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kaylee has them now
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She nods.

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"Here goes."

Star disappears.

He backhands his own palm, making a loud clap, and produces a triangle.  It looks like scabbed skin, red and brown and yellow, rough and mottled, with a little crescent-shaped patch of unblemished skin the color of his own flesh following one of the edges.  He gives himself a little cartoon skull, identical to the last one but in red-tinged black, on the back of his hand.

 

"Kinda changes everything," he says casually.

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"Yeah.  I don't - "

 

" - if I were on my own, or if I were the only coinmaker, I'd want to - I don't know exactly, but not just, keep going in the same direction but also with magic.  Medical research felt like the - highest-leverage thing, if I could work on curing the deadliest diseases or anti-aging research - but this is so much bigger than that, especially if this is the only box."

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"Can't promise it will, but if my pain tolerance holds up to what I'm imagining we could probably live off these things," he says.  "Make a floating invisible house or two, conjure all our meals.  But let's experiment on me first."

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"You're very - enthusiastic."

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"I figured out a little while ago that part of the reason I wanna be a surgeon is so that I can do grotesque things to other people that I wish I could do to myself," he says.  "What do you say we cut class and drive out into the woods where I can yell real loud and no one'll hear me."

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"What are you planning?"

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"Ever heard of the gympie-gympie?"

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They drive out to the woods.  Leo conjures a non-torturous ordinary stinging nettle, first, with a triangle so it'll disappear on its own.  "I figure if the plant disappears, so'll all the stinging hairs and venom that get into my skin."

He plucks a leaf and rubs it between his fingers, produces a clinky handful of scabby triangles.  (They've all got the splotch of unscabbed skin, but all in different shapes and places.)

He waits; the potted nettle vanishes.  "Ooh, yeah, that's better."

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"So you don't want to eat disappearing food or drink disappearing water," she says.  She's feeling less panicked and frozen now that there's a Next Thing to do about this, and they're doing it.

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"No, or breathe disappearing air..." he says.  "Might not get into your system fast enough for disappearing it to do real damage, but still.  All right, move back a little."

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She scootches away from him, watches.

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He conjures a clay pot full of soil with a stalk growing out of it, sprouting two wide laves, all covered in visible fine white hairs.

"Always wanted to try this."

He pinches one leaf between his fingers.

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"Ooh," he says.  "Oh.  Yeah, that's - ow.  Ow - right, that - "

He stops producing words and starts producing pentagons.

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She worries her lip, but doesn't say anything.

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Hexagons follow, as do nonlinguistic noises.

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Then the potted suicide plant vanishes, and he exhales, collapses down onto his back.

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" - you okay?"

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"Fine," he pants.  "Whoo.  That was a hell of a thing."

He sits up.

"Gimmie one of the hexagons?"

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She does.  She contemplates a pentagon, then wishes up a magic coin purse: more space on the inside than the outside, and the level of coin she wants will jump into her hand when she fishes around inside.  That'll do for a stopgap so they don't have to leave the coins strewn across the dirt ground.

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"I have added a feature to the car - " and he gets up, and opens the trunk.  There's a square panel at the bottom, which hadn't been there before, and when he pulls it open it reveals a ladder down into a wood-paneled room with a desk, office chair, and armchair, with a desk lamp on the desk and a floor lamp in one corner.

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"Ooh."  She climbs down.

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He follows.

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She sits at the desk, lets Leo have the armchair.  She hands him the coin purse, explains it to him.  "I'm going to use a square to let you use it as well as me - let me know if that wears off?"

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"Sure."  He fishes inside it, retrieves a square, conjures a hot dog for himself.

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