"You feeling better, then?"

"Well kinda, but mostly watch this!"

She steps over her stick, ragged end pointing back, looking like an old witch's broom....

And hovers.

Ev's just gonna have a look to make sure she actually is hovering and it's not just, like, a trick of the light.

Her feet aren't touching the ground. She's kind of wobbling, though.

She leans forward and moves across the room before dropping back onto the floor with a sharp huff.

"Okay," she says. "I'm gonna take that as a 'you can probably do magic or at least I should act like that for now.'"

"Told you so."

"I was suspending judgement," she says. "Since magic doesn't typically exist."

"Now you know. I think my magic is coming back from being hurt, I can fly for an hour at a time usually and I'm getting stronger because I'm getting older."

"Well, that's good?" she says. "I think?"

"Yeah. And now we can talk about doing magic things to make money without you thinking it's silly!"

"Yeah," she agrees. "Courier might work, depending on what your range is and how fast you can fly."

"Brooms and sticks aren't great for flying, I know how to make a better one, kinda, and the really cool ones I don't know how to make can let a magic girl go ten times as fast as a horse and keep flying all day. I can also do shields and blow things up."

"I'm not sure we need things to be blown up, but I guess that could be used at a quarry or something?"

"I guess. And whatever my special magic is. It's supposed to be easy to tell but I can't tell yet."

She nods. "How did the reading go?"

"I don't know a lot of words but I wrote down which. And a lot of words aren't spelled like they sound so I guessed what they actually mean."

"I can say them to you if you want? There are typical combinations that you pronounce certain ways, though, I think there's a thing called phonics that they usually use to teach kids?"

"Ooh, thank you!"

She produces her list from one of the bedside tables... Her handwriting is terrible.

That's fine, she can work on that at school! Ev might need to ask her to spell out some of the words, though, so she can actually 'read' the handwriting.

She can definitely spell out words. Her mistakes are the kind that one would expect from someone with spotty vocabulary painstakingly reading by sound.

It seems like she's spent hours and hours reading from the length of her list.

It does! Evelyn's encouraging about her effort, if that seems like it doesn't get a negative response at least, and she pronounces all the words for her, trying to define them if necessary.

A lot of defining is necessary. "Can I use one of the find things like the phone map to find words so you don't have to?"

"Uh, yeah," she says, "but I've only got this one phone on me right now, so you won't be able to do it while I'm not here. … Unless you just mean a dictionary, but that wouldn't give the definition aloud, it'd be written down."

She brings up the definition for one of the words through Google and has it play the definition aloud.

"If a dictionary has enough small words it will be okay. I know technology costs a lot sometimes."

"There are some cheap old-ish phones? I could probably get one of those, and I think they do internet fine, but yeah, a dictionary would probably be good. Maybe a young learners' dictionary or something, I think that sort of thing exists?"