"Break stuff, change stuff, conjure stuff out of nowhere, Elias apparently once made a neighbor he didn't like come over all warty forever, heal rat-bite-sized wounds apparently."

"Awesome."

"Oh my fucking god," says Alice. "Okay, so what we've learned today: you have magic powers, and I have an underground lair with a secret fucking passage – it's kind of fucked up that he built it so you'd fall two floors straight down, by the way, what's up with that – containing an actual fucking treasure map. When did we turn into the kids from The Magician's Nephew?"

"This afternoon. We turned into those kids sometime this afternoon," Bella says.

Bella shudders. "Yeah, I'll poke at it - maybe Elias wasn't very good at ciphers and I can figure it out by looking up the history of cryptography on the Internet, who knows, I can try making some squares if I have to, I'll use the pentagon I made if necessary." She pauses. "I should've milked that broken leg for a few more of those. Damn."

"You could break it again," Alice suggests philosophically. "I mean, you fixed it the once, so you know it works. Don't jump down the rabbit hole again, though, you might land on your head this time and that's harder to fix."

"Well, that's exactly the problem," Bella says. "Most of the ways I could break my leg on purpose are very scary things that I don't really care to casually do. I have a decent pain tolerance - I have to, I really do get hurt a lot, but I usually get hurt by accident. Once I had a broken leg I could stand to move it around a couple times. What do I do if I want to re-break it without risking landing on my head, though?"

"...uh," says Alice, because he can see a really obvious solution but he's not sure it's one she's going to like.

"Hand you a hammer?" Bella asks, suddenly quiet. "And ask nicely. I guess."

"Yeah," he says, also quiet. "That's what I was thinking."

"These are the most fucked-up magic powers ever."

"Pretty much, yep."

"Yeah, I don't think that's a project for today," Bella says. "I will pull out my old Legos and walk around on them some and see how far I can get that way."

"Your call," says Alice. It's not usually the kind of thing he would bother to say, because it's just so obvious, but in this case he feels like establishing it very clearly.

"...well, it kinda seems like my three wishes are star territory," he says. "Except the first one, I could get that if I just wished him off a cliff. So I'd probably just screw around with magic a lot and then give you the leftovers, because if I learn how to make magic wish coins out of my pain, there will be leftovers. I cannot think of enough superpowers to use up all the hexes I'd be making."

"There is probably some nonlethal solution," Bella says. "For instance, squares and up can make stuff. Can probably make - gold, which could be sold, even if it can't make non-counterfeit dollars. Fuckton of money versus fuckton of money is a different fight than fuckton of money versus dependent."

Bella looks at the cipher. There is a map drawn on the two-page spread, but the map seems to encompass the entire Pacific Northwest, and she's going to need to figure out what these blocks of symbols mean to determine where on the map the stash is. Sigh.

"You wanna put your magic book away and go see if Hilary will let us in her kitchen?"

"Hey, awesome," Alice says cheerfully.