"You love your new notebook?" Bella asks, pulling it out and handing it over. "That is my guess."

Bella laughs, at the antics and at the relation of Mrs. Hammond's attitude. "Sounds great. I have to do some nonzero amount of homework this afternoon, but I can do it at your house. Lemme call and tell Mr. Jenkins to tell my dad he's on his own for dinner again. Well, not quite, there's leftover mashed potatoes and half a steak..." She pulls out her phone and places the call, which goes a lot like the last one.

"Pff, homework," says Alice. "Sure, okay."

"Yes, homework. I can coast in English with recycled essays, but I have to actually write things down for other classes, even if it's easy." She shrugs. "I want to go to college."

"Dad keeps making noises about how if I was more responsible he could send me to law school. Pretty sure I'd rather die," says Alice. "We good to go?"

Bella gets up, favoring the hurt elbow still. "Sure. I haven't thought as far ahead as graduate school yet. I'm not even sure what I'll major in. Maybe bio or something."

"Can't help you there," he says serenely. "Y'know, this is the longest I've gone without skipping gym in ages."

"I got the impression you usually came to gym even before. You like Ms. Finch and whatnot."

"Yeah, usually's not the same as always," he says. "Maybe you're a good influence."

"No wonder your mom likes me." She tilts her head and heads outside, looking grimly at the ice. She sits on it again. Scoot, scoot, scoot. "What do you normally do during the school day while you cut classes?"

"October. I'm good at not getting caught."

This time, he even puts his seatbelt on without prompting!

Bella drives with care, although Forks of necessity is pretty good about plowing and salting. "Apart from it usually being father-infested and this being a good opportunity, is there anything particularly cool to do in your house besides inspect all the pretty things in it? I did that one time already."

"How come your mom skipped your room on the tour?"

"She also skipped hers and Dad's. And Hilary's." He brightens a little. "Ooh, we can help Hilary cook, would that be fun?"

"That could be fun!" Bella agrees. "I will copy all her recipes."

"Okay. I'll ask her."

Bella hums happily to herself. "My dad's having Hilary over on their coinciding day off next week. I think he intends to teach her to fish."

"Sounds like fun."

"Fishing is dull as a poorly maintained guillotine during the French Revolution," says Bella. "But perhaps they'll have fun chatting."

...He cracks up.

"Pretty much whatever I pick up," he says. "If it's boring I put it down again."

"Anything good lately?"

"I have a favourite book!" he offers. "You wanna see my favourite book?"

"Cool. I'll show you when we get there."

And in due course... they get there.

"Hello, Mrs. Hammond," says Bella brightly.

Bella giggles softly. "I'm told I missed some basement."

"Book first," Bella says.

"...so," says Alice, "this walking through walls thing. Is that new?"

"I'm at least as surprised as you are." She half-turns, and puts her arm back through the wall of the pillar. It goes like the pillar's not even there. She puts her weight on the leg that was formerly broken, and finds it just as fine as it was before she fell. "They're kind of fucked-up magic powers, though."

"...Fucked up like how?"

"You're going to love this," Bella realizes. "I can make coins that I can then use to grant myself wishes, of various sizes. The coins are made out of pain. I broke my leg falling down and fixed it with itself."

"...Yep, you're right, I love it," he says, grinning a little. "Except that if anybody's gonna have those magic powers it should clearly be me. I get hurt more than you do and I like it."

"I'm not actually sure if you can have the powers," Bella says, putting the pentagon in her pocket for the time being and looking at the book. "This is dedicated to someone named Elias Frobisher's 'descendant'. Might also be why I can go through the pillar and the chimney and you couldn't. I need to read the rest of it."

"You'll probably use 'em better than I would, anyway," he muses.

"Probably, yes," Bella says unapologetically. She picks a different pillar - one that is not insubstantial to her - to sit against, and she opens the book back up.

"That is really cool," Alice opines.

Alice perks up and leans forward. "Ooh, what's that?"

"Damn," he marvels. "Your great-whatever-grandpa was pretty hardcore."

