TRIANGLE
small one-time physical effects, conjure temporary mundane objects; pain on the order of a light slap

SQUARE
conjure permanent mundane objects, bestow temporary mundane skills, conjure temporary magic objects; pain on the order of a hard punch

PENTAGON
bestow permanent mundane skills, conjure permanent magical objects, bestow temporary magical abilities; pain on the order of a broken limb

HEXAGON
bestow permanent magical abilities, conjure larger permanent magical objects, bestow permanently the ability to create new coins whenever you feel pain; pain on the order of a pulped extremity

SEVEN-POINTED STAR
catch me if you can ♡

Uh.

She wishes on the triangle that - that this post-it note had a robin's-egg-blue heart on it.

The triangle vanishes; the heart appears.

She wishes on the hexagon for the ability to make new - pain-coins - and drives her thumbnail into her palm.

There is a new primitive mental action available to her wrt/ the pain she is feeling.  If and when she takes it it causes a triangle to appear in her hand.

It's not glossy black like the other ones, but the gleaming sort-of-fuzzy color of a blue morpho butterfly, complete with butterfly-wing vein patterns.  The edges, where the coin is thicker, are the black of a butterfly wing's edge.

She tests it by drawing a five-pointed star on the same post-it; it works again.

Yeah she doesn't want to keep messing around with these things without backup.

Leo's there in fifteen minutes.

"You all right, you sounded freaked."

In fifteen minutes she's made another triangle, drawn a little horseshoe on the same post-it with it, and then driven a sharp pencil harder and harder into her palm until she could make a square with it.  She holds up the square.

"Sanity check," she says, and holds up the square.  "Can you see this object?"

He takes it from her.  "Little shiny blue square," he says.

"And this one - " she hands him the box - "and the marks on this post-it - "

"Black box, more little shapes," he says.  "Star heart horseshoe."

"Okay."

She takes a deep, slightly shaky breath.

She hands him the pamphlet.

He murmurs under his breath as he reads.

"Catch me if you can," he finishes, slowly.  "...is there a difference between the colors?"

"I made the blue one."

"So you used the hexagon on yourself.  I would've volunteered," he says.

"I - wasn't going to ask - "

"No, trust me, better me than you."

He looks at the box, the pentagon and the star still there.  "Can you use one level of thing to do the job of a lower level?  Because you've still got the star."

She shifts uncomfortably.  "I haven't - tested much."

"Got plans for this?"  He holds up her square.

She shakes her head.

It disappears, and on the post-it, in the same blue color, there appears a little cartoon skull.

"So you can use a square to do the job of a triangle, at least," he says.

He looks at the pamphlet again.

"So the obvious thought is that whoever's making the coins should give themself a magical healing ability first thing.  ...Assuming we wanna make a bunch of them."

"...Yeah.  Yeah.  I don't want to - pass this up, there's so much we could do - "

"Yeah."  Grin.

...little grin.

"And of the two of us I think I have the higher tolerance for creative self-mutilation. I'd like to use that star to make some more of these."

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.

She solicits a square from him and creates a Rubik's cube whose sides are all the same color - the same as her coins - and fidgets with it.

Nom.

"So.  We've got magic."

"We do."

"What are we gonna do with it?"

" - could we pause time outside the - this - while we think?"

"That is a good idea."  He fishes in the coinpurse.  "We got two hexes and looks like ten pentagons left.  Is this worth a hex?"

"I - think that's up to you," she says.  "If you're gonna be making most of them."

"I don't mind fucking myself up," Leo says.  "But I'll try it with a pent first."

He composes his wish, and the pentagon disappears.  There is now a blue lightswitch, on the wall next to the desk, with a pause sign on top and a play sign on the bottom.

She flips it up to the pause position; lets out a breath, relaxes a couple more notches.

"Why blue?"  Curiously.

"Cuz time is blue."

"Of course!"

Grin.

"...You sound less freaked.  I'm glad."

"Yeah.  It was like..."

