing you have issues about or if you're just neutrally asserting your capability.+

+Meh,+ he says. +It's not my favourite, but I'd way rather hang out on a planet where nobody knows what a device is and have to act like a deck of cards in public than hang out on a planet where everybody knows what a device is, you know?+

+I cannot claim to know. I have never been to the latter sort of planet. Are they terrible?+

+They're probably not terrible if you're not a device. They might even be okay if you're a device who's, you know - not me.+

+What do you think the people there would do? Is there some protocol for handling self-aware devices you don't like?+

+I just don't like the idea of everybody knowing what I am. Because, you know, maybe they'll be nice like you, but... maybe they won't.+

+Are you going to object if I want to tell Charlie? Because that's probably going to be necessary if I keep haring off to other planets to fly around and explode things and terraform places.+

+I can live with you telling Charlie, I guess.+

+Thanks.+

+Not sure I get why you have to, but whatever, your call.+

+He has, you know, reasonable parent-of-some-seventeen-year-olds expectations that he will be made aware of my whereabouts. I'd feel bad sneaking around under his nose, and besides, it'd be inconvenient if he noticed I was gone a lot and wasn't telling him and decided to start implementing explicit rules I'd then have to break. I don't want to have an antagonistic relationship with him.+

+Huh,+ says Brilliance. +Okay.+

+Is that weird or something?+

+I just don't really know how parents work,+ he admits.

+Some of 'em don't work very well. Mine and Lexi's work fine. Except for the getting divorced part, I guess.+

+Gotcha.+

+If I fess up to both parents I might go visit Renée a lot. We moved up here so she could travel with her new husband, but she won't be doing that literally all the time.+

+And I can teleport you places now!+

+Yup! I'm not sure how you'll get along with Charlie but I think you might like Renée.+

+We'll see, I guess!+

And here is school. +Welcome to high school!+ says Bella with some irony.

He giggles.

Turns out Bella really likes having someone she can silently converse with during school. She usually talks to Brilliance - she's sure Lexi would react visibly if she said something, and that could wind up being some kind of problem. She makes snarky remarks about the teachers, the subject matter, her new friends - mostly the selection Lexi's monopolizing; she kinda likes Angela and Eric - and, during walks between buildings, the weather. +Hey, weather spells: doable, not doable? Good idea, bad idea?+

+I'm not totally sure!+ he says. +I don't know how, but that doesn't mean we can't do it. We just might have to screw around on a deserted planet for a while first.+

+Sounds like a plan.+ Bella writes this down when they're inside again. +Could be a good way of managing food security, if I could teleport around messing with weather systems, assuming I can't just create giant heaps of potatoes out of nowhere.+

+I have no idea how to do either of those things,+ says Brilliance, +but I'm cool with trying!+

+Someplace nice and unobtrusive,+ says Bella merrily. +Have the planets you found got any other characteristics besides probably not killing me?+

+One of them has, like - a lot of colourful sand,+ he offers. +It's really pretty.+

+That does sound pretty. Why does it have that?+

+Fucked if I know!+ he laughs.

+Have any of them got life on them at all, or are they managing to have oxygen atmospheres without?+

+Nothing you could see without a microscope, mostly. I think I remember some algae somewhere.+

+Algae'll do it. Were the sand colors all mixed together or separate?+

+Mixed together, mostly. I think there was, like, a big streak of green off in the distance.+

+Sounds pretty. Maybe I'll bring a camera.+

He giggles.

The rest of the school day proceeds uneventfully. Bella still sits out of gym, stretching and doing simple yoga poses on her mat in the corner. +If only moving around on the ground were as straightforward as flying.+

+It's not?+

+No, I'm pretty lousy at, like, walking. Running is worse, running and trying to do anything else basically impossible, that's why I'm over here while everybody else plays volleyball, I would die.+

+Wonder if there's a spell for that,+ he says musingly.

+Good question. I should see about inventing one. Trouble is I don't actually know what's wrong with me, it seems to be a case of the "just super clumsy".+

+Well, so a healing spell might not fix it, but... I dunno... something that makes walking more like flying, I feel like there's room for experimentation there. Maybe we can try it when we go hang out on the sand planet.+

+Sure. Just half an hour to go.+ Stretch-arch-hold-breathe. +I won't miss yoga, it's boring.+

+What even is it, I am hazy on some of the things you bio-people do with your bodies,+ snorts Brilliance.