"See, I totally want your magic powers," he says cheerfully. "Ooh, what kind of stuff?"

"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.

Laughing, Alice trots after her.

"Where will we find Hilary?" asks Bella.

"Kitchen, I bet."

Bella twirls once at the top of the stairs, thwacks her arm into the doorframe, and half-chokes-half-laughs as she displays and then pockets a square. "Kitchen it is!"

"Hi, Hilary! It's good to finally meet you. I can cook, but not as well as you. May I raid your recipe file?" Bella asks brightly.

"Has he got more daughters I'm handily defeating without even knowing it?" Bella asks archly. "I would love to participate in snail-free cake."

Bella produces her brand new blank notebook and pen. "I'm feeling very adventurous today," she says earnestly.

"Other cake book it is," says a very cheerful Alice.

"So one of these cake books comes to us from the sunken ruins of a ghost ship in the Bermuda Triangle, is that it?" Bella inquires. "And the other was obtained at the library fundraiser for fifty cents?"

"Oooh," sighs Bella. "I probably don't even have the equipment to make some of those at home, let alone the skill."

"You probably don't," Hilary agrees. "Laney, any preferences? Why am I asking you, you never want things. Bella!" She makes a gesture that causes Alice to hand Bella the recipe book. "Pick something that looks tasty and/or frightening."

"Ooh." Bella take the book and flips through. "Oooh-ooh-ooh. Are we ingredient-limited at all?" She stops at a page with a towering layer cake, cut open to reveal stripes of crumb and frosting under a thick coating of white rosettes. "Maple Caramel Coconut Butter Cake," Bella reads. "Wow."

Bella laughs aloud. "This thing has three kinds of frosting in it! Let's do it!"

Bella fetches mixing bowls as instructed. She bumps her head on the cupboard and does her best to be discreet in pocketing her new square.

"Careful there," says Hilary. (Alice snickers.) "Thank you, just set them down over there." She drifts over to the fridge and starts calling out ingredients to be assembled, carefully specifying where each one might be found. Alice hops to it.

"Sorry, I'm just really terribly clumsy," Bella says. "I don't know if that's one of the things my dad mentioned." She helps find ingredients too, humming to herself quietly.

"Knocking myself out would be an undesirable outcome," hums Bella, fetching shaved coconut from the fridge.

"I think so," Bella agrees, looking at the recipe.

Bella starts scooping measuring cups into containers. In the presence of the cake deity, she even bothers to sift the flour.

Hilary busies herself at the stove with butter, sugar, and the mysteries of the cosmos. Alice pours things and fetches other things and lends his supply of muscle power to the task of stirring. All in all, it is a very cheerful kitchen.

When the cake's several layers are each in the oven, and the various frostings are in their bowls and in the piping bag ready for application, Bella leans with a happy sigh against the counter. "Well," she says. "That's that, for the next thirty to thirty-five minutes."

"Job well done," Hilary agrees. "And would you look at that," she opens a drawer with one hand and picks up a pot off the stove with the other, "leftover caramel and three spoons. Dig in, kids."

Bella laughs gleefully and takes a spoon - and a big scraping of caramel from the bowl, too.

"I don't think I ever got to the point of seeing your favorite book," Bella remarks to Alice. "I became distracted by that other book and then we wandered off."

He swallows his current mouthful of caramel and says, "That is very true! Wanna go give it another shot? With less falling this time?"

"Yes, I'll have to be more careful given the state of your floor," chuckles Bella. She licks her spoon clean and puts it in the dishwasher.

"Yep." He sticks his spoon in his mouth again, pulls it out nearly free of caramel, drops it in the dishwasher, waves to Hilary, and leads the way out of the kitchen.

Bella follows him up to his room, trying to lope like she hasn't spent her life fearing falling.

Bella plucks the book out of his hand and opens it up. "What's it about?" she asks.

There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know "where it's at," this:

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.
Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it."

Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

Bella giggles. "Can I borrow this?"

"Go for it! If there's a book that is my brain, it's that book," says Alice.

"I don't know what I'd say if I had to pick a book to represent my brain," Bella says. "I like old literary fiction, but it doesn't mirror me, it's just fun to read."