"If we leverage this right we could cure - everything, we could cure nonconsensual death in full generality.  Make hexes, find more trustworthy people to make more hexes - just off the top of my head we could make - magic items that make infinite food, for people, and if we could create arbitrary pentagons we could just travel around handing them out to everyone.  Trinkets that unfold into houses, or, or blankets that you can crawl under and find a whole living space in.  Or a teleporting homeless shelter, or a million things.  And - "

" - and someone dies every ten seconds.  So it had to be perfect and it had to be as fast as we could.  But now that we've paused time for everyone but us we can afford to take time to breathe."

"You're a good - gal.  Is guy gendered, are you a good guy?"

She giggles.  "I'm a good gal."

"You're a good gal.  All right, I'm gonna expand the secret lair a bit, spend down our pentagons."

He stacks his pentagons in his hands, and one by one they disappear, widening the room, brightening the lights, adding doors to the walls.

"I don't mind making more pentagons or hexes, but I would very much prefer torturing myself in creative new ways to just the same thing over and over again.  It's the variety and the exploration of experiences that draws me to it.  But I can get by for a while just doing new things with the suicide leaves."

" - I will trust you about your tolerances," she says, as much to herself as to him, and then, tentatively: "...I like mezzanines and natural light?"

"Hmm," he says, and spends a pentagon.

A new door appears, with a blue "Kaylee" nameplate on it; he ushers her to it and opens it for her.

"I give you," he says, "mezzanines and natural light."

It's a great hexagonal tower, with five storeys above and below the entrance; all the walls are glass, and the windows on each face look out onto a different color of sky - clear day and cloudy sunset and blue-orange twilight, bright starry desert night sky and dark cloudy thunderstorm and beams of sunlight through gray and gold clouds.  Each storey has a balcony, a continuous four-face crescent, and two walls of nothing but windows.

"Oh wow," she says softly.  "It's incredible, thank you - "

He elbows her gently.  "Hey, don't mention it.  And feel free to tweak it, if you like, it's a bit off-the-top-of-my-head."

"I love it."

"I'm glad.  I'm gonna head into my room.  There's a red light on the door, that'll turn on if there's any suicide plant in existence in the room, and any suicide plant venom or hairs that leave the room will disappear.  Feel free to conjure some furnishings for your mezzanines while I'm gone, if you like.  I'll come out in a little while with a whole lot of coins."

"All right."

He comes out in a little while with a whole lot of coins.

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.

"But I think the context is different if you make the offer in a context where I've already accepted it once, and established it as a thing we do, and in that context I'd want to have another conversation.  And in all likelihood that conversation would end with me being okay with it, if you were!  But there's more I'd want to process if it were to become a regular thing, between us, rather than just accepting the original offer in the context it was made."

He nods seriously.  "I think that makes sense.  You're a good gal, Kaylee."

Grin.

Grin.

"So, you outlined three possibilities.  Either you can resurrect anyone, or you can create a soul catcher that'll let you resurrect people who die after it exists, or you can't resurrect anyone.  I figure we make two more of me, one dies, you try to wish him back, then you try to make a soul-catcher if that doesn't work.  ...Though come to think of it we might be able to do some of those things with - curses, if we can't with hexes."

"Are you - up for curses?"

"If I hadn't thrown the kill switch on the pesto I probably would've coughed up a couple curses."  He looks speculative.  "Give me ten minutes."

She does.

He returns to her room looking sweaty and harrowed, panting a little, but triumphantly holding up two scab-colored seven-pointed stars.

"I'm gonna have to veto doing that again for a while," he says.  "Til I build up my tolerance some more."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he says.  "I've got a killswitch, I can stop anything whenever, don't worry about me."

She takes the coins, when he hands them over.

"Do you - need a minute?"

" - yeah," he says.  "Yeah, actually."

He rather collapses into a chair, and stairs at the ceiling for a little while.

She'll give him as long as he needs.

He perks up after twenty minutes or so.

"All right," he says.  "I'm up for this resurrection experiment and then I think I have to call it for the day."

"That's more than fair."

For this event they relocate to another room, set up a bit like a doctor's office, all in white with a raised bed.

"...Do you want to know which of me is the original?" he asks.

"I think so."

"It's gonna be one of the ones who dies," he says.  "I actually worked a lot of this out years ago, when it was just a hypothetical.  But I've got a forking protocol I'm comfortable with, and I had to decide before I forked myself that if I did it for this, the original would be the one to die, so I knew I wasn't fooling myself."  He wishes a dark red letter A onto his forehead.

