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Bella is careful.
Bella is careful to go to the magic shop during lunch - not at night, not when her parents might notice her leaving home, not when her teachers might notice her skipping classes. She is careful to wear her crucifix, carry her holy water gun, keep her demon whistle ready to hand. She is careful to wrap her occult purchases in disguising packaging: chip bags, gym clothes, grocery totes. She is careful to restrict herself to spells that are necessary - whether "necessary" means for the result or for managing her mercifully limited dependence on the damn things is always carefully recorded in opaque code in her notebook, and if the ratio gets too low, she goes cold turkey outside dire emergencies for at least three days. This is uncomfortable, and it kills her class performance and her temper for those days, but she has to be careful. Her parents don't want her doing magic. They're afraid she'll get addicted. (Done.) They're afraid she'll get snapped up by the USADI, drafted into casting more than she can handle or things that shouldn't be cast at all. (Not done; and another reason to be careful.) They're afraid she'll get a spell wrong and hurt herself. (Not done; yet another reason to be... careful.)
She is confident that witchery has saved her life at least twice, possibly as many as four times; she's sure it's saved others more than that. A month ago she located the hiding place of the Gem of Amara, determined it ludicrously easy to find, and conjured it to her for safekeeping in Forks under considerably more sophisticated wards placed gradually over the course of weeks. (Not in the house; any vampire with a non-vampire demon friend could bypass that protection and she doesn't want to put her parents in harm's way. But in a house, because the protection is non-negligible; USADI experimental reports say that squatters count as living human residents, and she can get into the basement section of a consistently occupied old Victorian close to the city walls without bothering - or alerting - those who make it their hangout.) With this gem more securely stowed, it will at least take longer for some vampire or other to come across it, render themselves invincible, and slaughter an entire metropolitan area before USADI calls in something sufficiently heavy-duty to get around the damn thing.
She's looking into how to destroy it, but while Forks has the advantage of safety, it also has the disadvantage of a relatively cruddy magic shop. The Witchnook is capable of special-ordering things, albeit with a lag time of weeks or months, but Bella's not sure how far to trust the proprietor. She supposes her parents don't know she's a witch yet, so it can't be "not at all", but, well. She'll come up with some other books to order in the same batch, as cover.
Bella is careful when she goes out at night. She wears her cross, she carries her holy water gun and her demon whistle. She sets her alarm clock at maximum volume for fifteen minutes after she expects to be back, with a note taped to it for her parents, in case she runs into trouble. And usually she doesn't go out at night at all.
Tonight she needs a spell ingredient that cannot be out of doors during the daylight without losing its potency, though, so if she wants to get it home at all, she is going to have to spend ten minutes walking to the Witchnook, pay for her twilight powder, and spend ten minutes walking back.
Forks has walls.
She'll be okay.
She'll be careful.
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impetuous_force
impetuous_force
"I'm not confident your standards for hints are such that I'll recognize them as such while I'm in the 101 class," Bella says after a minute's thought. "I can think of things that are similar to hints, but nothing that's - obvious in retrospect when armed with the conclusion, like hints typically are."
eversomuchfun
"I beat up vampires while I was still human. There could be several explanations for that, but the one that's true is that I was better at fighting than they were, and one of the specific things I was better at was analyzing and responding to situations quickly." He shrugs. "And now I am a vampire who is as much better at that than most vampires as I used to be better than most humans."
impetuous_force
Bella thinks.
Then she says, "I'm probably going to have a bad time of my research project if I lean too heavily on anything the USADI puts out, aren't I."
Then she says, "I'm probably going to have a bad time of my research project if I lean too heavily on anything the USADI puts out, aren't I."
impetuous_force
"I remain open to the possibility that you're running some kind of prolonged con, but I cannot for the life of me determine why you'd want to."
impetuous_force
"Pure boredom motivating you to attend high school, yes, highly plausible."
impetuous_force
Gym class ends eventually.
Bella has the weekend, for her research project. She calls Angie at home; Angie obligingly mentions offhand that "John" is around, cooking more meals than not, so he's not taking the time away from school to sneak off to Port Angeles for dinner, it's a trip of a few hours and the Webbers would notice if he borrowed their car. Other than that, Bella mostly spends time trying to figure him out.
She searches the Internet for old news postings; she writes a lot. She draws little diagrams. She enumerates her assumptions, in ever-greater detail, and crosses them out when she decides she's not sure of them, and then from pruned lists she works forward again.
On Monday, she is perfectly friendly to Angie and Angie's new friend John both during bio and lunch.
At gym, she says, "The details are written down, and Ms. Finch will disapprove if I pull out a notebook now, but I could supply a verbal summary."
Bella has the weekend, for her research project. She calls Angie at home; Angie obligingly mentions offhand that "John" is around, cooking more meals than not, so he's not taking the time away from school to sneak off to Port Angeles for dinner, it's a trip of a few hours and the Webbers would notice if he borrowed their car. Other than that, Bella mostly spends time trying to figure him out.
She searches the Internet for old news postings; she writes a lot. She draws little diagrams. She enumerates her assumptions, in ever-greater detail, and crosses them out when she decides she's not sure of them, and then from pruned lists she works forward again.
On Monday, she is perfectly friendly to Angie and Angie's new friend John both during bio and lunch.
At gym, she says, "The details are written down, and Ms. Finch will disapprove if I pull out a notebook now, but I could supply a verbal summary."
impetuous_force
"Most interestingly," Bella says, "I think you are either a rapid-grown clone or some form of magical construct. Magical construct would explain more by itself - it explains almost too much; if you can make one at all you can make one with nearly arbitrary properties - but clone is more plausible given who you appeared attached to, and your characteristics aren't necessarily inexplicable even if there is not magic in operation to explain them."
impetuous_force
"Tony's birth announcement is about ninety percent of it. There's no motive to hide a twin, no motive to do it for fourteen years, no realistic chance of successfully doing it for fourteen years with such a high-profile family, and then when you showed up in public you behaved eccentrically, neither you nor Tony explained where you came from, and while there are plenty of theories about that you were only able to appear in the same place at the same time via sophisticated holograms I don't buy it, in large part because he left a body and you're talking to me. I don't have enough information to determine when you were either cloned or conjured up, though."
impetuous_force
"I would have been very embarrassed if I'd been mistaken," says Bella lightly.
impetuous_force
"I think," she says, "that what I know about you is consistent with you being, perhaps not one of those legendary vampires with souls, but one who is atypically motivated even given vampiric sociopathy. I'm not clear on what does motivate you, but I have no significant evidence against it being the avoidance of inconvenience and boredom plus some other features to round you out that I don't have information on."
eversomuchfun
"As far as I can tell, I don't have a soul," he confirms. "But the lack of it doesn't seem to be slowing me down. As you've observed."
impetuous_force
"The lack of soul doesn't seem to... control you. I don't know to what extent this holds, but you have more impulse control than the average vampire or Angie would have been dead before I learned she was in any danger.'