She practices with more complex objects until she can't focus well around the pain any more and then she pulls the flower out and screams into her pillow and then she lies there crying for a little while, because ow.
Practicing healing isn't easy, since neither of them are inclined to self-injury in ways not involving flowers, but she can brush a hand over her sister's forehead if it looks like she'll be crying long enough for a dehydration headache.
And she puts on her own black flower (ow, but she can handle it better) and practices her own conjurations. She started sooner, focuses better around pain, and is more invested in the results--she can already do things significantly more complicated than a chess knight. She conjures a piece of sapphire in the shape of a rose, and concentrates on making it last.
However, she might eventually notice that there's a moment just before the object leaves the magic and enters reality where its eventual lifespan is perceptible. And if she holds it there and fiddles with it, she can make it last longer (or shorter) once it's out. The rotation that lengthens the span makes the object more 'slippery', harder to hold onto and maneuver, and also puts it under increasing tension: if she loses her grip it'll unwind rapidly back down to a short-lifespan state. If she's particularly unlucky or managed to wind it particularly far, it might even spin all the way down to a lifespan of zero and disappear before she can grab it again.
If she works at it, she can get a simple object to last for a whole hour, maybe even two. The secret of permanency is not yet obvious.
Once she gets it up to an hour she works on getting progressively more complex objects to last that long.
And by this point it is time to get to bed. She evaluates her current pain level, determines that she can probably get to sleep like this, and doesn't bother taking out either of the flowers she's wearing for the night. In the morning she dresses in clothes calculated to hide the flowers, takes shameless advantage of the grace bonus her pink rose gives her in her art class, socializes with her sister and various acquaintances--
and shuts herself in their room again for more practice. This is the most interesting thing to happen to her for ages.
She doesn't really want to peel the black rose out of her system yet, and really, it's the one that seems to get the most good out of active practice. Twist twist twist how much more duration can she squeeze out of a glass marble before she goes back to scaling to greater complexity.
It gets easier with practice, both in the sense that she learns how to use the magic and in the sense that the magic gets more convenient to use. And she can benefit from practice wiggling particular shapes through the magic; the path and the parts where it catches aren't exactly the same every time, but they're similar enough to be recognizable.
She composes exactly what she wants in her head. It's pretty complicated, but it comes in more than one part, each of which can be manifested separately. Focusing and taking her time, she creates the perfect outfit for hiding her roses, down to bracelets to cover the stems on her wrists and opaque rose-shaped hollow glass "gems" to cover the roses themselves.
This is less interesting than working on complexity's careful wiggles or duration's tricky twists. She switches to mass after less time than she spent on the more interesting two. And then, getting tired of aching quite as much as she is, she peels the black rose out of her, takes a Tylenol, and emails Cass to see if she knows anything about how the roses might interact with things like drug overdoses, addiction and withdrawal. On the grounds that it seems like something that someone with roses might experiment with, she is careful to clarify, not because she strikes her as someone who would have any experience with that kind of thing in a less floral context.
"...Also fine. I maintain that trying out the black and white rose was the right decision, but I'm not planning on doing that again until I've built up my pain tolerance." She pushes back her sleeve to reveal a blue blossom on her wrist. "In other news, telekinesis is excellent."
...
The blue flower hurts a lot less than the black one, it feels kind of weird. Not being able to conjure things feels weird too, she spent long enough practicing that she keeps absentmindedly trying to draw a marble or a necklace or something through and minding the absence.
...
Fuck it. The ache didn't bother her that much, and it would probably be best to get used to it as soon as possible, considering how much worse taking it out and putting it back in is. She doesn't bother to take the blue flower out again (the nonblack flowers barely hurt while they're in, really) before sticking the flower of It Really Really Hurts back in her arm. Ow, but the resulting pain is frankly dramatically much less than the pain of putting it in, so there's that. Great. Let's conjure a bunch of pebbles and juggle them while finishing this worksheet.
Her concentration is, sadly, diverted as she has to finish the rest of her schoolwork (she has never resented its intrusion more than she does now, this is fun) but she manages to force at least a few more grams out of her capacity before she looks at the time and makes herself go to bed.
She makes a pen that'll last three minutes and scribbles on the margins of a piece of notebook paper with it, then tucks it out of sight. Does the paper stay writ on when it vanishes?
...
This means she's permanently made something. Ink is something. That is so cool. Between this and the fact that the roses heal all injuries maybe it would be a good idea to see if she can make food you can actually eat. Unless food is too complicated and/or massive, in which case she needs to push herself some more. She puts her hand back in her bag and tries to manifest a piece of chocolate.
So far the things that have continued to exist are things that have gotten mixed up with other things--saliva, paper and chyme. She dashes off to a bathroom, makes a simple glass cup to last half an hour, fills it halfway with water, makes more water at three minutes to fill it halfway, and conjures a stirrer for good measure to make sure it's properly integrated.
Permanency is a total bitch!
I'm not totally sure what the deal is with the temporary stuff sometimes not disappearing, but you know how you wind stuff up to make it last longer? To make it permanent you have to kind of... turn it inside out. I've told Anna how and she still can't do it yet, it's really tough.
