Cloud-pine worked! So much crashing. So much fun.

♥ K&P

Neat. Postcards don't really have affordances for return correspondence, but Isabella smiles and keeps the card in her room propped up against the wall on the back edge of her desk.

Pretty sure you'd hate it here.

K&P ♥♥♥

...Isabella has no idea what to do with that. (There are now enough postcards that they live all in a stack instead of propped up.)

That is okay, because three days after that, Kas knocks on her door.

"Hi," she says, hugging him. "I got your postcards. What do you know that I don't know?"

"I know the answer hand is always spinning. Are they saying sensible things? Did you look at the Louvre one and count pauses on symbols and translate them?"

"It said I'm legally dead and some French girl's brother is fucking her boyfriend and the atomic weight of cobalt is about fifty-nine and some other guy has a teenage daughter he doesn't know about and my sweetie's never going to settle," he says. "There was more stuff but I forgot a lot of it."

"Nope! I know it's supposed to be hard and stuff, but it just makes sense."

"...You're claiming you're an intuitive alethiometer reader?"

"Why, am I not allowed?"

"They're so rare as to have serious controversy over whether they exist."

"Well," he says, "boo."

"How hard will it be to talk you into hanging out with me all the time reading an alethiometer if I get hold of one?"

"Well, not all the time," he says. "But it's pretty fun."

"Routinely, a lot, in a sufficient capacity that I can get the thing read," Isabella says. "I can do some on my own - I assume - that being the idea of the research - but - damn, I need to go work out my find-a-lost-alethiometer spell now."

"You have a spell for that?" he laughs.

"No! I wasn't going to develop one until I thought I'd know what to do with an alethiometer once I had it! But I can certainly invent something!" She strides back into the house and up to her room.

Kas follows her; Petaal bounds after him as a Yorkshire terrier.

Isabella's spell-writing process appears to involve a lot of notes, half in English and half in witch-symbols, half on paper and half on random surfaces around her room.

It is fascinating, and also adorable.

Her excitement appears contagious - at least to Path, who keeps fluttering from perch to perch around the room. Petaal's terrier form is big enough to count as a perch.

Shortly after Path flutters away again, Petaal becomes a tiny, brightly coloured dragon and chases after him to give him kisses.

Path laughs. Isabella is momentarily distracted by cuteness, and then goes back to writing a grid of miscellaneous symbols on her wall in pencil and then circling half of them.

Kas hugs himself and awwwws and watches Isabella write.

"This could take a while," Isabella says. She frowns at her grid, erases a circle, draws two more, erases two others, and then picks up a notebook and starts muttering to herself about herbs.

"Okay," says Kas. "Will your teacher mind if I stick around for a while again?"

"Doubt it. Attic's right where you left it, probably slightly dustier. Nice choice of cloud-pine spray, by the way. The first one I cut had a balance issue and I had to go back for another inside of a year. Although maybe you crashed enough to ruin your first and this is your second?"

Isabella laughs. Pathalan lets himself be caught and gives Petaal an affectionate peck/nuzzle sort of gesture.

Petaal nuzzles Path right back, then lands on Kas's shoulder and turns into a king cobra.

Isabella's not really paying attention to any of this. She's drawing shapes on the wall and then smaller versions of them in her notebook and writing T-charts of pros and cons underneath the junior versions.

"That is not the hallway," Kas agrees. "That is a bar. Wanna go check it out?"

"Why in the name of any and every goddess is there a bar in Metis's house?"

"I have no idea!" says Kas. "But I wanna find out!"