The first car that stops for her is something sleek and black with leather upholstery and no back seat. The driver, leaning across the passenger seat to open the door for her, is not far off from her own age.

"You look like you've had a day," he remarks as he straightens up again.

She wishes it wasn't so obvious, but even with the wig she looks run-down and she knows it. "You could say that," she says as she gets in. "Can I get a ride to Tenth and Maple?" It's a few blocks from her house; she'd rather not give out her address. 

"Sure, no problem." He waits for her to get her seatbelt on before he keeps driving. "I'm Sean, what's your name?"

"Melinda. How has your day been?" It's got to have been more interesting than hers. Also she just noticed that this is a really nice car.

"I spent like half of it driving around aimlessly because my parents got me this car last week and it's my new favourite thing in the world. How about you?"

"Eh, school, homework, errands. It's a really cool car; what's your favorite thing about it?" Just off the sound of the engine she bets it's fun to drive.

He means to come up with some kind of reasonable answer to that question but instead the words that come out of his mouth are "that it's mine," with a flicker of golden light in his eyes.

Is it really yours when your parents bought it for you, she doesn't say, and then gets distracted by his eyes. It's probably just a lucky reflection from a streetlight but it's very aesthetically appropriate nonetheless. "Wow, your eyes just lit up when you said that."

"—yeah I guess they did, huh."

He spends a moment contemplating this and then says "...fuck it, whatever. I have magic powers."

His eyes light up again and this time they stay on. The light is sunny gold, with a fiery orange-red edge.

"I should probably be proving that somehow so you don't freak out but I can do literally anything as long as it stays in my car so it's kind of hard to think of something specific. My eyes sure do glow, though."

Oh wow that is the coolest shit. "I definitely believe you can change your eye color! Anything you want so long as it stays in the car . . . telekinesis? Magic healing? Speaking languages you don't know?" She thinks she managed to say all of those in the same tone of generic curiosity.

"...I wouldn't know how to try to speak a language I don't know, the other two seem fine—here," and he pulls a crumpled movie ticket out of his pocket and sets it down unsupported in midair, where it continues to float. "Telekinesis. I can make stuff appear out of thin air too but I don't know that I can give it away afterward, the magic only works on stuff that's mine or in my territory. ...I might be able to speak a language I don't know if you know it, but I might end up doing it by reading your mind?"

Magic!! She waves a hand all around the floating ticket and pokes it. "Try, hm, making a butterfly and letting it fly out the window or something? And I can quote the like two lines of Ode to Joy I know and if it works it won't be by reading my mind because I barely know what they mean either."

The window on her side of the car rolls down. A pretty blue butterfly appears, flutters toward the window, and vanishes again as soon as it crosses the place where the glass isn't.

"...if I'm gonna be fucking around with magic a bunch I should maybe find somewhere to park. I mean, if you'd rather fuck around with magic than go home."

Damn, there goes her half-formed hope of a cure, she thinks when the butterfly vanishes. Though maybe a pre-existing person would be a bit more durable. Either way her next choice is obvious. "I cannot imagine anything I would rather be doing right now than fucking around with magic."

"That's fair!"

He starts looking for a reasonable place to pull over. In the meantime, he can tell her whatever else about his powers happens to cross his mind. "The other thing I can do magic to is me—I kinda semi-accidentally made myself six inches taller and it's gonna be awkward if my parents ever notice."

"That sounds like the kind of thing they'll inevitably notice if you live with them but most people wouldn't jump to magic as an explanation. And I guess you can shrink yourself again if you're worried about it."

"Yeah, but I like being tall, and I know me and I know I'm gonna forget to keep putting it back."

Which reminds him of something awkward and he spends about two seconds wondering if he should maybe not say it and then realizes that of course he's going to.

"...the one thing I can do that sticks even when something leaves my car is like—change things back. Like if you, I don't know, broke your shoelace or something in here and I fixed it, it'd stay fixed. And I can take away memories of things that happen in here and that sticks. I... was planning on not letting anybody leave my car remembering I can do magic in it, because the guy who gave me the magic powers is incredibly sketchy and I bet if there are any other people around who got magic from the same place I don't want them to ever notice me, but, I dunno, you seem cool and it would be kind of a dick move and maybe I'm bad enough at hiding things that there's no point trying."

He successfully locates a place to stop, and stops there.

"I can keep a secret. And . . ."

Melinda takes a deep breath and provides some candor of her own. "Can you put things back to how they used to be before I got in the car. Because I've been--sick, for a long time, and I'd take being fifteen again with amnesia if it would fix it."

"I dooon't think so. But uh. People can be mine, I asked."

"What, precisely, does that mean?"

"He said they have to 'think of themselves' as mine, whatever that means, and then I can do magic to them same as I can to me or my car or whatever, and it sticks."

"I don't generally think of people being someone's as a coherent concept but I'm suddenly very motivated to figure it out. Thinking of myself as owing you a massive favor would be trivial, if you healed me."

