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Vivian is thrilled Isabella is all right. And now that some time has passed, she's extraordinarily proud of herself, as well. She did it. She brought sphinx magic back, it worked!
She moves 'spell can create non-extinct species' up her priority list. Someday, when it's safe, there can be more sphinxes.
She tells the owner of the Avalon magic shop that she's testing some experimental new healing spells and to let her know if anyone is interested. She pretends to be violently protective of "her spell" and insists on secrecy in spell casting, and only accepts those whom medicine could not otherwise help. 'Cancer curing spell' is less suspicious than 'spell nearly exactly duplicating sphinx magic' anyway. And she lets Isabella heal them, carefully, one at a time.
Vivian and Gianna continue to see each other. Gianna continues to be sweet and funny and fiercely, protectively loyal and just generally adorable, and Vivian is crazy about her. Work starts 'coincidentally' sending Gianna to San Francisco more often. When Isabella notices how much time Vivian and Gianna spend together, Vivian uses her questions as an opportunity to explain a few things. Isabella's reaction turns out to be, "Oh. Okay. I like her all right," before returning to her latest magical project, which makes Vivian giggle. How very like her daughter.
Life proceeds reasonably comfortably for the new few years. Isabella makes acceptable progress in school and astonishing progress in magic, or rather, she does whenever she can be lured away from 'casting healing spells' with Vivian. Vivian herself blows up a few beetles but eventually manages to create non-extinct species. Vivian claims a newfound interest in traveling to her friends, and periodically bundles Isabella onto a plane to go 'be a tourist' somewhere. Panda bears and Florida panthers start mysteriously, coincidentally increasing in numbers.
Gianna is still wonderful but she refuses to come out to Ilario, which Vivian... is upset about, but deals with. Reluctantly. It's not her place to say how and when Gianna comes out, if she does at all, but she hates feeling like a secret. The long distance becomes more of a sticking point. Vivian can't move to Italy or Gianna's friends would Find Out; Gianna won't move away from her brother. When Isabella is eleven, Vivian and Gianna reluctantly admit it's time to break up. It's about as amicable as they can manage under the circumstances, but Vivian still spends a couple of weeks sadly eating chocolate. Isabella is quietly soothing and spends a lot of time hugging her, which Vivian appreciates. Sphinxette snuggles are the best snuggles.
She throws herself into her work. She successfully creates a baby pegasus for a pegasus couple struggling with infertility, and suddenly finds herself with a second source of income. Critter couples hoping to adopt have very few options if they want a child of their own species- or they did, until Vivian. She charges more than the adoption centers, to encourage parents to take home existing children, but there's occasionally someone willing to pay. She contributes the bulk of her earnings to Isabella's college fund and uses the rest to reduce the amount of time she spends making charms. More time for Isabella, more time for magic research, more time trying to locate dragons. (She has been wildly unsuccessful at this task so far and she finds herself regularly heaping swearwords on runecasting's inefficiency at information gathering. This does not help.)
She dates a few more women, but nothing nearly as long as her relationship with Gianna. When Isabella is fourteen, she explains to her mother in her serious Isabella fashion that she thinks she likes women. But also men. Vivian tells her that being bisexual is totally okay, she will always love Isabella very much, and yes, it's time for the sex talk now.
More time passes. Vivian and Isabella continue to travel, mostly to China. They speak the language, they can visit Vivian's relatives in Wuxi, and people love Isabella. They ask her for pictures, they want to pet her hair, they tell her how beautiful and pale she is, they exclaim excitedly over her wonderful Chinese. Isabella's not wild about travel in general, but she likes China, and Vivian just laughs and takes advantage of it. The Chengdu research base is confounded but delighted.
Isabella is seventeen when Vivian overhears some interesting gossip in the Avalon. Someone turned up a wyvern in Toronto of all places, isn't that odd? A brand new one too, just found her medallion by accident. Who knew there were wyverns in Canada anyway?
Vivian didn't, that's for sure. Her friend Helen is roped into babysitting Isabella, and Vivian catches the next flight to Toronto.