"You have, like, a hundred books that represent your brain," Alice points out, perching on a corner of his bed. "Literally."

"Oh. I guess that's perfectly true," laughs Bella. "For some reason that didn't occur to me. They're in the background."

She sits on his bed, safely away from the bricks. "I don't think putting another barrier in front of it would even help. It's magicked to let me in."

"Yeah, let you in and then let you fall straight to the basement," he says. "Were there any skeletons of previous descendants down there?"

"The only thing in the room was a weird sourceless probably-magic glow, and the book and the hex."

"Great, now I'm imagining that the floor down there eats skeletons," he says. "...Stop me if I'm creeping you out."

Bella laughed. "I don't think so. I think Elias Frobisher just didn't have a lot of descendants who happened to wander into the house. It's a two-story fall - it could kill me if I dove headfirst, but it wouldn't be too likely." She shrugged. "For practical reasons he wasn't really concerned about being injured, himself - maybe the point of the fall is specifically so what happened to me was possible."

"Well, it's definitely one way to make sure whoever finds the book would use it," he says, rubbing the back of his head and looking half-suspiciously, half-admiringly at the chimney.

"It does seem like it could backfire, though. Anyone can use the coin and there was only the one in there. I could have wasted it fixing my leg if I'd been a slightly different person." She glances at her backpack, currently on the floor. "I guess that's what the stash is for."

"You're totally gonna take over the world," Alice predicts.

"Maybe," sings Bella.

"You are. I'm falling in love with you again," he declares.

Bella laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and bites her own hand to keep from laughing, and a triangle appears between her first and middle fingers.

Alice actually hugs himself with glee.

This just sends Bella into another paroxysm of giggles. She gets another triangle out of biting her hand, then chomps harder and gets a square.

Bella watches this with interest, releasing her hand from her teeth. She puts the coins in her pocket, which now contains enough that the glow is visible through the material. She frowns at this, and then puts her accumulation in the thicker backpack.

"So," he says, digging in the laundry drifts near the chimney, "will it creep you out if I say it's kinda hot when you do that?"

"Nah," Bella says. "It would only escalate to creepitude if you started swatting me without me signing up for that - whether you were doing it because it's hot or to try to steal the coins or because I annoyed you or whatever."

Bella cranes her neck slightly so she'll be able to see what he writes, but if he's not interested in showing her she's not going to make a fuss.

"Mm-hm. If you don't mind." Bella peers over his shoulder.

Bella mulls over whether to be helpful. He doesn't have any practice at this yet. "Would it be hot if I did the same things and no coins happened? Or if the coins happened some other way?"

Bella grins and supervises. The next question is whether those things, too, are hot in themselves - and whether they all add up to the correct amount of hot - but maybe he's got a different idea, or he'll come up with that one himself.

"I'm not sure about this one," he says, tapping 'you're gonna take over the world' with the end of his pen. "I mean, it's true and it's hot and it's obviously related but I'm not sure it's exactly the right thing. You know?"

"Mm-hm," Bella agrees. She thinks, tapping her cheek with one forefinger. "Maybe that I can now take over the world, or that I'm the sort of person who really might, or something about what you think I'll do with it once it is all mine?"

"Would any magic powers do the trick?" Bella laughs. "If I were a Japanese cartoon character and I changed into a frilly costume by saying something like, I don't know, 'luminous star mysticism awaken!', and then I could use the Japanese cartoon equivalent of a Care Bear Stare..."

"I promise not to turn you into a Care Bear," he says cheerfully, and looks down at the page again. After a thoughtful moment, he circles 'it hurt' and 'you were laughing having fun' and draws a double-ended arrow between those two.

"Perhaps disappointingly, I don't have your kink," Bella tells him. "I'm pretty darn sure of that. But triangle- to square-level pain doesn't ruin my sense of humor, and even fucked-up magic powers are still magic powers."

"Yeah, I know," he says. "But it matters that you were getting hurt and having fun at the same time even if you didn't like it the way I would."

