"I think—the second thing," he says, rubbing his face. "Not sure I've got any more math in me at the moment. In fact I'm kind of tempted to hand you all the cash in my wallet and say I'm paying you extra to let me dodge the five seconds of thinking about numbers it'd take to pay you normally, but I'm worried it would be obnoxious."

Karen's look softens a little more. He's more than clearly worn out. And attempting to make light of things. In a very silly way. She tries to come up with something witty to say in response to help him relax but she can't quite think that fast on her feet, so she settles for smiling at his joke. "Don't be silly," she tells him. "Besides, I wouldn't want to overcharge you. Worst case we can always settle up later, I know you're good for it." She smiles at him gently. Needs to put away teacher Karen and put on friend Karen. She's a little worried about what he's going to say, but it really is important to her that he gets what he needs here. 

She tilts her head towards the door. "Do you want to go head for food? We can just grab sandwiches from the cafeteria again, should be quick. We can start talking about things on the way over if you'd like." 

He takes a deep breath and gets up, gathering assorted Math Things along the way. "Yeah, okay. Food. And—I kind of don't wanna get into it in public, but we could sit in my car and talk?"

Some part of Karen spikes a little bit of worry about that, since that's the sort of thing boys would ask her to do. But really he had yet to treat her as anything but a friend, and well, a source of math tutoring and knowledge. Which still honestly pleased her more than just a little bit. There was no good reason to believe he was going to do anything untoward, and he looked really ragged and worn down and she wanted to help. Also there was that one lingering fact from orientation that she was vaguely reminded of. 

"You said you have a really cool car, before, right? Something expensive?" She doesn't quite remember what it was, but she remembers that he has it, and it would probably be interesting to see what it was like. "Sure, why not, as long as it's parked somewhere relatively nearby." Some part of her wants to make a joke about him not getting any funny ideas -- but really, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing to make light of at the moment. She really wants to give him a comforting hug, but she's still not sure it's ok, and instead just gets up and heads to the door, holding it open for him, giving him a smile. 

"Yeah, it's right around the corner. And it is a very cool car."

He smiles back, and follows her out.

Karen heads to the cafeteria first, trying to think of idle conversation topics before biting back whatever inane things she thinks of. He's probably not in the mood for anything like that. Or at the very least she's not sure what to say.

She ends up grabbing another sandwich, an apple, and a chocolate chip cookie from the rack, rather than waiting in line for something more elaborate -- since it was pretty clear there was something he wanted to get off his chest, and honestly the idea standing in line with him awkwardly silent was, well, awkward. After grabbing her food, but before she goes to pay for it, she takes a look at Sean to see what he's getting. 

Sean has gone for a chocolate fudge brownie. And... nope it's just the brownie.

Karen understands totally why he'd be going for something like that in his current mood. Still, she gives him a look. She considers telling him to have a little something more, some protein or something, but at least he's having something. And it's still a bit of an awkward silence, and she's worried about filling it with something like that. She looks away, and heads to the register to pay. 

He eats his brownie pensively on the way to the car.

It is, as promised, a very cool car. His mood lifts a little when he sees it, and a little more when he opens the door to get in.

(And he closes his eyes, and the moment Karen's inside the car he's reading her mind.)

It is in fact a very cool car. It looks sleek and fast like a spaceship, and the inside is soft and red and much more comfortable than she would have expected from a car. She takes a moment to enjoy the feeling of the seat as she relaxes into it, smiling softly, before turning to look at Sean. She's still not entirely sure how to break the awkward silence and she's a little bit regretting this choice in some ways. She really had planned to go home and work on that one problem and try to figure out how to prove the last remaining problem. How to get this set of starting conditions to shift and change to look like this end state. But she wants to help, it's important to help, and he clearly needs someone, and it's important to her that she manage to help save him from his idiot parents and teachers and tutors who couldn't figure out how to teach him. She wants him to flourish and she's glad to be his friend, even if he's a bit strange. But that's just how he's wired, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Regardless, she's concerned, and not sure what's going wrong, and is happy to be an ear to listen to things. She can always bail if it's something she can't handle -- though she really doesn't want to give him false hope -- and she can definitely bail if this was all a shitty pretense, though that seems highly unlikely and he still hasn't given her any lustful looks the way most boys do. So that's probably fine too. She's going to look at him caringly, and wait for him to talk. Though she'll probably talk shortly if he doesn't say anything. But she expects he will. 