+It's this family of postures and exercises you're supposed to combine with mindful breathing to accomplish - something. Flexibility, I guess, though there's a lot of spiritual woo wrapped up in it too.+

+That does sound boring. But then, maybe breathing is more exciting when you have to do it all the time.+

+No. No it is not.+

Brilliance cracks up.

+Like, there is a reason we are wired to ignore it unless there's something unusual going on. There is a reason we can do it in our sleep.+

Yep, still snickering.

+So you're not even biological enough to breathe when you're dude-shaped?+

+I can breathe, I'm pretty sure I can even eat food, but it took me a while to figure out that humans don't just do it when they need the air for something. Or - you know what I mean. And I'm not totally sure I get the point of eating.+

+You're pretty sure you can eat food, you haven't tried it? 'Cause unlike breathing that one has recreational applications.+

+Yeah, never really got the chance,+ he says. +Maybe I should take Dude Form for a test-drive sometime soon.+

+Sure, we can stop at home before going to Colorful Sand Planet, you can have an apple or something to try.+

+Cool,+ he says cheerfully.

Eventually gym class concludes, and Bella drives home alone because Lexi's going to try the "go to Jessica's" plan again, and she lets herself in the house and takes Brilliance out of her pocket and puts him on a kitchen chair.

"Are you as trivially adjustable like so as you are when you're a deck of cards?" inquires Bella curiously, tossing him an apple from the fruit bowl and grabbing one for herself. She bites hers.

"I can adjust the clothes," he says, grinning a little as he catches the apple. "So can you, actually. Why, got something you wanna see me in?"

"Not really, just curious if you picked it or if it came with you-ness."

"Okay," he says, and shrugs, and attempts to make the apple interact with his face.

"...You bite it," Bella says helpfully, and she demonstrates again.

"So you like apples?" Bella asks.

"Okay, apples are your new best friends," laughs Bella. She takes a less overwhelmedly blissful bite of her own. "Am I going to have to explain you to Charlie just so he doesn't wonder where all the food goes?"

+Why does anyone ever do anything other than eat,+ he says over magephone, because his mouth has way higher priorities than forming speech right now. +It's so good, is all food like this?+

"Um, apples are like this, other food is like other things, these aren't even unusually good apples?" Bella says, talking between bites like a civilized person. "Do you want to try, like, a taco, there's some leftover filling and a few more tortillas."

+I would fucking love to try a taco,+ says Brilliance.

Bella plates and nukes a tortilla and a glob of ground saucy beef. "This is spicy, some people don't like spicy," she advises him, sliding the place across the table. "...And you fold the tortilla part in half around the filling part and try not to let filling fall out and you hold it flat and bite it, is how this kind of food works."

"The middle bit of the apple there isn't generally considered food," comments Bella.

"You like spicy like some people like heroin. Jeez," laughs Bella, and she wanders behind his chair and pats him on the head, swiveling her hand around to sit at the perpendicular seat.

"...You okay?" Bella says. "Did I run into some weird device/human cultural point of non-overlap or something?"

"I really like that," he sighs. "That thing you're doing. The touching my head thing. Do more of that."

Bella makes a bit of an awkward face. But she pets his hair. "Unused to the - what was it you called it, complex tactile information?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, nodding a little. "I get some tactile sense in my other forms, but it just - it doesn't compare at all. And I had no idea taste was a thing until just now, pretty much, mmmmm now I can't decide between more touching and more taco."

"I am not actually obstructing your taco-eating adventure," Bella says dryly, scritching his scalp.

"But I'd have to pay attention to both things at once and that wouldn't be as good," he says, leaning into her hand again with a happy little sigh. "That is really nice."

"It's just me petting your hair, it's not like you're getting a shiatsu massage or something," Bella says. "Although I hesitate to name that because now I'm concerned that if you got one you would in fact explode."

"I would not," he says, grinning lazily. "Unless you mean the way humans do."

"Humans don't characteristically explode."

"They do too!"

