"I think I'm going to read every book in this house," Miles decides after a few seconds of thoughtful silence. "Wish me luck."

Yvette looks at him, blinking in confusion.

"To combat boredom?" she clarifies.

"Yes. Everything we did was strategically optimal but the end result is that I am going to be spending more time cooped up in this basement than I would strictly prefer. Reading every book in the house is the first line of defense, I'll come up with something else if and when I have to."

"Fair. Luck. ... If there are books on magic in this house, which there probably are, could you start with those and report anything promisingly long ranged and person focused? Actually, I could probably give you other things to do, though we're somewhat limited by only having one laptop."

"Sure, I can do that," he says. "Reading every book in the house can be the fallback."

"Excellent, I'll get you a list of books I already have copies of, and leave you to find the books on magic I don't have. I'll want to talk magic nerdery with Chris later - which by the way you should get a protection spell from her - but I'm going to compile all of my notes for the ensoulening spell itself so I can figure out where exactly I can combine it with something that'll make it long range. Or if I have to find workarounds for parts of it so I can - sorry, thinking out loud, I can stop if you'd rather."

"I like it when you think out loud."

"Oh, well. Then I'm compiling my notes on not just the things I actually did for the spell I used for us, but things I marked as potentially useful and then didn't end up using for one reason or another, because I might have to account for other bizarre factors. I have high hopes that Chris's magic will just make friends, it's unusually and fantastically tidy, but something might explode on my spell's end instead of hers. Because magic's a clusterfuck. So I need to figure out how likely that is and where the failure points will be if there are any."

"I bet you're really good at that."

"I have a spreadsheet," she says, smugly.

"Of course you do."

"And a program that'll help me timeline where different magical practices got started and how they branch off from one another!"

"That's amazing."

"Thank you! It's actually why I learned programming."

"It's a pretty good reason!"

"I thought so! If you want to put off the fallback plan, you're also free to look over my shoulder as I work, and I can explain things. Probably make sense of the things you might have seen before while we were locked in my house."

"I'd like that."

"Then I will be more than happy to provide."

Right. Time to investigate books.

Yvette does not have any of these books!

But then, there aren't a lot of them.

Yeah.

He comes back carrying all four of them.

"A cross-cultural study on the use of geometric figures in ritual magic," he says, "a different cross-cultural study on the use of geometric figures in demonic ritual magic, and two volumes on Norse runes. And that is all of the books on magic in this house."

"... Huh," says Yvette, looking at the books curiously. "Well, they all sound interesting, but maybe not directly useful to what I need to do. ... Possibly useful for integration with Chris's magic."

"Yeah, seems plausible."

"Well," she says, scooting over on the bed so he can sit next to her, "my shoulder is free if you'd like to look over it."

"I think I will do that!"

He sits. He leans on her.