"...Well that's. Thinking about that and about Jackson just makes me kind of sad."

"...yeah. It's why I wanna—help him, somehow. I know what it feels like, and he must be particularly sensitive and. Well. That's how he gets what he wants because he doesn't really see any other way to do it."

"And on the other hand, I can't stand it. I can't even tell him to go away, because then I told him to. I have sympathy and all but - but - I'm failing to come up with an analogy."

"Yeah, I know, it is in fact straight-up harassment, there's no way he doesn't get what he wants. Have you tried talking to someone in an official capacity?"

"I was basically laughed out of the office. That is when I devised my 'stuff occupies space' plan."

"Ugh," she groans in sympathy. "I—for what it's worth he at least varies his targets?" she says, gesturing at a table where Dominic and a few of his friends are sitting and studiously ignoring Jackson kneeling by. "And, you know, you've met Dominic, he's not exactly a noncentral example of dom and even he finds Jackson creepy. Maybe if lots of people complained..."

"What, a petition? 'Punish this one particular person, please'? I guess it could work, but it feels off."

"More like, if a big enough number of doms mentions it... but that might just duck him over."

"Making him stop somehow will make him miserable any which way, though. Is the awkwardness and revulsion he's causing worth his own not-very-deep satisfaction?" Sigh. "I don't want to keep talking about this."

She nods. "We can talk about something else."

"I read up a bunch of stuff about formal logic and it's surprisingly helpful with magic! I closed a bunch of, like, loopholes that were confusing the hell out of me."

"Formal logic, really? That's not at all like the way magic feels to me."

"Yep, formal logic. It's really hard to explain this stuff... Magic is sort of like this crazy bundle of loops and wires and latches and portals and, uh, parentheses, and to be able to do something I tug or tap on the mess in a certain way so the tug goes through it all just right... And there are rules, it's just... There's so much to look at, I can't possibly hold it all in my mind at once. Yet. And the formal logic helps me sort of chunk it into bigger pieces so I can think about more at once? I was already doing that, but now I can say, oh, if and only if three wire loop over to that two wire, the latch will open. Three wire has to be off loop so two wire will always be off so therefore that portal will also be off and thus this happens... Any of that make sense? At all?"

"In the abstract, sorta, but it's not how mine works at all. Mine works like—doing the splits. There's a resistance and I can feel this resistance but there isn't a clever solution anywhere other than just doing it enough times that I eventually can get it. And, I don't know, maybe sometimes I'm sitting wrong or doing the wrong thing—actually maybe the best analogy is yoga in full generality—the thing it is is something physical that I can feel when I do magic, you know?"

"Magic is weird. Physics studies have made no progress on it recently, I think, which just makes it weirder."

"I usually say that I'm an atheist, but, twelfth birthday. I'm at best deistic, to be honest."

"Agnostic." He leaves it at that.

"Yeah my point is, magic is majorly weird."

"I do think we'll nick it some day. Martin Luther - the guy who nailed 99 theses to a church door, not the civil rights guy - supposedly thought that babies were proof of God because no science could possibly explain such a wonderful and complex thing."

She giggles. "I mean, magic is in fact different in character from—other things. It treats minds as ontologically basic, for one thing."

"There's maybe something to that line of inquiry. Hmm. I'm normally in a much better mood for philosophizing, but today is kind of just... Bleh."

"Yeah. Anything you do wanna talk about to take your mind off things?"

Sadde and Wendy, how'd that go down...? Nope. Don't ask that.

"Oh, I read the book you recommended. Very good twist."

"That was great, right? I wish more people would think of stuff like that."

"It's surprisingly hard to be genuinely novel. Writers have to combine things that have been written by someone somewhere in a new way most of the time."