"Have you been watching terrible science fiction or something?"

"No, c'mon, people talk about exploding with whatever-their-feelings-are all the time, they obviously don't mean literal explosions, work with me a little here."

"I have never claimed to explode with a feeling."

"Yeah," he snorts, "I bet you haven't."

"Well, I haven't," she says. "I don't think it's really a common turn of phrase. My arm's tired, you can eat your taco now," she adds, dropping her hand to the table.

Brilliance goes back to overenjoying his taco.

"Careful, if you eat the whole thing there won't be any of it left for you to marry," drawls Bella.

+I don't wanna marry it,+ he says, +I wanna eat it. Mmmmm.+

"How much food can you hold? Because I can unload some more leftovers on you if you want, we have, what do we have, tuna salad, a pasta thing, minestrone soup?"

"I have no idea," he says promptly, "let's find out!"

"Pff." She gets out the named items, and warms the two that need warming after passing him the tuna and a fork. She explains the mechanics of the fork.

Brilliance only stabs himself in the face by accident once! And he seems to treat this with the same general enthusiasm, if not the same specific intense enjoyment, that he does any other kind of bodily sensation.

Bella permits herself a little snickering.

+What are you laughing at,+ he says, grinning around his latest mouthful of tuna.

"You poked yourself in the face with a fork. I have never seen anyone over age four do that."

+I got excited! You'd get excited too if it was your first time eating food!+

"Which event," Bella says, "happened to me when I was well under the age of four, and involved a spoon in someone else's hand, and mashed sweet potato."

+Ooh, what's a sweet potato? I wanna eat one.+

"We don't have any around right now. There are thousands of things to eat, I'm not going to just run to the store and grab you examples of every single one."

"Where are you going to get sweet potatoes while I sleep?"

+No idea! I'll think of something.+

"You're not going to just teleport places and steal them, are you?"

+...Would... that be bad?+

"Yeah? They don't belong to you."

"So that's what belonging means, is that you can't take it, it's not yours, it's somebody else's and if you take it they will have grounds to be upset and that would be mean of you. If you find food growing wild you can have that - but you'd have to be able to tell the difference between wild and cultivated."

+...Okay, but how else am I gonna eat all the food there is to eat?+

"You're gonna spread this project out over a long enough time that I can acquire it for you at a reasonable rate. Or acquire money so you can buy the food, I guess, you could get a job."

+Get a job how? Don't you need to have, like - human stuff, for those?+

"It'd help to have documentation, but you could teleport to other countries where they're less strict about it," shrugs Bella. "Or find somebody who'll pay you under the table around here if you don't want to deal with currency exchange. I don't think it especially matters if the job's legal as long as it's not unethical."

+...And how do I tell if it's unethical or not?+

"Uh, you could ask me, if you don't know," she suggests. "Picking fruit, fine, busing tables, fine, selling pot to elementary schoolers, not fine, assassinating people, not fine."

+I could've figured out the assassination one by myself,+ he volunteers.

"Okay, well, there, that's a start," says Bella.

+Still not sure why I should care. I mean, about the rest.+

"Uh... okay, can you take my word for it about dealing pot to kindergarteners or do we need to actually talk philosophy right now in order to preclude this outcome?"

"I don't really want to deal pot to kindergarteners, what I want to do is taste new things," he says, gazing sadly down at his empty plate.

Bella tosses him a banana. "Well, look, I can buy you a reasonable number of new things to eat per week - can you even get poisoned, you could probably eat random wild plants, if you don't have to breathe you could go swimming in the ocean and catch all kinds of sea creatures to devour, that sort of thing."

"Just - here." She takes his banana before he squishes it all over everything, peels it for him, and returns the denuded fruit. "So yeah, we can map out some places where the stuff that's around isn't going to belong to anybody and you can eat anything you find that looks tasty there."

"Bananas are inexpensive, you'll be pleased to note, you can have lots of them when you run out of new things to try and want to go back to your repeats." She pauses, then says, "Okay, now I'm sort of curious if you'd like straight pepper but it feels mean to offer you some and suggest that you try it."

+Why's it mean?+

"Because pepper is the thing that makes the taco filling spicy, and it only takes a little to make a lot of something quite spicy indeed, and most people would be very unhappy if they ate any significant amount of straight pepper."

