Bella jumps back and lets it hit the floor. "Don't fucking throw shit at people, oh my god."

Shrug. "Sorry." She pulls another, identical pen out of her pocket and walks to Bella to hand it to her. 

Bella feeds a little more mana into her magesight spell, and - "They're fine," she reports to Suze, and takes the offered one and also the floor pen.

The cases are made of stainless steel with a repeating eye pattern etched onto them.

"That's one of my weird book powers, is I can pull things out of pockets and bags and so on that weren't there. And another weird book power is, I'm not going to get hurt in a fight."

"Why do they have eyes on them."

"They have eyes on them? Creepy, what kind of personality is an eye pen going to have..."

“Oh, it’s easier to duplicate an existing object than to design a new one. That was my dad’s and, ah, the power that my family held was…somewhat eye-themed.” Up close it’s perceptible that there are little eyes embroidered along the edges of her shirt and the seams of her pants.

"What power would that be?"

“Where I’m from, supernatural things tend to draw power from one of a handful of paradimensional entities aligned with various concepts. My parents are both aligned with the Eye, which does—watching, knowing, learning, that kind of thing. I was headed on the same trajectory but didn’t have any real power of my own yet when I met the book.”

"And what's the book's deal?"

“It wasn’t from my world. I thought it was, at first, but it said it wasn’t—that the being that created it was bigger and farther away than any of the Powers I knew, and that it gets sent to empower people—in this case, me. But there’s a lot I didn’t have time to ask it, because it didn’t come with me and we only had until my captor came back to talk.”

"...does it wanna share?"

"I do not want to explain your death to your aunt, Bella."

"She fell out of the fucking library ceiling, I think it is worth entertaining her explanation of what caused that."

“It didn’t come with me,” she repeats. “I have no way of asking it. But if a sparkly purple notebook writes back to you when you write in it, it might be that.”

"Can you magically generate a sparkly purple notebook?"

“Sure, just a sec.” She ducks behind the shelves again and comes out wearing an apron with a big, wide pocket on the front. She pulls out a very glittery purple notebook and hands it to her.

Iiiis it magic.

Nope.

She accepts it and opens it up and is it magic now?

Still nope.

She takes one of the spooky eyeball pens and writes the date on the first page in the corner.

Nothing happens. The spooky eyeball pen continues to stare at her.

"Well, it's still a lovely notebook, thank you - what do you want for these things?"

“Information! Please tell me more about the monsters. And also your magic system, and this location—we appear to be in a library, are any of the books hazardous to read? Where should I go to not get dismembered monsters on the books, come curfew? Does anyone else want anything, it doesn’t spend down a limited resource to make things.”