"You're welcome. Happy queening," says James.

Cam snorts. "Thank you. Anything else that should happen before I maybe skip town?"

She shrugs. "I don't think so. Have fun, do things, call me if you encounter any obstacles you can't handle with available resources. Or if you want to quiz Chris about magic. I can also put you in touch with a decent demonology expert if you find yourself needing one."

"That could be useful, have they got a phone number of their own? For that matter, has Chris?" he asks, pulling out his new cell.

Chris divulges a phone number.

"My demonology expert is shy and skittish and prefers to be personally introduced or have questions forwarded through me. And he doesn't have a cellphone. You've seen him before; he's my source for reports of demon activity. He saw you at the library and then called me."

Cam inputs Chris's number. "Does he have a not-cell phone? Should I be introduced? Was he that grumbly fellow who was having so much trouble with his computer?"

"Yes he does, and yes he was. He has a home phone, and he has asked us not to give out the number. We'll ask him what he thinks of being introduced to you, if you want."

"Sure. Now work? I'm not planning to fly away in a tiny spaceship in broad daylight, no matter how ludicrously paper-thin the cover-up on the supernatural here already is, not till I know more about it."

"Sure. Chris can go ask him," says James, making a slight shooing motion at her aunt. "Good call on the spaceship. Someone would cover it up, but not necessarily before it attracted attention."

Chris finishes putting her rocks away and goes.

"I mean, I am planning to fly away in a tiny spaceship. I will just do it at night."

"When it will presumably be more difficult to see, and therefore less likely to get any nosy government agencies interested in you."

"Exactly. I was also thinking I'd go with a kind invented during a war that started over a century after this date and is therefore quite tricked out in stealth. But it's not going to be invisible."

"Also a good idea."

"Is Chris calling your demonologist?"

"My demonologist also happens to be her boyfriend, so she's taking the opportunity to go visit. She'll call me when she has an answer."

"Ah, okay. Interesting family."

"Just a little," she agrees.

"Is the chess set I made going to be useful for anyone else considering how I customized it?"

"Probably. It has some interesting symbology. It's still going to be most useful for spells involving you, me, and Chris, but I could see her getting some mileage out of the pen queen and the demon-angel motif."

"Along what axis did having the custom set help the spell, anyway?"

"It meant the physical pieces we were using were closer to the metaphor Chris wanted to build. Correspondences like that help strengthen a spell."

"That's way less specific than what I'm asking. Did using this set mean that the spell took up less weird-magic-fuel or that it will last longer or that it will improve my luck by, I don't know, forty-one percent instead of forty, or that it will apply against more different things but at comparable reliability, or what?"

"Magic isn't that exact," she says. "Among the possible improvements are that you might get better luck out of it, it will probably hold out a little better against external attack, and you might get some extra fringe protection against things that are on the edge of the definition of 'hostile', like invasive scrying. Those are the kinds of things affected by the strength of the spell. But the only definite effect is that the spell is stronger, and stronger means it is better at its job, not that it's better at its job in any particular set of exact measurable ways we know for sure in advance. If you want a better idea, you could ask Chris, because she can probably get a good read on how the spell turned out and she'll have a better idea than I would of what the baseline is."