He takes a deep breath, and lets it out, and opens his eyes.

When he turns toward her, he means to start with some kind of overview of all the things that have gone wrong in his life and the ways in which they are largely his own damn fault, but instead the words that come out of his mouth are, "So would you believe me if I said I had magic powers?"

Karen blinks. Alright, that is very much not how she expected this to start. Magic is the sort of thing you get in books and movies -- admittedly, the kinds of books and movies she likes -- but still, it isn't real, and it isn't ever going to be real. That's not how the universe works -- it's science and physics. Maybe he's using this as a metaphor? Maybe someone else is claiming this to him? She's not entirely sure what he's getting at. "Not... really..." She tells him, letting her confusion show on her face. "What do you mean?" 

His eyes glow gold, and then he's holding a lit candle, one of those scented ones that comes in its own little glass jar. He hands it to her. It is heavy and solid and definitely wasn't here a second ago—and wasn't lit a second ago either; the wax hasn't had any time at all to melt.

"How about now?"

She's confused and surprised and a little too dazed not to just take the candle when it's offered to her. It feels real. And smells real. And looks real. She closes her eyes and opens them again. It's still there. She waves a hand over it. It's hot. Something weird is going on. This is a very strange dream to be having, perhaps? No, that doesn't make any sense. She pinches herself anyways. Some kind of hallucinogen? Maybe. A rather dirty trick to pull but it doesn't really seem like the sort of thing the Sean she knows would do, though she's certainly thought she knew people in the past. She sighs a bit at the memory. Still, magic isn't real. Can't be real. Actually, that's probably what he means by magic. It's probably just some slight of hand trick, some really good slight of hand trick, and he's talking about stage magic. Except then he has no reason for what he said at the beginning. "That's a neat trick," she says, a little unsteadily, a bit thrown. "Got a rabbit in a hat, too? How'd you do it?" 

His eyes glow gold again. The candle changes colour from pink to dusky red, and scent from rose to cinnamon.

"I really seriously have magic powers and nothing else I wanna say is gonna make any sense if you don't believe that."

Okay the eye glowing trick is cool. And the color change. And the smell change. And she's really not sure how he's doing any of this. The scent change you could do by having a layered candle or something? That makes sense. And the color change... she's not sure how that works. Some kind of chemical reaction probably. Still, there's no good reason for him to be lying especially since he was clearly stressed about something and seemed so sincere before, and this is an odd thing for him to be doing given all of that. 

She puts the candle down carefully on the dashboard, still looking at it warily. "All, right, let's say I believe you," she says slowly, still not quite believing it. "I assume this has something to do with your bad weekend?" She'll listen, because clearly something is going on, and maybe things will make more sense if she listens. Maybe he's much weirder than she thought. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But maybe she was silly to assume she could just swoop in and help him flourish, maybe this is a bit above her metaphorical paygrade. 

"Yeah. It's—fuck, where do I even start—"

He rubs his face with both hands. Golden light shines between his fingers. The candle goes out, and reverts to a pre-burned state, with the pristine wick now seated in a swirling rainbow of variously fruit-scented wax.

"—well, first of all, I've only had magic for like a week myself but I know there's at least one other person out there who has it and I know that because I found somebody they mind-controlled. It was seriously scary. She walked out into the street in front of me while I was driving, and when I asked her what the hell she was thinking she offered to fuck me for twenty dollars, and—my magic powers mostly only work in my car but when somebody's in my car I can read their mind, and hers was fucked up, there was barely a person in there, just this creepy shell that only cared about having lots of sex and getting paid for it, and then inside that a... tiny little terrified scrap of a mind that was horrified about everything the shell-personality was doing but couldn't do a thing to stop it and she thought she deserved it, that's the worst part, like, it's awful that somebody ripped out most of her mind and put that thing in on top of what was left, but it's so much worse that he mind-controlled her so she couldn't stop thinking about how she was sorry and she deserved to be punished like this cause she pissed off somebody important. Couldn't remember what she'd done, couldn't remember who they were, couldn't remember who she was, couldn't think about anything else, just—sick and scared and helpless and watching herself do things she hated and feeling like that was the way things should be—"

He cuts himself off, takes a breath, tries to calm down a little.

"Anyway I fixed her," he concludes. "I couldn't get any of her memories back but I wiped out the shell and took apart the mind control and she's, she doesn't remember anything but at least she's an entire person now."

