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Stop and Smell the Roses
Gruesome Magical Girls Emily, Edie, Cass and Anna
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The rest of the school year goes by.

Edie and Emily continue working with magic. Emily gets her metal-manipulation from the blue rose and spends almost a week abandoning the rest of her magic practice just to play with it delightedly. Edie works up to keeping all three non-black roses that they have duplicates of in at all times. She practices enough with the blue rose to pick another kind of magic, and goes with repairing things. Emily discovers the ability to rearrange her petalsuit at will, which she takes less advantage of than she'd like to if they weren't being discreet. They tell their parents.

Summer rolls around. Classes let out.

So, Emily emails the Canadians, our mom actually owns a huge-ass house in Westchester County--she basically hates it, but she says we can stay there for the summer if we want to practice magic in without having to worry about being discreet or getting seen. Wanna stay with us?

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That sounds completely awesome! We're in!

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Cool! Emily emails them the address. It's not really in a town but apparently you don't need to be to have an address.

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When should we show up?

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We'll be there in about five days; any time after then is fine.

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Cool, see you in a week!

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See you in a week!

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And in a week, the Canadians show up at the house!

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Emily opens the door.

She's been making good use of her ability to manipulate her flower-outfit. She's wearing what looks like a ballgown of oversized rosepetals crisscrossed with stems, shading elegantly from paler to darker colors up to down in the petals and down to up in the stems.

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"Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice," says Cass.

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"Seconded, wow!"

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"Thanks! Pity I can't go about in public like this."

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"Yeah, shame."

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"Come in, anyway, pick one or two of the bajillion guest rooms this place has, seriously, it's ridiculous."

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"I'm loving it already."

In they go.

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The place is old, incredibly elegant, and really dusty. It gives off the air of a place that's been disused for decades and then inhabited for a few days by people who don't really care enough to try cleaning it, which is accurate.

"Mom grew up here. Her childhood was terrible, so she hasn't been back since she first went off to college."

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"I wonder if I can figure out how to clean this place up with magic. It's in dire need."

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"If you can't do it by magic, it's probably not worth it. This place is huge."

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"Then I guess I've got myself a project."

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"If you like."

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"I don't like dust being all over everything! And I have magic!"

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"That you do, for sure. It's not as bad as it could be, there's tarps over stuff in most of the rooms."

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"I'm sure the tarps help, but."

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"But yes, there is rather a lot of dust."

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"Neat freak," Cass says affectionately, patting Anna on the shoulder.

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"So does that mean you don't want to come on occasional exploratory expeditions?" Edie asks, floating into the room. She took a lot of Tylenol and finally put the black rose in, and is enjoying the ability to fly.

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"I'm up for exploring!"

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"Cool. There's a lot of interesting rich-person junk lying around."

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"There's a joke in there about being interested in rich people's junk...."

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"The rich people who lived here were my grandparents, so, ew."

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Cass giggles unrepentantly.

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"Fair warning, Grandmother was emotionally unavailable," she says flippantly.

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"I feel like that's less of a problem than the part where she's dead!"

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"Well, yes, but you were already warned of that part when you started making innuendo!"

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"Aren't you a rich person?"

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"Arguably, but I don't live like one and I'm a grown-ass woman and it's Mom who owns the money, so also arguably not."

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"If you say so."

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"I guess it depends on the context? I can go to whatever university I want and not panic if I have an unexpected medical bill, but I couldn't go out and buy a shiny car on a whim."

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"Yep, that's a rich person, far as I'm concerned."

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"Aha. Media stereotypes have deceived me."

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"They'll do that!"

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"I should be ashamed, being fooled for a minute. Shame, shame, Edie, no shiny car for you."

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"Someday maybe you'll get good enough to make one."

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"Huh. Maybe. That'd be pretty cool, actually, make a car when you need to go somewhere and let it vanish at your destination."

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"Tragically we're not quite up to that kind of thing. But hey, summer of magic fun, maybe we will be."

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"Well, actually doing that probably wouldn't be much more discreet than just flying everywhere, sadly."

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"Oh, I bet you could figure out how to hide your vanishing car. But it'd be a pain."

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"And explaining why I had no registration or insurance for it to any given police officer would be fun."

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"'Car? What car? There's no car here'," giggles Cass.

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"Yes, because that'll work so well if I ever get pulled over. 'Yes, officer, you decided to randomly accost a pedestrian who was walking on the shoulder. Over the speed limit? I don't think that's biologically possible.'"

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"Well it's not like they'll be able to prove you wrong!"

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"Unless they took pictures, or their radar gun records stuff, or..."

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"There's still no car there!"

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"And I'm sure that would be very confusing, but not necessarily enough to convince them it had never been there."

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"Yeah, you'd probably have to get fake documentation for your imaginary car to pull it off, and that just sounds boring."

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"And where would I get it? I've never even had a fake ID."

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"I wonder if you could get real documentation for your imaginary car? Like, how much of the Real Car Documentation process depends on the manufacturer and retailer and stuff?"

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"I have no idea. Can't be all of it, I don't think, I'm pretty sure there exist people who build their own cars...there are definitely people who inherit cars one way or another."

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"But when you inherit the car it'll already have some Real Documentation, right? I dunno."

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"Depends where you get it from, maybe? I dunno either."

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"If we ever get to the point of conjuring entire cars, we can figure it out then."

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"Yeah, true. I guess meanwhile you could use it for, like, a spare tire or something."

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"That'd work!"

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"Among its many other uses. Hungry?"

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"Ooh, yes."

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"Any dietary restrictions?"

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"Nope!"

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"Excellent."

A table just large enough for four people appears. Then a tablecloth appears a few inches above it and falls down, its hanging edges swishing back and forth with thwarted momentum. Then four chairs, one at a time. Then a handful of serving dishes, then a small variety of tasty-looking foods.

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Anna applauds.

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"Wow, somebody's been working hard!" says Cass. "Good going!"

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"Thanks! Magic is excellent."

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"Damn right."

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"Edie's better at teekay than I am, though."

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"Gee, I feel like a slacker now," laughs Cass.

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"Or we're just overachievers."

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"Being an overachiever looks like fun! Count me in!"

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"Welcome," she laughs, and pulls out a chair (not with her hands) and sits down.

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Cass and Anna sit down too and try some things.

"Ooh, and you conjure good food," says Anna approvingly.

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"My sister has a bit of an overdeveloped aesthetic sense."

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"You're not gonna see me complaining!"

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"Thanks. I do my best."

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Nom nom nom.

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And eventually they finish eating.

"The other major advantage to this: no having to do dishes. Just leave your dirty plates on the table, it'll all vanish before another hour has passed."

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"Magic: It's pretty awesome!"

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"It is!"

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"So when can we try out the new flower?"

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"Oh, here," she says, peeling it out.

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"Cool. Anna, you want it first?"

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"Yes please!"

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She hands the flower over.

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And Anna sticks it in her wrist next to the rest. It burrows into her arm; the stems disappear neatly under her sleeve without disturbing the rest of her outfit. Her only comment on the pain is "huh, this'll be a nice one to have in hot weather."

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"I know, right?"

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"Can either of you bud this one yet?"

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"Edie hasn't used it much. She doesn't like taking roses in or out often so she's been waiting until I could, and I can't yet."

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"I'll see if I can wear it enough to get it to bud, I got there fastest with all of ours."

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"Cool."

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"Oh man, it's so cold, I love it! This is officially my favourite flower!"

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"You like the cold?"

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"Yeah. It's like - refreshing? It's nice."

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"Fair enough."

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She smiles.

"So how've you guys been, anyway? Anything interesting going on that isn't magic?"

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"I dance. Between the pink flower's grace and the black flower's skill..."

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"Nice!"

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"Magic's awesome. I haven't had nearly as much luck exploiting it usefully, the black flower seems like the best one and I've only just worked up to putting it in for real."

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"Must be inconvenient, not liking pain!"

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"I mean, hey, if someone offered me a way to become a masochist I'd take it in a heartbeat."

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"If I knew how to teach it, I would! But it just seems to come naturally."

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"Yeah, I think it's just one of those things."

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"Yeah."

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"Oh well. Pain tolerance can be learned, so."

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"Close enough!"

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"Does mean my learning curve with the magic isn't as good as those of you with innate advantages. Oh well."

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Cass giggles. "I mean, I'm closer to you than Anna, I think? Anna's way out there."

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"Oh?"

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"Dunno about you, but I can't sleep with four flowers in."

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"...I, uh, have been assuming that the healing factor would take care of any negative effects of excessive painkiller and sleeping pill use."

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"I'm not sure Anna's ever taken a painkiller in her life."

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"Good for Anna."

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"Anna is weird," says Anna.

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"Weird is good."

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She beams.

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"Especially when it helps you do magic!"

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"A definite plus!"

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She grins, conjures a few glass marbles, and sets them to orbiting her palm while slowly changing shape.

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"Cool."

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"So what've you been up to?"

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"Not a ton! I feel very un-accomplished," she tips her head slightly in Emily's direction, "you're doing a million things with the flowers and I'm basically a slightly kinky couch potato."

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"Slightly kinky," snorts Cass.

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"But magic's so fun!"

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"Magic is fun! Unfortunately, so is sex!"

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"Okay, true."

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"But now we're here and we will hopefully be inspired by your example."

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"And perhaps at some point when I get a significant other I'll be inspired by yours."

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Giggle.

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"Probably with fewer knives, though. Just statistically speaking."

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"Hear that, Cass? We're statistical outliers."

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"If the magic wasn't already doing that I would like to have words with people."

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"Mm?"

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"For not telling me sooner!"

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"Ooh. Yeah."

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"I really don't think that's the case."

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"Me neither."

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"So. Guest rooms? Unpacking?"

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"Show us some guest rooms! We didn't bring a ton of stuff, Cass is kinda in the habit of conjuring all our clothes already so why haul them across the border."

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"Makes sense. Like I said there's a bajillion rooms, d'you have preferences about, like, floor?"

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"I like high places!"