"Most people would probably also be unhappy if they stabbed themselves with a fork," he points out. "Gimme!"

She shrugs and spoons him a spoonful of cayenne.

...Straight cayenne causes him to make some really interesting faces.

+Yeah,+ he says, hugging himself. Even his magephone voice sounds a little breathless.

"You are making some - faces."

+Mmmm.+

"So you like pepper, huh," snorts Bella.

+Mmhmmmm.+

"Noted." She glances at the clock. "Charlie's gonna be home soon, and there are probably better ways to introduce you than as this random dude in a weird jumpsuit thing."

"I could be a random dude in different clothes!" he offers, and starts licking his fingers.

"Yeah, you probably want, like, shoes, and go with jeans and a t-shirt like what I'm wearing only cut to fit you if you don't have a better idea," Bella shrugs.

"Very thematic," says Bella. "Looks a little like you're going to walk into a goth club or something, but it's less bizarre than the jumpsuit."

"All right. I'm trying to decide whether to lead with 'Dad, this is Brilliance, he is my magic tutor' or 'Dad, this is Brilliance, he is from another planet' or possibly 'Dad, don't come into the house yet, I have to tell you some things first'."

"Your call," he says, laughing.

"He might not want you staying in the house when I'm not present and awake," Bella says after a moment's thought.

"...that's weird," says Brilliance. "I mean, that's really weird. I'm your device."

"You look like a dude. Might have more luck if I present you as a talking pack of cards," shrugs Bella.

"Whatever," says Brilliance.

"Well, he could show up any minute," Bella says, picking up Brilliance's plate and putting it in the sink. "You want to live here, you probably wanna be a deck of cards. Or the staff."

He shrugs, and stretches out and wriggles much in the attitude of someone slurping the last bit of milkshake out of the cup, and then he shifts down to deck form and hovers over the chair.

Bella plucks him out of the air and goes to sit in the living room with some of her neglected homework. "We didn't get around to going to the colorful sand planet," she observes. "Maybe after dinner, assuming Charlie doesn't react worse than I'm expecting."

"...and what if he does?" says Brilliance.

"Then I occupy the evening dealing with that. Worst case scenario, he's a huge pill about it, you hang out not-in-the-house till I haul back to Renée's, I live with her till I turn eighteen and then get a job I can cheat at effectively with magic and move out. Anyone's guess whether I could get Lexi to move again," sighs Bella.

Brilliance snorts.

"Hmm?"

"Nothing, just - I don't know how you deal with all these rules."

"I have more freedom than most seventeen-year-olds because my parents know I'm responsible," Bella says.

Brilliance shivers. "Lucky you, I guess. Glad I'm not a human."

"...Are you?" Bella hesitates to point out that humans never have to planet-hop for centuries of high-stakes sleepless tedium and rarely spend their childhoods being tortured, but the notion is there.

"Sure I am. I mean, my life up until now has been pretty shit, but if I was a human I'd be dead, and now I get to do all kinds of stuff that you can't because the people who made you are controlling your life."

"They're looking out for me. Most people my age do pretty idiotic things even with more parental supervision than I have. They get drunk and crash their cars, or flunk out of school with no skills and no plan and spend the rest of their lives unable to get decent jobs, or they get pregnant, or whatever. I know I'm not going to do that, but Charlie only mostly knows I'm not going to do that. If he didn't set any rules at all that might be convenient for me but it would probably, given the way humans work, mean he didn't care."

"Well, I'm still glad I don't have to deal with that shit," says Brilliance.

Brilliance glimmers.

He glimmers again, a little ripple of light, like a visual laugh.

"Hi!" says Brilliance.

Brilliance giggles.

Light glints from the design on the outside of the pack when Bella corrects her father about the pronouns.

"I'm a magical device," Brilliance puts in. "We like having partners; we're kind of built for it. Bella's a good one."

Brilliance giggles.

"I never ate food before," says Brilliance. "Food is awesome."

Brilliance glimmers happily.

"All right, fine," says Charlie. "We can pay for your magic lessons with reasonable amounts of food and bookshelf space - is that all? Anything else involved in - magical device upkeep?"

