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Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming
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Edie has mixed feelings about the roses.

On the one hand, magic exists.

On the other hand, ow.

On the first hand, perfect healing.

On the second hand, ow.

On the first hand, flight.

On the second hand, holy fucking ow that one's definitely the worst, yep, ow ow ow.
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"You know you didn't really need to try that one, right, I don't even like that one."

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"If you think I'm letting a little pain stop me," Edie says, rolling her eyes.

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"Not really, but I'm not sure why you want to. I'm the one who's interested in getting really good at making little tchotchkes."

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"It could be important one day, and I don't want to be caught off-guard. Besides, flying."

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"Flying's pretty great." The black and white rose is only too much when it's going on and coming off, and that doesn't take that long (and she doesn't have to do anything to make it keep happening once it's going, or she might not be able to, but whatever).

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So she's supposed to be able to conjure stuff like this, right? (Ow ow ow.) So...does she just concentrate...like this? (She envisions a glass marble, focusing on the image in her mind and poking at what feels like the magic in her head.)

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There is a twist in the feeling of magic, as though the image is being pulled through it into reality.

Now she has a glass marble.

Holding it, she can detect a faint sense that it is her creation, and another, fainter sense that it is temporary, likely to vanish soon on the scale of minutes.
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Oh, that is so cool. Can she do something more complicated? A chess knight?

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The chess knight is harder to pull through the magic; it 'gets stuck'. Not immovably stuck, though; more like it's caught on something. Perhaps it could be wiggled free.

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Yes, that seems like a good thing to try.

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If she spends a few minutes trying different mental wiggles, she will be rewarded with a chess knight shortly after her glass sphere vanishes.

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If she tries the chess knight again, will it be easier?

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Whether it's because she has practice wiggling, or because she's learned how to wiggle a chess knight in particular, or because her baseline conjuration capacity has improved: yes.

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Can she conjure things in specific places? She tries the marble again, focusing on her desk halfway across the room.

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It feels like it has a longer distance to travel, but the marble is too round to get caught on anything along the way, so if she's patient enough to drag it all the way there: marble.

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Oh, good. Can she conjure objects inside things? She focuses on the interior of her pillow and focuses on the marble again.

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That feels like she meets resistance when the marble finally reaches the exit point of the magic. Incredibly strong resistance. Maybe not utterly impassable, but beyond her current strength.

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Doesn't keep her from trying, but eventually she has to give up even with her stubbornness.

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.
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Emily's concerned, but Edie...probably...won't do anything she'll regret in the long term, and unless it gets worse than this she probably won't be able to dissuade her.

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.
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The lifespan of the object is set when it emerges from the magic, and it's not immediately clear how to change that lifespan.

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.
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Tricky. But she has time to practice, and frankly, this is easier than learning to draw. If she varies the characteristics of the object, will that affect how difficult it is to hold onto?

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Yes. The metaphor breaks down a little here: the simpler an object, the less likely it is to 'catch' on the magic (or 'squeeze' with volume or 'drag' with mass or material complexity), the easier it is to hold onto when she's applying the final twist.

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.
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Well, of course not. Cass and Anna have had the flowers for how long and Anna can't do it? It's not going to be that easy. That's fine. She's an artist. She knows that beautiful things take time.

Once she gets it up to an hour she works on getting progressively more complex objects to last that long.
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It's tricky, and it stays tricky, but the 'strength' and 'dexterity' of her mental grip are improving, and the 'size' of the aperture in the magic might be growing a bit too.

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Excellent.

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.
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Three h—nope, she lost it. Two and a half hours, maybe, if she winds it all the way back up again.

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Two and a half hours, okay. In that case she will go back to scaling with that for a while, and then when she gets bored of twist twist twist slip, whoops she'll spend a while working on her maximum complexity.

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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.

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Okay, then...

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.
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If she's willing to sink some serious time into it, she can learn how to manifest all of that.

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Well, not all at once. She sketches out the parts she's not actively working on, so she doesn't forget, and works on one piece at a time. Once she's gotten the bracelet down she'll work on generating larger volumes of object.

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Her volume capacity has been increasing bit by tiny bit, but when she actively works on it in particular, it starts going a little faster.

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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.

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Cass responds:
Who, me? :D

Most of what I've tried is painkillers, and those work okay except on the black flower for some reason, I haven't gotten exciting enough about it to tell if the flowers do anything for addiction.
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"How're you doing?" Edie asks, having come in shortly earlier.

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"I'm fine. Apparently painkillers work on all but the black and white ones, which is unfortunate considering that they pretty definitively need it the most. How are you doing?"

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"...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."

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"As long as you're okay. You know there's no hurry on any of this, right? It's not like we're actual magical girls with monsters of the week and an impending boss fight. Don't push yourself."

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"I appreciate your concern, but I'll be fine."