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"Whatever's good!"

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"How do you feel about stairs? There's kind of a lot of floors."

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"I'm fine with stairs."

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"Same."

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There are guest rooms on the top floor. ...Which is actually not that hard to get to even if you don't like walking up stairs, because, black flower.

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"I love it," says Anna, leaning over the railing at the top of the stairs.

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"I am forced to confront the possibility that I inherited my excellent aesthetic taste from my maternal grandmother."

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"She not the kind of person you want to have inherited things from?"

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"She was an emotionally neglectful drunk."

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"With a really pretty house. Maybe the ancestor with good taste was farther up the chain?"

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"Entirely plausible," she says, relieved. "Or maybe it was grandfather."

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"Could be!"

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"So there's that. Anyway, pretty guest rooms."

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"They're very pretty. C'mon, Cass."

The two of them wander in and out of some guest rooms. They eventually settle on a pair with a connecting door that are right near the top of the stairs and also near a window with a lovely view.

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Emily vaguely supervises until they're reasonably settled in.

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How reasonable of her!

Anna and Cass decide to hang out in their rooms for a bit, where 'hang out' translates to 'snuggle while Anna pulls out her flowers and puts them back in again a bunch of times'. Just the ones that don't lead to bleeding; she doesn't want to make a mess in this lovely guest room. Cass practices conjuration and makes cute new outfits for them both.

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Yep, that sounds like something she in no way needs to supervise. She goes back downstairs, trailing flower petals that should last for days behind her.

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They emerge a few hours later, wearing their cute new outfits. Anna goes looking for books and Cass goes looking for Emily.

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Well, the flower petals might help with that.

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They're a pretty big hint, yeah.

And where will she find Emily?

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In a room a floor down floating and concentrating on conjuring things.

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"Hey, let's be magic nerds," she says by way of greeting.

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"I like this plan!"

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"Whatcha working on?"

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"Duration extension and trying to permanentify stuff."

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"Cool. What's the longest you've got one going so far?"

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"Just a few days, haven't been able to get past that..."

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"Me neither, actually, I think the longest I ever got something to last was a week, these days if I need something to last a week I just make it permanent."

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"Makes sense. Haven't cracked permanency, though."

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"Permanency's tough!"

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"It will be mine."

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"I'll bet!"

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"How long did it take you?"

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"Kind of a while! I don't remember exactly."

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"Mm."

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"Mm?"

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"Trying to figure out how long it'll take me."

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"Can't be more than like a few years, probably way less because you seem super motivated and I wasn't really?"

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"Well, I know it's there to work towards, you presumably didn't."

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"That too!"

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"It just sounds so useful!"

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"It's awesome!"

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"So, yeah, motivated."

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"Fun," says Cass. "Which of the secondary magic things did you pick? I forget if you said."

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"Skill for the black and metal for the blue."

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"Ooh, yeah. We've both got the shadows one, and I think I'm going to go for the enchant-stuff one next, see what kind of cool shit I can make with it."

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"That sounds really awesome."

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"Yeah. And I picked up a couple of the redundant ones in the red flower, healing and TK, because unlike Anna I don't think it's fun to go around wearing every flower I can get my grubby little hands on all the time."

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"And you are a masochist, right?"

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"Little bit? Or maybe a lot but I hang around Anna so my standards are skewed?"

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"Just trying to calibrate if I should be worried about Edie."

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"...worried like about what?"

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"Her pushing herself too hard."

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"Yeah, I dunno."

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"She says she isn't, but I dunno, I'm not so much worried about her doing it on purpose."

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"Well... I mean, does it seem like she's not happy with what she's doing?"

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"No, which is why I haven't so much been worrying. But it's not the short term that concerns me."

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"I see what you mean but I have no idea how to watch out for that kind of thing, it's never been a concern with me or Anna."

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"Yeah. Well. We'll see."

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"Yeah. I hope your sister's okay."

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"She probably is."

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"I guess that'll have to do for now."

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"Yeah."

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"Anyway! I said let's be magic nerds and we have not been magic nerds like at all, what are we doing. Can you tell me how you conjure such great food? I can do food but I can't do food like that, I'm wondering if I'm just not paying enough attention or what."

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"Well, what have you been doing when you conjure food?"

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"It's not that different from when I conjure other stuff... I just think of what I want and pull it through and there it is."

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"So you're not thinking very hard about what it should taste like?"

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"Guess not."

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"Well, what I do is I focus on remembering what the best example of the thing I'm conjuring that I've eaten tasted like, I wouldn't be nearly this good at anything I hadn't eaten a delicious example of."

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"Cool. I'll try it."

She thinks about delicious foods she has eaten. Ice cream seems hard to fuck up, maybe she should start there... ice cream cone? Ice cream cone.

"Okay, this is definitely better than my usual conjured ice cream. Like, not that much better, but the difference is noticeable."

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"Practice effects," she says sagely.

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Cass laughs.

"Guess I should practice more! Want some ice cream?"

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"Sure!"

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Ice cream cone!

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Delicious delicious ice cream.

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How about... popcorn, she can remember some really good popcorn... and she can do it one kernel at a time, more practice that way. Nom nom.

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"The red flower isn't as broadly useful as the others--until you start getting into secondaries, I mean--but with some practice it's more flexible than just about any real cutting implement."

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"Yep," says Cass.

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"...Which I'm sure you find way more interesting than I do. Good for doing my nails, though."

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"You know, I hadn't even thought of that. Bet you're right."

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"Easier to cut some things that don't like cooperating with knives, too."

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"Yeah - like what?"

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"Some kinds of raw meat that would rather get dragged around or deformed by a knife than actually let it cut it, for one."

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"Huh, yeah."

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"And some kind of threads and papers that try to go between the scissor blades instead of being cut."

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"Magic: it's useful!"

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"I know, right?"

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"It's so great!"

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She hops into the air and twirls around, the petals making up her gown fluttering.

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Cass giggles.

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She beams.

"So if a few days is a soft limit on duration, have you noticed any other limits like that?"

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"I bet there's one for size but I'm not sure I've found it, I don't try to conjure really big stuff that often... and I could be wrong, maybe you can just keep making bigger stuff."

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"The table I made lunch on was about as big as I've gotten so far."

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"Okay, let's see how big a table I can make."

She tries.

"Man, now I remember why I don't conjure really big stuff that often," she grumbles. "It's, like, work." But she manages a respectable dining table, which vanishes after a few seconds.

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"Ah, it seems I'm more stubborn than you are."

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"Stubbornness is not one of my defining traits!"

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"See, my reaction to difficult things is 'you will bow before my will' not 'ugh, work'."

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"I'm not so much about things bowing before my will!"

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"Might explain why I've been more motivated to work on magic."

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"Yeah, I think it does."

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"Mm. So how's Anna liking the new flower? I have notes."

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"Anna is a big fan of the new flower! She hasn't so much done magic with it, she just likes wearing it! What's in your notes?"

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"Science! Notes on how difficult it is to get things to freeze in various shapes, notes on how the temperature change for a given effort corresponds to specific heat..."

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"Cool!"

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"And heat of fusion. I haven't been able to do anything with heat of vaporization because it only lets you make things colder, not warmer, and I haven't dared try liquefying the air."

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"...Yeah that sounds like it could get messy."

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"Yeah."

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"It's a very pretty house, let's not wreck it."

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"I mean, we can also do stuff outdoors, but yeah."

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"Depending how messy it got..."

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"I mean, it's not like I'm talking about playing with antimatter."

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"Well, yeah, but I sure don't know what would happen if you liquefied the air. So I don't know how far away from the house we'd have to go if we wanted to be safe. So we might guess wrong."

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"Well, we could do research beforehand."

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"If you want, sure!"

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"Well, I think cooling the air that much is a little beyond what I'm currently capable of, but eventually."

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"When Anna gets the ice flower to bud and we have enough of it to go around."

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"Yeah."

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Cass conjures herself a handful of popcorn. Nom.

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"Hmm, so what else can we nerd about magic...?"

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"You done any cool stuff with conjuring? Like..." She frowns slightly in concentration, and then a glass ball appears in her hands. Inside the thick outer shell are several more shells in successive concentric layers, all made of perfectly clear glass with traces of dark red pigment forming faint swirling patterns; between each pair of shells is a thin layer of water. "I have no idea how you could possibly make something like this without magic, but isn't it pretty?"

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"Ooh. I've done plenty of things with conjuring I think are cool, but nothing impossible like that."

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"Well, what cool stuff have you done, then?"

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"Well, food. A set of bracelets that cover the roses on my wrists with opaque glass ones. Pens in increasing levels of absurd elaboracy. Sheets with a truly decadent thread count..."

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Cass giggles. "Isn't magic great? I totally want to see your weirdest pen."

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She conjures a pen with swooping rainbow designs traced with gemstones wrapping around the barrel, swirling gold loops attached to the side for where one's fingers go, and Hebrew lettering in each rainbow stripe in its chromatic opposite.

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"That's awesome."

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"The writing's from the Song of Solomon."

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"I have no idea what that means."

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"It's a racy love poem in the--Old Testament."

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"Oh, nice!"

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"I thought so!"

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"That is a seriously amazing pen."

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"Thanks."

A few days pass. Assorted magic is practiced. Eventually, Emily fins Cass again and asks, "Me and Edie were thinking about exploring again."

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"Count me in!"

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"Great! Where's Anna?"

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"I think she's on the roof?"

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"Cool," she says, finds and opens a window, hops out, and flies up to the roof.

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Anna is sitting contentedly and watching clouds.

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"Hey! The rest of us are exploring, wanna come?"

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"Sure!"

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"Awesome."

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"Where to?"

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"This way!" She ducks down and back through the window.

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Anna follows.

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Then Emily can presumably lead both Anna and Cass to where Edie's waiting.

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Yep!

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And then they can start exploring.

As advertized, there is a lot of tarps, dust, and expensive objects.

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"You never got anywhere on cleaning stuff up with magic, eh, Anna?"

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"Unfortunately not."