"Huh, okay," says Bella agreeably. "Anything else?"

"Mmmm." He drums the pen against the paper. "Dunno."

"You seem to like it when I have opportunities to decide things," Bella remarks. "Magic powers - not to mention taking over the world - both provide more of that. Any magic power would provide that, but the wishes are flexible - and I have to choose to make a tradeoff to get them each time, not just buy them in rolls from the bank and decide how to spend 'em."

"That does matter," says Bella, frowning and pulling out her notebook. "I'm going to make a long, long list of nice generic things to do with coins of all sizes, and find some way to wear them on my person at all times, so if it looks like I'm going to get mugged I can deplete the supply, usefully and instantly." She shakes her head. "But I have to sleep - at least until I have a hex to drop on making that go away - and should probably try not to keep too many of the big ones around. Someone who doesn't know what they're dealing with won't likely think to wish on a random glowing coin, but if they do, anything good-sized could be trouble."

"How big a coin would you need to lock up your backpack so only you can get into it?" he wonders. "Or, like, a box or something."

"I'm not sure. Possibly a pentagon, but it might take a hex - I don't know how Elias did the secret room, but I don't need quite that much sophistication necessarily. I don't want them in my backpack, though. They have to be touching me so I can use them, and I'd like them accessible in an emergency - if my car skids on the ice, I want to undo that right then, rather than dig around for a square in my bag in the backseat. I need a necklace or a bracelet or something."

"You could make it, like, invisible to people who aren't you?" he suggests. "And if I get powers and you end up buried in hexes, you can keep those all locked up in one place."

"Invisible necklace," agrees Bella. "Yes, that's a good idea. I think I can do that with a pentagon. If I can't, I'm in trouble, since I don't have a hex."

"But if it turns out that making the necklace invisible doesn't make stuff you put on it afterward invisible too," he continues musingly, "you'll be kinda screwed what with the glowy red things hanging from your neck on an invisible chain. It's a shame you've only got the one pentagon or you could just try it. See? This is why I should have magic powers."

"I think I saw something about..." She scoops out Elias's book again, and flip-flip-flips, and stops. "Here. If I wish for something that my coin of choice isn't big enough to handle, it just doesn't work. If I wish on a pentagon for a chain that I can make coins appear directly on and that will extend invisibility to those coins, then I'll either get that or it won't work." She taps the book a couple times. "I wonder if that's why stars fuck up so much - they are big enough for anything, so people don't have to be thoughtful about the exact wish?"

"I think having the invisible chain is pretty important. If I haven't thought of something more important, or a better solution to the same problem, by the time I leave here today, then I'll use the pentagon for that."

Bella smiles. She is not immune to flattery and has never troubled to render herself so.

He looks up at her, spots the smile, and grins.

"The necklace?" he hazards.

"Yes. I don't doubt I could make a plain chain with a square, but the permanent invisibility power is apparently a big deal."

"Read the book first," he says. "I don't wanna spoil it. You'll know when you get there."

"Are you aware," Bella says, "that I don't like mysteries?"

"It's a really short book," he says. "You could probably get to the right part before the cake's even done."

Bella looks at him, and then puts the magic book away and pulls out Alice's favorite instead. She opens it up again and begins to read.

"Probably, yeah. But I like the way he wrote it," he says cheerfully. "So yeah, I wanna make a rain of jelly beans."

"Property damage," Bella says. "Possibly injury or death, if there are too many of them. Certainly disruptions of schedules, some of which are actually important - there is a reason ambulances are allowed to speed. Gosh, with results like that, who wouldn't want a rain of jellybeans?"

He sticks out his tongue. "Ruin all my fun, why don'tcha. Well, it doesn't matter that much to me if I rain jelly beans on people or not. I could rain jelly beans in the middle of nowhere and confuse the hell out of the next hiker."

"You'd probably do some damage to the local ecosystem, but at that point I'm just nitpicking," shrugs Bella. "But... The combination of you having this kind of idea and how impulsive I have seen you be doesn't add up to 'this person definitely needs magic powers'. I don't think raining the jelly beans in the woods was your first idea. I might want to extract some kind of agreement that if I give you a hex to turn into coinmaking abilities you run anything pentagon-sized and up by me first."

