She's added a hexagonal platform to the center of her tower, contiguous with the sixth-story mezzanine by a bridge, all supported by magic; she's got her own desk there as well as a whiteboard.  She's writing on it in blue.

"I made gympie-gympie pesto," he says.  "And ten hexes and about a hundred pentagons."  He hands her a stack of five hexagonal coins.  "Got one bite in before I had to bail," he adds sheepishly.

She takes them.  "I - well I also did less frivolous things but I made up alternate names for all the coins on the basis that hex is already a kind of spell," she says.  "Triangles are tricks, squares are cantrips, pentagons are jinxes, and seven-pointed stars are curses."

"That's cute, I like it," Leo says.  "I made ten hexes and about a hundred jinxes.  I mostly have not been bothering to make squares - ah, cantrips, or tricks, I can try to ramp that up if you like."

"Cantrips maybe.  I don't mind making my own tricks as I need them, not so far anyway."

"All right."  He examines her whiteboard.  "What less-frivolous things have you been doing?"

"Well first thing is I've been thinking about some people I might want to contact and give the chance to bring into - this."  She gestures around them.  "Our - TARDIS, I guess."  Giggle.  "To consult on how we're going to use all this magic.  And I've been thinking some about where I'd want us to be to be comfortable stopping time and moving forward too.  The big thing is to what extent it's possible to use this magic to raise the dead.  Broadly I'm imagining three ways that could go - either we can resurrect anyone who's died with a big enough coin, or we can create a magic - thing - that'll render anyone who dies after we create it resurrectable but can't get people from before it exists, or we can't resurrect the dead at all.  - I'm focusing on dying because it seems to me the most - irrecoverable, bad-thing-that's-happening-almost-contstantly.  I'll want to have plans in place for - getting people out of situations they don't want to be in, in general, as well, but it's people dying that seems like the most important reason to stop time, to me."

"Hmm, I bet even if you can resurrect anyone making an afterlife or a soul-catcher thing for them could still make individual resurrections cheaper," he says.  "But that all sounds pretty sensible.  Who'd you want to bring in?"

She sighs a little.  "My mom and dad, and my aunt Sophie, and maybe Aunt Sophie's girlfriend too," she says.  "My model of how to get to them right now is to pull whatever room they're in into the time-stop and make a portal to them and - talk it over.  It seems cruel to make them choose on the spot like that but - I really don't want to let anyone die who I don't have to."

"...can I offer something that I think's gonna freak you out?"

" - sure."

He takes a breath, thinks about how to present this.

"So, the reason I'm the one making the coins is because - for any given horrible thing I've always wanted to know what it was like.  It's not just about the pain, for me, it's about the entire experience.  I'm okay with hurting, with hurting a lot, but what I want is to know what it feels like to - get pepper sprayed, or set myself on fire, or have surgery done on me without anesthetic.  Or eat gympie gympie pesto.  Sometimes bad things are painful, and I can make coins out of them.  But - " he meets her gaze - "I also want to know what it's like to die."

"If we could make there be two of me, if a hex or a curse could give me the ability to duplicate myself or conjure a second Leo Salk, one of us could volunteer to be killed, and you could test resurrection on him.  If it works, good for us.  If it doesn't work, then - one of us got to know what it was like, and the other one gets to go on being Leo Salk, and making coins, and finding out what other things are like."

"That does freak me out a little."

"That's all right.  We don't have to do it if you're not comfortable with it.  All I'm saying is that I am."

"I think - if I'm uncomfortable with it it's about you, not about me, like - maybe this is awful but it seems like something I'm afraid to - let people say is okay for them.  If that makes sense?"

"M...maybe.  Say more?"

" - like," she says, "well, with just making coins, I - feel a little uncomfortable about it but mostly I see that as my conscience trying to tell me that it's not usually okay to oblige people to hurt themselves for your benefit that way.  And I trust you to say, no, I'm okay with volunteering to hurt myself for you - to know that because you say it I can trust that it's true, and relax a little, and most of my discomfort with you making coins for me goes away and I'm willing to weather the little instinctual bit that's left over until it goes away too.  And if I'm more uncomfortable with - this new offer - than I am with you just making coins, it's because - my conscience is telling me that it's really really bad to kill people for relatively frivolous reasons, like to see whether you can magic them back to life when you don't even know if you can, and it's so bad that even if someone says they're okay with you doing it to them it's still pretty likely that there's something else going on, that I shouldn't just trust that because they said it'd be okay for them it really would be okay for them.  That - this is the part that's maybe awful - that they think it'd be okay for them but they're wrong, about - what they're willing to give up or what they want."

