so there was this deck of cards, right

[lexicality]

Jessica's house is cute. Lexi could see doing a lot of her homework here, listening to the calming chatter of gossip and getting help from Jessica on math (Bella's no help there) and helping Jessica on English. Forks isn't so bad. She doesn't mind the rain as much as Bella does.

Jessica goes to pee before they even start their assignment, after just introducing Lexi to her mom and dad as "one of Chief Swan's kids", and Lexi doesn't want to do work by herself or she wouldn't have come over in the first place. She sits on the couch and plunks her bag down and waits. There's a random deck of cards over there; she picks it up and flips through it. She's been trying to learn to bridge-shuffle.

Comments

[lexicality]

"I'll drive," Lexi says, hopping into the relevant seat, "you geek out with magic with your new superweapon."

[cardistry]

Brilliance sighs and tucks himself into Bella's pocket.

[incanted]

Bella has quietly willed herself back into her normal clothes while Lexi was making excuses to Jessica, and does now in fact have pockets; she climbs into the passenger seat. "So - why the profane incantation?" she asks. "Where'd that come from? Where do incantations in general come from?"

[cardistry]

"Spells are named the first time you use 'em," says Brilliance. "And if you don't make an incantation on purpose, it ends up being something you were thinking or saying at the time."

[incanted]

"Did you make that one up today or did you already have an energy blast spell when I found you?"

[cardistry]

"Made it up today," he says. "I've got other energy blast spells, but I didn't use any of 'em."

[incanted]

"Are either me or Lexi in any danger of accidentally casting spells?"

[cardistry]

"Uh... maybe? I don't really know," he says. "Probably not big ones. But if I were you I wouldn't go around wishing really hard for somebody to take a lightning bolt to the face unless you actually wanna throw one."

[incanted]

"But not just by talking; if I decide to curse someone out I'm not going to knock them through a wall with pretty colored lights? It'd be a wished-for result?"

[cardistry]

"Yeah," he agrees. "I can say 'fuck you' until my cards turn white again and nobody's gonna get blasted unless I'm trying for it."

[incanted]

"Okay. So spells happen if magic people want stuff enough - then why haven't we ever cast things before?"

[cardistry]

"Maybe because it's way harder without a device," he says, "I know that's true. Maybe because you didn't want things enough, or didn't want them the right way, or didn't know you could do it."

[incanted]

"What do devices do to make it easier? And is there someplace we can go get them? Ones that don't have other plans, I mean."

[cardistry]

"Not this planet, that's for sure," he says. "I've felt other devices around, but never more than a handful at a time, and I'm pretty sure they were just visiting."

[incanted]

"Okay, so we get to do without at least till we manage to travel between planets. Is that generally pretty doable or are we going to be stuck?"

[cardistry]

"I have no idea," he says. "It's easy for me. But I'm not, you know, hugely keen on meeting anybody who manufactures devices for a living, considering what my manufacturers thought of me."

[incanted]

"Are they all intelligent?"

[cardistry]

"Yes... maybe? Kind of? Depends what you mean by intelligent. I mean, at one end there's me, and at the other end there's what amounts to a baseball bat that takes voice commands."

[incanted]

"Well, that's kind of - dodgy, I guess, but I'd be surprised if literally all of them resented what they do."

[cardistry]

"The more powerful the device, the more it can think for itself," says Brilliance. "At least, I'm pretty sure. I haven't met that many devices."

[incanted]

"Are you really going to go find someplace to hang out and do nothing?" asks Bella after a silence.

[lexicality]

"Oh, so you are gonna lecture it," snorts Lexi.

[incanted]

"No. Well. Not very much. But if it's that dramatically easier to do magic with device help, and if they're hard to come by and potentially resentful anyway, it's worth trying to talk one into it."

[cardistry]

"...I dunno," Brilliance admits. "I mean, the one thing I know for sure I wanna do with my future is not blow up any inhabited planets; past that, I haven't really thought about it much."

[incanted]

"Well, for the short term, it's very kind of you to help us figure out the magic we command ourselves, anyway."