here goes

[self_composed]

Bella schedules an appointment at Stanford. She breezes through sixteen hours of motorcycle class, mostly by demonstrating that the instructor is redundant and wouldn't he rather teach her exotic motorcycle tricks and then just mark her as passing the course? She plays in a soccer game against a Port Angeles high school and wins. She starts driving her bike to school, and she names it Tegu after a lizard of similar coloring, because it needed a name.

On Friday evening she's due to fly out, crash in a Stanford grad student's house overnight, interview on Saturday, and fly home that evening. She bikes for the airport, black leather gold-studded saddlebags over Tegu's back wheel carrying her luggage.

Comments

[edgeofyourseat]

[Betcha I could make a star.]

He's been trying, but he hasn't been trying very hard. Pain at the hex level is distractingly sexy.

[self_composed]

[I bet you could,] she says. [I don't want to use any stars, yet, until I know why they are dangerous, when the other wishes are so safe to use while paying a modicum of attention.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[That is because you are smart,] Alice says cheerfully.

[self_composed]

[Yep. Also, things on the scale of eradicating malaria will attract attention, and I bet you a clever wishcoiner could find me via some divinatory power as soon as they knew to look. I have to find out more, I have to be more secure and informed. Even though people are dying of malaria right now.] She does not like this.

[edgeofyourseat]

[There's more where those came from,] Alice points out. Death doesn't bother him the way it bothers her. He thinks it would be pretty awesome if she did manage to get rid of it, but he's not going to complain if she doesn't, or if it takes a while.

[self_composed]

[People aren't replaceable like that. Everyone knows this about people they've actually met; you just have to extend it - I mean, there are more people where I came from. I would assume you don't want me to die, at least given that it doesn't appeal to me.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[I'd be fucking wrecked if you died,] he says. His voice is calm, casual; the emotions behind it are anything but. [So?]

He would suffer a lot, but suffering is not exactly new and different for him. And there are seven billion more people on the planet, and odds are there's at least one or two more that he could love this much. If he stuck around long enough to find them.

[self_composed]

[But not if they die of malaria first,] Bella says.

[edgeofyourseat]

[I don't think you're getting this,] Alice says dryly.

People, as individuals, aren't replaceable. Everyone is exactly themselves. The loss of a person is a loss. But except in a very few cases, it's not a loss that Alice personally cares about, and even for those—even for the one he knows would completely take him apart—he doesn't think they are irreplaceable in the sense that the world becomes a permanently worse place every time someone leaves it. It just keeps on being the world, with these people instead of those ones.

[self_composed]

[I lose you around the part where you don't think the world is worse when people are dying of malaria regularly, than it would be if people were not doing that,] Bella says. [I don't individually care about everyone personally - it's just shitty that they have to die, so I care about them impersonally and will see that they stop doing that.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Well, yeah,] says Alice. [And that's awesome. It just doesn't piss me off that a bunch of people are dying right now who wouldn't be if you'd fixed it already.]

[self_composed]

[Well, that's good, because if you were you might have to be pissed off at me.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Yeah, that's not gonna happen.]

Or at least, he can't imagine how.

[self_composed]

[Anyway. I will learn things and meet people and design-and-acquire personal superpowers and find out what the hell is wrong with the stars, and then I will take over the world and I will fix it. Step next: interview at Stanford.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[I love you,] Alice says happily.

[self_composed]

Bella switches to text mode, so she can send him: [:)]

She reaches the airport, and parks Tegu, and boards her plane. [Where are you at?] she asks; he wants to chase the plane, he'll be outside somewhere. [How're you planning to find my plane?]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Well, which one is it?] he asks reasonably, and indulges in idle speculation about a Bella-compass power.

[self_composed]

[I don't know, they all look the same from the inside. This is gate twelve, are the gates numbered on the outside?]

[edgeofyourseat]

He circles.

[Yup! Got it!]

Just for fun, he hovers outside her window.

[self_composed]

Bella eyes him, amused.

[Hello to you too.]

[edgeofyourseat]

He giggles.

[Hi!] he says, waving.

[So, about the breathing thing. What if I want to make it so I don't need to breathe, but I can still feel like I need to breathe?]

[self_composed]

[You're into autoerotic asphyxiation too?] Bella sighs. [Well, you could always decouple the two things - attach the sense of needing to breathe only to how much breathing you've been doing lately, not to how much oxygen that's been getting you. And have oxygenation and de-carbonization handled magically.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Mmm,] he says, and contemplates this with the help of his pentagonal understanding of the human body. [Yeah, that sounds... well, not quite.]

He'd much rather have it work more like the healing power: make a change that always works, except while he is telling it not to. So he can safely enjoy, say, drowning, and as soon as he stops holding off the magical gas exchange, his lungs become irrelevant again; but for things like this flight, he won't be constantly distracted by the thinness of the air.

[self_composed]

[Handling a lungful of water is a different matter from just not breathing,] Bella muses.

[edgeofyourseat]

[Whaddya mean?]