Even if she assumes magic exists this whole thing just took a very very weird turn. Her mouth opens a little wider and wider with shock as he describes all this to her. She's pretty sure he's not lying to her? Or he's really good at acting. So either he's crazy and also very good at slight of hand and... that candle keeps changing and there's no good way for him to be doing that but people are really good at illusions. Or she's having a really fucked up dream. Or he's telling the truth, and magic is real and... someone did that to someone? The heck. This isn't something out of a normal fantasy novel. 

"I'm sorry, you were right," she said after a moment. "This would probably go a lot easier if I actually believed you. I want to believe you but I don't yet, not entirely, this... sounds... I keep wondering when I'm going to wake back up. Or what drugs we're on." She pauses, and plays back some of what he said, still finding it hard to believe. "Wait. You said you can read minds? I guess... can you read mine?" She flickers through a couple obvious numbers, and then a couple less obvious ones (7, 20, 403, 7,522,901) before going with something he probably wouldn't actually ever guess unless he had more math knowledge then he, well, had (27 + 42i) and considering changing that as too simple as well before realizing that she was probably being silly. 

"Seven, twenty, four hundred and three, uh, seven million five hundred twenty-two thousand nine hundred and one—? And twenty-seven plus forty-two i. I could also actually mind-control you into believing me, for that matter, I just don't want to."

Eep. "Please don't do that," Karen says, a little bit scared. 

Okay maybe magic is real. Probably. Or at least... she doesn't know what to believe but there's no reason not to just believe everything he's saying. Other than how insane it sounds. But he read your mind, what more proof could you possibly ask for. Technically everything she could be seeing could be some kind of telepathy, but that's still magic. There's no reason to keep doubting. Just accept it at face value. 

She plays back what he said earlier for the seventh or eighth time, cringing at the awfulness of it. "That's... that's really fucked up," Karen says. "That's actually really fucked up." She's honestly not sure what else to say. "I'm glad you fixed her, as much as you could," she says slowly, still feeling a sense of unreality and a creeping horror. "Is... is she ok now?"

"She's... not not okay? I think? I'm telling all this in a really screwed-up order, I'm sorry. Uh. I'm letting her stay in my apartment because I never sleep there because I spend most nights with—well, Valerie—because, uh—okay there's actually a lot I need to explain about what I'm doing with Valerie. I should maybe try starting from the beginning. Except the beginning is really fucked up. But I guess there's no way I'm getting through this conversation without telling you a ton of really fucked up stuff anyway. Sorry."

Valerie, that name is familiar. The creepy horrible girl from orientation? The one she was worried about Sean hanging out with? And now he's spending most nights with her; maybe she did something awful to him like she was worried about and that's what's causing all of this? Karen is very confused, and he's not making a ton of sense, and it seems like all of this is a fever dream and might still be because even though he demonstrated magic pretty clearly in a couple ways if she's just dreaming then that totally makes sense.

Still, if she can't wake herself up there's no reason not to go along with it. 

"The beginning might be a good place to start, yes," she says. "I'm sorry, clearly there's something going on but I'm a bit shocked and you're not making a lot of sense at the moment." She winces a little at how direct that was. "Sorry!"

"No, that's completely reasonable, I'm aware that everything that's coming out of my mouth right now is complete garbage, it's just hard to talk right when I'm stressed—y'know what, fuck it, do you just wanna read my mind? I think I can get it all straight if I don't have to say it out loud."

That probably wouldn't be any less weird than anything else that's happened over the past 5 minutes. "Sure, why not." 

"Okay. I apologize in advance for... what the inside of my head is like and everything I've done in the past week."

Deep breath, a brief eyeglow, and—

It all started last weekend, when a creepy stranger walked into his apartment to offer him immense magical power in exchange for an unspecified favour at an unspecified future date, with a twenty-four hour free trial.

He didn't believe the guy at first, of course. Got kind of pissed off about it. But the power he described sounded very convenient: complete power over everything he owns and everything that's in territory he owns. He took it, and verified it by changing his body (which is of course his) into its ideal form—mostly just making himself about six inches taller.

Unfortunately, that apartment doesn't belong to him; his only territory is his car.

So (and even though he's trying to tell this story in order, the memory is still coloured with a deep and painful regret) he went hunting.

