"How's your curse?"

"Um, supposedly removed? I don't... feel any different? But, like, Circe said it's gone, and Circe is scary enough that I trust what she says, I guess."

"Scariness is trustworthy?"

"When it comes to magic, kind of? Like, I'm not scared of Arjun, I just know he's good at what he does. But Circe's super old and powerful and she kind of has this air of- not scariness per se, just 'I saw the civilizations that birthed your ancestors rise and fall, and I'm still going to be alive centuries after you die, and I'm allowing you to talk to me'? I guess I'm kind of conflating the scary part of that with the respectable part of it."

"Huh. She sounds - yeah, scary."

"I'm told it goes away when you get to know her. Which I do not plan on doing."

"Makes sense. Were you expecting your curse disappearing to feel like something?"

"I mean, sort of? Maybe a weight lifting off of my shoulders, a veil falling from my eyes. Some kind of object changing its position relative to my body, probably vertically. Instead I got Arjun waving his hands at me for fifteen minutes with a very intense Greek woman standing by in case he waved his hands wrong, then both of them nodding decisively and sending me on my way. It was like getting an MRI, or something. That's a kind of medical scan, you lie down inside a big machine and it makes loud noises and then they have a picture of your brain. Anyway, supposedly my inventions will stop exploding now, except the workshop's not open until school starts back up, so I can't even verify that. It just feels weird."

"Huh. Well, what do you suppose you'll invent now?"

"...probably a laser gun? I could start with something more, uh, useful, but I've never been able to make a working gun, not once, and they're supposed to be so easy to make. And apparently it's really satisfying to shoot things."

"Things like... what? Is there a target range around?"

"Oh, yeah, of course. I'm not gonna go out and- hunt rabbits with a laser gun, or something, that'd be crazy. And mean. The firing range is a thing."

"Why is hunting rabbits mean, are lasers a very bad way to die?"

"Not really. I just don't like the idea of killing things. And, like, I know that's hypocritical when I eat meat and stuff, but - rabbits are cute? Also there aren't any on campus, I don't think."

"Huh. Okay."

"Most people don't like killing things, way more people than you'd think looking at the stats on vegetarianism or whatever. -I know I'm kind of harping on vegetarianism but it is genuinely kind of weird that we're so willing to let animals die for our food when we wouldn't kill animals in person and it'd be really easy to go vegetarian, but like, chicken is delicious and vat meat is expensive and I guess I don't care that much about being a good person when there's an actual cost to me. Like I said, it's weird to think about."

"I would kill a rabbit if I were hungry and rabbit was handy. What's vat meat?"

"Vat meat is - meat without involving an animal, basically, you make chicken or beef out of a vat of proteins instead of a bird or a cow. It's more ethically consistent than meat you have to kill things for, but we can't make it without Devisors or Gadgeteers yet, so it's way more expensive than real meat. It's mostly a thing in California, I think, they're really big on caring about their ethics."

"Gosh. What exactly is the difference between Devisors and Gadgeteers anyway?"

"Gadgeteers follow the laws of physics. Like, if a Gadgeteer makes something, then theoretically somebody else could've made it, the Gadgeteer just did it faster and better and without needing to look up the science behind it or waiting a hundred years until science got to that point. Devisors, on the other hand, don't have to follow the laws of physics, we just have to be internally consistent. Powers Theory folks say it's a kind of Warper ability, that we believe in something so hard that we create pockets of unreality where the things we make can actually work. Like, the stuff I make out of cardboard - cardboard is just a kind of paper, really, but I've got this intuition in my head saying that it can do pretty much anything if I just give it a chance, and what do you know, it does. Historically most of what it does is explode, but. Anyway, most Devisors aren't as obvious as I am about it, they do things that seem to make sense unless you actually know something about the field they're working in."

"That sounds confusing, but it's all going to look like a mess of crazy technology to me for a while..."

"Yeah, probably. I apologize on behalf of Devisors everywhere for making it even more fucked up."

"That's okay."

"Anyway. What were we even talking about... vat meat, killing things, laser gun, inventions. Yeah. I've got a ton of stuff I want to make, but I'm gonna make the gun first so I can be sure it's not all just gonna blow up."

"Well, good luck."