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"Hmm. Emily, water, please?"

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Emily conjures a bucket of water.

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And Edie, arms moving in an imitation of a waterbender from A:tLA,  telekineses the water in broad sweeps over every dusty surface unlikely to be adversely affected by the moisture.

"Now we see if the dust vanishes when the water does, if I integrate 'em well enough."

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"That was adorable," says Anna. "Not sure about the dust vanishing, though, I don't think we've ever gotten something to vanish by mixing it with a conjured thing, always seems to go the other way around."

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"Well, at least it can not-vanish at the bottom of a bucket instead of on tarps."

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"This is a big improvement, it's true."

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Edie starts peeling back tarps. They largely conceal more expensive objects.

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There are so many expensive objects.

"Man, this house is something else."

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"It's kind of ridiculous."

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"Little bit! But in a cool way."

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"I guess."

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"I'm not even sure what the point of some of these is supposed to be."

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"Yeah, like, who keeps a tiny Gothic mansion in an alcove in the wall of their bigger more impressive mansion... oh, hey, I think that's a cuckoo clock," she says. "Hell of a cuckoo clock. But it's got that big clock tower and the doors look like they move."

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She snorts. "People with more money than taste. Or sense."

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"If I wanted a Gothic mansion cuckoo clock, I'd want that one," says Cass. "It's kind of badass. But I can't say I've ever wanted a Gothic mansion cuckoo clock."

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"I mean, none of the objects here would be near so ridiculous if there weren't so many of them."

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"True. After the, what, tenth beautiful antique cabinet full of painted plates, it's just like, did you really love painted plates that much? Maybe somebody did! I don't wanna judge the painted plate collectors of the world! But I dunno, they don't seem all that cherished to me."

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"If there was one thing Grandmother was not good at, it was cherishing things."

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"Sucks for grandma."

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"Yep."

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"But she did collect some cool stuff."

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"I guess."

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She looks at the Gothic mansion cuckoo clock, and thinks for a bit, and then conjures a cute little vampire plush doll with stubby arms and stubby legs and a black felt cape and white felt fangs. This she perches atop the clock tower.

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"Awww."

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"I think it's much better now."

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"Agreed."

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Cass laughs.

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"So is that one permanent, or...?"

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"Yep!"

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"Good."

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"Want to go find more neat stuff, or are we done exploring for the day?"

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"Let's find some more neat stuff!"

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"All right!"

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More neat stuff: is found.

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The neat stuff is pretty neat. Although Cass can't resist putting a plastic flower crown on the marble bust of Isaac Newton.

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Why would she want to resist?

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Admittedly she doesn't try very hard!

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Good for her.

Eventually they come across a room that seems more for storing expensive bric-a-brac than displaying it. And after enough poking in boxes...

"What the actual fuck."

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"Mm?"

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"Roses."

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"... Seriously?" She comes closer to look.

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There, in a pretty cut-crystal glass vase, are eight elegant long-stemmed eccentrically colored thorny roses tied with a faded pink ribbon.

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"...roses!" says Anna. "Hey, some of those are new kinds - or - those are the same shades of blue and purple and pink and yellow, but they've got the stems and petals reversed - and is that orange and red?"

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"Whoa. Looks like it."

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"So, should I take all the new ones and use them a bunch to see if I can get them to bud?"

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"...Probably the wise choice..."

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"Yeah. I mean, you can try them out too if you want."

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"Yeah, I definitely wanna try the orange one."

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"'Kay."

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"And probably the other ones, but if they're basically the same thing no rush. If you're going to hold onto it for a while for budding can I go first?"

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"Yeah, go for it."

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"Cool."

She pricks herself on it.

"...Heat," she says, when it's finished integrating itself, and makes a small flame appear above the palm of her hand. "I like this one."

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"Cool!"

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Cass giggles.

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"I call a moratorium on 'cool'-related puns pertaining to the orange and white roses," she says loftily.

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"I honestly didn't even mean to pun."

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"Oh, I wasn't talking to you."

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"Try'n stop me."

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"Is that a challenge, Ms. Buford?"

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"Please don't get into open war over puns," laughs Anna.

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"Yes, I don't think any of us want this to escalate."

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"Speak for yourself!"

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"Caaaaaaaass."

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"Hey, I'm just sayin', ain't nobody gonna stop me laughing at my own dumb jokes."

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"To be fair, that was Anna's lack-of-joke, not your joke."

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"Same basic principle."

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"If you say so."

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"Man," she says, contemplating the flowers, "what a piece of luck. I wonder if there's more kinds out there."

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"I bet not. Because the red ones, right?"

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"What about them, exactly?"

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"They've got a bit of magic from all the other... well, pairs I guess, except there's the black-and-white ones. So actually I guess there might be another one to go with red-and-black, and another one to go with black-and-white, and I'm just assuming the fire and ice ones make a pair together. But like, I would feel like it was really weird if we found, I dunno, green and brown ones, that had no overlap with the red-and-black kind."

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"Makes sense."

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"I thought so!"

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"You'd sort of think they'd have something more versatile than cutting, for their primary magic..."

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"Yeah, it's a bit weird."

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"I wonder where these things come from. If there's more magic out there."

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"Me too. I don't know how we'd tell."

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"Hmm. You can enchant things, with the black flowers..."

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"I don't know how enchanted you can get them, though. But yeah, there could be other magic stuff that people made. It'd take a pretty rare person to be able to get very good with the black flowers, though, I think. They're pretty bad."

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"No, I meant, maybe one of us could create some kind of divinatory artifact."

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"Maybe! But like, right now we don't know how it works at all besides 'you can make stuff be magic', it might not even do that entire kind of thing."

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"Possible."

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"Just have to wait and see, I guess."

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"Yeah."

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"I wonder what-all the new pair does besides fire and ice respectively."

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"Guess it's on me to do a lot of fire and/or ice and find out."

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"I'm jealous of your budding speed."

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"I'd share the trick if I knew how."

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"I believe you. Oh well."

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"Yeah."

She looks contemplatively at the bouquet, then picks out all the non-redundant flowers.

"How about I go put these in? Emily, do you want to keep the orange-red one for a while?"

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"Yeah, I think so."

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"All right."

Off she goes with the other two.

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Emily tries to see what she can do with the fire to start with.

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She can create and control small amounts of fire!

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How fine's her control?

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A little clumsy initially, but it responds well to practice.

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Good.

If she sets something on fire, can she put it out? Like this candle, that seems safe.

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Yes, with some difficulty!

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Oh, good. If she lights more than one candle and tries to put them both out at once, in what precise manner is that harder?

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It seems to be outright impossible (at least at the moment) to put out two candles simultaneously if they're not right next to each other, and even right next to each other, the separation makes it difficult above and beyond the thing where it's harder to put out fire the more of it there is.

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Huh! Well, is maximum separation the kind of thing she can increase with practice?

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It doesn't quite seem to work like that.

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Hmm okay well what if she adds more close-together candles.

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As long as they're really close together, she can manage quite a few of them. In fact, if she makes a row of candles very very close together, she can affect them all at once even when each individual candle is way out of separate-candle range of most of the rest. It seems like what might be happening is that she can only control or extinguish "one" fire at a time, but the definition of "one fire" is a little bit flexible.

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Aha.

She takes notes and conjures a metal sheet on the ground for fire protection and then sees how much fire she can create and control at once.

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She can fill about two cubic feet of air with flames, and reshape the blob of fire to her liking, although she's not great at fine detail yet. Any bigger than that gets abruptly much harder, and she can't pull the fire-blob apart into multiple pieces at all.

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She will work on expanding total volume, then.

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Her volume capacity expands slowly but steadily. She can work on her fine control at the same time if she likes, and that one seems to go a little faster.

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Yes she will do that.

Does the rose also grant fire resistance? She checks.

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It grants moderate fire resistance. She can still burn herself, but she has to try pretty hard.

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So if she wants to make a halo out of fairly cool flame she won't set her hair on fire?

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Correct! She can have her burning halo. It's very fetching.

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The number limit is really annoying. Without it she could layer her petal ballgown with an ornate design of flames.

Oh well.

She takes it off her head and experiments with how hot she can make it.

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There's an upper limit. It's pretty hot - definitely hotter than those candle flames. She might have difficulty measuring it without a specialized thermometer. If she works at it, she can get the limit to creep upward, but it's hard to tell how much progress she's making.

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Is it hot enough to turn blue?

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Yes, although there's still some orange at the edges.

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Alright. She'll play around a bit with conjuring various metallic salts inside the fire and seeing how much color detail she can get that way.

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So many colours! Kind of hard to get much precision out of it, but it's doable!

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She'll practice with that for a while then. 

Eventually she goes looking for Anna and Cass in order to show off.

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They're in their rooms, with the door ajar. Sounds like they're rehashing an age-old friendly argument about their respective taste in music. Probably safe to interrupt.

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She knocks anyway.

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Cass comes to get it.

"Hey, what's up?"

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"Wanna see what I can do with the fire rose?"

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"Definitely!"

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"Me too!" says Anna, coming to the door.

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She grins and conjures a ball of orange flame in the palm of her hand, shrinks it and heats it to blue, then has it "bloom" outward to form a six-petaled flower shape, with each "petal" fed a different salt by her conjuring so that they form a rainbow. Then the flower dissolves into a rainbow-striped cylinder that follows Emily's hand as she twirls, bringing it around to form a diagonal hoop around herself.The hoop splits into what appears to be several intersecting hoops that make a sort of bowtie pattern, one horizontal and the others at different diagonals, lowers her hands so that the tips of her fingers brush the lowest hoop-edges, then brings them up, the "hoops" following until they consist of an arch over her head. This she "grabs" at both ends, letting it widen and flatten into a shawl-like shape, drapes it over her shoulders, and finally lets the fire go out.

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Anna applauds.

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"Artist in the house," says Cass.

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"Yes. Yes I am."

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"Meanwhile Anna's mostly just been figuring out how to wear seven flowers without looking like a tool."

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"That's difficult?"

