"Renting not counting makes a weird sort of sense but it's very inconvenient. Another idea is that you might be able to make stuff in here with raw materials you bring in but tools you conjure or replace with magic. I'm imagining you crushing coal into diamonds but the best thing to make is probably more constrained by what's easiest to sell and I've heard diamonds in particular are weird."

"Huh, maybe. What is there besides diamonds?"

"There have to be less politically insane gemstones. Pearls would be both easier to explain and less likely to revert themselves on leaving the car but might turn out to be high-maintenance, I don't know how hard oysters are to take care of."

"...the idea of putting a fishtank in the back of my car is hilarious. Anyway, we can look stuff up probably. I don't even know what kind of science you need to know to make pretty rocks but I bet there's a kind and I might even be able to learn it if I tried really hard. Enough to make the pretty rocks, anyway."

"I see no reason you shouldn't be able to learn anything you like. I'll do some research on gemstones and pearl cultivation and also tutoring jobs for me."

"Cool," he says, smiling. "Thanks. ...I mean, the reason why I can't learn anything I like is because I am not smart, but, probably it makes a difference how hard I'm trying to learn the thing and maybe also how hard somebody's trying to teach me?"

"Some people do have to work harder to learn any given thing, true, but different people are smart in different areas, and you're right that the important thing is being willing to put in the effort. I don't know if gem chemistry is the best thing for you to be putting effort into or how easily you'll take to it, but there's no reason not to study it alongside architecture and magic. And hey, you can be practice for my tutoring job." Privately, she thinks she's got a solid chance of already being a better teacher than whoever convinced Sean he couldn't learn things, but that's neither here nor there.

"Sure, that makes sense."

Melinda checks the time on her phone, then twists around to look at the clock on the wall of a bank to make sure her phone handled time stopping and starting correctly. "Also we should work out scheduling such that I get to tomorrow morning having had some sleep somewhere and not being several hours jet-lagged."

"That... is super a thing we should do. Uh, hmm. How much time do you want to spend in my car? And are your parents expecting you home tonight at some point? Cause it seems like the easiest way to make sure you get to tomorrow morning having had the right amount of sleep at the right time is to like... stay in here, fucking around with time however's convenient, until the time outside the car is right around when you should be waking up, and then fuck around with time a lot so you get a full night's sleep in five minutes? I guess I don't actually know if I can shove eight hours into five minutes and we should test that before relying on it. And I guess you could still end up kinda tired depending how much time went into the fucking around with time in between and whether you slept for any of it."

"Sleeping in time dilation is definitely the logical thing to do. If I sleep now, then we do a bunch more experiments but not a full day worth, I can go home sufficiently tired to sleep a full night and be back on my normal schedule by morning." When she's not benefitting from magical healing she's nearly always tired enough to sleep a full night.

"Sure, that works. If you're okay sleeping in my car. Like, not that I am planning to do anything to make you regret sleeping in my car, but—I dunno, I keep noticing the fact that I could, and you... don't seem to be noticing it as much?"

"It's less that I haven't noticed and more that I've decided to take the risk and haven't seen anything to make me regret it. It's not like sleeping will make me any more vulnerable."

"Guess I can't argue with that. Okay. Should I try to see if 'a full night's sleep in five minutes' is a thing I can do?"

"Yup." She flops her head back against the headrest and shuts her eyes; if nothing actively stops her she'll be out in less than two minutes.

Nothing actively stops her! Instead, Sean tries to will her to have the most restful night of sleep imaginable, packed into the span of a few minutes. His eyes glow and she's out like a light...

...and then he has to contend with the fact that he is now sitting in this car with absolutely nothing to do. He manages to sit still for about thirty seconds, and then he cancels the time dilation between the car and the outside world and goes for a quick drive, because that seems better than sitting in his front seat jittering until he does something stupid. Probably if Melinda was awake she'd be able to think of a better way to occupy his attention, because she is smarter than him.

When she wakes up, he's just pulling back into the same spot where they were previously parked.

When Melinda wakes up she goes instantly from full sleep to full wakefulness. "Time for more experiments! Were we moving?"

"Yeah a bit, I got bored and drove around. Oh, I should put the time thing back." He puts the time thing back. The outside world goes still.

"How long was I out, objectively?"

"A few minutes. I think it was five but I didn't time it exactly because I am not smart."

"I don't need super precise. That was cool, I definitely packed a lot of becoming less tired into that five minutes. Did you have any cool research ideas? I'm thinking we should test your ability to delete things you didn't make."

"That is a pretty cool research idea! I haven't thought of anything, I don't think. I mostly just drove. —oh but I did think about—I wonder if I could make my car smaller, so I can park it, put it in my pocket, and then stick it in my living room to be an electrical generator? Except I am honestly terrified to try that because if I couldn't make it bigger again I would have such a bad time. And I don't know if, like—trying that on random stuff like my jacket or whatever that's my stuff but not my territory—would work the same way, I don't know if the magic thinks territory is a special kind of thing."