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.
"I'm ruling out a lot of things that won't work," says Bella, brightening some. "At quite an impressive clip, if I do say so myself."
"I have some time left to work on it, after all, even if I don't manage the trick anytime soon. I'm only nineteen."
"Rather," agrees Bella merrily. "But at any rate, people I do not know who are less deserving than a wizard trespassing in the Enchanted Forest die on a regular basis, so I am not troubled specially about him."
"I do wonder what he was doing there. We haven't been walking long enough to get out of range of my usual haunts even considering that I don't have a magic carpet yet, and I've never seen a wizard around this close to my house. Occasionally near where my mother lives, one time where my father lives, but never here."
"Well, they got divorced, in large part because Charlie's very attached to his town and Ranata doesn't like it there. She moved."
"It's a perfectly nice town, but small and sleepy and unremarkable," shrugs Bella. "I don't really want to live there either, not for any significant length of time."
"Forged and enchanted!" she says happily. "That's from Dad's side of the family. He was good with metal, too."
"It looks like a dwarf enchantment. I've investigated the magic but it doesn't like me as much as some kinds do."