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"I don't think you're doing yourself harm right now, just--make sure it stays that way, okay?"

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"...Yeah."

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"Good."

Since TK is apparently great she puts in her own blue rose to replace the black one. The insubstantial bruising is significantly more pleasant than the other roses' methods of joining. Now, what can she start out doing with telekinesis?
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Moving small light nearby objects short distances, not very precisely!

A lot of the mental dexterity involved benefits from her practice wiggling imaginary objects through the conjuration magic, though.
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Well, that's vaguely unsatisfactory. Is there a limit to the number of nearby small light objects she can move short imprecise distances?

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The limit starts out at one. If she practices and tries hard, she can increase that limit, along with the limits on how big and heavy and far the objects can be. Her mental grip gets 'stronger' and her mental reach gets 'longer', slowly but steadily, as she works.

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Can she do a little of this while also getting her up-till-now neglected homework done, it's not as interesting as conjuring and Professor Roth is not particularly forgiving of late assignments.

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Absolutely.

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Oh, good.

...

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.
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Conjuration and telekinesis work together very neatly indeed!

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If she works mostly on complexity and duration and drops all the non-conjured items she was futzing with, can she simply toss newly-formed items into the pile of floaty things?

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She can absolutely do that.

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Excellent. And maybe test/train her weight limits by generating gradually massier items.

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They are heavy and difficult to drag through the magic, but at least her mental grip doesn't seem to get 'tired' except as an extension of general mental fatigue. She can keep this up as long as her concentration lasts.

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Beautiful.

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.
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The next morning Edie notices the number of blossoms on her sister's forearms and raises an eyebrow.

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"The other ones don't really feel like much in comparison to the black one," she says a little defensively, "and it got so that not being able to conjure stuff was more annoying than the pain."

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"To return your own sentiments--don't hurt yourself. Well, I mean, besides--you know what I mean."

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"I do."

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Hug, and then they both need to get moving.

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Yeah. Ugh, class. Doesn't the world know she has important stuff to do?

When a classmate wants to borrow a pen, can she stick her hand in her bag and conjure a pen in it that will last longer than the class period?
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It takes half a minute to get it dragged/wiggled through the magic and spun up to a full hour's lifespan, but then yes, yes she can.

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Sweet. She hands it to him with a warning that she needs it back when class is over and spends another couple of minutes making a fancier pen to--

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?
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Luckily for her classmate, yes, yes it does.

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Oh, good. Her backup plan was to make something up about accidentally giving him a prank pen with ink that vanished after an hour.

...

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.
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Chocolate is a bit stubborn - internal complexity produces a lot of drag - but it goes eventually.

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It only needs to last about fifteen minutes. She can eat a bar of chocolate in much less than that time, even with the need to conceal it so no one catches her snacking in class.

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Eating conjured chocolate: success!

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Not really a conclusive test, though. She wasn't especially hungry, and it wasn't a lot of chocolate.

During lunch break, she ducks away to a secluded corner and attempts to will a chicken sandwich into existence.
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It's like trying to haul a small boulder through quicksand, but eventually: chicken sandwich. Perfectly ordinary and tasty chicken sandwich.

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She is less hungry after she has eaten it! How does she feel after the half-hour she gave it elapses?

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No sudden ravenousness or anything.

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This is so great. Can she make ink directly on things? Will it go away if she does? She gets out a sheet of loose-leaf, makes a puddle of ink on it, and gives the ink fifteen seconds--long enough to stain, not long enough that it would all have soaked in.

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The puddliest part of the puddle vanishes, but a stain remains.

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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.

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The conjured water manages to vanish despite its integration with the non-conjured water.

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Dammit. Okay, fill it up to three-quarters, fill it the rest of the way with conjured water, mix it up and see what happens.

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A three-quarters-full glass is what happens, when enough time has elapsed.

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Okay this is enough frustration for the moment.

She pulls out her phone and e-mails Cass a summary of her impromptu experiments and a request for advice on permanency.
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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.
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Tough like hard to figure out or tough like hard to keep a hold of?

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Both.

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Ugh. Oh well. On the plus side, food being a temporary thing that sticks around if you eat it is really, really convenient. Same with ink, in a way, I'll never need to buy a pen again.

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Can't argue with that.

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Magic is awesome.

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Damn right.

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I don't think I ever told you why I don't mind this as much. You know runner's high?

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No?

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It's that thing where when you've been exercising a lot your body gets flooded with endorphins. I get that for most kinds of pain, for some reason.

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Weird. Cool though!

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Yeah, it's pretty great.

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.
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The sparkliness of the sparkly pink ink fades somewhat after the relevant pen vanishes, but the ink itself is still legible.

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Huh. Good enough.

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.
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It is not at all intuitively obvious how turning a marble inside-out is supposed to work.

