here goes

[self_composed]

Bella schedules an appointment at Stanford. She breezes through sixteen hours of motorcycle class, mostly by demonstrating that the instructor is redundant and wouldn't he rather teach her exotic motorcycle tricks and then just mark her as passing the course? She plays in a soccer game against a Port Angeles high school and wins. She starts driving her bike to school, and she names it Tegu after a lizard of similar coloring, because it needed a name.

On Friday evening she's due to fly out, crash in a Stanford grad student's house overnight, interview on Saturday, and fly home that evening. She bikes for the airport, black leather gold-studded saddlebags over Tegu's back wheel carrying her luggage.

Comments

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice, having no demands on his time that he can't blow off for this, flies invisibly overhead.

[self_composed]

He's not invisible to Bella, though. [Tagging along?]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Yup.]

Because that is what he would rather be doing. And also she looks really good on that thing.

[self_composed]

[I have good design sense,] Bella sends. [Going to stow invisibly onto the plane or just try to chase it the whole way?]

[edgeofyourseat]

The second option sounds way more fun!

[Might as well find out if I can do that, right?]

[self_composed]

[Don't get sucked into an engine; you'll crash my plane,] Bella says. [And you'll probably need to magic goggles and maybe some way to breathe up high, but I assume you're stocked up on coins of all kinds.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Yup.]

His necklace is getting so long that 'necklace' is really no longer the word.

[self_composed]

[I'm wearing mine like a half-bandolier, half-belt,] Bella offers.

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice envisions this.

[Yeah, that'd work,] he concludes. He just has his looped a ridiculous number of times around his neck, but Bella's configuration sounds much more stable. Of course. Because she's Bella.

[self_composed]

[It didn't come off when I got hit by the car,] Bella points out. [Although it's getting heavy. By the time it gets long enough to need another twist over the other shoulder I'll probably start stashing extras in Elias's old trunk.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Sounds like a plan. And when that gets full we can make more of 'em.]

Because Alice is not going to stop producing coins anytime soon, and he produces a lot of them, especially on days when he doesn't have much else to do.

[self_composed]

[Unless I find a good use for a lot of coins that's as fast or faster than your rate of making them,] Bella says.

[edgeofyourseat]

[What the fuck could you possibly need that much magic for?]

Not that he doesn't enjoy the thought of having to make even more.

[self_composed]

[Running the world,] Bella suggests. [How many hexes do you think it would take to render, say, malaria, extinct? I'm not sure I can even do it with hexes, not without investing a lot of time in travel and finding people who have it and mosquitoes that carry it. That kind of thing might take a star.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Betcha I could make a star.]

He's been trying, but he hasn't been trying very hard. Pain at the hex level is distractingly sexy.

[self_composed]

[I bet you could,] she says. [I don't want to use any stars, yet, until I know why they are dangerous, when the other wishes are so safe to use while paying a modicum of attention.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[That is because you are smart,] Alice says cheerfully.

[self_composed]

[Yep. Also, things on the scale of eradicating malaria will attract attention, and I bet you a clever wishcoiner could find me via some divinatory power as soon as they knew to look. I have to find out more, I have to be more secure and informed. Even though people are dying of malaria right now.] She does not like this.

[edgeofyourseat]

[There's more where those came from,] Alice points out. Death doesn't bother him the way it bothers her. He thinks it would be pretty awesome if she did manage to get rid of it, but he's not going to complain if she doesn't, or if it takes a while.

[self_composed]

[People aren't replaceable like that. Everyone knows this about people they've actually met; you just have to extend it - I mean, there are more people where I came from. I would assume you don't want me to die, at least given that it doesn't appeal to me.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[I'd be fucking wrecked if you died,] he says. His voice is calm, casual; the emotions behind it are anything but. [So?]

He would suffer a lot, but suffering is not exactly new and different for him. And there are seven billion more people on the planet, and odds are there's at least one or two more that he could love this much. If he stuck around long enough to find them.

[self_composed]

[But not if they die of malaria first,] Bella says.

[edgeofyourseat]

[I don't think you're getting this,] Alice says dryly.

People, as individuals, aren't replaceable. Everyone is exactly themselves. The loss of a person is a loss. But except in a very few cases, it's not a loss that Alice personally cares about, and even for those—even for the one he knows would completely take him apart—he doesn't think they are irreplaceable in the sense that the world becomes a permanently worse place every time someone leaves it. It just keeps on being the world, with these people instead of those ones.

[self_composed]

[I lose you around the part where you don't think the world is worse when people are dying of malaria regularly, than it would be if people were not doing that,] Bella says. [I don't individually care about everyone personally - it's just shitty that they have to die, so I care about them impersonally and will see that they stop doing that.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Well, yeah,] says Alice. [And that's awesome. It just doesn't piss me off that a bunch of people are dying right now who wouldn't be if you'd fixed it already.]