"Nah," says Brilliance.

The door opens again. "Hi, Dad, hi, Bella," says Lexi. "What's everyone want for dinner, I was thinking either I'd thaw some of the fish or do split pea with the last of the bacon?"

"Ooh," says Brilliance.

"Make enough for Brilliance, he eats," Bella tells Lexi. "I'd say polish off the bacon, we bought a lot of it and those last strips'll expire tomorrow."

"Sure, soup," says Lexi, looking out of the corner of her eye at Brilliance, "can do."

The deck glimmers.

"Sure," says Brilliance, "want me to change?"

"Yes, do," says Charlie.

Brilliance shifts form in a brief flare of multicoloured light, ending up in the jeans-and-T-shirt outfit from earlier.

Brilliance laughs.

"Whatever," says Brilliance, and he shifts down again.

Bella laughs ruefully and starts outlining a practice plan for working with magic on the pretty sand planet. "Hey, did you figure out what percent of my mana I use on stuff before I went and flew in front of Charlie, Brilliance?" she asks.

"...nope," says Brilliance. "I forgot."

"Oh. Well, it was very brief, can we get an estimate to work with?"

"I'll start looking again," he promises.

"Maybe I'll recover to a hundred percent over dinner." The air has begun to smell of frying bacon.

"Maybe!"

Write-write-write. "Hey, given that you sense with magic, does that give you any irregular abilities like - seeing through things?" she asks suddenly.

"I could probably make a spell for it, why?"

"I just mean normally. There's nothing I need to see through. I just wanted to know if my notebooks or my clothes or whatever are transparent to you, because that'd be awkward."

"Not visually," he says. "If you put me down on top of a notebook I could probably, I dunno - count how many pages it has, even though I couldn't see them, that kind of thing. And I can tell what's going on around you when I'm in your pocket. Oh," he adds, "and when you wear your Barrier Jacket I kind of am it, but I don't get any human-style senses from it, just movement and damage levels."

"...You are my Barrier Jacket," says Bella.

"This is one of those things that's not weird to me but it is to you, isn't it," sighs Brilliance.

"Yeah. Apparently it is. If you didn't get that it might be weird why did you specify that you only get 'movement and damage levels'?"

"I can see why it's weird to you," he says, "I just don't think that way naturally. And it would be weird even for me if I was being your clothes and I got human-style tactile feedback from it."

"Okay. Well - I don't know about that. Had to save the world that one time, we were in a hurry, it's all right that you didn't stop to explain; maybe it won't even come up again."

"It'll come up if you ever have to fight anybody," says Brilliance. "I don't know if you'll ever have to fight anybody, but if you do, wear the damn Barrier Jacket. It's standard mage gear for a reason. You should probably wear it when we're fucking around with experimental spells too, just to be safe, but it's not as big a deal if nobody's actually flinging lethal damage at your face. ...Although it'll let me monitor your mana consumption better, so..."

"Yeah, if I get into an actual fight go ahead and jacket me, some weirdness is not competitive with being armored. The spells - didn't you say they might do weird things but probably not harmful things? Like if I heal somebody I might get a bizarre result but I won't accidentally hurt them?"

"If you're trying to make a spell to heal somebody," he says, "you won't accidentally hurt them instead, that's not how magic works. But if you're, I dunno, practicing manipulation of inorganic matter and you lose control of the spell at the wrong moment, you could accidentally drop a big rock on your head. Barrier Jacket'll handle that for you."

"Even though it doesn't come with a hat," Bella says.

"It's protecting you magically, not physically, is that really hard to understand or something?"

"Well, I'm just not clear on why it involves a costume change at all if that's what it's doing."

"It has to exist in order to protect you," he says. "And it can't just look like whatever other clothes you're wearing every time you put it on because it takes extra effort and mana to change its form and you don't wanna be doing it every time."

"That doesn't explain why it's an outfit and not an accessory of some kind that can go on over whatever I have on."

"No idea," he says, "I didn't design the spell. I can tell you right now, though, if I tried to make you some kind of... I dunno, Barrier Necklace... it wouldn't work nearly as well. There is something about being an outfit that makes it better at its job, I just don't know what it is."

