She meets Bridget there. They measure their plants in the lit room and the dark room, take pictures, and write down subjective evaluations of leaf droopiness. They leave.
They're about a third of the way to Bella's building when a man's voice behind them says, "Hello, girls."
There is a loud bang.
Bella ramps up to 6x and whirls around with what seems like absurd slowness at that runspeed. She's not in pain - he missed or didn't shoot at her - but she has coins, she triangles the gun jammed, that could happen by itself, right? She pentagons aikido, knocks his gun arm aside like she's still afraid of it, locks his wrist when he grabs for her and drives him to the ground and breaks it. "Bridget. Bridget, are you okay?"
A flattened bullet falls to the ground from somewhere in the vicinity of her shoulderblades. There is a large, obvious hole through the back of her jacket that matches another large, obvious hole in the shirt beneath, but her skin is unmarked.
She didn't do that.
The guy is trying to kick her from his pinned position. She twists the broken wrist again and he screams.
"Call the cops," she says.
Pause.
"If you tie your jacket around your shoulders they'll be less likely to haul you off to a lab and prevent me from asking you a great many questions."
She also, after a little rearranging, manages to find a configuration for the jacket that does not reveal any suspicious holes. Then she picks up the ex-bullet and tucks it into her purse. Then she calls the cops.
"You freaks," starts their attacker. Bella puts her knee on his neck in a cheap version of a sleeper hold and his eyes roll back in his head and he falls unconscious.
Bella's impression is of someone who has actually practiced aikido at some point. (She's going to have to think of a place she could reasonably picked that up; Youtube demonstrations wouldn't give her muscle memory.) Also someone whose response to trauma is mania rather than withdrawal. She jabbers quickly in grammatically incorrect sentences and has to expend a square to actually produce the name of the throw she used. She waves her arm wildly when asked where the gun was fired. "It didn't hit me but oh god it was so loud and I thought he got Bridget and I just it was like oh my god!" she exclaims, trembling for effect.
When Bridget is securely in place, Bella starts up and heads out.
"There, that's better," she says, and leans on the arm of her couch.
"So, I'm impervious to physical injury. I haven't always been. It started when I was a kid. You remember I told you my parents weren't funny? Well, my dad was the kind of not funny that lends itself to noticing when one day you can't get hurt anymore. I hope I don't have to draw you a picture."
She shrugs.
"Questions?"
"You said no fairy godmother, but if it wasn't your own doing, and it wasn't your dad's, and people spontaneously becoming physically invulnerable isn't something on the books as a normal childhood event, maybe somebody else did it, because of that, and then if I want to find out what's going on I know where to look next. So. Non-fairy godmother? Your mom? Siblings cousins friends aunts uncles next-door neighbors?"
"I didn't say I ruled out it happening spontaneously, but I can't get as far on that possibility through mere conversation," Bella says. "Or other routes either, really - I'm not qualified to look at your genes or whatnot even if you were inclined to let me, which, why would you, if you wanted that done you could do it yourself."
"I don't know, this phenomenon is weird enough that it could be related to anything. Was it your birthday? Did interesting things happen at school? Was the weather funky? Did you meet a strange old lady with whom you shared half of your lunch?" Bella shrugs.
"I know my tolerances are mostly beyond my ability or inclination to find," she says. "Cold weather is uncomfortable but I didn't manage to give myself frostbite the one time I tried. I don't need oven mitts. I don't get chemical burns. I have yet to meet the impact that can so much as bruise me, and I am impermeable to sharp objects including needles, knives, and any power tool you can name. Which was very exciting to test, let me tell you. I also don't get sick, although I haven't deliberately tested my resistance to infection in any systematic way."
This is truly fascinating.
"What else do you know about the power? Does it vary at all with time or circumstance, does it interact with the other person's power...? Exactly how does it protect you if you're forced into some position humans typically can't occupy without injury, like if I tried that same wrist-break I used on that creep only I was also half-steamroller? Do you just fail to twist past that point, or do your various parts extend their tolerances as they go so you could in theory turn your head all the way around like an owl if you had the right machinery?"