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"I've got them all hidden right now," says Anna, who does indeed not have any flowers peeking out of her clothes, "and that works out okay, but like if I let the flower heads be visible then I'm kind of clashy."

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"I see your point."

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"Yeah. I've made some progress! But I am not the artist in the house."

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"I will see what I can do!"

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"Thanks!"

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"Quite welcome."

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"Anyway. I think I'm gonna go make ice cubes or something."

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"Have fun with that!"

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"I'll try to make them pretty ice cubes, but no promises!"

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"Alas, a gap in the prettiness surrounding me, how shall I bear it?"

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"I bet you'll figure something out!"

She traipses off in search of a kitchen sink to make ice cubes in, since that seems like a reasonable place for it.

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The kitchen is fairly findable. Emily goes to show off for her sister.

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And Anna makes ice cubes. She can make them by freezing water or by just sort of making ice be, although it's way different from conjuring! She can make them in various shapes! ...kind of pathetically crude shapes!

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Emily would probably not be judging her for that even if she were there to do so.

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With practice, she manages to make ice cubes in shapes other than "vaguely cube-like lump" and "not very cube-like lump". Like "could plausibly pass for an actual ice cube", and "reasonably tidy sphere"!

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Spheres are good.

Edie is not impressed because she knows Emily well enough to know that wasn't especially difficult for her but she is entertained.

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Everyone practices magic to a greater or lesser extent, and a few days later another exploratory expedition is proposed.

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"Maybe this time we'll find Narnia."

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"There are a suspiciously large number of wardrobes."

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Cass giggles.

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They do not find Narnia in any of the first several rooms. They find dust and expensive furniture and knicknacks.

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So much dust. So many knickknacks.

"I'm going to count the number of wardrobes we see," says Cass. "That's four."

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"So it is. Oh, that tapestry's pretty."

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"Yeah, it's cool!"

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"It's not very, hm, archetypically tapestry-ish, though."

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"I can't say I'm that familiar with the genre."

The fabric is dark, and intricately embroidered with shades of blue and purple and green and red and a deep lightless black. It's hard to tell if it's meant to depict anything in particular; the colours form a tangle of ambiguous shapes, and searching for meaning there feels a lot like looking for lambs among the clouds.

"I like it, though. It's spooky."

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"What does an archetypal tapestry look like?"

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"You know, medievalish? Like the kind of thing you'd expect to see on the wall of some kind of King Arthur story or what not." She goes over to examine the tapestry more closely.

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"Huh. Yeah, I couldn't imagine King Arthur standing in front of this, unless it was some kind of modernized reboot."

It's not immediately clear what type of fabric that is, or what type of thread. The coloured threads are beautifully vibrant at their brightest, fading to a smoky dimness in places, but the fading looks intentional; the black threads remain uniform throughout. Anna wanders over for a closer look.

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"Don't the backs of these things always look like total garbage," wonders Cass, "or is that only when it's like the tag on a fancy shirt or something?"

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"Textiles aren't really my forte, but I think it might look like garbage..." She flips a corner over to see.

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It's messy but not that messy. And those black threads are unexpectedly cool to the touch, almost like they're made of metal, except they're also extremely soft and flexible in a very un-metallic way.

"Disappointing," pronounces Cass. "I was picturing it way more garbagey."

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"Like what?"

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"I dunno, just, like with the colours more all over the place and tangled up and stuff? And instead it's almost tidy."

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"I don't think these things are usually tangled."

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"Aren't they? Lemme see that."

She reaches for the tapestry to turn it over.

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"Oh, careful, you might snag something." She tries to take her hand away and frowned. Like metal, the dark threads had warmed quickly under her touch, and when she tried to pull her hand away she found they had become kind of sticky. "...Which might be easier than normal, these threads are behaving weirdly."

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"...yeah, that's weird all right." She doesn't touch the tapestry, but she peers at it.

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She tries to carefully remove her hand from the sticky.

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Despite her best efforts, a couple of threads at the edge of the cloth are pulled out into little loops, and the tapestry shifts a little. Cass steps back to try to get out of the way, but one of the loops snags on the zipper of her skirt pocket, and she stumbles and falls over and the whole tapestry comes with her, scrunched up and tangled in a knot of pulled threads.

"Aww man!"

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"Augh! ...Are you okay?"

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"Yeah, I'm fine - sorry about your tapestry - it was really nice, too..."

She tries to disentangle herself from the fabric. It doesn't work very well.

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"It's a real shame, but it's not like it was your fault." She bends down to try to help detangle her.

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"It was probably just really old. We probably shouldn't be handling all this stuff so casually." She will also assist.

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With Anna's help, they manage to get the tapestry detached from Cass's clothes.

"Yeah, I feel bad about it and I wasn't even—"

And then they are no longer touching the tapestry, or in the same room as the tapestry, or indeed in the house at all.

"—what the actual fuck."

They are on a dimly lit hilltop, surrounded by dark springy grass and small tangly bushes bearing enormous ghostly-white flowers.

Around them, the horizon is a high and jagged shadow against the deep blue of the night sky, matched by another such shadow looming above, like they're sitting in the open mouth of some enormous mythical beast - but the 'teeth' go all the way around; the roof of the planetary mouth appears to be a huge flat bowl exactly like the one in which this hilltop sits, complete with arrangements of lights that look like smaller, dimmer, bluer renditions of the patterns of lights you see overflying a city at night. Between the two halves of this inside-out planet, suspended in midair by no discernible means, masses of vegetation float in enormous grey-green tangles.

In four places, the dimness of the sky is broken by a slash of light: two softly glowing vertical silver-white bars standing exactly opposite one another, and two diagonal lines of blazing gold running opposite one another at identical angles, as though the silver and the gold are two rings in some enormous cosmic gyroscope. Their light shines in on the floating jungles, whose green peripheries are therefore the best-lit objects in view.

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"Remember when we were wondering if there was any other magic floating around. And when we found a neatly-wrapped bouquet of roses in one of these rooms."

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"I guess there was some other magic floating around!"

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"Holy shit!"

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"Clearly!"

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"...I should probably be freaking out or something but actually this is really cool," says Cass.

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"I'm freaking out a little bit!" says Anna.

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"I'm freaking out! We have no way of getting back!"

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"I mean, there was a way to get here, so logically a way to get back must exist, but, yeah, that doesn't mean we can find it..."

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"Something that could get us back has to exist but it doesn't have to exist here."

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"Yeah."

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She has now progressed to nonverbal forms of freaking out like sitting down, putting her head between her knees and trying to take deep breaths.

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Edie sits down beside her and hugs her.

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Anna sits a little ways away and looks up at the alien sky.

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Emily starts quietly crying.

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The sky is brightening in a couple of places. Near the high end of one of the gold lines, and more faintly near the low end of one of the silver lines on almost the opposite end of the sky. It's pretty, in a really, really strange way.

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Yeah. That's--not nothing. Eventually Emily stops crying and silently watches the sky.

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A disk of blazing gold peeks over the upper horizon on its way down the golden line. At the same time on the other side of the sky, a fainter silver disk peeks over the lower horizon on its way up the silver.

"This place is crazy," Anna murmurs.

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"No kidding."

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"Upside-down sunrise."

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"Maybe it's really a sunset...no, that doesn't fit either..."

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"If that's really the other half of this planet up there, it's sunrise for them... but at that rate, you'd get a hell of a short day before it goes past the other horizon and disappears..."

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"You think this--shell thing--is a planet?"

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"More like I don't know what to call it if it's not one."

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"Some kind of cavern or something? I mean, it seems likelier than not to be artificial."

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"It has a sun and a moon, it's approximately planet-sized... I'm getting kind of a Ringworld vibe, almost? Like, fantasy's answer to Ringworld." She squints at the floating jungle. "Maybe fantasy's answer to the Integral Trees, too."

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"I'm more of a fantasy person than a sci-fi person so I don't know what those are."

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"They're sci-fi books by this famous-ish old-school author. The Ringworld in Ringworld is a literal giant ring spinning around a sun, and the world in Integral Trees is a giant gas cloud around its sun. It's like - I'd put planets and Ringworlds and gas toroids and whatever this place is all in the same category? And I don't have a better word for that category than 'planet' even though 'planet' is not great."

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"Those things sound more...physics-compatible...than this, but I guess it's not like magic doesn't exist."

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"Yeah. Hence, 'fantasy's answer to Ringworld'."

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"Fair enough. Maybe it's an artificial planet, it still seems like the universe mostly defaults to physics."

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"I wonder what kind of weirdo would look at normal planets and then build this..."

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"...And they'd almost have to have been looking at Earth in particular, right? One yellow sun, one white moon..."

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"There are a lot of weirdos in the world, though."

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"True."

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"We should probably--go exploring, or find shelter, or something, I don't know what kind of wildlife this place has and rose regen is pretty robust but it would still be an unpleasant surprise to wake up half-eaten by a bear."

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"Yeah... okay, who's wearing which roses, I've got red - uh - red/black and black/white..."

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"Red/black, pink/yellow, yellow/pink, blue/purple, purple/blue, black/white, white/light-blue," says Anna.

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"Red/black, black/white, orange/red, pink/yellow and blue/purple."

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"Pink/yellow, blue/purple, black/white and red/black."

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"All right, good, we can all fly and we're not missing any roses. So I say we fly."

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"Sounds good."

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She rises into the air and looks around.

"I can't hardly see anything, how about you guys?"

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"There continues to be bizarre floating jungle?"

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"I feel like we probably don't wanna try to sleep there."

The sky is continuing to lighten, though, offering greater visibility. She squints at their surroundings. "...Uh, thaaaaaat looks like a giant snake?"

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"In the jungle?"

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"No, like right over there." She points. There is indeed a dimly visible form slithering through the bushes near the foot of the hill. It is large.

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"Whoa. Yeah."

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"I'm not sure where we should be going exactly but 'somewhere the giant snake isn't' seems like a reasonable place to start," says Anna. She looks around and flies in a snakeless direction.

