She nods.

"Here goes."

Star disappears.

He backhands his own palm, making a loud clap, and produces a triangle.  It looks like scabbed skin, red and brown and yellow, rough and mottled, with a little crescent-shaped patch of unblemished skin the color of his own flesh following one of the edges.  He gives himself a little cartoon skull, identical to the last one but in red-tinged black, on the back of his hand.

"Kinda changes everything," he says casually.

"Yeah.  I don't - "

" - if I were on my own, or if I were the only coinmaker, I'd want to - I don't know exactly, but not just, keep going in the same direction but also with magic.  Medical research felt like the - highest-leverage thing, if I could work on curing the deadliest diseases or anti-aging research - but this is so much bigger than that, especially if this is the only box."

"Can't promise it will, but if my pain tolerance holds up to what I'm imagining we could probably live off these things," he says.  "Make a floating invisible house or two, conjure all our meals.  But let's experiment on me first."

"You're very - enthusiastic."

"I figured out a little while ago that part of the reason I wanna be a surgeon is so that I can do grotesque things to other people that I wish I could do to myself," he says.  "What do you say we cut class and drive out into the woods where I can yell real loud and no one'll hear me."

"What are you planning?"

"Ever heard of the gympie-gympie?"

They drive out to the woods.  Leo conjures a non-torturous ordinary stinging nettle, first, with a triangle so it'll disappear on its own.  "I figure if the plant disappears, so'll all the stinging hairs and venom that get into my skin."

He plucks a leaf and rubs it between his fingers, produces a clinky handful of scabby triangles.  (They've all got the splotch of unscabbed skin, but all in different shapes and places.)

He waits; the potted nettle vanishes.  "Ooh, yeah, that's better."

"So you don't want to eat disappearing food or drink disappearing water," she says.  She's feeling less panicked and frozen now that there's a Next Thing to do about this, and they're doing it.

"No, or breathe disappearing air..." he says.  "Might not get into your system fast enough for disappearing it to do real damage, but still.  All right, move back a little."

She scootches away from him, watches.

He conjures a clay pot full of soil with a stalk growing out of it, sprouting two wide laves, all covered in visible fine white hairs.

"Always wanted to try this."

He pinches one leaf between his fingers.

"Ooh," he says.  "Oh.  Yeah, that's - ow.  Ow - right, that - "

He stops producing words and starts producing pentagons.

She worries her lip, but doesn't say anything.

Hexagons follow, as do nonlinguistic noises.

Then the potted suicide plant vanishes, and he exhales, collapses down onto his back.

" - you okay?"

"Fine," he pants.  "Whoo.  That was a hell of a thing."

He sits up.

"Gimmie one of the hexagons?"

She does.  She contemplates a pentagon, then wishes up a magic coin purse: more space on the inside than the outside, and the level of coin she wants will jump into her hand when she fishes around inside.  That'll do for a stopgap so they don't have to leave the coins strewn across the dirt ground.

"I have added a feature to the car - " and he gets up, and opens the trunk.  There's a square panel at the bottom, which hadn't been there before, and when he pulls it open it reveals a ladder down into a wood-paneled room with a desk, office chair, and armchair, with a desk lamp on the desk and a floor lamp in one corner.

"Ooh."  She climbs down.

He follows.

She sits at the desk, lets Leo have the armchair.  She hands him the coin purse, explains it to him.  "I'm going to use a square to let you use it as well as me - let me know if that wears off?"

"Sure."  He fishes inside it, retrieves a square, conjures a hot dog for himself.