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]

"Possible. Maybe if I make it at-will like the invisibility, or suppressible like the regeneration. Or maybe I should just save it till I start seriously working towards taking over the world."

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice beams a little.

"I love it when you talk," his tongue touches his lips, "megalomaniacal."

[self_composed]

Bella laughs. "What else would one do with wish powers, really, I don't know what Elias and his friends were thinking."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Maybe they were all like me," he suggests, tucking his hands behind his head and leaning back in his chair, "and just wanted to screw around with magic a little. Maybe they were dabblers."

[self_composed]

"Or maybe they got into preposterous arms races with each other, spending all their coins protecting the rest of their coins against each other?" Bella suggested. "Or they were wussier than me, and didn't have friends like you... and could do little triangle tricks but nothing serious."

She shrugs, and changes the subject back. "I think cognitive speedup is probably kosher with corresponding physical speedup... if and only if we get our internet upgraded."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Also they had never heard of Wolverine," he contributes. "Huh. Why not just get an Internet connection in your brain too? There's gotta be a superpower for that."

[self_composed]

"I'll think about that one," Bella says. "I'm not sure about that. It might mess with the servers somehow - I mean, how would I assign my head an IP address?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Not a clue. I'm done raiding your pancakes, by the way."

A single, lonely pancake remains.

[self_composed]

Bella puts the pancake in a plastic bag and puts the bag in the fridge, and turns the oven off. "I also wouldn't want to hardcode my brain with a particular browser, when the state of the art in browsing and web standards are going to be all different in a year or two anyway."

[edgeofyourseat]

"See, you are smart," says Alice. "You think of things."

[self_composed]

"Also, I wished myself programming powers a minute ago," Bella says brightly. "But apparently I wasn't specific enough, so I don't know any programming languages, just general principles and pseudocode and so on - which is fine for what I wanted them for, anyway."

[edgeofyourseat]

"I love you," says Alice.

[self_composed]

"I'm so surprised," Bella deadpans. "Goodness gracious. What brings this on?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"I dunno." He shrugs; smiles. "The fact that you wished yourself programming powers?"

[self_composed]

"Why that, though?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Not sure," he says. "'Cause you used magic, and you used it to do something useful and cool?"

[self_composed]

"In that case, I wonder how long it'll take for you to get tired of reminding me," laughs Bella. "Okay, I have one hex left on here." Necklace-heft. "I think I have enough symbols and I can presumably add more with pentagons if I'm getting too many black squares - meaning 'other'. Let's see, what am I trying to neglect?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Huh?"

[self_composed]

"What would I smack myself on the forehead for not thinking of, if I wished without taking however long it would take to come up with it?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Oh. Not a clue. But then, I don't know what you have thought of."

[self_composed]

"Your signals, and my input stream and how I can manipulate it," Bella says. "And an image compression algorithm of sorts. Should I be able to poke around in your memories? Should I be using something other than a naive magical heuristic for generating the words - like, should the power be consulting you to determine what words you'd attach to a thought if prompted?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yes," he says after thinking about it for a moment, "and... I dunno, actually. They're my thoughts, but you're the one who's reading 'em."

[self_composed]

"So I need an interface for sorting through memories - browsing some organized representation of the whole shebang? Searching by keythought? Picking them out of an index by date?" She closes her eyes. "Man, wishes do not make everything simple, do they. How about - if you could produce a word for a thought, then that one, otherwise if I could produce a word for it if I was having it, then that, and otherwise, a first pass at a naive magical translation - and otherwise a symbol. And I'll color-code 'em."

[edgeofyourseat]

"You are smart," he sighs, happily.

[self_composed]

"So," Bella says, "let me guess - you think in thoughts, and also, you remember in memories?"