universal star visitor brilliant start!

[incanted]

Eventually Bella and Lexi go to bed - they have to coordinate this; Bella's a reasonably sound sleeper but Lexi's not, so if Bella goes to sleep first Lexi won't be able to drop off with all the random nouns and if Bella goes to sleep second Lexi will wake up when she's trying to sneak around. They get up, and they get ready for school.

+Morning, Brilliance,+ says Bella while she's brushing her teeth.

Comments

[cardistry]

"I could probably make a spell for it, why?"

[incanted]

"I just mean normally. There's nothing I need to see through. I just wanted to know if my notebooks or my clothes or whatever are transparent to you, because that'd be awkward."

[cardistry]

"Not visually," he says. "If you put me down on top of a notebook I could probably, I dunno - count how many pages it has, even though I couldn't see them, that kind of thing. And I can tell what's going on around you when I'm in your pocket. Oh," he adds, "and when you wear your Barrier Jacket I kind of am it, but I don't get any human-style senses from it, just movement and damage levels."

[incanted]

"...You are my Barrier Jacket," says Bella.

[cardistry]

"This is one of those things that's not weird to me but it is to you, isn't it," sighs Brilliance.

[incanted]

"Yeah. Apparently it is. If you didn't get that it might be weird why did you specify that you only get 'movement and damage levels'?"

[cardistry]

"I can see why it's weird to you," he says, "I just don't think that way naturally. And it would be weird even for me if I was being your clothes and I got human-style tactile feedback from it."

[incanted]

"Okay. Well - I don't know about that. Had to save the world that one time, we were in a hurry, it's all right that you didn't stop to explain; maybe it won't even come up again."

[cardistry]

"It'll come up if you ever have to fight anybody," says Brilliance. "I don't know if you'll ever have to fight anybody, but if you do, wear the damn Barrier Jacket. It's standard mage gear for a reason. You should probably wear it when we're fucking around with experimental spells too, just to be safe, but it's not as big a deal if nobody's actually flinging lethal damage at your face. ...Although it'll let me monitor your mana consumption better, so..."

[incanted]

"Yeah, if I get into an actual fight go ahead and jacket me, some weirdness is not competitive with being armored. The spells - didn't you say they might do weird things but probably not harmful things? Like if I heal somebody I might get a bizarre result but I won't accidentally hurt them?"

[cardistry]

"If you're trying to make a spell to heal somebody," he says, "you won't accidentally hurt them instead, that's not how magic works. But if you're, I dunno, practicing manipulation of inorganic matter and you lose control of the spell at the wrong moment, you could accidentally drop a big rock on your head. Barrier Jacket'll handle that for you."

[incanted]

"Even though it doesn't come with a hat," Bella says.

[cardistry]

"It's protecting you magically, not physically, is that really hard to understand or something?"

[incanted]

"Well, I'm just not clear on why it involves a costume change at all if that's what it's doing."

[cardistry]

"It has to exist in order to protect you," he says. "And it can't just look like whatever other clothes you're wearing every time you put it on because it takes extra effort and mana to change its form and you don't wanna be doing it every time."

[incanted]

"That doesn't explain why it's an outfit and not an accessory of some kind that can go on over whatever I have on."

[cardistry]

"No idea," he says, "I didn't design the spell. I can tell you right now, though, if I tried to make you some kind of... I dunno, Barrier Necklace... it wouldn't work nearly as well. There is something about being an outfit that makes it better at its job, I just don't know what it is."

[incanted]

"How do you know a Barrier Necklace wouldn't do the job as well?"

[cardistry]

"...It's a device thing," he says. "If I'm familiar with a spell I kind of get a - sense for it, like I can tell what all its parts do. I'm not sure humans even get the relevant channel."

[incanted]

"Doesn't sound like we do, no. Huh."

[cardistry]

"Yeah. So, I can tell you that the being-an-outfit thing is functionally important, I just can't tell you why, or if there even is a sensible reason."

[incanted]

"Fair enough. What other sorts of things do you know in this mysterious devicey way?"

[cardistry]

"...That is a weird question and I don't know how to answer it."

[incanted]

"Okay, how about - why do spell diagrams look like they do, are the shapes functional?"

[cardistry]

"They mean something but they're not directly functional," he says. "The shape is related to the type of magic, but not intrinsically."