those who like such things | Glowfic Constellation

"How do you not know, it was the most important moment of the century—I remember every minute—"

"I was doing my homework and my mom came in my room to show me."

"My friends and I were raiding—uh, we used to play online games, raiding is when—it's kind of like us doing dungeons here? And I was like no way. No fucking way. We stopped playing for the night just to watch other videos of this shit and it was like, what the fuck?? And then it turns out we get powers? And then it turns out that when people say that they wish they could do RPG stuff in real life most of them don't actually mean it. But I did."

"So you didn't start from scratch, you got some personal magic?"

"Oh, no, not at all, I just went, I can be an RPG character in real life and they also said the same thing and then it turns out I meant it and they didn't mean it. So now I'm here being an RPG character in real life. But I didn't get the powers lottery."

"Gotcha. Me either, I just started by ducking in and dropping what I was able to scrape together on two MP and pocket lint and then I didn't even spend my first advances on more magic, I had a balance problem."

"Balance problem?"

"Dyspraxia if you want the fancy word. I fell over a lot."

"Oh. Yeah that'd be a problem in dungeons."

"What power would you guys have wanted if you could have one?"

Tom chews on his bottom lip. "If it's only powers that people, like, really do have, I guess maybe teekay? It's rare but not super rare."

"There are fewer than two hundred thousand people with powers and we've only been taking data for five years, we don't know what's actually impossible and what's merely vanishingly uncommon. I'd like to fly, that's hard to do safely with spells."

"...flying would be so cool. Is that even possible?"

"Yeah there's a handful of people who can do it. ...I'm scared of heights, I don't think I'd do well with flight."

"I'm not scared of heights but I'm scared of my spell running out of oomph because it unexpectedly draws down whatever I put into my sigils faster at a certain altitude or something," she sighs.

"Well when I get stronger I'll be able to fall from pretty tall heights," Chris says consideringly. "That'd be... so cool."

"Like, in a squirrelsuit or just - absorbing it."

"Like just tank it. I think I could do, like, ten metres now just fine? Twenty would bruise."

"Dang, okay. How do you even gauge that without jumping off things you might not be able to walk away from?"

"Who said I didn't do that?" she asks innocently.

"...I'm calling your bluff, if you had you wouldn't have given us an uncertain estimate like that."