Bella then gets up, takes hold of Bridget's hand, and attempts the throw. "Erm," she says, when Bridget just stands there. "Oh, right, usually your tendons would be screaming at you to get on the floor now - but the technique can work on people who can't feel it if you push a little harder, by sheer leverage. Cops use it on people too drugged to feel anything all the time." She follows through harder, Bridget goes down, and she leans on the wrist.
It does not go.
"That is really fascinating."
"Huh," says Bella. "Does anything hurt you? I mean, you said cold weather is uncomfortable - do you get hungry? Cramps around your time of the month? Migraines, gas, flashes of bright light, loud noises? Cayenne pepper?"
"Hmm." Bella taps her chin. "What if you tweeze hairs out of your leg or something? Will they refuse to come out, or does it just not hurt when they do?"
It is kind of genuinely horrifying in a way that very few things are, until he remembers that Bella has magic pain powers, which makes it a little better, and then he remembers that he could have magic pain powers if he wanted to and could use them on himself, and then it's fine.
She hits Alice with a comforting medium-square amount of "tension headache" flavor, as a screwed up long-distance substitute for a pat on the head. [There there. You are very unlikely to wake up with her power.]
"Rats. Hm. What else hurts but doesn't really injure... I assume you can cut your nails, right? Or they'd be ridiculously long. What about the nail that's still right over the nail bed? For most people any direct contact with the skin under the fingernail will hurt." Pause. "Am I being creepy? I am concerned that I am being creepy."
"Enough to get down to the pink. I encourage you to mess around with that if you care, but I'm going to file that under 'probably doesn't hurt'. Hmm. What if you sleep on a terrible bed for a week solid, or drink preposterous amounts of things like alcohol or coffee or other things that can kill you in quantity?"
"If you and something else experience a lot of friction, like if you'd fallen off my bike and gone skidding across the road, does it generate heat that simply fails to hurt you, or fail to generate heat at all? I think it would be obvious if you were absolutely frictionless, but in the same sense that your wrist failed to go past a certain point perhaps you don't generate friction past a certain point?"
"Which is why you're getting to hear the vicious ideas instead of me keeping them to myself. Hmm. I suppose if you were tossed into a large piece of machinery, it would break, and you would give whoever threw you there a withering look, but could you actually get out? I mean, are you only particularly tough when stuff is trying to break you, or can you exert the same defensive force outward and break stuff at the location you prefer? Be all 'no, comically enormous clockwork, you cannot move my arm there before this gear twists into uselessness, do it here instead'."
"Okay, lemme pick an easier to imagine example than comically enormous clockwork. Suppose you stick your arm through the bars of a cage which contains a tiger. It bites you. It can't break the skin, but you aren't made of rock, so it can get hold of you and pull anyway. Can you just stand there - can you basically lean on the fact that your shoulder will not come out of its socket and the teeth will not go through your skin, to also keep your feet planted - or is the tiger going to get you up against the bars of the cage and hold you there until it gets bored?"
"Interesting. But can you just break stuff when your bodily integrity isn't so obviously on the line? If you push on a wall really hard, that probably won't hurt you even if you fail, but if you did it hard enough it might make a regular person's hand slightly uncomfortable - would the wall break rather than 'pushing back' enough to make you slightly uncomfortable?"
"It is!" Bella agrees. "Hmmm. Ooh - if you hold a hot thing, it doesn't hurt you - I imagine you can tell it's warm, but perhaps you are nonetheless thereby more insulating than regular people. Either that, or the heat does go into you and simply fails to do damage - a lot of things simply fail to happen to you, it seems. I'm not sure of a good way to test this that doesn't involve a human who is not you holding an equivalent hot object so we can measure the temperatures of yours versus the control, though." Alice would so do it, but Bella doesn't want to explain to Bridget why she'd be willing to inflict burns on her boyfriend for science.
"I guess you could hold a hot thing and we could take its temperature anyway, and compare against some naive model," Bella says. "How far will a needle or a knife go before it won't anymore? A relatively dull one should compress before it pierces, normally."
"Far as I know," Bella lies easily. "I suppose there are all kinds of exotic powers I could have manifested and never noticed, but I don't have anything like yours. Why? Do you run into lots of people who've seen supernatural things and don't mean the Virgin Mary on toast?"