He's trying to explain the story, not just tell it, so he makes a point of clearly recalling the thrill he felt. It hurts to think about. He does it anyway. Hurting people is fun and power feels good and—then he could just take away her memory, like it never happened—and after Jenna there was Evelyn, and then he called it a night—

Then the orientation meeting—

—and here he slows down, focuses more on the details of the memory, because this is the first time he saw Karen, and he wants to be sure to get it right. He doesn't want to make anything sound worse than it was; he also doesn't want to make anything sound better. He wants to give her the truth. The real truth, the whole truth, all the truth she can stand, the truth even when it hurts him, the truth even if she hates him for it. That's what's important here, above anything else, and he is fiercely determined to see it through.

He remembers:

In his first glance around the room, he mostly didn't see details; he only got the exciting impression of a lot of different people all together, and he wanted to own them all, he was giddy with it, but even if he was going to try to take them all he'd have to pick one to move in on first, so he summoned a little focus and took a closer look.

The first person he saw clearly was Karen; and the first thing he saw about her was the social dynamic of the conversation she was having, or trying not to have, with those two boys. In that very first moment, he had no opinions of his own at all, no conclusions, no temptations or judgments; he was the flash of insight, the immediate comprehension of what she was feeling and why, the understanding of this moment in her life, of what it was like to be her right then...

...and, following on fluidly from that, the understanding of how he could help.

He doesn't know if what he felt in that moment was an impulse to help her or only an instinctive understanding of how. He's not sure how to tell the difference; he's not sure there even is one. He didn't really... know how to care about people, back then; the immediate urge to help her was a new kind of thing to feel, for him, and he would've thought it was strange if he'd stopped to think about it at all. But he didn't.

No, his next thought was a vague fleeting sketch of a future, a projection of where his interaction with her might go from there—be helpful, keep being helpful, get her in his car and then—he didn't even get as far as properly imagining torturing her before he realized he couldn't possibly do that, not after the way he was planning for them to meet. To have their first interaction be him deflecting unwanted sexual attention away from her, and then to follow that up by raping her later? He couldn't stand to make a liar of himself like that.

His thoughts turned down other paths, since the predatory one was blocked before it even began: could he make friends with her? (Was 'making friends' even a thing he was capable of?) And if he did make friends with her, could he still try to own her without betraying the implicit promise of the rescue? Maybe. If he did it as a friend, without tricks or coercion, as impossible as that sounds. Even that comparatively innocent ulterior motive felt a little iffy, but it was at least thinkable, in a way that anything more violent than that really wasn't. But in a room otherwise full of potential prey she was now the only person he couldn't think of that way, and he was still very much in a predatory mood, so he tucked the thought of approaching her away in the back of his mind and moved on.

(It does hurt, to recall wanting to hurt her. Even though he recognized almost immediately that if he was going to go near her at all it would have to be with genuine friendliness, just remembering that he considered doing otherwise is painful. And—it doesn't matter, really, that he only thought it for a moment, that he never made a serious plan to that end—he's still showing her that he considered raping and torturing her, and all by itself that's a damn good reason for her to feel betrayed. It's not like he refrained for any noble reasons, either; it was the dishonesty of hurting her that made him sick, not any thought of her well-being for its own sake. That's not an excuse. There is no excuse. The things he does to people, the way he thinks about people, are impossible to justify by any reasonable standard. She could decide he's a monster right now, the way everyone always seems to, and she'd be right.)

Anyway, he looked over the rest of them, picked Valerie as the obvious target because she looked easiest to talk into his car, started walking—and reconsidered almost immediately when he realized that he could talk Valerie into his car anytime he liked but if he wanted to rescue Karen he had to do it right then. The longer he delayed, the weirder it would look for him to belatedly intervene.

So—before he could approach her, he had to make sure of two things. The first was whether he could, in fact, stick to that implicit commitment. He'd definitely noticed that she was hot; if he made friends with her, she'd end up in his car at some point even if he wasn't deliberately angling for it; once she was in there, there would be absolutely nothing stopping him from raping her except his own will, and that temptation was not one he had much experience resisting.

He decided he could do it, after he'd thought about it a little. If it ever got too tempting, he reasoned, he could just remind himself how viscerally upsetting it would be to so thoroughly make himself a liar.

(And now here he is, and he has literally not even once thought of raping her since that point; turns out he's even better at this than he expected. But then, at the time he'd never cared about anyone before; he couldn't conceive of the possibility that he might regret hurting someone for a reason other than his drive to honesty.)

