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

[incanted]

"...How long do you think you'll want to hang around here, I need to know how aggressively to prioritize."

[cardistry]

He sighs.

"Man, I have no idea."

[incanted]

"More or less than a week?" she tries.

[cardistry]

"I don't know," he says fretfully.

[incanted]

"So you might fuck off any second and maybe I should cut school tomorrow?" hazards Bella.

[cardistry]

"I don't - I - maybe," he mutters.

[incanted]

"I should maybe cut school tomorrow? Because learning magic is a higher priority than school in the short term but I wouldn't do it if you were going to be here for a month because it'd make Charlie somewhere between worried and mad and probably wouldn't do my academic prospects any favors and I don't yet know if I'm going to wind up with enough magic to make school redundant."

[cardistry]

Brilliance sighs.

[incanted]

"Okay, if you have no schedule and will produce none, me and this notebook are going to spend ten minutes prioritizing - unless there is a significant risk you will decide to flee to Beijing or wherever in the next ten minutes - and then we can see about making the most of the time you've got to spend on me?" Bella says, tapping up the notebook she's been writing her questions in. She tucks her feet between herself and the desk chair and starts scribbling.

[cardistry]

He stays quiet.

[incanted]

"Have you been on Earth long?" she asks conversationally while she's drawing arrows between and numbering various questions.

[cardistry]

"Oh... probably a hundred years or so," he says vaguely. "I wasn't really counting."

[incanted]

"No wonder you weren't substantially baffled by anime references." Write write.

[cardistry]

"Yeah, seen some of that," he says. "It's amazing all the shit you pick up as a pack of cards."

[incanted]

"I guess Lexi found you in Jessica's house? How are you even hearing anything? Do you see? Smell? Feel?"

[cardistry]

"Yeah," he says. "I don't know, how do you hear anything? I hear stuff by hearing it."

[incanted]

"I hear stuff with my ears. If something went wrong with my ears, I couldn't hear anymore," says Bella. "You don't have ears."

[cardistry]

"That's weird," he says. "I hear stuff with magic."

[incanted]

"If something went wrong with your magic would you not be able to hear anymore?" inquires Bella, still scribbling away with most of her attention.

[cardistry]

"...I think that's kind of like asking you 'if something went wrong with your body would you not be able to hear anymore?'," says Brilliance. "I mean, yes? Maybe? Kind of? Depends what? But that is not the likeliest problem. I don't really have likely problems; I'm supposed to be indestructible."

[incanted]

"You come apart," she points out. "What happens if someone separates your cards in any of various possible ways?"

[cardistry]

"As long as I'm not frantically pushing myself apart from the inside, nothing," he says.

[incanted]

"So if Jessica played solitaire with you and lost the ace of spades down an air vent or whatever this basically had no effect."

[cardistry]

The ace of spades slides out of the deck, flies across the room, and teleports back with a quick flash of Brilliance's spell-circle.

"Nope."

[incanted]

"And I'd ask what happens if somebody bent or tore a card but if you might decide to go check out Mexico City or some completely other planet any second now," she says, putting her pencil down, "that's not where I wanna start; it's pretty generous of you to stick around at all now that the world is apparently no longer in danger of losing structural integrity. So what I want to know about is scaling. Can I give magic-ability to other people?"