"...Okay, but we'd better make some kind of magic instant checking-my-stupid-ideas-with-Bella system, because if I'm off in Nevada or whatever and I have an idea I like that much, I'm not waiting for you to answer your phone. I'm just not."

"Sure, you can make us some hexes and bam, instant telepathy," Bella says lightly.

"Purely communicative telepathy," Bella says. "At least as concerns the contents of my brain departing it. Select notebook contents are it in that department; my thoughts are mine."

He waves a hand in a gesture of agreement/dismissal. "Sure, but you'd be okay with you reading my mind, right?"

Bella nods cheerfully. She taps her own notebook with her pen and starts writing Charts of her own, for ways to quickly use up any coins that are in danger of being stolen, and depleting excessively tempting stashes. Me able to read pinball wizard's mind, is one of the items under "hexagon", along with "flight" and "no need for sleep" and "todo: look up list of X-Men".

"Whatcha doin' up there?" he wonders.

She shows him the list in progress. The pentagon list has "languages (various)" and "musical talent" and "(after masochistic magic-generator exists only) remove clumsiness?" and "cook like Hilary!".

"Wolverine," he says when he gets to the entry about X-Men.

"That's the one with the retractable claws? Do you really want to go around with claws in your arms all the time?" Bella asks.

"Well, that would be kind of cool, but I was thinking more the healing factor," he says. "So you can just hurt yourself over and over and not use up a bunch of wishes fixing it afterward. ...I guess maybe I want that more than you do."

"Oh, a healing power," agrees Bella, pulling back the notebook to write that down and point an arrow from it to the very top of the list. "That would be useful, but yes, more for you than me."

"And probably you'd want to be able to, like... hold it off," he adds. "So you didn't have to keep your arm in the cage of rats or whatever, and in case you break your arm in front of a bunch of people and don't wanna be hauled off to a lab or something."

"Right," Bella agrees, adding a "(voluntary postponement option)" note next to the item. "But having this list is mostly not useful until we have surplus coins in these ranges, which will take until I get into a spectacular accident, or we find Elias's stash and it has a hex in it, or it doesn't have a hex in it and we engineer that level of harm." She says the last with gritted teeth. "Or I chicken out and try to take over the world with squares and occasional pentagons, even though that would be harder and less fun."

"I hope it has a hex in it," says Alice.

"Yes. I also hope that it has a hex in it," Bella says.

"I mean, I can think of lots of ways to get around not having a cage full of rats handy," he says. "But you probably don't wanna do any of 'em."

"No, go ahead and tell me, I might as well try to get used to whatever one of the ideas is best in case there isn't a hex," Bella says.

"...Do you actually want me to sit here listing ways I could hurt you really badly," he says—phrased as a question, but delivered without the intonation that would make it one.

"Start with whatever's tamest, we'll see if I squeak and run away," sighs Bella.

"I am bad at tame," says Alice, inarguably. "Okay, well, first one that comes to mind, I could just get a knife and keep cutting you until you hit the right level of hurt. Which we'd know because you'd be raining hexes instead of pentagons."

"Do you know enough about anatomy to avoid me bleeding out?" Her voice is level, though she doesn't look thrilled about the topic.

"Probably," he says. "Which brings me to option two: fire."

"That one sounds even harder to keep under control," Bella says, scrunching her eyes closed tightly. "I think I can listen to one more possibility and then I want to stop."

"Well, I don't mean set you on fire," he says. "Chemical burns sound any better?"

"Yes, actually," Bella says. "Or maybe extreme cold. Liquid nitrogen or dry ice or something." She manages a very weak smile. "Coin requires pain, not utter terror."

"It's harder to get that stuff, though," he says. "And liquid nitrogen does not hurt as much as a cigarette burn, I'll tell you that right now."

"Sooo we're done talking about hurting you, then," says Alice. "Okay. I bet it is, actually. Wanna go check?"

"Yes, I do," says Bella.

