ultimate twin sacrifice motion, set up!

[incanted]

Bella spends much of the flight from Phoenix wishing that she had not been able to convince Lexi to come with her.

Of course it would have been pointless if they didn't both go; the idea is to give Renée freedom of movement, and she'd be nearly as likely to stay home with one daughter as with both. So Bella worked on Lexi, and Lexi agreed, and they presented a united front, and now Bella has to actually move to Forks. At least there's only another year and a half before she can abscond to college and go wherever she wants. (She hopes Lexi will come too, but of course there's no guarantee they'll go to the same college, even though their school grades are about comparable.)

They're in all the same classes here even though they weren't in Phoenix. This is just as well; they naturally divide introduction duties between themselves, explaining each other's nicknames as need be to anyone who refers to the one of them while addressing the other ("No, she goes by Bella." "It's not Alexandra, it's Lexi.") and swap interlocutors when one of them has an interest that matches better up with the other sister. They're going to wind up sharing the same circle of friends, but by the end of the day it's clear that Jessica and Mike are going to be mostly Lexi's, and Angela and Eric are going to be mostly Bella's, and that's assuming they stick to the people who most friendly-like introduced themselves on day one. They aren't allowed to pair up in bio with each other ("you should make friends here!" the teacher encourages), so Bella gets Angela and Lexi gets a random boy who doesn't seem to want to be friends outside of class. In gym, Lexi makes Bella's excuses for her, and Bella is allowed to sit out. Bella wouldn't have wanted to try to explain her issues with gravity and her own limbs without an obviously un-self-interested twin to run interference. She probably would have had to bring in her freaking medical records. Bella spends gym class on a mat stretching and doing bodyweight exercises while Lexi plays basketball. Lexi's not exactly an athlete, but she's not an ambulance ride waiting to happen either.

At the end of class, Bella offers to run both of their paperwork to the office when Lexi says she wants to catch a ride to Jessica's house and get caught up in Government. Bella prefers to work out of the textbook and doesn't want to accompany her; she'll hit the office then drive their shared beat-up old-new station wagon (thanks, Charlie!) home and Lexi can get a ride home in time for dinner from Jessica's mom.

Bella folds up the mat, and a pair of scuffed old playing cards falls out. She picks them up - what, did someone play Go Fish on this mat and never bother collecting their jokers? - pockets them to toss later, and puts away the mat.

Comments

[cardistry]

"Okay," says the pair of jokers. "It's simple. You pick me up and hold me and accept me as your weapon, there's some snazzy special effects, then I do a search spell and we go find the rest of me and overwhelm it with magical damage until it shuts down. I'm pretty sure if I reintegrate at that point, I can rip the program out by the roots, and then there's no more problem and you can go back to whatever you were doing when I said hey."

[incanted]

"Can I get my sister to sanity-check me - will she be able to see the special effects?"

[cardistry]

"Anybody can see the special effects."

[incanted]

"Okay. What's the approximate percent risk per hour of someone else finding the rest of you?"

[cardistry]

"I have no idea," the voice says promptly. "I think I felt another magical signature around here somewhere today, and last I saw it about a year ago, the rest of the deck was still in this town; it doesn't move around as easily as I do. So there's somebody wandering around that it might be able to use, and they might find each other any minute, but as to when that'll be or if it'll even happen, your guess is just about as good as mine."

[incanted]

"This doesn't, like run in families or anything, does it?"

[cardistry]

"Man, do I look like a genetics expert?" it demands.

[incanted]

"You look like the discard pile for a game of gin rummy," Bella says. "How the hell should I know what you're an expert on? I'm calling my sister, I'll pick her up, we'll do special effects, if they happen we'll go from there." She pulls out her phone and starts dialing.

[cardistry]

The pair of jokers laughs good-naturedly.

[incanted]

The phone rings, and rings, and Lexi doesn't pick up. Bella flips her phone closed. "She must be busy. Or she let it die again. Homeward, I think. Have you got a name?" she asks, buckling her seatbelt and turning the keys in the ignition.

[cardistry]

"Yeah," it says, in dare-you-to-comment tones. "Brilliance."

[incanted]

"I'm Bella," says Bella. She has no idea why he'd use that tone of voice; it's not like she has any idea what constitutes a normal name for a deck of cards. She pulls out of the parking lot. "If you can rip out the program that destroys planets, why didn't you do it before?"

[cardistry]

"...I honestly have no idea how to explain," says Brilliance. "Your language doesn't have words for it. I'm not sure there's a language that does. Uh, let's try... it was supposed to be a part of me I could never remove. Until we split apart, it was. Now that we're apart, I can't take back the part of me that it stole unless I beat it up a whole lot first, but once I do it should be weak enough for me to wipe it out."

[incanted]

"As long as we're waiting for Lexi to confirm that I don't belong in a padded room, let's have some storytime," Bella says.

[cardistry]

Brilliance sighs.

"Sure," it says. "So once upon a time, there was a bunch of pretty nasty people who wanted an indescribably powerful magical weapon. They made me. Trouble is, indescribably powerful magical weapons can think for themselves, and I do more of that than most of us. They weren't so keen on that part, so they had all kinds of ways to keep me in line. One of them was just jamming a control program directly into my mind."

[incanted]

"Well, that sucks," says Bella. "...What do indescribably powerful magical weapons do when they have their control programs ripped out at the roots, dare I ask?"

[cardistry]

"Never met another one," it says. "Me, I have no idea. I just know I really don't want to destroy another planet."

[incanted]

"...Another planet."

[cardistry]

"Remember how I said the people who made me were all dead?" it says flatly. "Their other favourite way to control me was torture. One day somebody forgot to lock down my power output while they were at it. I blasted the planet in half."

[incanted]

"...How inhabited a planet are we talking about here?"

[cardistry]

"Probably a couple thousand people," he says. "I never met most of 'em; they kept me at the bottom of a deep dark hole. It wasn't populated like this world or some of the others I've seen. Think that's why they set up shop there."

[incanted]

"And you killed them all."

[cardistry]

"Yep," he says. "And I'm not sorry. But I'll be happy if I never have to do it again."

[incanted]

"Christ."

[cardistry]

"What?" says Brilliance belligerently. "It happened centuries before you were born, so even if you have a brilliant idea about how else I could have gotten loose, it doesn't make any difference now."