exploratory kidnapping

[alicornucopia]

In this room are two women, one gray and sixty years old, one just thirty and red-haired, both wearing elaborate outfits. The younger casts a spell.

In this room is now also a third person. (On whom the elder woman promptly also casts a spell, which she had at the ready.)

Comments

[alicornucopia]

"Oh, that's very interesting," muses Terali. "Not necessarily useful, but interesting."

[missnicegirl]

"Useful for what?" wonders Matilda.

[alicornucopia]

"It's not something we could learn," Kerah explains, "or teach anyone else."

[missnicegirl]

"Well," says Matilda, "I could ask Miss Honey if I can come to your world to take witchcraft lessons, and if she says yes and you find me witchcraft lessons then when I figure out how people start having magic I'll tell you."

[alicornucopia]

"There are some people we'd have to ask about that," says Terali.

"Who's Miss Honey?" asks Kerah.

[missnicegirl]

"She's my adoptive mother since last year, and she's in charge of the school I go to."

[alicornucopia]

"Then she'd definitely be one of the people we'd have to ask. Is she going to be upset that you've vanished from wherever you were?" asks Terali.

[missnicegirl]

"Not immediately, she wasn't in the room or anything, but she will if she looks for me and can't find me at all. Can you come home with me to talk to her?"

[alicornucopia]

"That's not part of our exploration protocol, but we can send you home with a letter and then summon the letter," suggests Kerah.

[missnicegirl]

"Okay."

[alicornucopia]

Kerah gets some paper (it's square) and a stick of graphite (it doesn't leave any smears on her hands). "What's your language called, Matilda?" she asks, turning a few pages in a nearby book.

[missnicegirl]

"English. Why?"

[alicornucopia]

"Because now I can cast a spell on myself that will let me write a letter in it. It might come out a little funny, but it should be readable." Kerah casts the spell, and starts writing.

"We can just send this along after we send you back," says Terali. "You don't have to wait. How long should we give Miss Honey to write a reply on the back of the letter?"

[missnicegirl]

"I think an hour would definitely be enough."

[alicornucopia]

"How long is an hour?" asks Terali.

[missnicegirl]

"Well, an hour is sixty minutes and a minute is sixty seconds, but I don't have a clock with me..."

[alicornucopia]

Terali casts a spell; now there are numbers in midair. "The fastest-moving number is splits, then ticks. Is a second close to one of those amounts of time?"

[missnicegirl]

Matilda peers at the numbers. "It looks like a split is about the same thing as a second."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. Then we'll give you an angle and a half to leave plenty of time," says Kerah, "and then take the letter back."

"Ready to go home?" asks Terali.

[missnicegirl]

"Okay! Where will you put the letter?"

[alicornucopia]

"It'll just land right in your lap," says Kerah.

And Terali casts something and Matilda is back where they got her from.

[missnicegirl]

Well, that was interesting.

She puts her book away and goes to find Miss Honey.

[alicornucopia]

It will take a couple minutes before the letter lands in her lap.

[missnicegirl]

By that time she has found Miss Honey.

"An interesting thing just happened and I'm not quite sure how to explain," she says.

"Well, start at the beginning," Miss Honey prompts.

"I was sitting in my room reading, and then I was on the floor of a strange room with a glowing ceiling and two grown-ups looking at me. They said I was in a world called Elcenia and they brought me there with magic, which they called 'wizardry', because they were looking for other worlds with interesting things in them. I told them a little bit about the things I can do, which I think probably count as magic for their purposes. They said there's a kind of magic there that they think I can learn, it's called witchcraft and people make headache cures and shampoo with it."

And then the letter appears on the floor in front of her, and she picks it up and opens it. "This is a letter from the wizards."

[alicornucopia]

The letter says,

Dear Miss Honey,

Apologies for any incorrect spelling or grammar in this letter resulting from the translation spell. We apologize for any inconvenience resulting from our summoning your daughter; we didn't seek her out specifically. We are potentially interested in an ongoing exchange of information and magic between our worlds. We will summon this piece of paper back in about an hour if you wish to render any reply.

It is signed in not-the-Latin-alphabet.