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Sounds like a plan.

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Yep.

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"This place is pretty," says Anna. "Or. Looks like it would be pretty if I could see more of it."

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"I could do fire but I'm not sure if that would help or just destroy our night vision."

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"And it might conceivably tick off the giant snakes. Yeah, let's avoid that for now."

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"I think wild animals are generally scared of fire? And I'm not really scared of the giant snakes, they would probably not be difficult to behead."

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"I'm not that scared of the giant snakes, but, hmm, I'm not in a hurry to find out how scared of the giant snakes I should actually be, you know?"

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"I guess."

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Shrug. Flying flying.

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That looks like it might be a house off in the distance!

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"Do we want to try dealing with locals?"

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"Locals might know how scared we should be of the giant snake! Of course they probably don't speak English..."

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"And we don't know if they'll be friendly, or have magic of their own...but we're not going to magically learn their language by not talking to them and only interacting between the four of us until and unles we can find a way home seems...excessive."

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"Yeah. Okay, I vote talk to the locals."

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"Same."

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"Agreed."

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They change course housewards.

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"Big house," comments Anna.

It's not quite as big as the one they were in an hour ago, but it's still undeniably mansion-like. It does at least seem to be built on a human scale, with recognizable architectural elements like rectangular windows and hinged doors.

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"Yeah, could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on a number of factors we have no way of knowing in advance."

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"Hooray," sighs Anna.

Flying flying.

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A woman steps out onto a balcony and sees them approaching.

Huge white feathered wings appear at her back, and she takes off and flaps gracefully toward them.

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"Definitely magic. Also, pretty."

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The woman greets them in, predictably, a language none of them has ever heard of.

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Yep.

Wonder twin powers activate! Form of: Well, I have the black rose's skill-learning enhancements, that should help with languages, right?

"Sorry, I don't speak your language," she says, mostly as a demonstration.

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She says something else, in an agreeable tone, and then beckons and turns to glide back to her balcony.

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She follows.

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She lands. She says more things. She opens a door and waves the four of them inside, where there is a comfortable sitting room. She vanishes her wings and sits down, looking contemplatively at them.

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Sitting looks like it will happen, then.

They make an odd picture, sitting here in their odd clothing. Emily especially; she's wearing the same dark-to-light petal gown as when she greeted the Canadians at the start of the summer.

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Anna stands awkwardly next to a couch.

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Cass plops onto that same couch. It's comfy.

"Okay so now what," she says.

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Their host says something back, which of course they can't understand.

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Edie sits down next to her sister.

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She points at herself. "Kyralaine."

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Okay, introductions, sure. "Anna."

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"Cass."

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"Edie."

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"Emily."

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Kyralaine says something that is probably a pleasantry from context.

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"Nice to meet you too?"

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"Yeah. Um, your house is really nice."

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She smiles wryly and says something else, a couple of sentences long.

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There is a sound from the hall, and then someone opens the door and walks in from that direction.

His appearance is significantly less human than the woman's. His ears are long, pointed, and mobile; his teeth show noticeable fangs; his fingernails are short sharp claws; and there is a sleek-furred black tail swishing behind him.

He blinks at the woman, blinks at her four guests - pays particular attention to their odd clothes, especially Emily's petal-dress - and then asks the woman a question.

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She answers briefly, and then makes introductions, correctly remembering all the newcomers' names and introducing the boy with the tail as "Ashras".

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Ashras turns a friendly smile on the four strangers.

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"Hi, we don't speak your language," she says wryly.

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He nods, smiles wryly, and - goes to fetch some paper and a fountain pen, with which he approaches the guests' couch.

"Feinth," he says, indicating the paper, and he writes down a word; and then "sina," the pen, and he writes down another word on the next line, and marks off those two rows and divides the page into two columns, and offers pen and paper to the guests to see if any of them will continue the game.

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This seems reasonable

"Paper," she says, writing the word beside the first of his, and "pen," beside that one.

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He nods, takes it back - echoes "paper", writes something after where she wrote that - echoes "pen", writes something after where she wrote that - hands the implements back to Edie. There is enough space for her to put down similar transcriptions of 'feinth' and 'sina'!

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She will do that, then, and hope the English alphabet doesn't prove too torturous.

She points at him, says "man", then points at herself, Emily, Cas, Anna, and Kyralaine, and says, "woman." Then she writes those down as well.

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He hmms, and glances at Kyralaine, and then gestures something that might be meant to convey hang on a moment and leaves the room and comes back a minute later holding a small framed portrait of a young woman with serious eyes and long pointed mobile ears like his. This he offers to Edie with a half-shrug, as though to say, categorize this?

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Ah. Yes. "Woman," she says.

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Clarification achieved, he transcribes the gendered terms, offers translations, lets Edie transcribe the translations, and then provides the other category distinction - the four guests and Kyralaine are Ceirene; he and the portrait are Aluvai.

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Helpless shrug.

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He glances at Kyralaine again, then shrugs slightly himself. All right, what other vocabulary can they exchange, here...

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Up, down, left, right? I/me, you, he, she? Colors?

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Yes, they can do all those!

Names for various items in the room! Verbs: writing speaking standing sitting walking flying!

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Miscellanous adjectives and then the verb "to be"?

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Sure!

Alphabets - his has twenty-four letters, which he writes down neatly and names aloud: fas, var, pei, bes, san, zar, tai, des, shar, wyr, kai, thi, re, lu, ne, mi, urnu, ormo, yi, adai, iki, evei, chiri, tsai. Spelling in his language seems to be somewhat more reasonable than in English, although not completely - wyr in particular shows up in the, er, weirdest places, and there are some silent vowels.

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She can respect that.

She writes down the latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase on separate lines but each capital above its counterpart and names them together, and demonstrates use cases for capitals like the beginnings of names.

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Ashras seems amused by the existence of capital letters, but follows along. And writes down his name and Kyralaine's, and attempts to transcribe them into the Latin alphabet himself.

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Capital letters are fairly nonsensical! Edie transcribes the earthlings' names into his script.

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All right... 'yes', 'no', 'maybe', they're running out of paper which is an opportunity to introduce 'more', and numbers too, and then - how about geography?

He draws a map. Actually he draws four maps, all approximately circular. He indicates their current location in the upper left quadrant of map number one.

He gestures to the map(s), and then to his guests, inquiringly.

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"...No," says Anna, since this seems to be the most efficient way to communicate the correct answer given their limited mutual vocabulary.

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Ashras laughs.

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...Right. Hm.

She takes a blank sheet of paper, then draws an oval with openings at the long ends. She draws stick figures inside this, some with pointy ears and some with round ears.

Then she draws a circle, and stick figures standing on the outside of the circle. She labels four of the stick figures "Edie, Emily, Anna, Cass," and then circles them and draws an arrow to the oval.

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"...huh," says Ashras.

He redraws the oval example: pointy-eared stick figures standing on the inner circumference of the oval, round-eared stick figures standing on the outside, and pointy-eared stick figures with tails floating in the very middle amidst a scribble of vegetation.

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Aha.

She looks at the round-eared stick figures on her Earth and nods. Then she draws another picture--the stick figures representing her and her friends in a room. She draws an arrow from the room to Earth. The room has a tapestry in it. She draws another picture, with the Emily-stick examining the tapestry and touching it. Then another, with the Emily stick trying to draw her hand away and threads coming with it. Then one with the Cass-stick tangled in the remains of the tapestry. Then one with them all on a hill. Then she adds a giant snake to the hill, and draws the four stick figures flying away, and adds the house, and a stick figure with wings which she dubs "Kyralaine."

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Ashras examines this narrative. He seems to find it very puzzling.

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They're pretty puzzled about it too!

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At least they can all be confused together.

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Yeah.

More words? Maybe they can start stringing sentences together soon.

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Yeah - actually how about they attempt to construct and translate into both languages an actual description of the events of this story -

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Hoo boy. Okay.

They were staying in an old house and periodically went exploring because there was some neat stuff in it, and one neat thing they found was a tapestry, and its threads went sticky when Emily touched them, and then Cass's clothes got caught on one of the distended threads and then it dissolved into a tangle around her and the other three tried to get it off and then they were on a hilltop on this planet and decided to leave because there was an enormous snake and happened by chance upon this house. How much of that can get translated?

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Plenty, with enough creativity and stick figures!

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Plenty of both is available!

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Ashras seems to be picking up English faster than the reverse. Hey, how about full names and family relations - a stick family tree takes shape - Azair Kevarsin and Kyralaine Evniar, the parents of Ashras Kevarsin, Inlaith Kevarsin, and Elarron Kevarsin -

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Emily is probably doing better than Edie, even though she's mostly just watching, because she unlocked the black rose's skill thing.

Sure, families. Charlotte Frances Xavier and Eric Magnus Lehnsherr are the parents of Edie Magda Lehnsherr and Emily Moira Lehnsherr.

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The other two don't seem to be interested in sharing genealogical data. Ashras doesn't press.

All right, how about politics - here are labels for assorted regions of this planet - the part they're in is Tarnedrae, and it belongs to Ashras's family, ruled by his grandfather Faidre; the girl in the portrait is Rokarai Iserra, and her grandfather Dalvor Iserra rules Aluvanna, which is the entire interior of the planet, as represented on these two circles of the map. The outside is Ceir (pronounced with a K sound but spelled chiri-wyr-evei-iki-re; he contemplates possible English transcriptions and then settles on using a C for the chiri-wyr cluster) and does not have a nice tidy single ruler for him to name.

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Edie sketches a rough world map and identifies the United States. Do they have enough vocabulary to communicate "representative democracy"?

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They have enough vocabulary to make a reasonable effort at it, and for Kyralaine to start nodding along and then attempt to explain Ceirene politics in return. The concepts aren't completely clear, but there's definitely a democratic flavour involved.

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Well, the United States is one of those, and has three branches of government--can they communicate "judiciary" and "bicameral legislature"?

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...they might have to expand on those concepts to get them across.

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Expanding can happen.

