if i got three wishes, first i'd find out all about how wishes work

[self_composed]

Bella brings two blank notebooks to school the next day. Her old one is safely computerized and boxed up with its predecessors.

At lunch, she sits with Angela; Jessica and Eric and Lauren sit at the same table but mostly talk to each other, and Mike is nowhere to be seen.

Bella is just about on time to gym, thanks to an overnight icing that means she has to pick her way with extreme care across the slippery grass or the slick sidewalks. The second time she falls down, she gives up on attempting any dignity at all, and, cradling her thwacked elbow, scoots the rest of the way to the gym on her rear. This leaves her with damp jeans but no further injuries, and they were a little damp anyway from the falls.

She doesn't have time to do more than smile and wave at Alice on her way to get her mat and get out of the way of careening balls. She spends the class doing the subset of her safe activities that won't stress her elbow.

Comments

[edgeofyourseat]

Just to satisfy his curiosity, Alice puts his hand against the pillar (it was one of the big ones, after all) where she walked through it.

Nope.

Shrugging, he sits down against it.

"Wanna tell me what it says?"

[self_composed]

"Paraphrased, Elias Frobisher believed this book would be found by his descendant, and wanted to pass on what he knew about magic. The book came with a coin that was like this -" She shows off the pentagon - "only six-sided and it didn't glow red, it was just kind of sparkly. I wished on it to get the power to make my own coins, which I can do by being in pain and moving the pain left to right, which, swear to God, makes sense after use of the hexagon coin for some reason. There's apparently types."

She bites the inside of her cheek a little and gets a triangle, then another triangle when she pokes at the bitten place with her tongue; these too glow red. "Like so. I think this is the smallest kind, but I need to read more."

She turns the page again.

[edgeofyourseat]

"That is really cool," Alice opines.

[self_composed]

"I know," Bella enthuses. "This page is a chart of kinds of coins. There's five kinds, but Elias never quite got as far as making the star kind, at least not before he wrote this book... which he says was at least in part because using stars often goes very wrong. The other kinds work better and a hexagon's enough to grant permanent magical power. Not just the power to make coins..." She turns the page. "If I get hurt really bad - like enough that the hospital would have to remove something on the order of an entire foot or a lung or something to save me, under normal circumstances - then I can make a hexagon and use it to be able to fly, or turn invisible at will, or have super-strength. I could be a freaking comic book hero."

The next page has a drawing. She blinks at it and then covers it with her hand.

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice perks up and leans forward. "Ooh, what's that?"

[self_composed]

Bella shuts her eyes, moves her hand, and turns around the book. "That's an illustration of how Elias made the hexagon I just used," she says.

It appears that Elias opted to stick his arm into a cage full of starving rats. A caption under the image explains that while this was agonizing, it also created numerous smallish wounds, each individually something he could take care of with a Second Coin instead of having to expend a Third.

[edgeofyourseat]

"Damn," he marvels. "Your great-whatever-grandpa was pretty hardcore."

[self_composed]

Bella puts her hand back over the image and turns around to read the opposite page. "I suppose so," she says. "I wonder if I actually am related. There doesn't seem to be an index... Oh, that's convenient, a table of recommended methods for getting certain coins with ideal pain-to-injury and pain-to-coin ratios. Kind of outdated probably, still a useful reference."

She reads on, turning the old pages carefully. "Aha. He made the secret passage in his house so only his descendants could get into it, and his descendants would always be able to get into it - so even though there were walls put around what used to be the passageway, I can just walk right through them. But..."

She blinks at something in the book, then offers Alice a triangle. "I think you can use the coins. Up to and including using a hexagon to get your own magic powers if I'm ever able to produce one, or we find someone else who does magic and they'll give one over. You just can't get into the secret room is all. Try doing something with the triangle coin I made; those are cheap, I could make a dozen by poking the wire end of a spiral notebook binding twelve times."

[edgeofyourseat]

He leans forward, takes it, looks at it for a moment.

