"That's true," she acknowledges. "Okay, good harmless simple spells..." She starts rummaging through her notes.

There's a simple one for making a little light.

"Eeeee!"

"So I can do mending, and drawing, and I'm sort of tempted to start giving myself papercuts to see if I can do small healing without passing out."

"Do you want me to sell my finger for science? Because I can, a paper cut's not a huge deal."

"It might be easier to concentrate on if it's not me, but I'll want to try on myself eventually anyway," she says.

"Don't be sorry," he says, smiling. "Thank you for healing me - no falling unconscious?"

"I think healing must be really automatic? It almost slipped into the wrong - mode, but then I concentrated on the details enough and stayed awake and did it."

"Hmmm. Is the - automatic mode just for healing?"

"I don't know. It does seems suspiciously strange that we would have both needed healing without knowing it right after I turned, doesn't it?"

"A bit, I mean we still could have both secretly had cancer, but - yeah. A bit strange."

"But I don't know what else it would have thought was important enough to do all by itself. Or if 'thinking it's important' is even the right metric."

"I... have no idea. Do you happen to remember what you were thinking about at the time?"

"That I was dreaming," she says wryly. "That I could not possibly have really turned into a winged quadruped."

He snorts. "Oh, right. 'Welcome to my freaky transformation dream,' indeed."

"It was very freaky."

"I bet," he laughs. "But you got magic out of the deal, so that's pretty cool."

"Yeah. And I didn't, say, accidentally use sphinx magic to turn myself into not-a-sphinx. So that seems like a dead end."

"Hmmm. Yeah, ugh, that's annoying. I have no idea how to solve this problem, I can't math at it to make it go away."

"I wonder if I can trigger automatic mode on anything other than healing. It could come in handy in any situation where as long as I succeed it's okay to nap for half an hour afterwards."