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]

"Sure, that seems like a good way to kill an afternoon," Bella says when she reads the thought.

[edgeofyourseat]

"Awesome! Please help me build an underground lair so I won't forget something obvious like bathrooms," says Alice.

[self_composed]

"I think if you forgot bathrooms, you'd realize pretty quick you needed to add them," Bella says. She gets a fresh notebook, so that diagramming may be done. "It'd be more problematic if you forgot, like, ventilation, and passed out in your sleep and suffocated. That would be really inconvenient."

[edgeofyourseat]

"See?" he says, with a warm happy glow of affection. "This is why I need you. Okay, so: bathrooms, ventilation. Where should I put it?"

[self_composed]

"Uh, hm. Deep, enough that you won't run into someone's actual basement so the ceiling should be a couple stories down, but you don't want to overdo it and be next to the mantle of the earth or anything. Not in an aquifer. I wonder if there's a map of nearby aquifers on the internet. Probably want to surround yourself with rock, not dirt. Possible we need to learn some geology."

[edgeofyourseat]

"What's an aquifer?"

So yes. Yes they should.

[self_composed]

"Underground pocket of water," Bella says. "How big do you want your lair?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Doesn't have to be that big," he says. "Well, it depends how much I wanna do there, I guess."

Absolute necessities: a bathroom (with a shower, because of what he can do there with a knife) and somewhere to sleep.

Things that would be nice, if he'll be staying there a while: somewhere to cook (conveniently also doubling as somewhere to hurt himself) and somewhere to sew.

"That doesn't add up to that much, right?"

[self_composed]

"Yeah, sounds pretty small. How long do you envision living here?" Bella sketches vague lines of layouts. "I'm not sure what'll happen to your dad's stuff if we can get him sent to jail, but it's not necessarily the case that you'll have access to the house after." Pause. "I'm planning to live in Forks till I finish high school in a year and a half, then go off to college somewhere."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Might as well go for the kitchen and the sewing room too, then," he says. "D'you know where you wanna go?" (Half-hoping, half-assuming that she will let him follow her.)

[self_composed]

"No, I haven't started seriously looking into that yet." She smiles. "But I see no reason that you couldn't make a duplicate lair near wherever I wind up. Even if any sane admissions officer wouldn't touch you." She adds to her sketches.

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice smiles and loves her for a moment, then turns his attention to what she's drawing.

[self_composed]

Bella finally settles on a floor plan with a central room, radiating a bathroom and a kitchen and a bedroom and a sewing room. "Do you want the place to be accessible without using coins every time?" Bella asks. "You could make it person-specific, like the pillar and the fairy mound are specific to Elias's descendants. Or, you could just put in a staircase or an elevator and tuck the entrance away somewhere. In case anyone else ever earns the privilege of visiting."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Well, I'll put in stairs," he says, "and make it so you'n'me are the only people who can get to 'em, and if I ever wanna bring anybody else in, I can wish 'em in then."

[self_composed]

"Okay." Bella adds a stairwell that leads down to the central room, and moves the door to the kitchen so it's under the angle of the stairs. She starts drawing squares in the kitchen and labeling them - stove, double-decker oven, fridge and freezer, cupboards and counters and sink. "This is all gonna have to operate by magic. You're not going to be on the grid in your lair. Other furnishings that don't need electricity or water you can wish up separately after you have a feel for the space."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Wonder how much magic it's gonna take," he says, thinking happily of what he might do to provide it.

[self_composed]

"I think it might be possible that you could create an entire sufficiently-designed-in-advance lair with one hex," Bella laughs, "but maybe you'll have to outfit the kitchen and the bathroom with a few pentagons or something." She finishes tiling the kitchen with kitchen implements and moves on to the bathroom.

[edgeofyourseat]

"Pentagons are easy," he says with a lingering look at her stove.

[self_composed]

Bella is mildly amused.

"So, magic sewing machine, magic plumbing, magic kitchen appliances, magic ventilation not by means of device. Out of curiosity, are you planning to go grocery shopping or just wish yourself food?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Probably the wishing," he says. "Don't have to worry about money that way."

[self_composed]

Bella nods. Of course saleable goods can be conjured even with mere squares, but she's not sure how to step that up in volume without attention.

She checks the time. "Angela'll be here soon. I'm not sure whether it's best for her to spot you or not, but I should start playing invalid."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yeah, good plan," he says. "Do you also wanna hide the..." with a gesture at the notebooks full of his childhood.

[self_composed]

"Yeah, probably a good idea." Bella shuts all the notebooks on the table, stacks them, and takes them upstairs; then she flops onto the couch, illusions herself various casts, and says, "I'm actually not sure how I'd let her in if I were as beat up as I'm supposed to look, so maybe you'd better own up to being here after all. I don't want to make her just leave everything in the mailbox for Charlie to bring in."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Sure," says Alice. "Do I need some kind of excuse to be here, or is 'skipping school to hang out with you because I care more about you than school' good enough?"

It has the advantage of being pretty much true, but true and plausible are not always the same thing.

[self_composed]

"You are known to care almost zilch about school," Bella says. "I think it'll do. She might not even solicit an explanation."