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

[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 Kind of outdated probably, still a useful reference."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."

[self_composed]

"Yeah, I don't think that's a project for today," Bella says. "I will pull out my old Legos and walk around on them some and see how far I can get that way."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Your call," says Alice. It's not usually the kind of thing he would bother to say, because it's just so obvious, but in this case he feels like establishing it very clearly.

[self_composed]

Bella nods.

"If I go on a magic treasure hunt," she says, "and there's a hex in the stash... and if I gave it to you... what would you do with the fucked-up magic powers?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"...well, it kinda seems like my three wishes are star territory," he says. "Except the first one, I could get that if I just wished him off a cliff. So I'd probably just screw around with magic a lot and then give you the leftovers, because if I learn how to make magic wish coins out of my pain, there will be leftovers. I cannot think of enough superpowers to use up all the hexes I'd be making."

[self_composed]

"There is probably some nonlethal solution," Bella says. "For instance, squares and up can make stuff. Can probably make - gold, which could be sold, even if it can't make non-counterfeit dollars. Fuckton of money versus fuckton of money is a different fight than fuckton of money versus dependent."

[edgeofyourseat]

He shrugs.

"I'd kind of rather wish him off a cliff, but sure. I care that I get out way more than I care how."

[self_composed]

Bella looks at the cipher. There is a map drawn on the two-page spread, but the map seems to encompass the entire Pacific Northwest, and she's going to need to figure out what these blocks of symbols mean to determine where on the map the stash is. Sigh.