She nods.  "All right.  Whenever you're ready."

A moment later, there are two more of him, lettered B and C; they all shake each other's hands.  "Pleasure to meet you."

A lies down on the bed.  C stands over him.

"All right," C says, "I'm going to use a square to wish your brain and heart into liquid, still sound good?"

"Yes," A says.

"Enjoy," says C.

"Good luck," says A.

A looks up at the ceiling, shimmies his shoulders a little in pleasant anticipation.  Then - it's hard to tell, lying prone on the raised bed, but not impossible - he goes entirely limp.

She looks at C for confirmation; when he nods, she takes out a jinx (to start) and thinks.

She wants, not just another Leo, but Leo A, the one who died, that particular chain of experiences that ended, restored to health and allowed to continue living, allowed to move from the last link in the chain to a new one and beyond, as though teleported forward in time from the moment of his death to the moment of his resurrection, losing nothing.

Once it's in words, she recites it to herself, in a whisper, twice.  She doesn't expect it to work with just a jinx but she tries it anyway, for completeness's sake.

He sits up.

He looks at B and C.

"Not gonna lie, I'm a little disappointed."

She's rather staring.

They glance at her, then between each other.

C speaks.

"You okay?  Joking aside this seems like good news."

"It is," she says.  "Just - it didn't even take a hex.  I figured we could raise the dead with these but I didn't expect - it'd be that easy - I'm really glad we paused time."

"Me too," says C, and he glances at the other two of him.  "Us too."

B: "Good day, good news.  Think it's time for us to turn in."

"All right."

"...thank you so much, Leo."

They all grin.

They meet again in Kaylee's tower the next day.  Leo C shows up alone.

"Right now I'm the point-Leo on talking over our plans with you," he says, "and A and B are working on making more coins.  We might switch out in the future, or we might work out some kinda hive-mind situation.  We wanna avoid having just one of us diverging from the others by having the closest relationship with you."

"Yeah, I - really didn't think about that sort of thing, when we were planning for forking you - how we'd handle having more than one of you around, interpersonally."

"It's okay.  Neither did we.  But we don't mind keeping each other in the same place socially by sharing memories around, if it comes to that.  Right now I think you don't have to worry about it too much."

"All right, if you're sure."

"One of us will let you know if we become less sure."

Businesslike: "So what were we in the middle of yesterday, when we did the resurrection test?"

" - talking about what conditions I'd want to resume time under.  Handling resurrecting the dead was a prerequisite for that.  ...I think I read that something like a hundred billion humans have ever lived, and ideally I'd like to bring them all back eventually, plus any non-H-sapiens moral patients if we figure out some principled way to figure out who those are, but I can't imagine it's feasible to set up a system that will let us do that perfectly from inside paused-time with no - test-cases or anything."

"Does that include all the - well, I could name any number of extremely evil historical figures..."

She - exhales.

"I have - almost always thought that if I were omnipotent I would resurrect everyone who's ever lived - even if I had to put them in solitary confinement forever I could at least let them choose between that and death.  It's never sat right with me to kill someone - really to hurt someone at all - if you didn't need to to save more lives, or fix some bigger problem.  And I think when we're this powerful the line between killing someone and - letting them stay dead - kind of dissolves for me.  Maybe not all the way.  I don't have to bring everyone back as soon as we unpause time.  But in the long run, not being-going-to resurrect someone, eventually, when we're omnipotent enough - means condemning them to death, in a way that doesn't feel all that different to condemning them to death if they were still alive."

"But I do sometimes wonder if I only feel this way because nothing - evil enough - has happened to me personally, or anyone close enough to me."

"I think there are people to whom evil things have happened that agree with you," Leo says.  "But you're gonna piss some people off if you resurrect - "

He stops.

"You can say the examples you're thinking of," she says.  "If I'm going to wield this kind of power and do the kinds of things I'm going to do I have to be equal to talking about horrible things."

He - nods.

"You're gonna piss some people off if you resurrect Hitler, or their rapist who they killed in self defense."

