"Ah. And now that you're an extremely powerful magic person instead of a random teenager it's kind of especially important that when you get mad you take the time to plan the optimal response."

She's honestly not sure how much she can help with that; her own temper generally tends toward rude wisecracks with a hard-to-formalize set of instincts for when they are best delivered to third parties behind an offender's back.

"Yeah pretty much! I mean, outside my car it's much harder for me to do something really stupid on impulse but I still did plenty of stupid things even before I had magic powers."

"Well, if you learn to speed up your mind outside the car that will give you more time to think. I guess you could also try to magic yourself less impulsive but that doesn't sound like the sort of thing you'd want to do without knowing exactly how the magic works."

"Yeah, I'd hate to mess around with my head and screw it up somehow and then find out I couldn't fix it."

"Yeah, you could go too far the other way and not be able to make decisions or something. Anyway, more magic experiments, or figuring out a way to get money before the end of the semester?"

"More magic experiments. Seems easier to figure out."

"And they might give us ideas for getting money anyway. Oh, how about scrying, can you make an image of the North Pole right now? Or for that matter the North Pole a thousand years ago?"

He blinks. "Huh. Looks like I can't."

"Huh. Can you make a magic mirror showing the image? And then separately can you make an illusion that looks like a butterfly but if you touch it there's nothing there?"

He tries the butterfly first because that feels like firmer ground. It flutters in a little circle and he pokes it and his finger goes right through. Then he tries the other thing and doesn't even get eyeglow.

"So no scrying, but illusions will be helpful for keeping your powers a secret. . . . Heh. You could be a stage magician."

He giggles.

"It'd be the perfect cover! Anyone who said you were secretly magic would get laughed out of the room. And I don't know if you have the right kind of charisma or enough to make it big, but you definitely have some. Hmm, what else is cool . . . if people can eat food you make and it doesn't make them sick afterwards you could run a restaurant--no, someone would try to take home leftovers. We should really figure out what stuff gets undone when it leaves your territory but that's hard to combine with the very convenient time-stop effect."

"I could run a buffet," he suggests. "And not let anybody take home leftovers. And then what, 'I tried to steal food from this place but it vanished'? —oh you know what we should test, we should test you drawing on yourself," he conjures a Crayola marker and hands it to her, "see if it sticks or not when you get out of the car."

"Ooh, good idea!" She draws a couple short lines on the inside of her forearm, then fishes a pencil out of her shoulder bag and scribbles on a fingernail. "And something with a non-conjured implement as a comparison. Also you can try, like, turning my zipper pull blue or something, since that won't be on top of another effect."

His eyes flash and now there is a bright shiny beetle-shell-blue zipper pull.

"I could try getting out of the car and back in now, and then we'd have the results and could use them to decide what to try next."

"...man... Like that's reasonable, but if you do it then I can't decide afterward that I don't want you remembering any of this, and I don't even really think that I'm gonna decide that, but it's still kind of—I don't know, scary? To be doing something that means I definitely can't?"

He thinks about it.

"...honestly though, I'm probably actually better off with you remembering stuff because it kinda seems like you are smarter than me and you're way less sketchy than the guy I got the magic powers from so all in all you're pretty good to have on my side. So sure."

"You won't regret it." She puts a hand on the door handle--"You're going to need to put time back to normal first."

"—right, yeah." His eyes glow. The rain resumes falling.

And she's out of the car before he can change his mind, and perhaps more importantly before she can change hers.

It sucks exactly as much as she expected it to. She keeps a hand on the door so she doesn't fall over, tries with mixed success to catch her breath, then gets right back in the car.

He makes sure to take a look at the ink before he fixes her again, in case he accidentally erases it. It's still there. He fixes her. It's still still there and now he feels a little bad about waiting the extra half-second.

If she was aware of this thought process she wouldn't blame him at all--getting the information means she doesn't have to do that again until it's time to go home. She was dealing with it this morning and she'll deal with it again but she'd rather not deal with it more than she has to. 

"So the ink that came out of the marker you made is still there, which is good news for the food idea. Want to try disappearing the marker and see if the ink stays around, just to be sure?"

"Oh, huh, I wouldn't have thought of that."

He tries it.

The marker vanishes, but the ink stays.

"That's... huh. I feel like that maybe means you could eat food I make by magic after all?"

"Yeah, I think so! You'd want to do a menu of stuff that doesn't keep well and not allow doggy bags, and you can't start immediately since it requires real estate that isn't in the middle of nowhere, but it sounds like a really good medium-term plan. Shorter-term I still haven't thought of anything that beats working a computer-based job from stopped time. Unless you want to do some more body modification and do whatever sport will let you make money fastest."