"How does salt feel?"

"...itchy? It has to be a bunch of salt together for me to notice it, I can't feel a few grains."

"Hmm. How about the stone in Mom's engagement ring?"

"Oh, is that what you do instead of earrings? It's crystally."

"Both halves of the couple get wedding rings, typically, but only the one who was proposed to gets an engagement ring. That's why Mom has two rings and Dad one."

"We do earrings, you put the left one in when you get engaged and the right when you get married. ...Societies where it's just one thing wind up with a lot of them turning into artifacts and this is not the sort of surprise most people want to give their bereaved."

"That makes a lot of sense. We don't do artifacts like that here, so it's not so much a risk."

"Yeah, it makes perfect sense."

"...Although I suppose I shouldn't be assuming that it's a property of the world and not the people in it and that you wouldn't leave an artifact if you died."

"I might. I will keep track of my favorite possessions so you know what to be careful handling."

"Also, try not to die."

"That too."

"De-aging spells are rare but they exist."

"Oh - oh, good."

"Strictly a magical girl thing, not a sorcerer thing, which makes it harder to scale, but I've got some hypotheses about relevant factors in determining who gets them."

"Do tell."

So Edie expounds upon her hypotheses about personality factors and motivation schemes and pulls out her laptop and shows her relevant data.

"I bet I get one."

"At some point! Wouldn't surprise me a bit. Seems to be invariably really high-level, though, so I wouldn't count on it being soon."

"It's curious that there's a progression like that. Naively I'd expect spell power to map onto accomplishment size instead."

"You'd think."

"Weren't you going to tell me spell-getting stories once we weren't on a bus?"

"Right! Sorry, I forgot." She tells her spell stories. Some of them are from defeating villains. One was from the de-aging spell analysis. A handful had to do with her social activism.

They are all interesting and lovable.

Of course.