She nods soberly.

"And I'm not telling you not to," he says.  "And I'm not telling you to by telling you that I'm not telling you not to.  I'm just - observing the consideration."

"Yeah.  You can observe the consideration without - declaring whether you're fighting for or against the side that would cite that consideration."

"Exactly."

She stands, and turns away, toward the railing of the platform, toward the wide sunset-window beyond it.

"I'm wondering if I need to found a country."

"Oh?"

"I'm - twining together a few trains of thought," she says.  "My focus has been on resurrection, but one of the other conditions I had for unpausing time was setting up a system for getting people out of unsafe situations even if they weren't about to die.  In my most starry-eyed visions - we flip the switch, and everyone comes back, and everyone on Earth - gets a little note or hears a little voice, if you're not safe where you are or you're not comfortable where you are or you can't bear to live like you're living, I can give you something better.  We flip the switch and every homeless person is offered a home, every abused kid or abused partner is offered a sanctuary."

"And if I am going to push magic as far as I can, to improve as many people's lives as much as I can - building something from the ground up might be easier, in some ways, than trying to interface with and modify existing institutions.  Especially if I want to go as fast as I can, to get as many people to post-scarcity as I can as soon as possible.  Which I still kinda do."

"And.  If I am eventually going to resurrect dictators, or war criminals, or even just people who were executed - it might go over better if I can take responsibility for them."

"Mmm, a place where we're sovereign might be a useful thing to have, but I think we want to avoid... a situation where anyone who dies gets forcibly relocated there, de facto, even if they're allowed to immigrate right back."

" - that's a good point.  We might not be able to avoid some level of - that - for the backlog of people who're already dead - but we already said we can't build that system before we unpause time, we might need actual experience using this level of magic before we can plan what to do there effectively.  So we want a system where anyone who dies going forward gets put back where they are by default, but anyone who would prefer relocating to... Salk-Whitlock-Topia?... can do so..."

He smiles at Salt-Whitlock-Topia.  "Leskawland."

"Might be better to give them more options than just relocating.  Way back when, you mentioned something like giving everyone a trinket that unfolds into a house.  If everyone had one of those, and they were stocked with food, and they were magically keyed to their owners who could decide who gets to go in and out - not out," he corrects himself, "you should be able to get out easily no matter who you are.  Just in.  And suppose they could... fly around, or teleport, too.  That would do a whole lotta good without us needing to found a country at all."

" - Yeah.  That's true.  And I think I feel better about it, as a first-pass thing to do when we unstop time.  That and something to heal everyone who's terminally sick and something that will resurrect anyone who dies after we hit play.  Assuming we can manage that much magic throughput?"

"I bet I can work up to it.  But there's a lot of details we probably want to work out about this in the meantime anyway."

She nods seriously.  "Absolutely.  This is a first pass."  But she writes it down on the whiteboard, Leo's floating unfolding home idea and RESURRECT EVERYONE WHERE THEY ARE GOING FORWARD.

"...Once upon a time we were talking about bringing more people in," says Leo.  "You wanted to pause time for them and talk to them, but were worried about putting them on the spot, so we decided to test how resurrection works on me so we could decide if we wanted to unpause time before we brought them in.  Do we want to try to work out this whole thing just the two of us, before we unpause time, now that we know how we can resurrect people?"

She - sighs.

"No.  No, I don't think I do.  I think this should have more than two people on it.  Even if more than two is just five, for now, us and my family... of course if there's anyone you want to bring in?"

"I'll think about it.  But honestly I wasn't sanguine about doing this just the two of us either.  Hell of a pitch, though."

"Yeah."

She sighs.

"I should start working it out.  Who to talk to first, how to approach this."

"Want help?"

"Maybe sanity-check me in a bit?  But - I think I'll brainstorm on my own."

"All right.  I'll go catch up my forks, check out our coin reserves."

With a sort of fizzling pop and a brief shower of blue sparks, an envelope appears in midair in front of her, and lands on her desk.  She startles.

In pretty blue cursive, where the address label should be, it says:

To: Mom
From: Santa (Kaylee)

Blink.