"A cheap coin probably only grants cheap-ass wishes, right? Mm..."

There's a folded sheet of paper in the back pocket of his jeans; it looks like it's been through at least one laundry cycle. He rolls it into a long, thin cylinder and looks at it, holding the coin.

The end of the cylinder catches fire. The coin is no more.

"...Huh," says Alice, pinching out the flame. "I just did magic."

[self_composed]

Bella grins.

She looks down at the book again.

"Careful with stars, star wishes go wrong, if you get a star consider just never using it, etcetera etcetera... third-coins are enough to grant fantastic skill at a mundane thing, like speaking a language. You could break your arm and become decent at the piano, Alice." A page turns. It's not a very thick book, and Elias was liberal with his illustrations. "Seems like the square 'second coins' are where it's at for efficiency though. You can get them without doing actual injury - stepping on a Lego would do it, I bet - and they can do some really decent stuff if you apply them right..."

[edgeofyourseat]

"See, I totally want your magic powers," he says cheerfully. "Ooh, what kind of stuff?"

[self_composed]

"Break stuff, change stuff, conjure stuff out of nowhere, Elias apparently once made a neighbor he didn't like come over all warty forever, heal rat-bite-sized wounds apparently."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Awesome."

[self_composed]

"Yeah. I'm going to make a lot of those jobbies." Page turn. "This is his 'justice theory' on how it works. Which is silly, as it clearly works by fucking magic, but okay. Oh, he had several theories. Justice theory. Trading the equivalent of parts of your sentence in Hell for smaller and more manageable units of power than you can get for selling your entire soul." Page turn. "Celestial sphere theory. Artifacts from the Tower of Babel. I had a weird howevermanygreats-grandpa."

She turns another page.

"These are little profiles on some other coinmakers Elias knew..."

Page page page; apparently those don't much interest her right now.

"...And this one is a treasure map. Elias says, 'Dearest descendant, what remains of my legacy is hidden, but you may seek it if you have by your own efforts earned the power to do so and if you can disentangle this cipher, by magic or by intellect."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Oh my fucking god," says Alice. "Okay, so what we've learned today: you have magic powers, and I have an underground lair with a secret fucking passage – it's kind of fucked up that he built it so you'd fall two floors straight down, by the way, what's up with that – containing an actual fucking treasure map. When did we turn into the kids from The Magician's Nephew?"

[self_composed]

"This afternoon. We turned into those kids sometime this afternoon," Bella says.

[edgeofyourseat]

He laughs.

"So, are you gonna take a crack at the treasure map? Maybe there's another hex there and I can get magic powers of my very own without you having to stick your arm in a cage full of rats."

[self_composed]

Bella shudders. "Yeah, I'll poke at it - maybe Elias wasn't very good at ciphers and I can figure it out by looking up the history of cryptography on the Internet, who knows, I can try making some squares if I have to, I'll use the pentagon I made if necessary." She pauses. "I should've milked that broken leg for a few more of those. Damn."

[edgeofyourseat]

"You could break it again," Alice suggests philosophically. "I mean, you fixed it the once, so you know it works. Don't jump down the rabbit hole again, though, you might land on your head this time and that's harder to fix."

[self_composed]

"Well, that's exactly the problem," Bella says. "Most of the ways I could break my leg on purpose are very scary things that I don't really care to casually do. I have a decent pain tolerance - I have to, I really do get hurt a lot, but I usually get hurt by accident. Once I had a broken leg I could stand to move it around a couple times. What do I do if I want to re-break it without risking landing on my head, though?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"...uh," says Alice, because he can see a really obvious solution but he's not sure it's one she's going to like.

[self_composed]

"Hand you a hammer?" Bella asks, suddenly quiet. "And ask nicely. I guess."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yeah," he says, also quiet. "That's what I was thinking."

[self_composed]

"These are the most fucked-up magic powers ever."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Pretty much, yep."