"Thank you," he says, pleased, and then shimmers and reverts to his human form, still garbed in chainmail. "Fascinating," he murmurs quietly, prodding at his arm. 

"Dad, did you design that form entirely to make Mum laugh?" 

"Of course not. It also saved me a power point." 

"Dad." 

He laughs and hugs her. She hugs back, smiling reluctantly. 

"I shouldn't be jealous, wizardry has some serious downsides--but being both is extremely cool and I think I am in fact jealous." 

"I can feel my mana going up! And I am not doing anything at all!"

"Did you take charge swap?" 

"Nope! Magical girl thing! I have three ways to build mana now and one of them is being hopeful!"

"--Guess I should have pushed her harder on cool perks! Oh well, I will pick that one up later. For now I will revel in the fact that next time I go to sleep, lying in is manafully virtuous." 

"Doesn't that sound just delicious? I might charge swap later, it is possible I will have a girlfriend next week and maybe then one of the squishy ones will be appealing, but for now, sleep! The magical girl shit is really cool though, yeah, you can buy into it for six points, I did that plus one to hopefully cure my dyspraxia in case I ever have a shoe malfunction."

"Oh, excellent. I will need six points but I bet the honeypot will get me that, and my mana generation is not going to be a sticking point for that." 

"I'm very happy to play battery!"

"Thank you for your service!" Bella shakes out her newly lengthened hair.

"Shame the Awakening new body thing only happens once--ooh, hm, I bet there are witch potions--or not potions, some other thing, whatever--to grow hair out. That would be magnificent." 

"For what, Wilbur to make hair-shirts out of? Is wizard hair that good outside the Scholomance, as a material?"

"I mean, our spiders still only produce so much silk at a time--I guess there could be better, easily accessible fiber sources here. Or somebody could figure out a safe source of sirenspider silk. But wizard hair is still more magically useful than, like, wool, from non-magical sheep."

"Siren-spiders are that thing Helena squished, right?" 

"That's the one, why?"

"--Well, Naturalism lets you copy traits into an organism's germ cells, and Dagny copied siren-spider silk for her favorite tarantula." 

"Enterprising. - In other news, Lucasta thinks I might have a mysterious duplicate but she doesn't have perfect clarity on mysterious duplicateness and she doesn't look like me. Should be booking it here any minute now though."

"Oh, excellent!"