"I had a lot of downtime, I wanted to pick up an instrument, I thought 'well, why not'... The boost is really nice, I like it a lot."

"Magic is really great, yeah.  Except when it's really awful.  - Wait, by that do you mean that's the reason you started playing in the first place?  That's terrible."  She's grinning.  "Not that I really have a leg to stand on given that my reason was the band director being like, 'We could use another French horn' when I was in fifth grade."

"That's a legit reason, the band had another French horn and you had a decision procedure. And yes, that's why I picked up violin. - I might need to recalibrate my chiplock, if I'm going to be altering my brain much." He puts the violin down, picks the computer up.

It responds less smoothly than he's used to.

"Um, I don't know if I would just yet - if you're doing the permanent ones, I thiiiiiink those will probably be way less than this?  Like as in maybe there won't even be a noticeable difference until I've done it a few times and it's accumulated a bit."

"There's slack built into it for people being in different moods or states of intoxication or whatever, plus you're supposed to recalibrate it every few years anyway because people change as time passes, but if I'm going to get several permanent enhancements I want to recalibrate very frequently as they come in and definitely between getting any two of them so it can keep up."

"That makes sense."

Cam recalibrates his computer.

Judy goes back to not skipping leg day while he does.  When he looks done, she sits back down and says, "Probably this is the part where I disappear upstairs again for a while?  - Uh, after getting legs that are not terrifying wonderful dinosaur legs."  She pulls out the catalog and points to the projector one and also a metal peg one meant for tap dancing.  "And also maybe some regular tap shoes and something to put on the floor in my room so I don't have to worry about scuffing it up."

Cam can get her a rolled-up danceable floor covering and some more legs.

And so she can go upstairs to wait out her cooldown.

This time, it's mostly exciting instead of dreadful because now she can check out the library!  - Probably Cam wouldn't have given her access to things he didn't want her to have, so presumably there's either not stuff about summoning in here or she's earned enough rapport that she's allowed to know how that works now, but she should still probably close the tab on anything that mentions demons in more than a passing sense until she can ask.  And also maybe keep to things from before 2006.  That should still give her way more than she could possibly go through in a few days, right?

Far far more!

Yay!!  Then she will watch musicals - wow there are so many recordings of musicals - and read fanfic and do tap and go on walks through the halls on her tall tall legs and sing and go back downstairs.  "Hiya; how long was that?"

"Forty minutes, my boost hasn't even worn off yet." Cam is eating Peking duck and mashed potatoes with onions.

"Rad.  Um, something occurred to me, which is that - I have no clue how likely each of these is, but what if, one, Maiar can get vampire souls; two, simming something they show up in but that targets someone else doesn't give them one; three, targeting them directly does; and four, Sauron having a vampire soul would be in some way, uh, bad."

"...in what way would Sauron having a vampire soul be bad, do you have a general model of that?"

"Not really?  Uh, it makes humans eventually resurrectable, right, and I guess Ancora can already get Maiar but maybe this would let more people do it someday, possibly accidentally, or give him a way to bring himself back, or become harder to kill or unkillable in the first place.  Mostly I'm just - trying to avoid doing irreversible things we don't know the effects of, on principle.  Or like, it could still be worth it, but it seemed important to at least bring up."

"Can we test whether you can give, say, Alassëo, such a soul, if he's up for it?"

"I don't know how to perceive them or whether it's even possible for vampires to.  I could try."

"I'd ask Nechar but his power set is not very - sensory - does it have any other effects, a soul of that kind -"

"I don't know.  You talked to Ancora more than I did and I had no clue they even existed until Ancora mentioned them.  - Also I guess they could hypothetically not exist at all, who knows."

"Yeah, I suppose it's possible Ancora was bullshitting."

"I'll defer to your judgement on that."

"I really don't know. Maybe if we wait long enough the security shift will change and we can get help from someone else, or someone will walk in the door."

"I mean, I'm not thinking of any reasons why I shouldn't sim Ancora; there's still that.  Maybe once we've done it enough, it'll make sense to let them back in and we can just ask.  Or do that via sims."

"Oh, yeah, simming Ancora is a good idea, we could ask all kinds of things."