Ari is patrolling the streets of scenic Vancouver! Well, actually he's just going to visit Peter, but he's keeping an eye out for monsters along the way. It's a nice night, monsters like ruining that kind of thing. The streets are more or less deserted, it being 2:00 AM on a Tuesday. Ari whistles cheerfully.
Pen has been in this apartment long enough to see the whiteboard used. She grabs the eraser, erases a bunch of her writing (she can't reach it all) and swats the empty space.
People whose parents have manufactured a lot of wishcoins are typically born with an innate magic power that sometimes tends to take a while to manifest. People with powers like that are called ingots. This is apparently my ingot power! I like it.
"It does seem quite useful. I couldn't have put any of that that well, and I'd like to see Ari try. And I'm glad you like it; it'd be pretty unpleasant to be stuck with powers you don't like."
My parents never tried to fix my grammar problem with magic because they weren't sure if I'd grow out of it and they didn't know how it worked so they worried about messing up my brain somehow. But now I can do this and it all comes out just right really easily!
"It's good that it worked out this way! I know I'd like to be able to communicate exactly what I meant without tripping over myself, I used to have an awful time of it. I don't know that I'd want that if there were other powers on offer, but I just dealt with it by getting a speech coach, so it was never as much of a problem as it seems to have been for you."
Erase swat. When I'm older I'll have wishes to do whatever else I want but if wishes would have fixed my grammar problem they would probably have done it already. What was wrong with your speech?
"I used to say things before I knew what I was saying with them, so I'd stammer and never get anything out. Nowadays I'm very careful about the words I use, and I think out my sentences before I say them. And I sound very refined as a bonus. I have to talk pretty slowly for it to work right, though."
Pen nods. And then she looks at the hand she has been swatting the wall with and jumps up and down and cackles some more.
She eyes it critically. "Too much?"
She sighs. "I'm afraid you're right. But it's so useful when there's poltergeists around to have something that can devour them... I could give it to Peter, but we're trying to wean him off necromancy, and it's not like he needs any help. Maybe I'll just shove it in the closet and take it out when we need to go ghostbusting."
"The skull takes the energy that lets the poltergeist exist on this realm, takes it out of the poltergeist, and turns it into energy that we can use. Technically it'd work on any ghost, but most ghosts are nice; poltergeists are the mean ones, who often kill people. The necromancer I took it from was using it to kill all the ghosts in the area. And people, but I got rid of that function entirely. Peter is a friend of mine and Ari's. He mostly uses ectomancy- that's magic that has to do ghosts- and he used to use necromancy too- that's death magic- but we stopped him when we found out, because it was affecting his personality. The skull is necromancy."
She sighs. "Magic is- tied to who you are. If you use too much of the wrong kind, it'll change who you are as it goes through. Very unpleasant. Peter became gloomy and depressed, he got much more violent, and he was starting to lose his respect for human life."
"It's not going through us, so it won't do nearly as much as Peter using necromancy for everything. And we're constantly doing other kinds of magic. It balances out. But Peter's sensitive to it, and it'd just be asking for trouble."
She tosses the skull into a closet. It lands in a pile of various unpleasant-looking implements, and Sally shuts the door.
A curly-haired man appears in the middle of the room. He spots Pen and grins. "There you are, little penguin."
"Gah! Attack? Who! Uh... gleh."
He crawls out to the living room to observe the proceedings.
"You got me," Micaiah says to his daughter. "What happened to your wings? Who are these lovely people?"
Look, ingot magic! The guy who just bumped his head is Ari and he found me when I wandered into the wrong world. And that's his roommate Sally. They're nice. Ari got a magical faerie who owed him a favor to hide my wings so they wouldn't get too much attention because this is an Earth and doesn't have any angels native. Did you bring a Jane gem?
"...She couldn't do that before I went to sleep," Ari mentions. "The glamor'll break if you put her in a circle of iron filings."
"Want your wings un-hidden, pentagram?" inquires Micaiah. "Look at you all ingoty and everything. Yeah, I brought a Janegem."