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]

"Hell, if I hex up perfect memory for myself, it'll be true," Alice says with a shrug. "Fucking hard to disprove it then. No way I could've kept journals all this time, though; he searches all my shit whenever he can stand to deal with the mess." Which is very infrequently these days, but not totally unheard-of, and was much more common back when he had fewer possessions to leave lying around in the first place.

Oh, thinking of which— "Does shit like going through my clothes and throwing out all the stuff I actually like count for this kinda thing? He's done that a few times."

[self_composed]

"...No, I don't think so," Bella says. "It should, but I'm not actually sure that teenagers have property rights, legally speaking, even though decent people pretend we have as a polite fiction. The occasion around Christmas is more ambiguous... but still ambiguous. We'll leave that one up to the lawyer." She writes it down in the second notebook, after two line breaks. "Anything else?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yeah, figures. In that case, nah, I think that's it."

When he looks at the notebooks, he's not sure whether to be surprised it took that much or surprised it didn't take more.

[self_composed]

Bella gets a tricolor highlighter from the junk drawer, and goes through them all again and highlights the ones that left marks - or injuries that might turn up in a sufficiently thorough medical exam, and then in another color highlights the ones that were related to particularly jury-baitish incidents and not things like wearing dresses or swiping Mrs. Hammond's lipstick. "Lawyer'll do the rest. We'll talk to Charlie when he comes home." She checks the time. "I think it is lunchtime now."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yeah," says Alice, "I think so too. ...Aw, fuck, I forgot to bring anything."

[self_composed]

Bella shrugs. "I'm not in the mood for anything more complicated than cold cuts on rye, and we have those. Sound good?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Sure."

[self_composed]

Bella fixes sandwiches - she polishes off the roast beef, so Alice gets salami. They eat. Om nom nom.

[edgeofyourseat]

Over lunch, Alice finds himself considering the possibilities of an underground lair.

He concludes pretty quickly that he had better get Bella's help designing the place. And maybe also building it.

[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.