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And in return Kyralaine attempts to explain the semi-independent structure of Ceirene regional governments, and the council formed by the regional rulers, and the relationship between various legal and administrative authorities within this structure... at least their vocabulary is definitely increasing under this pressure.

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Yes, yes it is. Political parties, do Ceirene have those?

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She happens to know of a few regions whose governmental structure supports such a thing, including the one where she used to live, but she's not familiar with the way all of the regions of Ceir work politically because there are a lot.

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That makes sense! Edie couldn't tell you nearly so much about European politics.

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This is such an interesting and productive and vocabulary-expanding discussion!

Would the guests like anything to eat?

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The guests have the capacity to generate food but are at least some of them curious about local cuisine.

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...really?

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"Yeah, check it out," says Cass, producing an ice cream cone. Slurp!

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"Can you generate any other things?"

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"Lots! Emily and Cass are the best at it."

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He pulls a small blunt steel pin, engraved with simple designs, out of a pocket.

"Can you generate - this? It's a—" he says a two-word phrase, writes down the words on the latest vocabulary sheet, makes a little flame appear at the end of the pin, points to the flame, says one of the words, points to the pin, says the other. Fire pin.

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"If it's magic I dunno if I can do that, but," she says, and hands him an identical steel pin.

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He makes a flame appear at the end of that one, too.

He looks at his mother.

He looks at the guests.

"...Do you want to save the world?"

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"Absolutely,"

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the twins say in unison. "What does it need saving from?" Edie adds.

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"...People from another world," he says wryly.

He finds someone's drawing of the planet, traces inward vectors with the tip of a claw - "They came this way. They destroyed a lot of Ceir. Now they come this way," new vectors in toward the edge of the planet rather than its outer surface, "to try to destroy Aluvanna."

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"Well, we promise not to try to destroy you. Do you know why?"

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"No. No one knows why. We tried to ask. They don't talk to us."

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"That's bizarre."

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"Yes! It is!"

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"So you want us to make weapons?"

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A brief diversion to verify and record the word 'weapon', then -

"Yes. This is not a weapon," he lights the fire pin again, "but there are weapons like it. Bigger ones do more. Different ones do different things."

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"I am unenthusiastic about the idea of providing weapons to one side in a war with only their word that they're in the right, but if you are telling the truth trying to get the other side of the story would just get me killed, so."

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"If you want to try, Dalvor can send people with you. But yes, it would maybe get you killed."

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Can anyone think of a less potentially lethal way to check off the top of our heads? she asks the others via convenient rose telepathy.

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Um... beats me, says Cass. Although, related question, could we actually fight the alien invaders? We might be able to fight the alien invaders. Like, without arming the locals. Flowers are pretty badass.

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...and if we could fight the alien invaders then we could go look at the alien invaders and probably not die? Yeah, I don't know, says Anna.

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It sort of depends how destructive the invaders are? Like, I'm not confident any of us could survive being completely vaporized.

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Yeah. So let's find out more.

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"What kinds of weapons do the invaders have?"

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"Like ours, but - more."

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"What kind of more? More powerful, more versatile, just more of them..."

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"'Powerful'? 'Versatile'?"

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"Versatile--um, you can do more things with it. Powerful, more...force? Did we cover force?"

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"Aha - " He gives translations and adds these words to the vocabulary list and then answers, "More powerful."

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"What makes these more powerful, just size?"

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"Size and design."

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"Do they have bigger weapons or better designs?"

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Wryly, "Yes."

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"Ah. I see."

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"But if we could make weapons by magic..."

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"I dunno what your industrial base is like but with four people making them only one of whom can make 'em permanent I'm not sure how much good it'll do."

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"Only one...?"

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Cass raises her hand.

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He nods acknowledgment, looking thoughtful.

"How fast?"

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"...Well, probably faster than you could make them without magic..."

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"And... more powerful weapons are made, hmm, very complicated and exact, out of many metals..."

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"More complicated takes longer than less, but I can do it."

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"How does the metal affect things?"

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"Ah... I don't have the vocabulary for a good explanation yet," he says. "There are about seven things a magic weapon made of only one metal can do. Different metals do different things. More than one metal in the same weapon does a new, more powerful thing."

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"That is a reasonably good explanation! So steel is fire?"

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"Yes—" and now they can add 'steel' to their vocabulary list.

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And Emily will conjure bits of other kinds of metal so they can be added to the list, too! Copper, gold, silver, platinum, zinc, lead, titanium. Are any of these in the seven?

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Kyralaine asks to see the samples and holds each one for a few seconds. She diagnoses them all as magically active, and recognizes and provides translations for copper, gold, silver, and platinum.

"And I think I've seen zinc in a - mix - with copper; together they do the same magic as zinc but stronger. I don't recognize lead or titanium, but I can tell that lead does the same magic as gold but weaker, and titanium does the same magic as zinc but much stronger."

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"What does copper do? What does zinc do?"

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"Copper does - I don't think we have the word yet - um, loud weather? Zinc does... I don't know if we have the word yet..."

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"Lightning?" she guesses, sketching a puffy cloud with a lightning bolt coming down from it.

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He laughs. "Yes! Lightning. Copper does lightning." He provides a translation and adds it to the vocabulary list.

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"Do we have words for what gold, silver and platinum do?"

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"Gold does light, silver I don't think we have the word, platinum... the opposite of fire?"

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"Cold?" she guesses, looking at Anna, who has the white flower.

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Anna shrugs, and demonstrates cold by conjuring a glass of water set to last for a few seconds and then freezing it. "Cold. Freezing. I froze the water."

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"Yes! Platinum does freezing."

He adds this new verb to the vocabulary list.

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"So we need the words for silver and zinc...I should conjure more things, see if there are more 'strongers' you didn't know about like titanium."

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"Yes, let's find out."

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Aluminum? Bismuth? Cobalt? Chromium? Manganese? Tin?

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Aluminum is a weak version of copper. Bismuth is a very strong version of - a metal they haven't encountered yet; manganese is a medium-strong version of the same effect. Tin she recognizes as opposed to just diagnosing its magic; it appears in a different copper alloy with a different effect, or alone with a weaker version of that effect.

Chromium... does something, but she's never encountered a metal with this effect before and has no idea what the effect actually is.

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Something totally new! Awesome! It's safe to make a chromium pin and test it, right?

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In theory, yes. A mere pin shouldn't be very strong, and this feels like it might be a medium-strength metal.

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She makes a chromium pin.

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And Kyralaine balls up a stray piece of paper and puts it in a bowl and carefully aims the pin at it, and...

...about half of the crumpled ball of paper collapses into a papery puddle. She pokes the remaining paper gently with the pin. The liquefied parts appear to be slowly solidifying again.

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"Liquefaction. Cool, but very dangerous."

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"Interesting."

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"Can you try to describe zinc and silver? Or demonstrate, I can make pins."

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"I think I should start writing this down," says Kyralaine.

She makes a chart, with nine magical effects and three levels of strength for each effect, and fills in the names of effects and their associated metals in the local language with room for English translations, or the English word when it's the only one she knows. There are some blanks. She solicits Ashras's help to describe the effects well enough that they can at least translate all of those into English.

When she's done with what they currently know, the chart looks like this:

Force - zinc (weak), copper-zinc alloy (normal), titanium (strong)
Fire - iron (weak), steel (normal)
Light - lead (weak), gold (normal)
Energy - tin (weak), copper-tin alloy (normal)
Lightning - aluminum (weak), copper (normal)
Freeze - platinum (weak)
Stun - silver (weak)
Corrosion - nickel (weak), nickel-iron alloy (normal), bismuth (strong)
Liquefy - chromium (normal)

"I think," she says, contemplating it, "that there are probably weak, normal, and strong versions of all the effects. Do you know more metals to conjure?"

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"Definitely. Do you have to be directly touching the metal or can I encase it in something, some metals are poisonous and one's a liquid."

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"If you encase it in something very thin, it might work. It will help if they are in the pin shape."

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Emily conjures a very very very thin diamond pin-sheath filled with mercury.

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She examines it. She shakes her head. "Not magic."

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Okay...Vanadium? Gallium? Indium? Scandium? Palladium?

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Gallium: liquefy (weak). Indium: liquefy (strong). Palladium: stun (normal). She updates the chart accordingly.

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Cadmium? Niobium? Yttrium? Zirconium? Ruthenium? Rhodium?

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Niobium: lightning (strong). Ruthenium: fire (strong). Rhodium: stun (strong).

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Osmium? Iridium? Tungsten? Tantalum? Hafnium?

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Osmium: freeze (strong). Iridium: freeze (normal). Tungsten: light (strong). Tantalum: energy (strong).

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"And that's everything, unless we've somehow managed to miss any effects!"

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"Yes. Should we keep checking just in case?"

She finishes filling in the chart. It now looks like this:

Force - zinc (weak), copper-zinc alloy (normal), titanium (strong)
Fire - iron (weak), steel (normal), ruthenium (strong)
Light - lead (weak), gold (normal), tungsten (strong)
Energy - tin (weak), copper-tin alloy (normal), tantalum (strong)
Lightning - aluminum (weak), copper (normal), niobium (strong)
Freeze - platinum (weak), iridium (normal), osmium (strong)
Stun - silver (weak), palladium (normal), rhodium (strong)
Corrosion - nickel (weak), nickel-iron alloy (normal), bismuth (strong)
Liquefy - gallium (weak), chromium (normal), indium (strong)
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"There's alloys on that list, I was just checking pure elements, should I check alloys?"

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"Most alloys are exactly the same as one of their - parents. And all the alloys that are not like that are only a stronger version of one of their parents."

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"Pity I can't feel their magical qualities, I'd like to be able to use another magic system...I guess a lot of it's redundant with the roses anyway."

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"You can learn to feel their magical qualities. Or - maybe. I don't know what effect being from another world will have on it. Anyone here could learn if they were - if they tried and gave it a lot of time."

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"It's not just innate? That's good. Is it similarly difficult to use them?"