She presses the edge against her arm with obvious force. It makes a polite sort of dent, the kind you might get from poking yourself with your finger. And in much the same way, a paler line along her skin is briefly visible when she drags it away.
She considers. "Your jaw muscles got sore when you bit your tongue - I wonder if you could cause them actual damage? Or if you just aren't strong enough to do that?"
Actually, as far as Bella knows they're tied, and will be until Bridget meets Alice or Bella meets the mystery other person. But it would not do to share so.
[So apparently I'm not the only person with a random power. I suppose this was more likely than me happening to have something that only happens to one in billions of people. The fact that I met one suggests that they're either pretty common - or there's a selection effect.]
Pause.
[Second possibility: slightly worrying.]
[Imagine you say that your club is open to everybody, and then you only advertise that it exists in yacht clubs. You are going to get people who have yachts. Anything that filters who you're looking at like that. I'm not sure I like the idea that someone or something is filtering who I look at so I get magic people. But it's only one - you weren't magic till after understood causes unrolled - so perhaps I'm only paranoid.]
Bella thinks about it. [I don't think Bridget planned to get shot. I invited her on my own initiative to walk with me as far as my dorm - although it's possible she'd have invited herself along if I hadn't. I could have biked to and from - though it's possible that she just knows how I get around campus normally. We could have gone a different route - but I wouldn't necessarily notice if she were doing something subtle with her body language to steer me, and I didn't notice the guy until he was right behind us anyway so who knows how long he was tailing us. Hm.]
Bella chews on her lip as she ascends the stairs to her room. She waves to Janine, if she's awake, and starts changing for bed; it's late.
[I suppose I'm not immune to non-mental spying. One moment while I design something to fix that.]
[I am working on that. I think it'd cause more problems than it solves for people to mysteriously go blind if they look at me when I can't tell they're there - but mechanical bugs and magical divination, I think I can do. In the case of the bugs, I just happen to always be indistinct if that's plausible - image goes grainy, my voice is an indiscernible mumble - and the device outright malfunctions and quits bugging if that wouldn't make sense. Magical spying says I'm a null result, if they're looking for something specific I'm not that - if they're looking for me, I don't exist. This does have the drawback that someone who is already looking for me can tell that something unusual is going on. But we know that there exist natural superpowers - mine and Bridget's - and a reasonably competent magic stalker knows that too. Hmm.]
[I don't think I'm being spied on a lot by random people. Nobody cares about security camera footage unless a crime is going on. But it can be suppressible like everything else. Maybe I should add a bug-sensing component so I can be more judicious about what I do and don't block.]
[Like PIs and stuff? Hm. Okay, I'm going to be immune to magic spying and add general-bug-sensing so I'll notice if I do have a stalker and they change tactics. Magically, I am not the droids they're looking for; nonmagically I will notice if someone is taking my picture - actually, since it's just going to be a sense, I may as well throw in how many people are looking at me, with their eyes. Now I have to decide what that should feel like.]
[If I don't think of an alternative, yes it is. I'd magically expand my field of vision but I think it'd make me twitchy, reacting to things I shouldn't be able to see...] Think, think. [I'll take your directional feeling and make it buzz, I think. Faster for the more intently someone's looking at me - someone scanning a crowd I'm in or a stationary security camera in the grocery store will barely register, someone actually spying on me will vibrate like a bell. And I'll fuss with the distance indicator to add a dimension so I know what it is that's looking at me. And I'll run at one-point-five by default while I get used to it.]
Bella does not want magic (except Alice's) to be able to tell where she is, or anything about her characteristics; she wants it to fail subtly when it can, fail unsubtly when it can't, and - well. Someone might already be magically spying on her. Maybe she can come up with a way to unobtrusively fade out...? Not likely. Not if they're paying attention.
There doesn't seem to be a plausible way to fade inconspicuously from well-attended magic spying without mental tampering that might not even work. But perhaps Bella can make it register the way it would if she died, or lost the characteristics on which she's being monitored, instead of as though she jammed the detector. If the hypothetical stalker comes and checks on her in person she will have a chance to identify them: they will be looking at her. Hard.
A hex goes.