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Summer vacation elapses, and sees their storefront doing one heck of a business in the Avalon with the help of their griffin employee. There is a suggestion box for new spells they should invent, some of which have to be long-term projects but others of which are converted into new product fairly promptly.
School starts up again. Darren and Bella are both skipping straight into twelfth grade. (Bella looked into just starting college early, but while she does technically have the sort of resume that can lead to that kind of thing, she can't exactly write an essay about how she saved the life of another person and this caused her to have Moral Character, let alone about how she started a small business - so skipping one grade it is.)
They apply to colleges. They both get into University of Washington and get sufficient scholarships to accommodate both going there.
Summer ensues again.
One afternoon, Bella is over at Darren's, and has fallen asleep - in purring fullform - across his lap on the couch.
shesepankh
shesepankh
"I don't know. It does seems suspiciously strange that we would have both needed healing without knowing it right after I turned, doesn't it?"
shesepankh
"But I don't know what else it would have thought was important enough to do all by itself. Or if 'thinking it's important' is even the right metric."
shesepankh
"That I was dreaming," she says wryly. "That I could not possibly have really turned into a winged quadruped."
shesepankh
"Yeah. And I didn't, say, accidentally use sphinx magic to turn myself into not-a-sphinx. So that seems like a dead end."
castmyown
"Hmmm. Yeah, ugh, that's annoying. I have no idea how to solve this problem, I can't math at it to make it go away."
shesepankh
"I wonder if I can trigger automatic mode on anything other than healing. It could come in handy in any situation where as long as I succeed it's okay to nap for half an hour afterwards."
castmyown
He winces.
"The problem with that is hitting other people that are innocents in the warehouse, or missing guards that are just outside of it," he points out gently.
"The problem with that is hitting other people that are innocents in the warehouse, or missing guards that are just outside of it," he points out gently.
shesepankh
"...you and Savannah did, in fact, wind up killing everybody in the warehouse," Bella points out. "And I knew there were guards present. I'm assuming here a reasonable state of knowledge about where I'm aiming my magic carpet bombing."
castmyown
"I mean in a future warehouse situation. I uh - yeah, we did end up killing everybody in the warehouse."
castmyown
"I - maybe there's a way to do automatic defensive magic? Put a shield up and be safely asleep inside it where no - ink monsters or anything can get you."
shesepankh
"...That sounds worth doing. I'll try it before I go to bed, maybe, passing out during the daytime wrecks my sleep schedule."
castmyown
"Good!"
And then there are snuggles. "Any other experiments we can do? I bet you can do some cool things to technology if given the chance."
And then there are snuggles. "Any other experiments we can do? I bet you can do some cool things to technology if given the chance."
shesepankh
"I'm afraid I'd break any technology I got if I tried to do something more complicated than fix a cracked screen."