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"No, using them is easy. It's... hmm... to use them, you need to feel that they have magical properties at all. Everyone here has that sense. It's hard to learn how to tell fine detail with it."

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"Well, I can't."

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"You don't know that yet."

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"I mean I don't have the sense, not I can't refine it."

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She shakes her head. "You don't know that yet," she repeats. "Most people can't feel the magic until they hold a - large pin, a magic weapon - and try a few times."

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"...We really should figure out some way of confirming your story that doesn't involve dying. But as long as it's temporary it can't hurt to make one anyway, how are they shaped?"

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"Like this—"

She draws a plain cylinder on a spare sheet of paper. It's about an inch wide and ten inches long.

"If you make a gold one it will only do light, it won't be a weapon."

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She makes a gold one.

"You were right," she says thoughtfully. "I did speak too soon."

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Kyralaine smiles.

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"I wanna try!"

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Emily hands her the wand.

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She holds it for a moment, trying to figure out how to—oh, huh. It's subtle, but there's definitely a feeling of something there.

So then how do you use this subtle feeling to make light...?

She tries manipulating the faintly perceptible energy field in various possible ways. The magic word turns out to be 'squeeze'. The end of the wand lights up like a flashlight until she mentally releases it.

"Nifty," she says, passing it to Anna.

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"How'd you make it go?"

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"You kind of... squeeze it? But like, magically?"

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She tries that. Flashlight!

"Cool."

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"No kidding."

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Anna offers the wand to Edie. "Wanna try?"

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"Definitely." Squeeze. Light. "You know, Emily, I bet you could have a lot of fun with a wand of liquefaction and the rose telekinesis."

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"Oooooh."

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"...What exactly are you plotting to liquefy, here?"

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"Nothing specific, yet, but liquefied objects reconstitute, so if I liquefied, say, a piece of glass, and then telekinetically shaped it until it was solid again..."

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"Ooh, huh."

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"Wouldn't necessarily even need telekinesis, depending on viscosity; naively I'd expect glassblowing with this stuff to be harder but safer, and molds exist."

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"I guess we can experiment, but saving the world probably comes first."

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"Definitely."

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"Yes," says Ashras.

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"It's a pity scrying isn't a rose power, or at least not one we have yet."

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"What?"

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"Yeah we haven't explained the roses have we. Do we want to explain the roses. We probably want to explain the roses."

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"Count me in favour of explaining the roses," says Anna.

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"Yeah same. Who's volunteering?"

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"I can explain but I'm not gonna demonstrate the part where they come out."

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"What are roses?"

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"Do you, like, not have flowers that look like this," she asks, gesturing to the flowers at her wrist, "or is it just the magic version that requires explaining."

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"Flowers are different in Aluvanna. I've seen flowers like those before, but they were different colours and not magic. Please explain the magic."

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"So our word for the flower is roses. These are magic roses. Most roses are not magic. Magic roses are symbiotic organisms that plant themselves in your body if you prick yourself on them, give you magic, and hurt like a bitch. Each of the different colors gives different magic."

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"Huh," says Ashras. "That sounds useful. What's telekinesis?"

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She picks up the light wand. She does not use her hands.

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"How hard is it to learn how to use magic roses?"

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"How hard like how long or how hard like how much does it hurt?"

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"Like how long."

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"Depends on your pain tolerance, creativity and drive."

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He starts laughing.

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"Are there any extra flowers?"

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"There are some I can make more of... should I?" she asks the other three.

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"Cass, I forget, did you get the enchanting things power?"

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"Not yet, why?"

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"I thought maybe you could enchant a scrying thing to spy on their Enemy or a lie-detector to confirm their story," she sighed. "I really really doubt these people are, like, magic Nazis or anything, but how would I tell if they were."

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"...I feel pretty confident that they're not magic Nazis," says Cass. "Like, I dunno. They were being nice to the random flying girls from another planet even before we turned out to be stupidly powerful?"

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"Not exactly definitive proof but I get what you're saying," says Anna.

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"...What is a Nazi?"

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"Wow, um, I am not qualified to actually explain Nazis without a lot of angry screaming and probably some crying. There was a war, they were unambiguously the bad guys, people use the word as a synonym for evil if they feel like being dramatic."

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"Well, we aren't those."

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"It's not that I don't believe you it's that it would be really, really bad if we decided you were the good guys, armed you, and turned out to be wrong."

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"Yes."

He shrugs.

"And I don't think you can be sure. But you can talk to Dalvor about it if you want."

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"I don't have any better ideas," she admits.

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"I think you can save the world with these flowers but I don't think you can save it today. Are you tired, do you want to sleep? Are you hungry, do you want to eat?"

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"It wasn't very late when we left...I'm not terribly tired, anyone else?"

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"Not really."

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"Yeah, me neither."

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Cass shakes her head.

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"What time is it here?"

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"What do you mean?"

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"...Um, you have a cycle of sleeping regularly, right?"

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"...ah. Not in Aluvanna," she says. "Twice a day there is taiva, like now, when we see the sun for a short time. The rest of the time it is dark. So Ceirene sleep at night, but Aluvai sleep when they want to. It's the second taiva of the day now."

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"Huh. I think humans benefit from a regular sleep cycle, even if it's set arbitrarily, but that wasn't exactly my area of study, and in enough time to evolve tails and so on you could probably evolve away the circadian rhythm...of course, that's assuming that humans here evolved the same way I'm used to and that Aluvai evolved from Ceirene, which isn't necessarily the case..."

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"Evolved?"

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"Oh you don't know about evolution here yet, okay--or, no, maybe you do, the word hasn't come up before--okay, so you know how people will take animals and make the animals have babies who have the most of a specific trait they want, and then over time there are more of that kind of animal who have that trait?"

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"Yes?"

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"So animals do that in the wild, too, only it's not the traits that humans like best, it's the traits that'll let them have the most surviving babies, and over a very very long time they can even change into other species that way, and that's evolution."

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"Hmm. I see the logic," she says thoughtfully.

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"So since humans evolved as basically Ceirene on my planet it seems most likely that humans had a very similar evolutionary path here, although it isn't necessarily safe to assume that Aluvai evolved from Ceirene instead of some common ancestor."

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Nod. "Well. I sleep the Ceirene way, for most of the second dark time every day. But you can sleep when you're tired and no one will say it's the wrong time. Although most people try to be awake for taiva."

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"Makes sense. So, um, what would be a good time to try to get an audience with the king?"

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"I can talk to him now, and you can see him before next taiva."

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"Okay, that works."

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Smile. Nod.

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"...we should maybe be speaking our language, not yours," Ashras realizes.

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"Presumably your king does not speak it!"

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"Yes. Exactly." And then, switching languages - "Yes. Exactly."

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Emily smiles and nods and picks up a piece of paper and starts studying the words of his language on it.

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Ashras will be delighted to help!

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This will be helpful!

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Ashras is a helpful person.

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And language tutoring is a particularly helpful thing to be helpful at, right now, Edie would like in on this please.

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All are welcome in Ashras Kevarsin's impromptu language school!

(At some point he takes an aside to mention that the Ceirene call the language Ceirene and the Aluvai call it Aluvai and there is no neutral term and it's a bit silly. Technically there are two different dialects but they overlap to the point where calling them separate languages would also be silly.)

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...The outside of the planet is called Ceir, right, and the inside Aluvanna? Does the planet as a whole have a name?

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Yes, it's called Suranse. It happens to be really awkward to transform into a demonym, and all the plausible ways of doing so turn out differently in the two dialects.

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That is in retrospect unsurprising. Although it is sort of surprising that the whole planet has only one language.

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There's at least a couple dozen more, scattered around, but nearly everyone speaks the main language as well as their local one.

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Huh. Does he know how that happened, historically?

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Nope, if you go back far enough you start getting lost records, and the oldest winged ones only go back about five thousand years which isn't nearly enough.

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"People with wings live thousands of years?"

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"Winged ones live until killed."

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"How do winged ones happen?"

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...this is a complicated explanation but he's pretty sure he can manage it...

Okay so, it's a mental state, and it's a little different for everyone but the pervading theme is a sense of accomplishment, and once you have experienced the correct flavour of that mental state for you personally, you get your wings, and then you have wings and a Sphere and - does he have to explain Spheres, he probably has to explain Spheres.

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He totally has to explain Spheres!

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"A Sphere is a place that's yours and yours alone, and you can make a portal to it - like a door," he gestures at the door, "from anywhere you are, and they start out about as big as a big house but they get bigger slowly over time, the king's is huge. It's rude to walk into someone's Sphere uninvited. Dead people's Spheres stop growing..."

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"Huh. Well, as you've no doubt guessed, we don't have winged ones back home. Our recorded history goes back...a bit more than five thousand years, I think, but that's with archaeology helping. It's...surprising...if you've had the same language for five thousand years."

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"'Archaeology'?"

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"Digging really, really old stuff out of the ground and studying it to figure stuff out about the people who used it."

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"...Huh. We don't really do that."

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"Your ground works differently than ours. And there's less of it."

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He laughs. "Yeah."

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"I wonder what kind of accomplishment counts, Emily's pretty accomplished with conjuration..."

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"I don't know whether you have to accomplish the thing in this world or not, never having been out of it to check..."

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"Well, I don't appear to be acquiring any new limbs, for what that's worth."

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"It suggests that either whatever you've done doesn't count for you or you would've had to do it in Suranse."

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"Hard to tell the difference between the two, though."

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"Yeah."

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"Oh well. We're going to save the world, I'm sure it'll happen eventually."

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"Yeah, I wouldn't worry."

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"Not about that, anyway."

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"Saving the world is kind of a weirdly worrying prospect!" says Anna, and then realizes she said it in English and manages a less fluidly phrased translation.

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"I was actually talking about maybe never seeing my parents again but you're not wrong."

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"Yeah."

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"I mean, like, I'm not judging you for not missing your parents or anything, it's just that mine happen to be excellent."

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"On the not-missing-your-parents scale, Anna's a 'meh', I'm the 'hahaha no'," says Cass. "But it's cool. I'm sorry about you guys missing your missable parents."