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Can she try to turn the twistiness inside-out?

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No.

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Bah. Well, when she inevitably fails to permanentify an item, does it come out the way she tried to make it only temporary, or does it fail in some more annoying way?

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As long as she doesn't lose her grip on it while she's trying to make it permanent, the rest of the conjuration process still works fine.

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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.

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All this practice works nicely for its intended purpose. Her textbooks shall have the fanciest of dust jackets.

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And when she gets back to her room that afternoon, how much time will it take to generate the sweater from her Perfect Concealing Outfit?

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Not even a quarter of an hour! Well done Emily.

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Awesome. And now she can go back to practicing telekinesis, too, that's harder to hide on the inside of a book bag. Write on this conjured pad of paper, conjured pen!

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Write write write. Steadily improving handwriting.

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Conjuring more massive and voluminous items than she could get away with in class! Attempting to telekinese them! Doing a stupid dance of sheer glee in midair because she can fly!

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Objects respond to her will! So many objects!

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And after another day or two of her revised schedule of classes-while-sneaking-practice-followed-by-retreating-to-her-room-to-practice, when she is poking at the assorted magic doodads in her head, she notices an extra one.

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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.

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Uh.

Okay.

Anna and Cass do not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as nearby, so she has to get out her phone and open the email app to inquire as to whether this is normal.
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Oh, yeah, totally.

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No pun intended, but did it slip your mind?

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Little bit! We don't use it that often.

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Which rose is it attached to?

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Not any of them in particular, just whichever one you've used enough to get it.

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Nifty

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!
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Holy crap this is awesome

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I know.

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...

...

Seems like I'm still limited to language, though.
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Enh, it's the roses, maybe if you work hard and believe in yourself you can send your innermost thoughts without lossy lingual compression.

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You realize I'm going to babble at you for hours now, right?

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Stop if I really need to concentrate on something.

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Of course.

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Nnnnot a problem, then.

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I love you so much.

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Love you too.

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.)
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The bookmark is tricksome but possible; it takes an inordinate amount of effort to have the bookmark push the pages aside even by the tiny necessary amount, but it works.

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.
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She'll do that, then. This is her magic, and it is not going to get away with not letting her do things.

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?
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It pops.

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The class is briefly startled but settles down quickly.

Is pushing stuff out of the way its own thing? Should she be working on that by itself?
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It seems to be to some extent its own thing that can be worked on, and also to some extent just way harder than most other things conjuration can do for some reason.

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Huh. Well, she can work on that too then. Random piercings in miscellaneous locations that are not currently visible but that she would not be mortified if they were.

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Random piercings continue to be difficult. The more of herself she has to displace, the more difficult they are. But it'll improve like any other conjuration subskill if she works at it.

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Good. One more little detail to add to the current routine.

(When she goes to bed that night she notices that she barely notices how much having the black and white roses active hurts any more.)
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And when she wakes up the next morning...

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.
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Oooooh. Okay, she needs to think about this. Possibly email Anna and Cass. Yes, definitely do that. They might know more about the four things.

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.
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The shadows one is fun, we both have that. Cass has the skills one too and it's really useful. If you keep practicing with black-flower magic you'll get to pick up the rest eventually.

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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.

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...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).

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The blue flower would like Edie to choose between magic for shielding things, magic for transforming objects, magic for repairing objects, and magic for manipulating metal.
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...Transforming objects. That sounds fun. (Although she tells Emily about the metal option as soon as she gets them. It's not really a question which one Emily's going to pick when she's done enough blue magic.)

To start out with, how may she transform an object?
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She may alter the colours of things. Not very fast. And not the roses. The roses are not editable by this power.

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This is not particularly surprising!

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They can go on like this for a while. It's a good routine. Magic is fun. And, you know, gross and painful, but whatever.

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.
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Whoa, nice! Pics?

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Pics! Shortly thereafter: Hurts like freezing.

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Coooooool.

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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.

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Yeah, if you don't have full outfit control yet then you can only mess with it while there's a new flower on its way in.

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I can probably cover this with, like, normal skirts for a while, but this was not the most thoughtful life choice I have ever made.

She pokes at the new available magic.
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Would she like to make things colder? This magic makes things colder.

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Yes she would! How much colder how precisely can she cold things?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Exactly how well can she target it? Can she freeze shapes?

Permalink Mark Unread

If it is her life's ambition to freeze things in shapes then she can freeze things in (blobby, small, imprecise) shapes. And, like so many things in flower magic, she can improve this capacity with practice.

Permalink Mark Unread
It's not her life's ambition, but along with trying to freeze things faster and in wider areas it's the obvious route for improvement.

Oh, hey, does the rate at which she can reduce something's temperature correlate meaningfully to its specific heat?
Permalink Mark Unread

Seems to.