"You may write and enforce that."

So she writes "obsvere that wlal for tnwety-three seondcs and tehn do a bakfclip in the air."

...Promise looks at the wall, but not for twenty-three seconds, and doesn't take off either. She giggles.

Sadde giggles, too. "Can I try other spellings?"

"You may."

"obsvere that wlal for tewnty-three sceonds and tehn do a bakfclip in the air"

Same result.

"obsvere that wlal for twenty-three seconds and tehn do a bakfclip in the air"?

Promise stares at the wall for twenty-three seconds but doesn't backflip.

"Did you actually read the words as 'twenty-three seconds' those two first times?"

"I read the whole thing."

"Why did it give you the freedom to choose for how long you should look at the wall?" she wonders.

"I was able to be sufficiently uncertain about whether you meant twenty-three seconds."

"What else could that have meant?"

"I don't know, but I didn't know for sure that it meant twenty-three seconds, either. Just like if you wrote it perfectly but I didn't watch, I wouldn't be perfectly sure that it was really you who'd written it."

"Hmmm... how about," and she writes "obsvere that wlal for twnety-three seconds and tehn do a bakfclip in the air"

Same result as the first couple trials. "What are you testing here exactly?"

"Trying to see whether there's a correlation between just how garbled a word is and how far you can twist it."

"The operative part didn't look messier than the first couple times."

"I did only change one letter's place in all examples, I suppose... Does this look messier?" she asks, writing "tenwty."

"It's kind of subjective. Maybe a little."

"tnewty"?

"Too messy to read if I didn't think it was probably more of the same."

"This is really interesting. Can you write words messily like that?"

"I have pretty good handwriting. I guess I could try..."