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Here is a house.
It is pretty and trim and green-and-cream and really ought not to be able to hold itself up like that, and yet here it is, somehow defying the laws of architecture. It is surrounded by a neatly bordered garden of ornamental and useful plants of all sorts: here vegetables, there herbs, there spell components, there rows of flowers.
There is a sign out front. It says only: Magic. Not, Beware, Magic or Magic Emporium or anything like that. Just: Magic.
Sitting on top of this sign is a cream cat with smoke-dark points of color on each paw, his ears, and his face and tail.
All in all, you could be forgiven for thinking that a witch lives here.
thaumobabble
thaumobabble
"Okay," says magic person agreeably. "So have you had an eventful whimsy-based quest that might or might not yield husbands so far?"
thaumobabble
"And you haven't run into any mischievous elves or lost panthers or would-be bandits or lost dukes' children from Kasselthwaite? I'm surprised."
allthebrightest
"Because when Sherry doesn't wanna meet anybody in the Enchanted Forest, she doesn't."
thaumobabble
"Really! Now how do you manage that?" inquires Bella, who will now be narrated with her name despite the fact that her traveling companions don't know it.
allthebrightest
"Near as anybody can tell, nope," says Tony. "She's just really good at noticing things. Not that the royal magic doesn't help."
thaumobabble
"Huh. You'd have to be extraordinarily good at noticing things to avoid running into anyone in a week's walk through the forest. And that's if the forest didn't decide to throw anybody at you a bit more forcefully than usual. If you were feeling so antisocial how come you came up to my house?"
thaumobabble
Bella is inestimably pleased by this compliment. "Cricket said you thought I was a witch."
thaumobabble
Bella laughs. "Most people can go on thinking I'm a witch for a long time. Sorceress stuff isn't widely recognized, I have to adapt anything from fire-witches or elves or unicorns till it's unrecognizable, nobody expects a girl to use wizard magic in any form, and everybody uses a dragon spell or two. A witch could do most everything that's left over, and I do dress like one."