"These marks here signify branches I can omit to shrink the spell, in the likely event that I can't make the whole thing fit," she says, pointing at an example. "I really hope we find an alt with good memory improving magic, it would be so useful for cheating at spellbinding. We could do anything, and then it wouldn't matter so much that we could only do it six times a day."
"Yeah," he agrees. "Immortality that works on several people at once. Mass resurrections. Something like Cypress's portals - that reminds me, I started working on that. Do you want to see, after I'm done being impressed with your wonderful spell chart?"
"I swear," he mutters, once they are out of spellcharts to look at, "if someone drops another building on us after we manage these I will be very unhappy."
"Maybe we'd better not both cast hexes in the same day when there are would-be voters around," suggests Iobel.
"Yeah. Though - one of us could get concussed again and - well." He sighs.
"Maybe we should see if we can get our alts to escort us when we do things like that, then."
"... I - still don't even remember most of what happened when I was concussed. It's a little distressing."
"I didn't get a chance to write notes on it until much later, so I don't have - a verbatim transcript, but I can tell you some things."
"You were a lot less guarded. You made jokes and didn't seem like you were walking on eggshells. I'm not sure how much of that was your apparent expectation that you were going to die or that I should have let you."
"... A jovial nihilist. Charming. I'm - sorry you had to put up with that."
"The nihilism per se wasn't so much a problem as the - I didn't like that you seemed to think I might agree with you if you suggested I let you die."
"You're welcome. I - I think sometimes you've seemed to think I'm fishing for compliments that I haven't earned or something, but a decent fraction of the things I'd like to have recognized about me include such glowing personality recommendations as not literally malicious enough to want an innocent person to die."
"I - think it wasn't... About you," he sighs. "You just - happened to be there. I don't - think that you're malicious enough to want an innocent person to die."
"You're worried that I - subconsciously think you're - that malicious?"
"I worry that on some level you either think that, or - assign me the role of someone who is that malicious without thinking about it because your thought process requires the role be filled."
"Yeah. While you were concussed Berathyme ran interference when I thought of something I wasn't sure I should say - she said it boiled down to you being paranoid."