"The backyard would suffer no damage. It will attract attention anywhere."

Only walking as far as the backyard sounds better than walking all the way to the junkyard and she's going to be presenting the whole fait accompli to her parents anyway. "Backyard sounds good!" She moves toward the stairs.

The genie follows her upstairs and out the back door, growing bigger and louder the whole time.

And then it's a towering, thirty-foot mini-cyclone with vague arms and a head, and glowing white eyes.

It reaches one arm towards her and in a much deeper voice than usual says, "There is no going back. This is the last time to remain as you are."

"I want to be a spirit-bearer!" She affirms over the sound of the cyclone.

The genie touches her forehead.

It's like a sunburn. Or maybe like being too cold. It's - a new qualia, an intense one, too intense, spreading along her head and down her neck and through the rest of her, power, power, and change, and pain, and the world blurs like she walked outside from the darkness-

The genie declares, "Fire."

-And now she's wearing a plain skirt and leggings and short boots and a high V-cut shirt with a pattern of triangles on the hem, all themed in red and orange - and she can feel it, just under the surface, the new qualia is there. It's magic. She just has to push-

(The genie is gone, now. And the whole process was certainly a lot of wind and noise.)

It's too much, it hurts, it's awful, it's absolutely worth it, it's amazing. She looks at her new clothes and can barely see them past the feeling of power and definitely can't delay doing the thing her magic is telling her to do. She turns away from the house towards an empty piece of yard and pushes.

It's as intuitive as picking up a screwdriver. She gets a flickering bar of red fire flaring out from her palm, about two feet long, curving upward where it fades out at the end, like the world's largest lighter.

Her hand is warm - very warm, clearly much warmer than would have been comfortable a minute ago.

She could do another thing (probably the spear) and she could almost but not quite do a third thing-

First she'll try to get a better understanding of this first thing. Can she make the flame smaller?

It gets smaller and then suddenly breaks up and stops being a steady stream, spurting around everywhere.

(Someone's car alarm has been going off - it stops.)

"Ack!" She says when it spurts around everywhere, trying to turn it off altogether.

Her parents have rushed out of the house by now and seen her. "Margaret, what's happening?" "How are you magic?" "What's going on?"

"Okay, Mom, Dad, first of all everything is fine, relax. I'm a spirit-bearer now because I met a friendly genie and gave them robotics lessons in exchange for magic." They're a bit brought up short by the matter-of-fact explanation and stop asking questions mostly because they can't come up with an order to ask them in.

Some of the neighbors are looking out the windows at her. The next-door neighbors shout over, "Is everything all right?"

"We're alright! Sorry about the noise." She turns back to her parents. "Questions you probably have: I've been meeting with the genie for a while, mostly here and in the junkyard on Washington Street, they never did anything dangerous-seeming or acted like they wanted to hurt anyone, they've probably left town now because they wanted to watch my robotics project and now they've done that, no I won't let this interfere with school any more than I let spending all that time on the spider-bot interfere with school."

"Well," says her father weakly, "we always knew you were going to accomplish a lot."

"Yes," says her mother, "but no more inviting genies or anybody else over to the house without telling us! We live here too, you know."

"Yes Mom, I promise, sorry." 

Hug? Hug. "Best parents." "And don't you forget it." "Har har, Dad."

The neighbors shout back, "Well, if you're sure... Congratulations, I think?"

It hasn't been quite long enough for the emergency response 'bearers to get to them. And they're more worried about tracking the genie, in fact. Nothing else happens right away.

(Her magic is there, right there, she's barely used it at all, it'd be just as easy as moving a finger...)

To the neighbors: "Thanks!" To her parents: "So do you want to see my spear? Let me show you my spear!"

They stand back, she stands back. Spear?

Spear! It's short (for a spear), maybe three and a half feet long. The shaft is a dull orange, and feels cold like metal. It has a simple narrow tip, and feels much lighter than it should.

She spins and thrusts it in the spear drills they learned in phys ed (hey, no more hoping nobody notices she's suddenly started trying harder in phys ed, she can just straightforwardly try hard now!).

Two spirit bearers fly over the neighborhood, and past it, at high speed.

This time she considers waving, but doesn't because they're going too fast to notice. They're probably chasing the genie; she's glad she legitimately can't tell them anything about where they went.

"I'm glad to see you've been paying attention in gym class", says her mother. "Yes," says her father, "just goes to show that even non-academic subjects are important." 

"Yeah, I knew what I wanted from the genie going in. I've been trying to be prepared, reading up on spirit-bearers and stuff."

"Oh, what did you find out?"

"It's important that I regulate my emotions sensibly, and not have too strict of a routine, and that I exercise my magic," spear-twirling, "and a bunch of stuff about all the kinds of monsters."

They keep on questioning her in this vein for a bit while she gets a feel for her spear. It's a lot like the way they question her about precalculus and US history.

After a couple of minutes, a spirit bearer who looks to be in the middling-low tiers of power comes to a halt above her backyard. White-themed outfit.

"Hello! I'm with the state emergency response service! Is anybody hurt? May I land and talk to you?"

Margaret and her parents all answer at once with variations on "Hello, nobody's hurt, come on down."

She lands and gives Margaret a once over. "So, what we're figuring happened is - that genie just empowered you and alarmed a lot of people, too. We make a point to come visit when this sort of thing happens, in case there's something else going on, and because there's a couple things about magic that can get you into trouble."

"I'm sorry about the alarmed people. I don't know of anything else going on here and now, the genie went off somewhere."

"No need to be sorry. Genies are kind of alarming, is all. We escort genies and supervise them from time to time, making sure everything's safe and in good order. The ones that don't - declare themselves - can make trouble sometimes, so they make us a lot more nervous. Congratulations, by the way! What did you do for it? What's it going to do next, you think? Just a guess is fine."

"Thanks! And I gave a lot of robotics lessons, they wanted to learn how robots were made so I made a little climbing bot in my basement and explained what I was doing as I did it. I don't have a clue what they'll do next, though--maybe more engineering, maybe something completely different."