"Lemme know when you're done with it."

"Mmkay." She flops on her a little more. "I can literally feel your heart beating, that's pretty cool."

"I think I'd be grossed out by sensing through people except, um, the first coherent scene I took in after I got this had you in it."

"I don't have a normal conception of gross and also that's kind of adorable."

"What's your conception of gross?"

"It's less weird in what it contains and more in what it doesn't, it's more weird in being smaller than in containing normally non-gross things."

"Well, I am glad you are not grossed out by the sense, I should've mentioned it being potentially gross first."

"Nah. Anatomy's interesting, not gross."

Snuggle.

Snuggle. "So, where were we before we got distracted by things other than magic. Other than this world's kind of magic."

"Sorcery and how I might want it."

"Right. So, I haven't made any formal study of sorcery, having not decided at least yet to become a sorcerer, but here's some stuff I sort of picked up through osmosis from my dad..." She explains some stuff.

"It sounds really interesting."

"It has a much higher time investment involved than being a magical girl which on top of the pain thing and some other more personal stuff is why I haven't picked it up yet, but yeah."

"'Like hell' isn't very precise - I might find it a good trade if it just promises some way around the music problem -"

"Hmm. I don't think I've ever heard of anything like the music problem before, so I doubt there's some kind of readily-accessible spell that'll take care of the problem like that," she snaps her fingers, "but there might be a solution. There also might be a magical girl solution--you can affect what kind of spells you get."

"How do I do that?"

"Get emotionally attached to it, basically."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Um--if you want something--like teleportation or healing or a better beam weapon or whatever--and you consistently spend time thinking about it, spending emotional energy on the idea of its existence--and it's not too high-level for the next spell you're going to get--you're likely to get it."

"What defines how high-level a thing is?"

"If there's a specific algorithm for it I don't know what it is. In general a better version of a thing will be higher level, and you may have noticed we don't live in a post-scarcity paradise."

"I haven't seen that much of the place," Annie points out, "but the presence of supervillains could have explained that by itself."

"Right. True. Well, the kinds of things that would make the world a paradise are pretty rare."

"Maybe I can get flight and then not be so inconvenienced by how bad my balance is."