"I mean, so, I do actually want to help you if I can figure out how, and I don't actually want to do anything bad to you, but you met me like five minutes ago and should maybe be thinking slightly harder about whether you want me to have absolute power over you forever?"

"Believe me, I'm thinking about it. But on the other side of the scale is the fact that if you were going to attack me you could have done it already, and the fact that if I turn you down my 'forever' could end up being a lot shorter than most people's. But I don't have to decide anything tonight unless you insist on it."

"Fair enough. Okay. ...I can fix you for now if you want."

"That would be great. Thanks. And then we can do some more fun non-depressing experiments." She tried to make that last part come out flippant and mostly pulls it off.

His eyes, which have been dormant for a bit while he wasn't doing magic, light up again. He doesn't know what he's fixing but he does know approximately what end state he wants.

"There, how's that?"

It feels wonderful. Melinda takes a deep breath, stretches her arms to the extent the car will allow, and slowly breaks into a huge grin. She wants to leap out of the car, run, dance, turn cartwheels for the sheer joy of being able to. "Oh, this is excellent, I have literally never felt better."

Also her hair has grown back to the length it was before it fell out and is now sticking out from under her wig in a completely undignified manner. When she notices this she snorts and shoves the wig into her shoulder bag where it's out of the way.

...when he sees how happy she is, he grins and bounces a little.

He deserves to be happy; he has magic and it's great. "So, let's get down to business. What are your goals here? Do you want to understand the fundamental workings of the universe? Do you want to change the world in some specific way? Do you just want to get a better sense of what your options are?"

"I think mostly the last one. Like, not that I'd turn down understanding the fundamental workings of the universe, but I sure wouldn't have thought of it by myself."

"In that case, let's try finding out where it gets its information. Like, you weren't thinking about every atom of that butterfly, right, so it must be able to get information from somewhere. So we should check the German poetry thing and whether it can read my mind and whether it can predict the future and whether it can do calculations neither of us can. And then any of those will have amazing practical applications."

"Sure, okay, try some German poetry on me and we'll see if I understand it."

"O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen,
Und freudenvollere."

Her pronunciation is pretty good, but she's quoting something she's only heard sung so her intonation is probably very weird. 

He tries wanting to know what it means, but his eyes don't even light.

"Nope, I got nothin."

"Hmm. Maybe I'll try looking up the meaning myself and saying it again and seeing if you can get it out of my mind. Oh, and while I'm doing that I should tell my mom I'm going to be out late so she doesn't freak out when I don't get home on time."

"Sure," he says agreeably.

Typeitty typeitty staying with a friend don't wait up for me see you tomorrow. And then a different chunk of poetry, which Melinda at least knows means:

Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt,
To be a friend's friend,
Whoever has won a lovely woman,
Add his to the jubilation!
Yes, and also whoever has just one soul
To call his own in this world!
And he who never managed it should slink
Weeping from this union!

This time he gets the eyeglow. "Huh, okay," he says. "—I guess we can't tell from that whether the magic was reading it out of your head or off of your phone—?"

"Ooh, good point! Uh, what number am I thinking of and what's the first sentence of the Wikipedia page for Trenton, New Jersey?" She concentrates on "73801" and pulls up the Wikipedia page for Trenton, New Jersey on her phone but doesn't look at it.

Eyeglow and "73801" right away, and then another eyeglow and he reads off the first sentence of the Wikipedia page slightly more hesitantly.

"Excellent. What does that feel like, by the way, are you hearing the words in your head or seeing them in your mind's eye or just knowing what they are with no sensory interface or what?"

"The number I just kinda knew it, the words I - sorta had to read?"

"Neat." She fiddles with her phone some more. "Okay, I'm about to generate a random number between one and 1000. Can you guess what it's going to be? If it feels like you have no idea just guess randomly; I heard that sometimes people can't access their sight or hearing right and it feels like just being really good at guessing."

"I got nothin. Uhhhh, seven hundred and five?"

She hits the button. "Nope, 861. So you can't instantly get rich off tomorrow's stock prices but also we don't have to fret about free will or whatever. Want to experiment with making stuff next?"

"Sure! What should I make?"

"A chocolate chip cookie the way my grandmother makes them, a card with the first hundred prime numbers on it . . . we already know you can do living things and while it would be good to know if you can resurrect dead people we should definitely not test that right now . . . oh, how about a sealed container full of vacuum and a lit match?"

Eyeglow, chocolate chip cookie. He makes a napkin in his other hand and transfers the cookie into it and hands them to her. Eyeglow, card with numbers; he hands that to her as well. Eyeglow, hollow glass ball, which he hangs onto for the moment since he's rather running down her supply of hands. Eyeglow, lit match, which he looks at for a second and then blows out.

She balances the cookie on one leg and looks up the prime numbers. "The magic can do math without you doing it consciously, cool. You should eat the cookie because if I digest it too much before getting out of the car and it vanishes that could additionally suck on top of how much getting out of the car is going to suck already. And I have no idea how to tell if there's air in there other than I guess putting a burning thing inside it and seeing if it goes out immediately."

"...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."

"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."

"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."

"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."