"I'm in no way prepared to fight a demon. Frankly, Basic Knife is pretty pathetic about getting me into shape if I run into a ghoul. Against humans I'd just -" She taps her temple. "Knock them over."

"If that's the case, I sincerely hope you don't run into a ghoul," she says, looking a bit worried.

"I stay on the warded paths or indoors at night. It's not hard to avoid getting killed if nobody's actually out to murder you, on campus. And if somebody's out to murder me they'll probably be other students who've taken all the same required courses or better."

"What was the previous shiny thing?"

"My hydrokinesis," she says, calming down. "I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but the existence of magic isn't widely known in my world. I'm not sure if that's because it's uncommon, or because no one else has been willing to put in enough work to make their powers do anything significant. It was...disquieting, at first, but I've managed to adjust. Because my power follows rules and allows me to investigate the reasons for the rules."

"Why don't people know about it?"

"I'm not sure. I don't even know if anyone else has them. It might just be me. Or it could be that randomly-ocurring magical powers are a recent phenomenon and those who have them are loathe to disrupt the status quo. Or perhaps no one else has been willing to put forth the amount of effort necessary to get any useful results." She smiles a bit at that last one. She's quite proud of herself for putting in the amount of effort she did.

"You might be the only person? Why don't you tell people?"

"I'm working on it," she says. "My abilities will undoubtedly attract the attention of the general public, and this is likely to be unpleasantly disruptive, so I've been putting it off."

"Disruptive to - what do you usually do with your time?"

"In my spare time, I read, but I don't tend to have a lot of spare time, what with schoolwork and math team and quiz bowl and various academic competitions and volunteer work and practicing magic and organizing my neighbors' attics and basements and whatnot for a little extra money. That's almost irrelevant, though. The sort of media coverage I'd anticipate would likely hinder my ability to attend school unmolested, at least for a while."

"You could go anonymous like a - fictional superhero."

"I did consider that!" She grins. "I may or may not have designed an outfit and picked a stupid name. Unfortunately, I don't think I could pull it off, and besides, it wouldn't suit my end goals. Which are 'use my powers to help people as much as I possibly can for the rest of my life' at worst and 'find a decent amount of other magical people, set up some sort of training program so that we can all help people as much as we possibly can, then spend the rest of my life studying magic and how it works and helping people on an as-needed basis.' In case you were curious."

"You could always unmask after you were out of school and whatever else was squared away."

"I still wouldn't have the faintest idea where to start," she says. "I mean, I've done some research, I have a vague idea of what our world's major water-related problems are, but most of them aren't in places a fifteen-year-old can easily get to. And besides, most of them aren't fixable at my current power level. I'm already doing small, helpful things anonymously, like cleaning ice off of major roads in the winter. I'll consider super-heroism again once I can control larger amounts of water and have a way to get to hurricane impact zones quickly."

"...I keep having these flinch reactions when you say things like that," says Bella.

"Oh! If I'm upsetting you, I'm terribly sorry," she says. "I'd be perfectly willing to discuss something nonthreatening with you if you'd like to flinch less."

"No, it's fine - just observing. I've very thoroughly trained myself on the hubris thing."

Parvati shivers. "I still wish I could help you with that," she says. "I know that's not actually a helpful thing to say, but, well, if I could do anything more helpful I'd be doing it."

"I appreciate that."

"Thanks. Are any of your gods relatively friendly, or are they all likely to smite you?"

"I mean - I don't want to downplay the availability of divine magic. If I went to the student healing center with a missing arm, arguably Khersis would be involved in fixing me. Divine magic is big and often, routinely, positive. Just..." Shrug.

"Comes with some pretty negative side effects? Yes, understandable. And I don't mean to be a...world snob, or anything. I don't want to act like my world is perfect and wonderful and yours is contemptible in every way. People in my world probably die of injuries that would be easily preventable in your world, for example."

"I'd actually be sort of interested to compare life expectancy but don't know off the top of my head where to look up statistics."