"How do you know a Barrier Necklace wouldn't do the job as well?"

"...It's a device thing," he says. "If I'm familiar with a spell I kind of get a - sense for it, like I can tell what all its parts do. I'm not sure humans even get the relevant channel."

"Doesn't sound like we do, no. Huh."

"Yeah. So, I can tell you that the being-an-outfit thing is functionally important, I just can't tell you why, or if there even is a sensible reason."

"Fair enough. What other sorts of things do you know in this mysterious devicey way?"

"...That is a weird question and I don't know how to answer it."

"Okay, how about - why do spell diagrams look like they do, are the shapes functional?"

"They mean something but they're not directly functional," he says. "The shape is related to the type of magic, but not intrinsically."

"...Like, they're assigned when the magic type is invented but it's arbitrary?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"And ones I invent are going to wind up falling into your magic type - is that for the same reason my mana color synced with yours?"

"Um... close! I dunno, it's hard to explain. But those are pretty related, yeah."

"I kinda wish I knew what my mana color would have been before I found you."

"Who knows."

"Not something you can check with your devicey senses of such things?"

"Nope."

"Well, the aurora-ish mana is really pretty anyhow."

"Yep," he says smugly.

"So how come your human form is - well - a human form? I wasn't exactly certain last week that we were alone in the universe, but I figured the aliens would be aliens. There's a decent fossil record on this planet indicating that humans evolved here, and convergent evolution isn't that precise, I don't think."

"Not a clue," says Brilliance. "Humans seem to be it as far as intelligent biological life, but fucked if I know why."

"So you don't know if they're converged or secret forgotten colonists from Earth or colonists to Earth fossil record be damned or what."

"Nope."

"Dinner's ready!" calls Lexi.

"Ooh, soup." Bella gets up, heads for the table, and trips over nothing whatsoever.

Brilliance has just finished assuming human form, half a step in front of her; he spins around and catches her before she can fall on him.

"Thanks," says Bella, regaining her footing and smiling at him.

He grins back and lets go.

She makes it the rest of the way to the kitchen without further incident.

Lexi has ladled out four portions of soup, which are sitting at each of the four places at the table. She peers quizzically at Brilliance - she hasn't seen his human form before - but doesn't say anything.

"Brilliance, eat with a spoon, you'll get soup everywhere," says Bella exasperatedly. "Like so, watch." She takes a spoonful of her soup.

"Needs to be housetrained," mutters Lexi under her breath.

Brilliance tries the spoon. It works much better this way! He beams gratefully at Bella.

"There you go. Consider practicing chopsticks on an uninhabited planet instead of picking up a pair for the first time in a Chinese restaurant, though."

He cracks up. But manages not to giggle soup all over the table!

How skillful!

"I don't think we have enough ice cream for four," Lexi says when the soup is dwindling.

Brilliance looks disappointed.

Brilliance beams gratefully at Charlie!

Ice cream, om nom nom.

"So ice cream is also a hit, huh?"

"Oh my god, just eat it, it's just ice cream," says Lexi. "It's not like God made it."

"Ice cream is the best," Brilliance sighs, and he spoons up another spoonful.

"Be nice, Lexi, he ate food for the first time ever just a few hours ago," Bella says.

"Why does it matter, he's your - thingy."

"My device, and you're my sister but that doesn't mean it's okay for random people to be mean to you, just because it would be more relevant if it was me being mean to you."

He gives Bella a warm smile made only somewhat ridiculous by the spoon sticking out of it.

"Well, your device decided to move into our house and eat our ice cream," says Lexi. "It's weird, why doesn't he be a pack of cards?"

"Sometimes he's a pack of cards and sometimes he's human-shaped, we can buy more ice cream, come on."

"It's not like we're rich."

"If that becomes a problem I will find some way to cheat outrageously at some job with magic and earn plenty of money so I can feed the guy who is teaching me magic, okay? You don't have to worry about it, you just have to be civil."

"Fine, do whatever, your device," mutters Lexi, "I got possessed for you, by your device, now I have to make nice to it, sure, Bella's the smart one." She scoops up her ice cream bowl and tromps upstairs with it.

Bella puts her spoon in her bowl and sighs and cradles her head in her hands.