The second and maybe more important question, though, was whether he still wanted to make friends even with all forms of major harm completely off the table. And... he looked at her again, saw her again, felt her feelings again, experienced that instinctive understanding of how to help her again; and he reminded himself that one friendly favour did not create an unbounded obligation, that if making friends with her turned out to be a drain he could just stop; and he considered the fact that he might very well never have a better opportunity to try convincing someone to belong to him using only nonviolent methods, because if he did this he'd be closing off the possibility of ever using violent ones, and at the same time giving her a good reason to think well of him right from the start...

And he went for it.

He slid into the shift in perspective that he'd used a few times before, the persona he'd nicknamed Helpful Sean, and he let the drive of social instinct pull him through the process of separating her from those two boys. It surprised him how easy it was to just—be Helpful, to inhabit that perspective so completely that his usual predatory mindset didn't colour his thoughts at all. It's not that he forgot she was attractive; it just didn't seem important. The important things about here were all in social perception, not physical: her tone, her posture, her expression, the things that showed him glimpses of her feelings. And even those he saw in a new light, a friendly helpful light, a perspective where comfort and happiness are good and fear is bad.

Talking to her like that was good, too. He liked it. He wasn't sure he was much good at it, but he liked it. She was nice, and she seemed to like talking to him even given his clumsy grasp of the concept of small talk, and he was genuinely impressed by her description of the ways she likes to think.

...Valerie, on the other hand, was almost physically painful to interact with. Everything about her just dripped fakeness. He's lucky she asked him to dinner or he's not sure he would've been able to force himself to make any kind of overture. He was also definitely planning to torture her into becoming his magical slave, and not regretting it even slightly, and honestly still doesn't, but he'll get to that—

The man with the magic called, asking for his decision on whether to make this bargain permanent. He said yes. There was no possible way he was ever going to say anything other than yes.

And then he had a date with Valerie, and as soon as she stepped into his car he made her unable to lie—he hadn't thought of mind-reading yet—and told her what was up, and asked her to swear to be his slave. She tried to bargain with him, but she was so incredibly bad at guessing what he might want and how his interests might be served by letting her keep her freedom, he got fed up pretty fast—particularly after she insulted Karen (and here he remembers telling her that Karen was worth ten of her, and meaning it).

So he moved right along to the torture.

Honestly he's pretty sure it wasn't the torture that broke her, either—it was seeing his perspective, when he showed it to her with magic. She swore herself to him immediately, after that, and he fucked her face just to let off a little steam, and for some fucking reason (he is by this point furious with the magic over this, though he was fine with it at the time) that's what finally triggered the magic to make her properly his. He wasn't expecting the tattoo, or the bonus mind control. In fact just about the first thing he did was lift the bonus mind control, at which point he discovered that even without it, Valerie is super into being owned and controlled by a powerful master; and so he used that knowledge to construct a cover story, because he didn't want her walking around knowing about magic all the time, even though back then he had much less reason to be so security-conscious.

She was still kind of tiresome after that, but vastly improved from her previous self, especially when he had just discovered mindreading and could watch her think about how hot he was the whole time.

He doesn't dwell on all the sex, though he does fondly remember her crying on him before he briefly gave her back all her memories. He—well, he wanted someone to be able to appreciate his success at deceiving her, but he also wanted her to know what he'd done to her; he doesn't like it when he does things to people and they don't know. And she was satisfied with it, enough so that he felt fine about taking them away again.

So. Then a bunch of other stuff happened. Karen knows about some of it and most of it isn't relevant to a full understanding of either magic or his shitty weekend. The next relevant memory is, hmm... probably dancing with Jenna, who he still didn't regret hurting yet because he's a fucking idiot—sorry, sorry, that was out of order, the explanation's coming but first he has to get through the part with—

Dani.

His confusion, and how it turned to shock and then horror as he dove deeper into the tangle of her mind. His careful investigation. Fixing her, and then explaining that he couldn't make it permanent without owning her, because of how his power worked—and their discovery that the blowjob was a non-optional part of that process—he didn't even want to fuck her, it seems like such a cruel irony that for all the times in his life that he's deliberately hurt and exploited and violated people for his own selfish reasons, the first time he ever met someone he really truly uncomplicatedly just wanted to help, circumstances arranged for him to hurt and exploit and violate her when he did not on any level want to—he had to use magic just to get through it, it was that far from being in any way hot—

For some reason, that memory rattles him more than he was expecting. He has to stop and take a few deep breaths to regain his calm.