"To: Mom, From: Santa (Kaylee)" is how Kaylee always addressed Christmas gifts to her, when Kaylee was little.  She liked playing along with the game of giving-gifts-as-Santa-Claus but felt bad about lying.  And the ink, and the... magic... sparkles... were both in her daughter's favorite shade of blue.

Well.

She flips the envelope over, and opens it.

Mom,

I'm sorry if this is alarming.  Everything is fine, nobody's hurt or in danger.  I have something I want to ask of you, though, you and Dad and Aunt Sophie.  After you've read this letter, you'll have a chance to talk it over with both of them, and with me - and my friend Leo Salk, who is also involved in all this, if you want.  It's a really big choice, and in a way it's kind of a really awful and sad one, too, and I'm sorry.  But I'm not in trouble, and no one's going to be in trouble no matter what you choose.  In fact, everything's going to be a lot better than we ever thought it would be.

Executive summary: My friend Leo Salk and I both just gained access to a source of magical powers.  He's helping me produce it and make good use of it.  It's very powerful and versatile, and we think that if we think it through and leverage it properly we can cure basically all diseases, give everyone on Earth a safe home and enough food to eat, push out human life expectancy as far as people want it to go, and even resurrect the dead, maybe everyone who's ever died in all of history.  But we want to do it right, and every second that goes by, people are suffering and dying.  Think about all the most horrible, unspeakable things that are happening in the world right now, everything we have to just not think about because we can't do anything about them.  I could stop all of them in an instant, if I do this right, and I don't want to allow any of them to go on a second longer than I have to.

That's why one of the first things Leo and I did with our magic is use it to stop time.  We're hiding out in a sort of secret lair that Leo used our magic to conjure; time's passing for us, and now for you, but not for anyone else in the universe.  Leo and I have been in stopped time for a few days, mostly experimenting with magic and thinking about plans for what to do with it.

This is the really awful part.  If I can possibly avoid it, I don't want to restart time until we're ready to deploy our plans for distributing magic food-and-safety to as many people as we can, and we've only just started making those plans.  I'd like more people's help planning.  The really awful sad choice that I'm going to ask you to make, you and Dad and Aunt Sophie, and maybe a few other people, is whether to come join us in our lair, inside the stopped time, and live with us for as long as it takes us to work out what the best thing to do is; or else go back out of stopped time, and let me and Leo make our plans on our own.  If you say no, then after we're done saying goodbye, it will seem like an instant for you until you see me again, but a lot of time will have passed for me - probably months, maybe years.  If you say yes, you'll get to come into the lair, and help us plan, and all the time that passes for us will pass for you too; for everyone else, outside the lair, it will seem like an instant before you can see them again, but time will have passed for you that didn't pass for them.

You can take time to talk it over with Dad and Aunt Sophie, once you're ready, but I'm not going to unpause time in general until it's time to save everyone.  That's part of what makes it awful and unfair to you, and I'm sorry.

I sent you this letter because I worried that if I tried to just walk into your office and explain everything, it would be confusing and alarming in the wrong ways, but I'm actually right outside your office door,

She puts down the letter.  "Oh, for goodness' sake," she says, voice exasperated and fond.  She stands up from her desk and strides to her door and pulls it open.

"Hey," she says, apologetically.

She pulls her daughter into a hug.

Hug.

"Hey, Kay."

Quietly, and with the barest suggestion of impishness, she says: "Did you stop reading and let me in as soon as you got to the part about me being outside your door?"

She de-hugs just enough to look her daughter in the eye.  "Yes, I did."

"It was toward the end anyway," she says.

She shakes her head, and pulls Kaylee inside, and glances over the rest of the letter:

I sent you this letter because I worried that if I tried to just walk into your office and explain everything, it would be confusing and alarming in the wrong ways, but I'm actually right outside your office door, and whenever you're ready you can open it and we can talk.  You're the first person I've sent this letter to, but you don't have to decide before I send it to anyone else.  I'm going to give another letter just like this to Dad, and to Aunt Sophie, and then set it up so we can all be in a room together and talk it over as a team.

See you in a minute,

Love,

Your daughter, Kaylee

She takes a deep breath, through her nose, and lets it out.

"Well, let's go get your dad."

Little grin.

Little grin.