"We kind of both got possessed by the same thing," he says, giving Bella one last petpet and then going back to his own ice cream. "It's dead now, I got Bella to help me kill it."

"You okay?" he says to Bella.

"Frustrated. I know Lexi's freaked out, but she's usually not catty to people."

"It's no fun getting possessed."

"Yeah, and she was trying to do something nice for me, and now I've been kind of ignoring her to talk to you."

He shrugs, and goes back to his ice cream.

Bella finishes hers. "Lexi cooked, so it's my turn to do the dishes. Unless there's a spell for it," she adds.

"I don't have one on hand," he says. "I could make one, but I'd probably wanna practice it on dishes nobody cared about first."

"Would it meaningfully affect the spell if you practiced on, like, paper plates? Would it transfer?"

"Good question! I think paper plates might need a different spell," he says. "They don't get dirty the same way, you know?"

"All right, maybe at some point I'll swing by the thrift store and get some random dishes. In the meantime..." She turns on the sink and starts scrubbing.

Brilliance is finished with his ice cream by the time she needs to take his bowl away.

"Look, I can talk to Lexi, this sniping isn't really like her."

"Thanks," he says, smiling wryly.

"You're welcome."

"Sure!"

"I wanna invent a spell to be a line of defense against any environmental hazards you weren't in a position to notice - but before I start trying stuff - is my mana at capacity?"

"Oh, cool," says Brilliance, as a faint mana-coloured shimmer settles onto Bella's skin.

"Something unusual about how that worked?" Bella asks, looking at the pretty shimmer. "Ooh, I'm shiny."

"Did you not expect it to work?"

"I was thinking of it differently than how it hapened."

"In some complicated technical sense or what? Also, how much of my mana is this drawing?"

"...Some," he says. "More than flying. Want me to work it up into something I can maintain for you?"

"Yeah, that'd be swell - and weren't you going to figure out percentages?"

"It's harder than I thought," he says. "I don't see it as numbers, I just feel it. ...Could you pick me up? I feel weird just hanging here. And I can get a closer look at the spell if we're in contact."

She plucks staff-Brilliance out of the air and props him on her shoulder.

"Will that still be true if I start flying?"

"It will if I'm hooked into the flying too," he says.

"Cool. Let's go see some colorful sand."

"Oh, this place is pretty," marvels Bella.

"I know, I love it!" says Brilliance.

"I wanna fly around, can you hook into that without jacketing me?" Bella asks.

"Sure, Flight," he says casually. The sprays of mana feathers appear at Bella's heels without the accompanying sense of effort.

She rockets into the sky, whooping.

Brilliance giggles.

Eventually she calms down and lands in the pretty sand and consults her list of things. "Okay, I bet you want me to prioritize seeing if I can conjure food, that'll solve a certain quandary you have if I can."

"Yeah, that'd be awesome," he agrees.

"I command a sweet potato to exist!" Bella attempts.

"I wanna figure out why, I've only tried this twice, that's too early to give up," laughs Bella, "what do I try next?"

"I'm not totally sure this will make anything better," says Brilliance, "but maybe a long-form incantation that is more specific about the sweet potato being food?"

"Specific about it being food like how? Also does anything happen if an incantation is false, like if I say 'I want to eat a sweet potato' when actually I want you to eat a sweet potato?"

"I'm not sure exactly," he says, "like I said, I'm going out on a limb here. I don't think a false incantation makes a difference as long as it doesn't confuse you about what you're trying to do with the spell."

Bella nibbles her lip, then goes ahead and tries: "I want to eat a sweet potato."

"...Okay," says Brilliance. "So what I'm getting here is, the spell's not coming together because you don't have a good enough feel for how it should work. My best guess is if you work on easier spells that have to do with matter manipulation, and get those down pretty good, and then come back and try some simple conjuring and work up from there, it'll work much better."

"Okay, matter manipulation like - sorting the sand by color, or making colorful sandcastles, or melting it into colorful glass? Can you be more specific?" asks Bella, bouncing on her toes.

"Is there anything to casting through you besides intending to?"

"Nope! You've already done it a bunch. It should actually be easier to cast through me than otherwise, when you're holding me in this form."