"I used to do ballet as a kid but I got kicked out of class for fighting. I don't think anybody would take me seriously if I tried to get back into it this late. What kinds of computer-based jobs even are there?"

"There's programming, there's graphic design but you need a portfolio, there's tutoring but that wouldn't let you stop time, there's phone-based customer service, some people get really popular on YouTube and Instagram and turn that into piles of money but I've never looked into how that works . . . "

"And I don't wanna be famous in case other sketchy magic people notice me."

"Good point. Have you tried programming at all? I could do the tutoring but I'd have to do it from in here . . . Oh, have you tried making the car bigger on the inside yet?"

"I have tried that and it works!"

"Oh, excellent. Then theoretically you could put a partition in the middle and only stop time on one side and I could hang out in the back and do SAT tutoring while you did whatever." Part of her motive for this plan is definitely that it involves her spending a lot of time in the place where she can do things like "inhale all the way" but she honestly thinks it's a good plan apart from that.

"That would be cool!"

"Awesome; we can see how much money that gets us. I have good test scores but I think the really big spenders want people who have already been to college."

"If there's time-bendy stuff going on you can probably also spend more time tutoring than most people because you can, like, get a night's sleep in a couple seconds, but I dunno how much of your time you actually want to spend in my car. Or how much your parents would let you."

"Sleeping, doing homework, honestly any activity I can do in here will be improved by being healthy or in accelerated time or both. I agree my parents would complain if I told them everything, but magic is already a secret so I don't see why they'd need to know where I'm spending the hours they don't know I have. It would be good to tell them you exist, though, and ideally to introduce you at some point so they don't think you're the sort of person I would need to hide from them."

"I will do my best not to look too disreputable. No promises. I'm a pretty disreputable person."

"And my parents are very traditional. I'll spend a month or three laying the groundwork first."

"Sure. Okay, can you think of any other stuff to test? You're good at this."

"I assume you've already tried changing the car's appearance and making it not need gas and stuff. Can you make it invisible? Just for a couple seconds so nobody outside sees it vanish."

"Hmm... maybe? But I don't know how to tell from the inside that it's invisible on the outside? I mean for that one I guess I could just step out - yeah one sec."

He double-checks that time isn't currently screwy (it isn't), opens his door, and gets out. From inside the car, the only visible effect besides his eyeglow is that things outside the car get a little shimmery and dim. But he says 'huh' and gets back inside and reports, "Yep, totally made it invisible. Like it wasn't even there."

"And I could still see it fine from the inside, so that works. Not sure what we might need to use that for, but it seems like the sort of thing that could come in handy. Have you tried teleporting, or having the car be in one place but the door opens to a different place?"

"I have not tried that and I'm not sure how. I mean, I guess I could just..."

He sits there for a few seconds, trying possibilities, then shakes his head. "Nope. Not any of the ways I tried, anyway. Although, hmm, I can probably teleport stuff around inside the car? Do you have any random stuff that you don't super mind if it disappears, I want to try it with something I didn't conjure to begin with so we can see if it's still there after you leave."

She finds a packet of tissues and offers him one.

Eyeglow—it's floating gently down from the ceiling—eyeglow—it's in his hand. He offers it back.

She folds it back up and sticks it back in the packet, saying "That's pretty neat. I bet you could set up an infinite electricity machine and sell to the grid, especially if you can do a little pocket of upside-down gravity or something that doesn't need your ongoing attention."

"...wow, there's an idea... uh, hmm..."

He spends a few seconds thinking, and then conjures a clear glass sphere with water filling the bottom third or so. The water in the middle starts falling toward the top, where it splashes outward and runs down the sides.

"...neat!"

"What a good design! You can stick a turbine in something like that and let it go. I guess we should make sure a current-carrying wire doesn't do anything weird when it leaves the car, and I'll look up how to get a hookup that goes both ways. It would need to be somewhere in particular, so you couldn't do it while driving around--what's the parking situation at your apartment?"

"I have, like, a spot in the parking garage. I doooon't think I can run a wire from there all the way up to my apartment."

"So that might be another thing that's easier once you own some land. Maybe we should try to get a space in a trailer park or something, just to have a handful of square feet where you can put things and nobody will disturb them."

"Maybe. I... have no idea how to do that... and I definitely don't know how to do it in a way that doesn't look super sketchy... but maybe we can figure it out? Are trailer parks even the right thing, actually, I don't know if people normally rent space there or buy it and I don't think renting counts."