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

[edgeofyourseat]

"Ooh," says Alice. He wriggles a little in his seat, as though trying to find the point of contact, and then settles. "Yeah. That. That's nice. I like that."

[self_composed]

"Enough that we shouldn't spend a few more squares and minutes trying other ideas?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"You can if you want, but I like it," he says. "Up to you if you wanna try to find something I'll like more."

[self_composed]

She shrugs. "We'll go with this one. I bet I can modify it later with a pentagon at the most, if I have a better idea."

She moves on to the next parameter in her now-purely-mental list, which is how all this will feel to her.

[edgeofyourseat]

"'Kay," he says contentedly.

[self_composed]

"What are your thoughts like?" Bella asks. "Verbal, visual...?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Not usually," he says. "Well, visual sometimes, like when I'm drawing. And verbal sometimes too, I guess. But mostly they're just," he makes an open-handed gesture of helplessness in the face of inadequate vocabulary, "thoughts."

[self_composed]

"I'm leaning towards a visual channel - superimposed on my peripheral vision maybe - but if your thoughts aren't going to readily translate into words or pictures that could be a problem. Hmm."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yeah, not really," he says. "Like, when I remember something I remember all of it, not just what it looked like."

[self_composed]

Bella's composing multidimensional charts in her brain now. She likes her new memory. "This is starting to feel like what I imagine designing a complicated new computer program would be like," she says. As an afterthought, she expends a pentagon on programming skills. They might help.

[edgeofyourseat]

"Whatcha got so far?" he wonders.

[self_composed]

"The reason I don't want to read your thoughts in 'thought form', so to speak, is that I think it might get confusing - my memory's not going to fool me anymore, but thinking someone else's thoughts directly still might. So I want to have a basic text channel to just read, with pictures where pictures go - but that won't cover everything. So now I'm inventing symbols to stand in for various things that text and pictures might fail to handle, and if I'm curious about one I want to be able to mentally poke it and open it up, and attaching that opening to a unique action should make it clear that the thought behind the symbol is yours and not mine. I'll probably want to be able to open up words or phrases, and the pictures, too, for more detail - the text and images are just a first pass." She tilts her head. "Do you want any more fine detail on your end - to know what I'm opening up and what I'm just skimming?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Sure, might as well," he says. "That'll be fun."

[self_composed]

"Okay. I guess the obvious way to communicate that is just with a plain intensification of the regular signal, when I poke something."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Sure!"

[self_composed]

"I guess the trouble with this plan boils down to my cognitive speed." She hmmms thoughtfully. "I wonder if there are any disadvantages to just ramping that up as fast as a hex'll take it."

[edgeofyourseat]

"You will get bored as shit," Alice predicts.

[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.