"Yeah. I was half-expecting when I asked that Bar would object, but she pointed out that she will also just buy arbitrary objects as long as they're in decent condition and I could have just gotten the same result handing her anything else I had socked away."

"I wonder what all counts as money, come to think of it. If Emily or I held the door and the other one ran out and grabbed a handful of leaves on speculation that there was a society of Golgafrinchams newly landed on Earth somewhere, would that count, I wonder?"

"Golgafrinchams?"

"Fictional aliens from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. A colony ship of them crash-landed on Earth, accidentally supplanted our supposed nearest relatives as the ancestors of modern humanity, declared leaves to be currency and promptly started burning down trees to prevent inflation."

"Wow. I mean, you could always ask, I'm sure Bar has a policy on this."

"I think I will do that, later." She closes her eyes and focuses for a moment, then opens them again.

"...Note to self?"

"Mind Palace Gateway turns out to be useful in constructing a more usual sort of mind palace."

"Oh, cool. I would have had to figure out something like that if I couldn't stash notebooks in my shield."

"I hadn't even thought of that. Most people don't really do stuff like that. I didn't so much before I got magic--I told my sister pretty near everything, but that's not the same as having a more permanent kind of record."

"I've always been really big on notetaking. There's grocery list people and then there's diary people and then there's me."

"It does not surprise me even a little bit to find another area where you're exceptional."

--have a ring containing a purple gem appear on her hand, and her shield disappear. The rest of her outfit remains the same.

"Okay, so it's not just playing nice with my puella magi outfit as long as it's already there, it has adopted it as its own plus wrapping-paper-shiny." She puts her ring on (left hand, middle finger, same as her purple diamond fingernail mark) shrugs off her new magical powers too, and appears in jeans, snowboots, and parka. She takes off the parka and the boots.

"I figured it probably had, but there was no guarantee." Detransformation!

Bella plops back onto the sofa. Next to Edie. Pauses a moment, then plops her head on her shoulder.

Edie startles at the unexpected physical contact, then giggles and leans her own head against Bella's.

Giggle.

This seems like an appropriate time to put an arm around Bella. Yes?

Yes. Bella snuggles up.

Eee snuggles! Snuggles are not completely absent from Edie's life in general but cuddling your sister is very different from cuddling a cute non-relative with whom you are on a datelike thing.

Bella has gone a very long time indeed without snuggles. Snuggles are nice.

Bella can have all the snuggles she wants!