Time to meet this wyvern.
revivian
maybeso
If she asks around at the Toronto Avalon, on a weekend, about the wyvern, she will be directed to a girl who is in the Avalon park, displaying no non-human parts at all besides some artful swoops of ice-blue along her cheekbones, sitting in a wheelchair with a spiral-bound notebook and a lapdesk and a pencil, chanting in French at a necklace.
revivian
Vivian speaks no French, and has the misfortune of walking up from an angle that is mostly behind the bench. Unaware of what she's interrupting, she walks over. "Hello, are you May Swan?"
maybeso
The girl startles and drops her necklace and stops incanting. "I - yes? Hello?"
revivian
Vivian looks at the necklace, and at the runes on the ground in front of her, and bites back a number of horrified different curse words. "Did you just- swallow that?" How is she okay? How is she alive?!
maybeso
"Eugh. Yeah. It's going to take a while to redraw, but it should go faster the second time," sighs May. "Can I help you?"
revivian
"Noooo, I mean, you can't- you don't- wasn't that a spell? Aiyaaaa, I just interrupted a spell. I'm so, so, so sorry, I had no idea- you should be dead! Best case, you'd be coughing for the next six hours- I don't- what did you do?"
revivian
"Once you start a spell, you can't stop it. Swallowing a spell half done will explode in your lungs. Didn't your teacher explain...? Aiya, they didn't even mention you did magic or I'd have been more careful, I'm so sorry."
maybeso
"I'm self-taught and the thing you are talking about has never happened to me. I try to avoid interrupting spells because then the diagram is expended but my lungs are fine."
revivian
Vivian continues to hyperventilate for a second before an explanation occurs to her.
No one knows what dragon magic does.
No wonder the war was so devastating.
"Well... now you know?" Vivian squeaks, then gets her voice manageable again. "Don't- don't. To other runecasters, I mean. Exploding lungs. Now you know." She eyes the girl. She seems perfectly harmless. She can't be much older than Isabella. "Perhaps it's a wyvern thing."
And perhaps Isabella is just an oddly shaped housecat.
No one knows what dragon magic does.
No wonder the war was so devastating.
"Well... now you know?" Vivian squeaks, then gets her voice manageable again. "Don't- don't. To other runecasters, I mean. Exploding lungs. Now you know." She eyes the girl. She seems perfectly harmless. She can't be much older than Isabella. "Perhaps it's a wyvern thing."
And perhaps Isabella is just an oddly shaped housecat.
revivian
"I heard you're a new arrival, so to speak," Vivian says carefully. "I was wondering if you knew of any others- like you."
She refuses categorically to say wyvern. If this girl were a wyvern she would be dead.
She refuses categorically to say wyvern. If this girl were a wyvern she would be dead.
maybeso
"Wyverns?" asks May. "I haven't got a spare medallion to try on my parents. No guesses about anyone else. Speculation goes that I'm a weird offshoot - there's like a twenty percent chance one of my great-grandfathers was a random G.I. during World War II or something. No telling."
revivian
"But- you've never met any? Your parents don't know anything? You have no other relatives?"
If she's been hiding Isabella and her healing magic away from a teenage girl... well, she probably won't regret it given what she knew then, but she'll feel extremely stupid now.
If she's been hiding Isabella and her healing magic away from a teenage girl... well, she probably won't regret it given what she knew then, but she'll feel extremely stupid now.
maybeso
"No aunts or uncles, no living grandparents, no extended family in Yellowknife or Osaka. What an interesting series of questions you have."
maybeso
"You didn't know that before you came up to me, knowing my name. Obviously. What's going on?"
revivian
Vivian thought about this in advance. She'd rather not spill about Isabella quite yet. Just in case. "I'm an environmentalist," she says instead. "I- invented? Rediscovered? A little of both- a spell that can restore extinct species," she explains. "But funnily enough, when I tried it on dragons, it didn't work. So I'm more than usually curious about spontaneously discovered wyverns."
maybeso
"...Restore extinct species. Like, what, resurrecting them from the dead, or just spontaneously creating more of them out of thin air...?"
maybeso
"And you traffic in... magically spawned passenger pigeons?... instead, and now you're looking for dragons and think wyverns may be related to dragons?"
revivian
"...well, I started with beetles. But my main concern right now is that if I were to return dragons and sphinxes to the world, I might trigger a second war. So I've been looking for dragons, yes."