"And there's the whole thing of - I know people sometimes like being in pain, I know some people are masochists, and there's a whole kind of background radiation of evidence that it's possible to - be a masochist healthily - that makes someone saying I'm willing to safely hurt myself very badly to help you more believable, given other things you can come to know about that someone.  And I don't really have that for volunteering to die.  Like I'm sympathetic to pro-euthanasia arguments for terminal illness but - if someone who's bodily healthy says they want to die or they don't care if they live or die, that rings much louder alarm bells that something's wrong than if someone just says they sometimes enjoy pain or are able to withstand hurting a lot.  And if something is wrong then - using them for experiments that they might not walk away from alive wouldn't actually be doing right by them."

He sighs.  Not unhappily, just sighfully.  "Yeah, I think that makes sense."  He leans against the railing, lolls his head back easily.

"I'm not suicidal," he says, "not in the way you're thinking, I don't want it to stop.  I just - "

" - would it make you feel better or worse if I talked about why I'm - interested in dying?"

"...I think I want to hear it," she says.  "I want whether it makes me feel bad to not be the going concern, or the primary one, right now."

"That's fair."

He gathers his thoughts.

"I don't want to die because I'm trying to get away from something," he says.  "I don't want to hurt because I'm trying to get away from something, I want to experience things because it's always been better for me to know than to wonder.  Worrying about being too scared of scary movies was worse for me than being too scared of them, when I was a kid, I would've been so much better off if I'd started watching slashers earlier.  Earlier today, I told you I made gympie-gympie pesto?  This stuff makes people want to kill themselves just from touching their skin, I put it down my throat - I was safe, I wished on a healing power, I could snap my fingers and erase all the venom from my system at any moment.  I did it and I felt good after.  And I've felt - bad-good, I've felt the way you feel when you self-harm, when you do something that's slowly fucking you up worse because it's better than whatever you're feeling that second, and this isn't that.  I felt excited beforehand and I felt exhilarated afterwards.  My version of going on a roller coaster."

"So when I think about dying, it's not because I can't imagine carrying on, or that there's some problem or pain that I can't concieve of going away.  I just think that... I can imagine falling asleep on the couch while I'm watching a movie and never waking up, but I just can't wrap my head around what it would be like to be here one moment and gone the next," he snaps his fingers, "boom, just like that.  I can imagine ceasing to exist slowly but not ceasing to exist quickly.  And in exactly the same way I wanted to know what eating gympie-gympie would do to me, and the same way I wanted to know what happens in horror movies when I was a kid, I want to know what that's like.  It's just the same impulse that I've fucked myself up running away from my whole life.  And if there were another one of me, one of us would get to live and one of us would get to know, and we'd both be coming out ahead in different ways."

"I'm not saying I need to do it," he says.  "There's plenty of stuff like this that I haven't done.  I can not-do-it because you'd be uncomfortable, just like I didn't fuck around with gympie-gympie until I had magic to make it safe, and just like I wouldn't kill myself just to try it if I didn't know there was gonna be another me who could carry on everything else I wanted to do with my life.  But I know that this isn't an impulse I should treat as unhealthy or wrong for me.  No fault to you, I don't blame you for worrying, but this flows very naturally from who I am, and who I am is an okay person for me to be.  If I can do this safe, if there'll still be a Leo Salk afterwards who's just as much Leo Salk as I am, then I know it's not something I shouldn't do for his sake or for mine."

She nods slowly.  "That - doesn't sound like mental illness, to me.  I think some people would say it does but - at a certain point - I think that's your right, to decide you endorse all that."

"Well I'm glad.  Do you wanna talk it over more, or think more...?"

She thinks.

"I think what I wanna do..."

"...you offered this - from a cold start, when I wouldn't have imagined asking.  And with what you've told me I think I'm comfortable with you volunteering to run this experiment for us.  But I think I wanna - do it this once, and then take it - not completely off the table, but - "

" - I think offering to do it again in a social context where it's understood between us that it's an available action is different enough that - I want to be careful again, of like subtle social implications and expectations.  I want to be really really cautious of doing this because you feel obliged to.  I feel comfortable accepting this particular offer because I think it existed in a context where - I don't think I was pushing for it, even subconsciously."

"You weren't."

She grins briefly.