"I was so sad we couldn't participate in Halloween, when I was little. It looked so neat."

" - oh, because the candy'd give you debt? That's terrible. I will buy you lots of candy and you can wear a costume and we can put up decorations and it'll be great."

Happy snuggle. "I think I'll be a very convincing sexy fairy."

"Hardly distinguishable from the real thing."

"Love you."

"Love you too."

She looks up CPR class times; there is one available through the library in about a month. She buys some medicine-related textbooks and starts reading them to herself. She makes a little paper pin that says "nurse" on it and makes sure to bandage every cut that Zana gets, which she usually doesn't do because Zana gives herself kind of a lot of cuts, between the claws and the being three. She has a rocky first couple days back at school, but manages to get mostly back in the swing of things by the end of the week. She snuggles Connor in her bed every night and helps him look at fairy costume elements and toddler dragon costumes and decide which things they should order.

Spell: Bandage

You can heal small cuts.

To learn this spell, scratch your skin. Run your hand over the scratch, saying 'looncan'

Well, it's healing, if not very impressive healing. Maybe she can spam uses on people at school, or something.

She reads it to Connor, because she reads all of her spells to Connor.

"I guess it got the idea about the bandaids?"

"I guess so. It's - not super impressive but maybe we can build up from here if I cast it a lot."

"Yeah. It seems like maybe it doesn't care about power level? Like, it's given you some insanely powerful stuff and some really low-level stuff, kinda randomly..."

"Yeah, at first I thought it was gonna keep building up, but it seems like at this point it just... gives me a match for whatever I'm doing? Which is plausibly going to make it really hard to build up to actually substantial healing or resurrection stuff."

"At least until you're a nurse, yeah."

"That's so long! There's gotta be another way. I just... haven't thought of it yet."

"Practice forgery and get the ability to make a fake diploma?"

"I'm reasonably certain that they check on those things by calling your school rather than by asking you to hand over your literal diploma to check that you graduated. I'll just... spam it a lot and see where that gets me. You wanna go shopping for halloween decorations after school?"

"Yeah, sounds good."

Cool! Then after school they can go shopping for decorations and candy at the drugstore next to the magic shop.

...where there is also a magic shop, which has a big Halloween sale sign up in the window. She passes it every day, and somehow it's never occurred to her before now that it might be useful to her in any way. And it still might not be real, although it also might be, but -

" - I have an idea, and it's either really smart or really dumb."

"Hmm?"

"Suppose that the way that you become the sort of person who gets healing spells is by trying to cast healing spells."

"Does trying to cast spells look like...doing anything?"

"Not when I do it my way. But I don't have to do it my way, not if I'm just sending signals to the spellbook, it doesn't matter whether I'm doing the sort of magic that works on its own. I just have to be doing what I would be doing if I were trying to heal people with magic, right? And lots of people try to heal people with magic, they just, use, like, crystals and candles and incantations or whatever."

"Huh! Does that work?"

" - honestly I have no idea, it could really go either way at this point. Most people don't believe it does."

"It seems like it'd be easy to tell?"