"I was under the impression that Hilary's title was 'housekeeper', not just 'cook', though she'd certainly be worth retaining as the latter - does she keep out of your room or are you just very, very fast?" Bella asks, following.

"She gave up on my room," he says. "The parents let her. Once in a while when my dad wants something to be pissed off about he sticks his head in and yells at me about my floor."

Bella snickers quietly, and trots down the stairs towards the kitchen, sniffing the air for maple-caramel-coconut-butter-cake.

"Yes ma'am!" Bella says smartly.

Bella handles caramel. She stubs her toe once, and her hands are covered with caramel; if a coin appears, Alice can't see where.

He does notice the toe-stubbing, and spends a brief moment wondering if she managed to make any coins out of it. There aren't that many places one might have appeared. Maybe she didn't. Or maybe it went to a place that is conducive to creating more coins and wow he is stopping that train of thought right there. Luckily, he has cake-lifting to distract him.

Frost frost frost. Ice ice ice. Hum hum hum. If Bella's new coin exists and is making her uncomfortable, this doesn't show on her face.

Good! That means he can just forget about it. Forgetting about it is a great plan.

Bella isn't very good at icing rosettes like those that go on the outside of this cake - it's not a task friendly to slippery hands or shaky arms - so she lets Hilary do that, but she watches the technique carefully.

So does Alice!

"Is spaghetti a multi-person job?" Bella asks. "I'm happy to help, especially if this is fancy Hilary-the-cake-goddess spaghetti, but I'm not sure how extra hands would be useful."

"Ooh, learning things," says Bella. She has her notebook in her pocket. She removes it from her pocket.

"You're not allowed to cook when he's home?" Bella asks. She peers at the recipe. Huh, fennel seeds.

"Nope. Too girly," Alice says succinctly.

Bella ferries dishes, inhaling appreciatively.

"Hello again," Bella says cheerfully. "We made spaghetti and an evil cake."

Bella places the last fork and sits down. She splashed a little sauce on her hand during the cooking process - earning her a triangle and an early taste - and she knows exactly how nice this is going to be.

Bella giggles around a mouthful of spaghetti and nods enthusiastically.

"Mmm... I can take some home, you said. So somewhere between those two sizes."

"Your wish is my command," says Hilary, causing Alice to giggle uncontrollably.

Bella takes only a moment to grin at Alice before taking her first bite of cake. And oh, it is an evil cake.

"It's pretty fucking good," Alice concurs. His mother rolls her eyes, but doesn't caution him about his language.

"How much of it can I bring with me?" Bella asks. "I'm sure my dad will love it too."

"In that case, half," says Hilary. "Of what's left."

"Up we go again?" Bella asks. She doubts that rules about asking to be excused apply when Mr. Hammond is gone.

"Nice," says Alice, perching on a corner of his bed. "Okay, so what kind of stuff would be urgent?"

"Well, for example," Bella says, "it might turn out that the cipher is really complicated and takes me weeks to crack, or heavy-duty magic that I'm not currently ready to generate. You might want the pentagon for emergencies during that time. I'll give you some squares and triangles either way. In case you need them," she adds softly.

"How long is he going to be gone?"

"'Bout a week."

"Mkay." Bella closes her eyes. "I wonder if the triangles can make any amount of progress on the cipher? If so I can probably do the whole thing with a pair of tweezers pulling out leg hairs or something. I honestly know nothing about cryptanalysis." She picks up one of the triangles that she brought into existence near her foot, and pulls out Elias's book and turns to the cipher/map.

Alice watches curiously.

"I wonder if it's even solvable," says Alice. "...I wonder if you could use a wish to check. How big a thing is the answer to a question?"

Bella flips to Helpful Charts. "I'd be really surprised if he went to all this trouble to lie to someone he'd never meet," Bella says. "Hmmm... all the purely information based stuff that's listed is pentagon and up. Vocabulary words for magically acquired languages, and whatnot." She tosses the square into the air, and catches it. "What seems like a good test question? What do you want to know?"

"I dunno," he says. "Why not just ask it that one and see what happens?"

