i believe i can fly

[self_composed]

Alice eventually goes home for the evening.

Bella goes up and sits in her room.

She has five hexes.

Five.

That's rather a lot of hexes.

She gets out her notebook, with the lists, and she makes some wishes.

And then she goes to bed, grinning.

In the morning it will be time to make plans.

Comments

[self_composed]

"Pancakes?" Bella says. "I made a bunch and some are keeping warm in the oven." She gestures, and sits herself down at the kitchen table. "I already ate. Hmmm. Mindreading on arbitrary targets. Kinda sketchy. I can do it in two steps anyway at any time as long as I have a hex on me. But it will feel more available if it's a power I already have and I don't have to spend any coins to do it." She's just narrating as she writes.

[edgeofyourseat]

"Pancakes!"

He fetches himself some and sits down next to her.

"Seems to me if you're worried about using it when you don't wanna, it's easier not to if you can't yet," he comments. "And hexes just got a lot cheaper."

[self_composed]

"Mm-hm. So you, my font of hexes, clearly have no objection to me spending one just to be able to read your mind. I guess that settles it." She turns to a new page of the notebook. "Now I have to determine exactly how I want this power to work." She flips a couple pages back, to where she did exactly that sort of reasoning about the invisibility, flight, and regeneration, and scans them for a template.

[edgeofyourseat]

Font of hexes. Her font of hexes. Alice grins.

"I think I'd like it if I could tell when you were," he offers as relevant data.

[self_composed]

Bella writes that down. "Fair enough. In the form of a pleasant mental chime when I start and some corresponding alert when I stop, or just some kind of general sensation when it's happening?"

[edgeofyourseat]

He laughs.

"Second one's more like it."

[self_composed]

"Preferences on manner of sensation?" Bella inquires. She's meanwhile writing down possible forms she could receive thoughts in.

[edgeofyourseat]

"Dunno," he says, shrugging. "Not something too distracting, but something I can't mistake for anything else. So I'll know, you know?"

[self_composed]

Bella shrugs and writes down various existing senses plus "novel input?" on that list. "The advantage of this, I suppose, is that if I ever want general mindreading powers, I can arrange for them to work differently, without notifying anybody. So it makes sense to do this separately even if I do later decide I want to be able to spy on everybody."

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice grins.

"Awesome."

Om nom pancakes!

[self_composed]

Write-write-write. "Help yourself to as many of those as you want, and let me know when you're all done so I can freeze the rest."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Okay!"

Mmmmpancakes oh hey.

"Djwff," he says with his mouth full; swallows; tries again. "D'you wanna give yourself a perfect memory? Wonder if that'd be a hex or a pentagon."

[self_composed]

Bella stops, and looks at her notebook.

"Huh," she says. "I wouldn't need these anymore."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Is what I was thinkin'," Alice agrees.

[self_composed]

Bella makes another list - she doesn't want to miss something and wind up with just, say, a photographic memory - but this is a quick one.

"Not a pentagon," she says after a moment. And then, "Hex did it."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Cool," Alice says sunnily.

He helped!

[self_composed]

Bella shuts her notebook, leans back, and thinks.

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice eats his pancakes.

[self_composed]

"Are you sure you don't have a preference on what it should feel like to have your mind read? 'Cause you're the one who has to live with it," Bella says.

[edgeofyourseat]

"...You could test things out with squares," he suggests. "Just wish for me to feel such-and-such for a bit and I'll tell you if I like it. Because even if I thought of something I thought I'd like and told you about it, you might not wish for it exactly the way I thought it and I might not think it exactly the way it'd end up."

[self_composed]

"Makes sense." She starts out with a stereotypical sensation of 'being watched', which has no direct analogue but is very distinctive.

[edgeofyourseat]

"...hmm," says Alice. "It's okay, I guess. Dunno if I want it to be the one."

[self_composed]

She shrugs and tries the sensation of being patted on the head. "Except," it occurs to her, "that might be confusing if I actually pat you on the head."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Oh my god, that's adorable," he says, "and also no way, because yes."

[self_composed]

Bella bumps it up a level of abstraction: like 'being watched', but 'being touched' instead - noplace in particular, no particular way. "Hm?"