And then she pockets her phone and gets to her next class and writes with a pen that she barely resists the temptation to be as ornate as she can manage on short notice, because if she writes with a different fancy pen every class this is going to get noticed and people will ask questions.
She makes it emit sparkly pink ink, though, because her lecture notes are her own business and she can read it just fine.
When she gets a good moment (this teacher just lectures out of the book and it will be easier and faster to just read the chapter later than pay attention) she sees if she can make heads or tails of permanency. With a marble, first, because she doesn't want difficulty of creating the item itself to confuse the issue.
Well, she'll pretty much poke at it at least a little whenever she tries to conjure something, then. Meanwhile she can go on forcing her other factors more capacious. She can't do much on the volume or mass fronts in class, but her bag can contain longer-lasting more complex things. Have a fabric dust jacket with an absurdly high thread count, random textbook.
Its function is not immediately obvious, but reveals itself after a bit more poking: it's a telepathic communicator. Sending only, no specialized receiving function. It's willing to send to anyone she knows well, as long as they're approximately nearby - in the same building, or just a ways down the street.
And then she puts her phone away and concentrates on her sister.
Heeeey I'm telepathic now! Possibly you are too, I don't know, Anna didn't say how much you had to use a rose to get it but you've had the blue on your wrist almost as long as I've been wearing the pink one around and anyway this is a thing!
And then back to class, with her sister chattering in the back of her mind. Can she make a bookmark already tucked between the pages of a textbook? Can she make a small rubber ball in motion inside the desk? Can she pierce her ear with a small, spontaneous stud? (She shakes her hair over that ear first and sets it to last only seconds, trusting in her rose regeneration to close the hole. The point is not to acquire a second ear piercing, the point is to see if the thing can be done.)
She can make a small rubber ball and use telekinesis on it the moment it emerges; 'in motion' is not a setting the conjuration process seems to have.
Pushing a conjured item through the final barrier into reality when the destination point flat-out intersects with a solid object is really difficult, even more than just the bookmark trick, but she's strong enough to get the spontaneous ear piercing past the resistance.
Hmm. Can she make a small-enough-to-escape-notice but overinflated-enough-to-pop-immediately balloon...over there, and make it so it only lasts a couple of seconds? What does that do?
It's pretty clear about belonging to the black flower in particular. It doesn't feel quite like any of the other flower magic she has. It feels like a choice, between four differently-flavoured subspecialties. One feels like it has to do with imbuing magical properties into existing objects; one feels slippery and hard to define; one feels like it has to do with making it easier for her to learn new skills and improve old ones; and one feels like it has to do with manipulating darkness.
I woke up this morning with a new thing in my brain asking me to choose between four different things and it's definitely from the black rose and I was wondering what else you could tell me about that? I'd prefer to make a more rather than less informed choice.
She considers what she could do with the skills one combined with the grace from the pink flower, picks that one and starts looking up low-commitment high-output classes on things like dancing and martial arts. She ends up joining a dance club on campus, which eats a little bit into her "telekinetising things and blatant conjurations" time but is fun enough on its own merits to make up for that. And between the grace boost and the skills magic she gets absurdly good absurdly fast.
...Edie hasn't been doing much less with blue-flower magic than Emily was with black-flower magic (and she added the red flower, a little while back, because she had gotten used to a single flower's worth of pain a little while ago and Emily wasn't using that one so one of them should explore its effects).
Emily sticks with dance club even after she's better than anyone else there at any of the dances they know, what with their lack of cheaty magic. But she's not particularly subtle about how good at it she is--that would make the dancing itself much less fun. She acquires a handful of admirers.
Possibly the most likeable of these is Luc, whose mom is from Montreal and who plays up his consequent knowledge of French like a Hollywood Parisian, but always in a sufficiently self-parodying way as not to become insufferable.
And one meeting, he presents her with a blue-stemmed white rose.
"What," she says.
He gives a presumably gallic shrug. "My great aunt died, recently. This was hers. She always claimed it was possessed, and perhaps she was right, for for as long as my parents have been bundling me into the car and incarcerating me in her stuffy old house for family reunions it has sat on the hall end table, and never has it wilted! When it fell into my possession in the general scuffle of my less savory relatives for the crumbs of her estate, I knew such beauty and mystery could only belong in the possession of the veritable Muse of our fair halls," he declaims.
"It's...beautiful. I appreciate it more than you know," she murmurs, taking it with care not to cut herself on the white-tipped thorns and even more care not to accidentally prick him with them. That would be a disaster.
And once the meeting is over and everything's packed up and everyone's left there is a very urgent email to write.
Found a new rose!!!!!!!!!!!!! Guy from dance club gave it to me. Inheritance from a dead relative who thought it was possessed. Have not tested it yet. Will v. soon.
And after a few minutes: Ha. Pun intended? Also, cute, I look a little less like palette-swap Poison Ivy and a little more like some kind of plant fairy now. ...I'm going to have to peel something out and/or put it back in if I want to get rid of this skirt, aren't I.
Well she can't cold things very fast yet, but she can refrigerate them pretty respectably if she puts the time in. With sufficient dedication, she can even freeze water. The effect is reasonably well targeted, but of course when she makes one thing cold it tends to make things next to it cold all by itself.