It is pretty and trim and green-and-cream and really ought not to be able to hold itself up like that, and yet here it is, somehow defying the laws of architecture. It is surrounded by a neatly bordered garden of ornamental and useful plants of all sorts: here vegetables, there herbs, there spell components, there rows of flowers.
There is a sign out front. It says only: Magic. Not, Beware, Magic or Magic Emporium or anything like that. Just: Magic.
Sitting on top of this sign is a cream cat with smoke-dark points of color on each paw, his ears, and his face and tail.
All in all, you could be forgiven for thinking that a witch lives here.
"There's nothing much in the part of the forest except the Tree of Pearls, which I can't imagine why it'd interest a wizard particularly."
"It's a tree. It grows pearls," says Bella. "Instead of fruit. Or as fruit, depending on how you look at it. They're edible, in contrast to most pearls, quite tasty actually, also make lovely jewelry, I made Renée a necklace of them once."
"That's kind of awesome," says Tony. "Unless you threw a real one in there by accident. Then, ow."
"There's no good place to get real ones without just buying them from a traveling salesperson, around here, and I have no use for real ones - for all the magical applications the fruit kind works just as well. You'd have to go south for a week to get to a lake with freshwater oysters, and southwest from there for another two weeks to reach the ocean."
"Mostly trees and moss," says Bella. "But interesting trees, some of them, and pretty moss!"
They walk till dark, and Bella knows less about where they are now, as she only rarely ventures this far from her home.
The weather's fair; Bella produces a bedroll but not a tent. "I can have a look at your bag now," she offers to Tony.
It's a simple spell, but for anything that's not a sleeve it takes varying amounts of coaxing. She does some of this coaxing aloud. "C'mon, you're so sleevy, I bet you always wanted to be a sleeve when you grew up, huh, you'd make the best sleeve," she coos to Tony's bag.
Bella smirks at her and goes back to wheedling the bag, interspersed with variants on the spell. Eventually she has made enough progress to sprinkle the bag's interior with a mix of herbs that smell almost like dinner. "Come onnnnnn... you can do it... you will fulfill your destiny..."
"I bet my sleeves want to be bags. They work more like bags than sleeves anyway - c'mon - you know you wanna be sleeved - c'mon c'mon - deepandwidecapacioussleevealwaysgiveherw