Pause.

"...No idea how to say that in Aluvai-or-whatever, sorry."

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"I wonder if Suranse would be easier to make a demonym out of using modifiers from earth languages."

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"Suranse...ian? Suranse-ese? Yeah I got nothin," says Cas.

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"Suransego? Suransais?"

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"That last one barely even sounds different."

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"It sounds meaningfully different!"

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"Sur-an-se, Sur-an-sais... it sounds different enough to me but I might just be charmed by the rhyme with français."

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"It is plausibly less distinct if you know zero French. I should get Ashras's opinion." She switches to the ambiguously named language and attempts to explain.

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He follows along reasonably well!

"Yeah, I don't think we'd have much luck getting any of those to catch on. And I think Suransais does sound less distinct to me than you."

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"Pity I'm not more of a linguist."

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"Oh well. We get by."

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"Clearly. It would probably be rude for us outsiders to just try and pick a completely new name for your language anyway."

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"If it sounded nice, I'd use it!"

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"Alas that we have yet to meet your standards! I'll keep thinking about it."

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"In the meantime you really can just call it Aluvai when you're in Aluvanna and Ceirene when you're in Ceir."

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"Yeah, that seems reasonable."

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"I thought so! It's still silly but it's not all that inconvenient."

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"It might be less convenient if we can figure out how to get home, especially if we can also get back here and there's the opportunity for interplanetary contact."

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"I guess."

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She shrugs. "I guess that's the kind of thing I'd bring up with someone more governmental if it looks like it's going to happen."

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"'By the way, their language has two names depending which country you're speaking it in!' Yeah."

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"I actually meant your government, mine does not have the best track record for handling this kind of thing, but yeah."

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"Oh?"

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"So my country is actually a former colony, and the former colonists and their ethnic ilk are in a position of considerable systematic power over the original inhabitants, and the biggest cultural group of original inhabitants in the area where I lived called themselves the Haudenosaunee, but almost everyone knows them as the Iroquois, which is a French word derived from the Basque for 'killer people,' which was what another group that lived nearbyish called them. For example."

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"...wow."

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"Almost no one knows that Iroquois means that. And my country--has a deeply shitty history. But is getting better."

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"Ceir and Aluvanna used to be at war with each other on and off, before the Enemy showed up and everyone had much bigger problems. We still have nasty names for each other but we don't actually call each other's entire countries by them."

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"I mean, presumably you remember that they were nasty names."

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"Yes, everyone is very clear on that."

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"Basque is--not an obscure language, exactly, I'm pretty sure it's common knowledge that it exists, but it has a very small speaking population. The vast majority of people who call the Haudenosaunee the Iroquois have no clue that they're technically perpetuating Algonquian slurs."

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"It's sort of fascinating how things work when not everyone has a single language in common..."

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"English sort of seems to be heading that way. But not for good reasons, which was why I asked about the history of yours."

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"Hmm?"

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"Britain, the the language country originated from, has a long and rich tradition of usually-abusive colonialism. Allll over the world. And countries descended from its colonies, like mine, are pretty powerful--the United States is by some reckonings the most powerful country in the world--so."

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"Aha. Yeah. If anything like that happened in Suranse, it's lost to history."

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"Probably not worth worrying about at this point, then."

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"Yeah."

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"At least a universal language is pretty convenient."

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"It is!"

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"The roses come with telepathy but it's verbal-only, more's the pity."

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"I'm more and more tempted to try these things..."

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"They're pretty great. Even if their telepathy is substandard."

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"What standard are you measuring it against?"

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"To meet my standards telepathy would have to be able to transmit concepts that words can't really encode very well."

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"That would be really useful!"

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"I know! But rose telepathy can't do that, sadly."

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"Yes, it's very unfortunate."

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"The black rose has an enchanting feature, apparently, I'm hoping I can get somewhere with that.

Sometimes I hate being alone in my own skull."

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"I can't say I've ever experienced that, but... it would be nice to be able to communicate on a deeper level."

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"I didn't used to think if it that way, but I read a book about a thing that people could do that would, among other things, render them telepathic, and at one point someone referred to someone who wasn't as--locked up in a little bone box--and I was just, like, 'yes, this is me.' There's this--impenetrable barrier between me and even the people I'm closest to and it's not, like, a persistent distraction or anything. But I don't like it."

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He nods thoughtfully. "Yeah, I think I see what you mean."

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"I have high hopes about the enchanting thing, although none of us have gotten it yet so I don't know how well-calibrated that is."

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"—you know, leaving aside how much it apparently hurts, those flowers just look really uncomfortable," says Ashras.

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"For magic, you get used to it."

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"Really? I mean, don't get me wrong, I still want to try it, but... really?"

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"I think it's kind of fun," volunteers Anna, "but I'm very weird."

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"Magic is awesome and I am stubborn as hell. ...It is kind of uncomfortable though."

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"Magic is awesome and I'm also very stubborn, I bet I'll be fine."

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"That makes sense!"

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He laughs.

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"It is not permitted to be prohibitively uncomfortable!"

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"Exactly."

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"The rest of us are just some level of conveniently masochistic."

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"I guess that is convenient under the circumstances."

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"It is!"

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"But it's not - well, if I understand your meaning correctly, I don't think it's quite what I was talking about - I mean, I think there's a difference between things that hurt and things that involve flowers growing out of you and I think I handle the first kind of thing more easily."

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"I think I get what you mean?" says Anna. "And yeah, it's a whole different thing, but I got used to it fine."

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"It helps that most of them don't actually burrow."

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"...Yeah, that sounds like it would help a lot."

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"Most of them just sort of--phase through."

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"Yes, that would be - easier."

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"That does suggest you don't want to try the red and black one or one of the pink and yellow ones first, though."

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"Depends. How useful are those ones?"

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"Every rose has a kind of augmentation it gives you, a primary magic, and four secondary magics. You start out with just the primary magic and the augmentation, and after you've trained the primary magic enough you can pick a secondary magic. Once you've trained some combination of primary and secondary enough you can pick another secondary, and so on. The red and black flower's augmentation is speed and reflexes, and its primary magic is cutting things. The pink and yellow ones both have grace for the augmentation and healing other people for the primary magic; I haven't trained with either of the pink and yellow ones very much because we're not sure why magic isn't common knowledge in our home universe yet so we've been hesitant about letting other people know and all roses do regeneration."

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"Hmmmmm. How about the other flowers, what do they give you?"

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"The black and white one augments you with flight, and its primary magic is conjuration; it's by far the most useful flower but also the one that hurts the most and responds zero to painkillers; I wouldn't recommend trying it first even if you intended to go with it for the first one to get used to. The white and blue one augments your senses and does cold and is a bad choice to try first because we got it recently so we only have the one so it should stay where it is so we can replicate it sooner. The red and orange one also augments your senses and its primary magic is fire, same deal with the newness. The blue and purple ones augment your strength and give you telekinesis and the one with the purple blossom and blue stems is new but the one with the blue blossom and purple stems isn't, I'd recommend you go with that one first; even if based on the magic you want to start training some other one as soon as possible the one with the blue petals seems likely to be the best combination of 'reasonable to put in right now' and 'minimally unpleasant to do so for calibration purposes.'"

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"All right, I accept your logic."

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"They hurt differently, too--the pink and yellow ones just burrow, the red and black one burrows while drawing blood, the red and orange one burns, the white and blue one freezes, the black and white one just hurts, but a lot, and the blue and purple ones hurt like bruising. In case that affects anything."

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"...I can't decide whether the black and white one sounds great or terrible..."

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"I still think you should try one of the not that ones first but you can check for yourself, assuming talking to the King goes as I'm pretty much expecting it to at this point."

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"And how are you expecting it to go?"

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"Something that ends with us convinced that it probably isn't worth risking death to confirm that your enemies are as genocidal as you claim."

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"That's how I expect it to go, too!"

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"I'd sort of expect you to say that regardless but I do in this case believe you."

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"If I didn't think talking to the king would work I would've suggested you do something else!"

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"Talking to the king could've been a stalling tactic, or something you hoped would work but you weren't sure and didn't have better options."

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"Stalling you is the opposite of what I want to do."

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"In the world where you're telling the truth and your enemy is as genocidally inclined as you claim, yes, obviously; if you were lying stalling could be much lower-stakes depending on what the truth was."

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"...I'm tempted to get sidetracked into a discussion of what alternate truths would make sense and what the appropriate thing for me to do in those scenarios might be, but I feel like that might not be a reassuring conversational topic."

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"I dunno, if you were evil the odds that there was much overlap between the evil you would do and the evil you would discuss aren't that great."

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"...But does that affect how reassuring it would be to hear me discuss what I would be like if I was evil?"

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"Well, it means that hearing you describe an evil thing means I'm not going to go 'oh no you would do that thing!'"

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"No, but I predict that if I start talking about what I'd be like if I was evil, after a few hours you will come away convinced that if I was evil I'd be really good at it."

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"My first reaction is to go 'but if you were evil you wouldn't let me know that' but my second reaction is 'unless that's what he wants you to think' and this could get recursive fast if I'm not careful."

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"See?"

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"I suppose I do. You win this round."

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He giggles.

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"So to return to the topic we were on before we got onto this little tangent, since it seems fairly wrapped up, which of the roses d'you think appeals most after the black and white one? Magically, I mean."

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"Maybe blue and purple. The fire one is also appealing, though."

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"I know, right? Oh, the blue and purple one has metal manipulation as one of its secondaries, that seems likely to go nicely with your magic system."

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"Nice!"

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"Emily was over the moon about it."

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"Any particular reason?"

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"It felt...right. Like moving a limb I hadn't realized was paralyzed."

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"I'm glad you got to find it, then."

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"Me too."

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Kyralaine comes back.

"The king will see you now, if you like."

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"Now sounds good."

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"I can lead you there through my Sphere. This way."

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Spheres seem super useful. Follow follow.

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Ashras comes along.

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Makes sense.