"You want me to test the square's information gathering powers by asking it if it has any?" Bella asks.

"No, but that's awesome and you totally should!"

"So much for that," he says, but he's laughing.

Bella is muttering to herself rather madly. "Not enough for good frequency analysis - original spacing? Is it English-based, even? Numerical symbols..."

It is really cool. Alice is not even sure what he's feeling right now, but he likes it.

"I dunno," he says. "One pentagon from me would be more efficient than a shitload of squares, but you are obviously not into the idea of breaking your own leg and you seem to make squares pretty easily, so it kinda seems like they're more... fuck, what's the word... cost-effective. If all you wanna do is read that one map."

"Right." She shudders. "I just really don't like the feeling when all the knowledge goes out of my brain... and I don't know how many times I'd have to do it. Ten times? That's probably still better than handing over a hammer. Thirty? Not sure."

Bella smacks herself in the forehead. Not even hard enough to get a triangle, but still. "Yes. Yes, please do." She hands over one of the remaining squares, the in-progress decryption, and the cipher.

When he slows down, Bella hands him the last square, and starts biting her hand again. She gets squares about half the time, triangles the rest of it.

He grabs it and wishes again. Torn-out notebook pages with things scribbled on them are starting to accumulate around him, and the cipher is nearing completion.

"In a good way?" Bella asks, peering at the map. The X is within driving distance, but it might be a day trip. "Tomorrow's Saturday and your dad will still be out of town. We can go then."

"Tomorrow it is," Bella says, taking back Elias's book and comparing Alice's analysis to the original. "That took fewer squares than I expected. Nicely done."

"Thanks, I guess," he says. "I used up an extra one so I could draw the map that well. I figured we didn't want to end up in the wrong place because I scribble."

"Right," Bella laughs. "Tomorrow morning? I'll pick you up at nine-thirty, ten?"

"Sure!" says Alice. "Whenever you feel like, just call me before you get here. Do you even have my number? You don't, do you."

"I don't," she agrees, and she turns the page in her notebook. "What is it?"

Alice grabs the pen and writes it down for her.

"Cool." She tears off a page corner and writes her number on it for him.

"Oh, thanks," he says, and puts it on his desk under a previously lonely paperweight.

Bella counts her coins. She has the pentagon, and one square left from hand-biting, and ten triangles. She's still got one shoe off and one shoe on; she stands up and kicks the wall smartly a few times, then massages the toe, yielding in all four more squares and another triangle. Then she hands him two squares and four triangles. "If you need them. Keep them inside your socks or something where they won't be visible but you can still use them."

"Okay," says Alice, pocketing them for now. "Thanks."

"In case the treasure's already gone," she mutters, "or it doesn't have any hexes in it. In which case these denominations are what we have to work with until I make one heck of a hack into my brain."

"...Until what?"

"Until I work up to handing you a hammer, or holding still while you brandish some form of acid, or whatever," Bella says, gritting her teeth.

"Or—whatever," he agrees. "I'll keep working on better ideas for that."

"It's going to hurt like fuck to get the right coins, whatever we do," Bella says, shuddering.

"Man, you really don't like that idea," he observes.

"Well, yes. In this respect, I am a normal person."

"I wish I'd been the one who fell down the chimney."

"That would have been more convenient," Bella says. "In several ways."

"Yeah. Like, right now you'd be making a list of all the superpowers you want."

"I did already make a list like that," Bella says with a small smile.

"Yeah, but differently."

She nods. "Of course," she says, "if you got the powers in the first place I wouldn't feel nearly so entitled to the possible fruits of your, er, labors. Whereas I think I have some claim if a stash of coins left to me provides you the ability to produce said fruits."

"...it's the same either way for me," says Alice. "I mean, if I get wish powers, I'm giving you my extras because I want to. Not because I owe you them or something."

"Right," Bella says. "But I probably wouldn't give anyone else wish powers if I didn't expect to get something from it. I feel pretty okay about profiting from something that's mine and would probably be vaguely guilty if it were not ever mine and you were just giving me a lot of wishes made out of pain all the time."