"A sitting room sounds nice. With windows, and a view."

"Yeah. ... Though, I've been having trouble looking at, um, anything city-related, so maybe a view of the ocean. It's hard to look at my home when it's been defiled. I'll probably get over it eventually, but."

Hug.

Hug.

"It used to be very pretty," she mumbles into his shoulder.

Much hug.

Yep, much hug.

"I'm not sure if I'll even be able to look at it once it's fixed, if it's all. Empty and sad."

Nod. Hug.

Hug.

"Anyway. Um. Back to architecting?"

Hug. "Yeah. What else does a castle need..."

Many things, it turns out.

So many things!

"Should we indulge in a ballroom?" wonders Ivethis, eventually. "It seems a bit silly with the two of us, but then where else would you get to dance?"

"What are magic castles for if not extravagant indulgences?"

Giggle.

"Okay. Ballroom indulgence. By that logic, I get a multi-story library."

"Definitely."

More giggling.

She can make little models of potential layouts! Without even thinking about all of the specifics, even. This makes layout planning much more convenient, but not entirely trivial.

"I'm not sure I have a great way to test the structural integrity of layouts," she muses. "I can make little dollhouse versions all day and night, but they don't have the same weight bearing down on them, so it's - not as obvious where the points of failures are."

"...yeah, good point. Hmm. It's a magic castle, can you make it hold itself up by magic?"

"Well, let's find out."

A bit of wall deposits a block of stone precariously supported by a number of removable sticks. It looks reasonably stable, on its own. She scootches towards it, and starts removing support sticks. After removing a few from both sides, she hums thoughtfully, and switches to removing sticks from only one side.

Even once she's removed all the left sticks, the stone block stays right where it is.

"Well now I'm wondering if I can just remove both sides and if we can make a flying castle."

"Let's find out!"

Ivethis smiles, and starts removing more sticks. "I mean, even just this happening isn't quite enough to build a castle on, I'd want to leave it overnight to check that it'll stay when I'm not staring at it, but it's still very -"

As she gets down to a limited number of sticks, the stone block stops putting up with the lack of support, and decides abruptly that it would like to start following physics again. Right onto Ivethis's hand.

"Ow-!" she yelps, withdrawing the bruised hand. "Ow, fuck, I suppose that's what I get for testing things with my hand in the line of fire, ow."

"—you all right?" he asks, moving closer.

"Yes, just my pride that suffered the real injury. Nothing's broken, just a bruise."

She shows him the injured hand. It looks like the corner of the stone brick got her, there's already signs of a small but nasty looking bruise. Probably would have been better if it had just hit the entire hand, it wouldn't have concentrated the force all to one area.

"I'd say 'first blood,' but I'm not bleeding," she says, wryly.

He smiles at her.

"I can heal it if you want," he offers.

"... I'm honestly a bit torn between wanting to see cool magic and stop being bruised and wanting to have this as a reminder to keep my hand out of stupid situations."

She frowns at it, and tilts her head. "Are you healing it now?"

"Mm? No...?"

"Oh. Um. Am I seeing things, then, because it looks like it's healing."

If one looks closely, she appears to not be seeing things. Slowly, the bruise is shrinking and cycling through the various colored stages of being a bruise. The edges are fading to yellow, the middle parts of the bruise are still an ugly purple.