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

[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?]

[self_composed]

[Well, how are you planning to get the water out? Just coughing and coughing for a few minutes? And it can't be good for salinity either.] She's poking his medical skill now. [Whether it's freshwater or salt. If you just refrain from breathing, you don't have that problem. If you want to be able to inhale any random substance and suffer pleasantly and then cease at a moment of your choosing, you're looking at something more complicated.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Square,] he says succinctly. [It's not like I'm gonna take up drowning as a hobby.]

[self_composed]

[I couldn't reasonably have guessed that,] Bella points out. [Putting a swimming pool in your lair and drowning five times a day, six on Sundays, is exactly the sort of thing you would do. Anyway. I still think it makes the most sense to tie your subjective sensations to how much breathing you've been getting done - make that the state of affairs when you suppress the power, so normally it won't trouble you, normally you'll feel fine and oxygenated - and meanwhile render breathing biologically irrelevant.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Yeah, but the effects of not having enough oxygen are actually a part of the experience,] he argues. [Why fake it when I don't have to?]

Also, there is no way on Earth he would keep to a routine anywhere near that regular. But that's kind of beside the point.

[self_composed]

[So you don't pass out by miscalibrating?] Bella says. [You can't make any wishes - such as taking the water out of your lungs and preventing it from doing whatever nasty stuff water will do in your lungs, preventing breathing aside - if you pass out.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[It's not actually gonna kill me, though.] Or at least the risk of it doing so is acceptably low. [So I can just fix it later.]

[self_composed]

[How about this: three states for the power,] Bella says. [By default, you don't need to breathe, but you will anyway if you're not paying attention, so you don't freak out observers. Change it on purpose, and you can inhale whatever you want, suffer the usual effects uninhibited, fun stuff. Fall unconscious, and you don't need to breathe anymore and your body will not automatically try to do it in case that would make things worse, but will expel whatever's in your lungs at the time.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Unconscious as distinct from sleeping, because that could get awkward fast.]

[self_composed]

[I'm not sure how distinct passing out due to oxygen deprivation and sleep actually are,] Bella says. Her plane is starting to taxi. [But I guess magic is pretty good at telling those kinds of things apart.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Yeah, they are actually not that similar,] says Alice.

He double-checks the power, holding the whole thing in his head to see if it feels like he missed anything. Nope. Okay.

A hexagon disappears from his necklace, and he experimentally holds his breath.

[self_composed]

Good timing, too, the plane's starting to take off. [Well?]

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice giggles over brainphone and gives her a thumbs-up.

[self_composed]

Bella smirks and starts trying to nap on the plane.

[edgeofyourseat]

It turns out that Alice has absolutely no problem keeping pace with Bella's window. He also feels absolutely no need to breathe, although he tries it once the plane levels off, just to see what happens. It feels kinda weird. No suffocation, though.

Whee!

[self_composed]

It's a medium-sized flight. Bella gets off at the San Francisco airport and meets the helpful grad student who's hosting her overnight. [Blue Camry,] she informs Alice, when said grad student has showed Bella to her car in the parking lot. [Parking lot A.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Oh, like I know what one of those looks like,] he says, and contemplates whether he would rather have encyclopedic knowledge of cars or a Bella-compass. Definitely the second one.

[self_composed]

[That seems awfully narrow. Why not just a general tracking power?]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Okay, a person-compass,] Alice amends. [But I don't wanna always know where everyone is. That would get old fast. So a person-compass that tells me where somebody is if I ask it.]

He burns the hex, focuses on Bella, and follows his shiny new directional sense to the car in question.

[self_composed]

The grad student, whose name is Myra, pulls out onto the road. Bella makes small talk, about what she's studying (programming), and shows off a little in case anyone is going to ask this girl what the prospective student she hosted was like. Or in case she'll go on to be useful in her own right.

[What are you going to do overnight?] Bella asks Alice.

[edgeofyourseat]

[Fucked if I know,] he says serenely.

[self_composed]

[Okay. It isn't going to involve breaking into Myra's apartment, because that would be creepy,] Bella informs him.