"...huh. 'What happens to food I make that you eat in my car and then leave my car with' is also a good question actually but it'd be kind of hard to tell what with how much getting out of the car is already going to suck, yeah. Hmm, well—" he conjures another lit match inside the glass ball, which emits the briefest possible flare of light and then instantly dies.

"Vacuum confirmed, cool. Oh, you know what would be neat, can you make stuff that's been destroyed. Like the lost plays of Euripides or something."

He gets a brief look of concentration and then says, "I think maybe 'the lost plays of Euripides' is - something I don't know enough about to try to make?"

"Hmm. You could try reading what little we know about them, or pick your own favorite lost historical thing. Also I just realized I never asked: how did you get your powers? Did you just wake up with them this morning or what?"

"A really sketchy guy broke into my apartment and offered me magic powers and said if I tried them out I wouldn't be able to turn him down and he was not wrong."

"Okay that is extremely sketchy, especially considering the ownership theme, and we should consider the possibility that he's going to show up at some point and claim you owe him your immortal soul or something."

"He said I owe him an unspecified favour at some point in the future and I said I'd think about it and I figure if he asks for his favour and I hate it I will tell him to fuck off and then he'll murder me or whatever and that's what I get for making deals with sketchy assholes."

She nods, increased respect in her eyes. "Sounds about right. But let's not give up on finding out what his deal is and what our options are. I would strongly prefer you not get murdered."

"Yeah, me too!"

"So we should look at getting you more resources, and finding out more about that guy and whether he's given anyone else magic, and whether there are any others out there like him. And possibly checking if crosses and holy water burn you or something."

"Yeah, sounds like a plan. I mean, not that I know how to get more resources except by, I dunno, mind-controlling somebody into buying me a house, which is probably a bad idea in like five different ways..."

"You've got magic powers; there's got to be a dozen different ways you can ethically get money. Buy empty land and put houses on it and rent them, once you've got some startup money. Oh, and see if you can make time go at a different speed in here, so you get an hour to do things for every second that goes by outside; that will help with a lot of stuff."

"—huh, I didn't think of that at all—I'm not even sure how to try it, it's hard to—figure out how to imagine it as a thing that could be."

"Huh. Well, what it would look like from in here would be everything outside slowing down and coming to a stop, even the rain coming to a stop in midair, but it's not actually something happening outside, it's us speeding up."

"Yeah, that makes sense..."

He thinks about it. Stretching out time itself until the rain is crawling through the air. That makes sense, right? That feels like a thing it should be possible to do? Maybe.

His eyes glow, and the speed of the outside world winds down over the course of what looks to them like a few seconds. There's a raindrop paused just outside the window and it looks like it would be possible to reach out and poke it, but it occurs to Sean that that would be a very bad plan actually and the window rolls shut.

"Nice one. I bet you could learn to do it to just yourself, too, and then you could be the Flash. I wonder what other abilities you can give yourself. Eidetic memory? Mathematical genius? Perfect pitch and singing talent?"

"I have no idea what being a mathematical genius would be like, I suck at math. Honestly not sure what perfect pitch feels like either. I guess I can imagine having a perfect memory?"

"You might be able to get the same results just by using magic to remember each specific thing you want to remember when you want to remember it. Anyway, back to money-earning plans: is there any job you especially want? Especially something you can do remotely, because then you could get three of them at once and do them in accelerated time."

"I kind of suck at most things. My parents are paying me two hundred thousand dollars to make it through my first semester of college without getting arrested but they're probably not going to keep that up for all four years. On the other hand they sent me to study architecture and I guess if I somehow manage to actually learn architecture that'd be pretty useful."

"Oh, you'd be fantastic as an architect if you owned some land to use as a scratchpad, you could just go straight from concept to implementation and then redo it all completely as many times as you needed until you had it perfect. Don't worry about being bad at it; everyone is bad at most things starting out. And it sounds like we've got a solid lead on getting you startup capital, assuming you haven't got any urgent plans to get arrested."

Also wow, his parents must be loaded. She estimates how long it would have taken her to save up that much at the grocery store job and silently boggles a bit.

"I am gonna try pretty hard not to get arrested, yeah! But like—I don't actually know how much it would cost to get some land somewhere that I could build a house on, I guess I should find out, but I don't think two hundred grand would cut it? And I also don't think I can buy land and put houses on it and then sell the houses, I feel like that's... butterfly territory. Although, I dunno, maybe there's a trick to it that I could figure out. But the sketchy guy did not give me any hints on that one."

"Yeah, no, you'd want the houses you sold to be built normally, the land would just be for experimentation to make your designs especially beautiful and pleasant to live in and stuff, and you could put it out in the middle of nowhere where land is cheap and nobody will notice anything funny. Though I bet if you learned enough about construction, you could build houses with mundane materials and magical construct labor and those might keep existing when you sold the land; we'll need to test that."

"Oh, yeah, that's a good point!"

"Also construction sounds like a fun thing to learn."

"Also, and I only ask this because it seems important to know, is there a reason your parents are especially worried you're going to get arrested? I might be able to help with whatever it is."

"...I'm just kind of not a great person, honestly. I get in fights and stuff. I lit a teacher on fire last year. Like, not in a premeditated way, he had a lighter on his desk and I got mad."