"It's weird the spellbook doesn't tell you any of this stuff."

"It super doesn't! I think it appreciates drama. We - probably should figure out why it gives me the spells it gives me, you were right about that. It's obviously connected to what I want somehow, it's not just giving me random stuff, but it's not so attuned to it that it never gives me terrible ideas that I need to pass up, y'know?"

"Yeah. We should've been, like, taking notes on...what you were thinking about or planning for when you got it, what you got, stuff like that."

"Yeah. I guess we can start doing that now? Although I'm - not really sure what to note, I think about lots of stuff?"

"Yeah, I dunno. I guess if we'll be stuck here for months we could also do tests where you specifically try to do or think about something right about when you'd expect a new spell?"

"Yeah. - I feel like I should be, like, aiming for something, then, and see if that does anything? I haven't been thinking at all about what kind of stuff I hope I get from the spellbook, really, it - somehow didn't really occur to me that I could affect it - "

"I mean, we don't know that you can? But it seemed like it stopped giving you creepy mind control once you rejected the creepy mind control."

"Yeah. Just, like - if seems like it's reacting to what kind of person I am? Or something? And - I can, like, do things about what kind of person I am. In theory."

"We can go jump off a lot of treetops and maybe it'll give you flight. Since you'll be a ...flying sort of person."

"Sure. Worth a shot, I guess."

Hand squeeze. "'m glad there's at least one thing about being a fast fairy that's as nice as I imagined it."

"I'm glad you get to have that."

And they can feed Zana and explore and jump off of treetops a lot. It is in fact pretty great. Kind of scary, the first time, but once she's established that she's definitely not going to horribly injure herself it's a lot of fun.

Jumping off treetops is one of the best experiences in the world, next to kissing.

Well they can do lots of it!

And maybe some of the other thing, too, once Zana's asleep. Or at least more practice with telepathy. Possibly it might be good to practice telepathy until they can do it without having tons of emotions at each other.

Yeah probably but that's going to take a while because knowing that someone likes you is really nice. He wouldn't want to have telepathy with his family, it'd be too - she must think his family kind of sucks and they don't, they really don't, they're just all impressive, as people, in all these different ways in which he is not remotely impressive and this would definitely come up when they were reading each others' minds and then he'd know that they were kind of sad that he wasn't smarter and more capable and - that's not their fault, you're not a bad parent for wishing your children were smart and capable, but it'd hurt to know about, you know?

She's pretty sure her parents are also disappointed that she's not smarter and more capable and better, and she is, empirically, dealing with this by never talking to them and failing to tell them that her sister is dead, so yeah, she feels like her decisions are maybe kind of ridiculous here, but they do leave her with a pretty good understanding of why someone might not want to talk to their more impressive family members? But actually she mostly thinks his family is suspicious because they tried like one thing before deciding he had to be enslaved to someone they had never met, and the one thing didn't involve, like, explaining anything. Also she thinks maybe Matt is evil. Shit wait no she didn't mean to think that. It's not that he's evil it's just that he gives off really suspicious vibes, what with being perfect all the time, he's actually never done any evil things that she's aware of, he just kind of gives off terrifying vibes and the sense that if he were evil there would be nothing you could really do about it because nobody would really believe you ever. This is a dumb thing to be thinking about. Um. Sometimes she's glad that Azalea isn't more impressive than her, because she feels like if she were then maybe they wouldn't get along as well, and she hopes that doesn't make her like a terrible person or anything.

Matt is definitely - he's actually not evil but it's like when someone is pointing a loaded gun at you? Nervewracking no matter what your best guess about their motives is? It makes sense for people who have noticed that Matt is more dangerous than someone pointing a loaded gun at them to be nervous about this and in fact it'd be kind of weird not to be? But he wouldn't actually hurt her. His family was really scared about the debt because if she'd, like, decided to lie to someone about something minor then it'd have caused the whole family problems and by fairy norms the obvious reason to reject the money would be because you wanted the person so his father just kind of assumed it was that and actually Matt could've...like... explained but maybe he thought this was a good way for things to work out? It did turn out that way?

That's kind of a bizarre thing for Matt to expect but it did admittedly work out pretty well? Mostly she doesn't like people noticing her very much and Matt seems like he notices a lot of things and also like if this were a movie with a supervillain in it he would be a pretty prime suspect for the supervillain's secret identity, apart from the part where he is a high school student and therefore probably not a supervillain. It's kind of a shame there aren't any supervillains around because this kind of means she can't be a superhero even if she gets a superhero power set. Probably that's a dumb thing to want to be in the first place, it sounds like if you did it in real life without a writer you would definitely get yourself killed within a year.

Maybe she can get the spellbook to make her bulletproof. And otherwise disasterproof. 

That would be cool. Does he worry about her dying again STOP IT brain STOP IT

Of course he worries about it it was horrible. He's not quite sure why she - like if she doesn't want to think about dying that's legit, dying is probably very scary.

Snuggle. It honestly wasn't that bad? Like, the zombie bite hurt, and it was completely terrifying for about a minute, and it would have been a lot worse if she hadn't gotten to come back right away, but she doesn't feel, like, super traumatized about it or anything. Mostly it just seems kind of pathetic to want confirmation that people who care about you worry about you dying. Because you shouldn't need confirmation, and also maybe shouldn't want them to worry in the first place because worrying is unpleasant for people. But she likes it when they worry anyway because maybe she is pathetic. Her internal monologue revolves a lot around things being pathetic, huh.

It kind of does. None of the things actually seem pathetic, either. He's gonna worry about her whether or not she enjoys it, though, if she's doing dangerous things, so probably it's better for her to enjoy it than not? 

That does make some sense. As long as it doesn't make her do more dangerous things. She will try not to do more dangerous things. At least not unless she has, like, a much better non-perverse reason.

Of all the things people are into 'being worried about' is approximately the tamest nah this is venturing into stuff he was going to try not to think about because he'll freak her out.