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]

[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.]

[self_composed]

[Yeah, I think you just did it backwards,] Bella says. [Dang. I might feedback-loop on that, tomorrow morning.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Oooh, fun,] Alice says happily, snuggling into a towel.

[self_composed]

[That's a word for it, yes. Say, as long as I'm designing the power - I'm inventing arbitrary units so I can compare various instances of it with each other, and so on - remember the test with the square? That was just - plain. Would you like the power to be not-plain? Come in various flavors? Like ice cream.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[Yeah!] he says enthusiastically. [That would be awesome.]

Ice cream pain. Bella is the best.

[self_composed]

[Such as?] Bella says. [I'm liable to neglect something, but presumably you know what you like.]

[edgeofyourseat]

[I like everything,] he says. [And I am nowhere near as good as you at listing stuff. And there's bound to be stuff I haven't even tried yet that I'll like.]

(And he is not totally sure that she really wants him to start listing ways he likes to hurt, because it is all about the details, and Bella has historically seemed to think the details are kind of gross. Also, it gets pretty sexual in a lot of ways, but that seems to be less of a problem now.)

[self_composed]

[Okay. If I miss anything, a pentagon'll add it in if we want,] Bella says. And she composes a list. [Whether you gave me ideas or I come up with them myself they still enter my head, you realize.]

Let's see. There's heat, obviously. Cold. Acid. Is base meaningfully different? Meh, she includes it as its own thing; may as well. Electricity. Various flavors of more mechanical injury - cuts, bludgeons, puncture wounds, crushing, tearing, cramping, scraping. She's not sure how some of these will scale up, but magic is very good at that sort of thing.

And she includes "plain", too.

[edgeofyourseat]

Well, now Alice is thinking about all the subtle flavours of sharp: knife, glass, wire, different kinds of knives, where you put it—it all makes a difference.

[self_composed]

[Ah, so we're not going vanilla-chocolate-strawberry here, you want mango gelato with coconut flakes too.] Bella goes back to her mental list and adds shades of nuance. If Alice sees a meaningful difference between being incinerated in a furnace and branded with a soldering iron he may as well be allowed to enjoy those fine distinctions.

[edgeofyourseat]

[I love you,] he giggles, hugging himself, and finally heads back to his room to curl up in bed.