high school is kind of boring really

[self_composed]

School plods along. Bella is native-quality fluent in Spanish, professor-level at math, well and thoroughly versed in the workings of the United States government, capable of doing actual independent research projects in biology, and she's been speaking English since she was one. Alas, these skills only make classes easier for a short time. After the novelty wears off they're just tedious. Bella winds up squaring her homework done more often than not so she can work out the kinks in her design for telekinesis, or play music, or attend soccer practice, or write little computer games, or read, or just fly around. This works out fine. Magic is pretty good at homework.

She winds up not attending most of the dances, but she does want to go to the end of year one, as she will be leaving Forks High School forever and it has some good points. Alice promised her a dress...

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[edgeofyourseat]

[It is,] he agrees, leaning against the shower wall and humming to himself.

[self_composed]

[So you can make stars. Even without... help. I should start thinking of ways to learn about what the matter with them is supposed to be,] muses Bella.

[edgeofyourseat]

[I wouldn't wanna to do it like that all the time,] he says, [but yeah, I can make stars.]

He runs his hand along the line of new hexagons, clicking them together, and then counts the points of the stars with his fingertips. It's really something, having these physical manifestations of pain.

(She meant something else with that pause, he's sure, but—she did help, in a way. She was absolutely a part of that experience, and not just because she was watching. It was for her and about her even if it wasn't with her.)

[self_composed]

[If there's a level of pain that makes you say you wouldn't wanna do it all the time, should I install a ceiling after all?] Bella asks. [I haven't wished up the power yet.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Nope,] he says happily. [It's like—you liked that maple-caramel-coconut-butter cake we made, but you wouldn't wanna live on it, right?]

[self_composed]

[Fair enough, but if that's all you meant I'm not sure why you mentioned it. Seems to go without saying.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Maybe it doesn't mean the same thing to you, then.]

What he meant by it was: there are things that are intense, and glorious because they're so intense, but by the same token too intense to make a casual part of your daily routine. Cutting a half-dozen hexagons out of himself is a casual part of his daily routine by now; this never will be. But it's still something he likes and wants and would hate to miss out on.

[self_composed]

[Oh. I wouldn't mind having desserts as nice as that cake on a daily basis.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[So I guess it was a bad example,] he says, amused.

[self_composed]

[Apparently. I'd get bored of Disneyland if I went too often?] Bella suggests instead.

She pauses, then says, [You realize that a primary benefit of the pain power will be the ability to jack up volume for when I can start doing big obvious things like curing malaria, so ideally that wouldn't bother you. But you already pour out way more coins than I could reasonably ask of anyone, so if it does I'll see about getting creative. It's possible that I could just render mosquitoes extinct without damaging the ecology too much, if not with a direct kill-the-bugs wish then with a designer virus or something.]

[edgeofyourseat]

Awww. Alice loves her. He loves her because she wants more coins out of him and he loves her because she doesn't just want to take them; he loves her because she's going to cure malaria and he loves her because she has no experience that relates sensibly to what it's like to set yourself on fire and burn through skin into flesh.

He suspects, though, that he's going to like it even more when she does it. And he already liked it a lot.

Humming to himself, he gets up and turns off the shower.

[self_composed]

[Well, antagonizing you with unwanted all-consuming pain attacks and then swiping your coins? Probably not the best recipe for long-term cooperation, which is more important. That and I like you, and liking you precludes torturing you without you being into that. Heck, if you asked me last year I'd say it precluded torturing people at all, but you're just that weird.]

Pause. [And I could know what it was like, sort of, if I opened up the memory - just have no reason to do that.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[You were looking,] he says. [How much did you get?]

[self_composed]

[It was a very very large lightning-bolt symbol,] Bella says.

[edgeofyourseat]

He laughs. [Yeah, I'll bet. But I mean—how much it hurt and what it was like to hurt that much are two different things.]

[self_composed]

[What do you mean?]

[edgeofyourseat]

...Alice begins to think they might be speaking at cross purposes a little.

[Okay, what did you get, other than a great big lightning bolt?]

[self_composed]

[It was surrounded in its affect-gray, and there were some verbal tracks - mostly in my color or the magic's, not yours, so I guess you weren't really generating words - and there was the emotion-blob. I could open the emotion-blob,] she suggests.

[edgeofyourseat]

[Might help. What was in the verbal tracks?]

Because no, he was definitely not generating words, but he wonders what words were getting generated for him.

[self_composed]

[My name, a few times, tagged with footnotes I didn't open and surrounded in a very lovely pale affect-gray. Stuff about the quality and location of the pain - that it was fire or that the water was interacting with it in various ways, like that.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Huh,] says Alice, musingly. [Well, maybe it'll be in the emotion-blob, then.]

It'd be kind of weird if her mind-reading managed to miss the quality of that experience. But Alice finds that he can't even really figure out whether it was a thought or a feeling or what. It's important, he knows that much. Maybe it wasn't something he thought at the time, but only occurred to him later?

[self_composed]

[Here goes.] Bella scans backwards in his memories, finds the blob, and pokes at it.

Ecstatic submersion in experience bursts across Bella's mind like a paintball to the gut. It's crushing and drowning and utterly fantastic.

It doesn't last forever. [If there was a drug that did that, it would be illegal and everyone would take it anyway,] Bella opines.

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice cracks up.

[Yeah, now you've got it.]

[self_composed]

[I think, like, enlightened Buddhist monks are supposed to be able to induce that state. Only that's about not-experiencing things more than it is about experiencing things. Also it takes them a long time to figure out how to do it.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Looks like I found a shortcut. Maybe not, though, 'cause that was definitely about experiencing things.]