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In this room are two women, one gray and sixty years old, one just thirty and red-haired, both wearing elaborate outfits. The younger casts a spell.
In this room is now also a third person. (On whom the elder woman promptly also casts a spell, which she had at the ready.)
Matilda in Elcenia
missnicegirl
"Yeah! Witchcraft didn't work at all on Earth before, but I got it to work there this morning, except that doing it felt like doing my own magic and not like doing real witchcraft."
"Huh! How strange. I wonder if it learned the whole thing or just the parts you know?" asks Raha. "We could find out. I could give you a recipe with ingredients you haven't learned yet to try at home and not tell you what it does."
missnicegirl
"Sure!"
Matilda works very conscientiously on her vitamin potion. She is fascinated by the new look at wizardry she gets through the analysis spell, and as far as she can tell she isn't doing any extra magic on top of the witchcraft.
Matilda works very conscientiously on her vitamin potion. She is fascinated by the new look at wizardry she gets through the analysis spell, and as far as she can tell she isn't doing any extra magic on top of the witchcraft.
And Raha finds some advanced but basically safe recipes with exotic ingredients, and copies them over without too many hints about what they are supposed to make.
missnicegirl
Matilda double-checks that all of the ingredients are things she has heard of or expects to be available on Earth. (Her vitamin potion is coming along beautifully. She is an excellent student.)
Some of the ingredients are not things she has on Earth. Raha packs up little jars of those for her.
missnicegirl
Home she goes with her little jars.
Over the next two days she completes her homework, and then she comes back with all of the potions finished. They all came together fine, but of course she needs Raha to verify that because she doesn't know what any of them are supposed to do.
Over the next two days she completes her homework, and then she comes back with all of the potions finished. They all came together fine, but of course she needs Raha to verify that because she doesn't know what any of them are supposed to do.
Raha investigates! Are they respectively a painkiller, something that clears smoke out of a roomful of air when misted, and a purple hair dye? (She has a mouse to test the first and last on.)
And it has been long enough that while Matilda is still at her witchcraft lesson, the wizards turn up with a finished draft of an analysis for Matilda's own magic.
They have already cast it on themselves; they cast it on her.
They have already cast it on themselves; they cast it on her.
missnicegirl
Matilda's magic is something that she goes around having a lot of all the time, even when she isn't doing anything in particular with it.
When she floats some objects by way of demonstration, her magic acts upon the objects while she's floating them, and then slowly fades from the objects after she sets them down.
When she whips up a batch of elixir base being very careful to do only witchcraft, her magic doesn't interact with it particularly.
When she whips up a batch of elixir base using witchcraft as well as her magic, her magic acts on it while she's working and sticks to it afterward, and in addition, the liquid has a faint shimmery glow that elixir base is not normally known to have.
"Well, that's interesting," says Matilda, peering at it.
When she floats some objects by way of demonstration, her magic acts upon the objects while she's floating them, and then slowly fades from the objects after she sets them down.
When she whips up a batch of elixir base being very careful to do only witchcraft, her magic doesn't interact with it particularly.
When she whips up a batch of elixir base using witchcraft as well as her magic, her magic acts on it while she's working and sticks to it afterward, and in addition, the liquid has a faint shimmery glow that elixir base is not normally known to have.
"Well, that's interesting," says Matilda, peering at it.
"It is a little sad, isn't it? But we get our mice from a store that also sells them to be fed to snakes. I think testing elixirs is a nobler occupation," says Raha.
So (to control for the possibility of introducing more of Matilda's magic into the potion) Raha turns the glowing elixir base into a pep elixir, and fetches a mouse, and feeds the mouse a mouse-sized dose.
missnicegirl
The mouse becomes very pepped. Not dangerously so, but in a way that noticeably exceeds the strength of the dose.
"Huh. It seems to have made the elixir stronger. Either that or this is a very peppy mouse. We'll keep an eye on it to see if there are any side effects."
missnicegirl
"That's interesting! And it makes a kind of sense, as a side effect of sort of doing the same magic twice on something. I have no explanation for the glow, though. The glow was weird."