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

[missnicegirl]

"Yeah!"

[alicornucopia]

"Hmm. Well, I was going to save this for a surprise, but over the last few weeks Kerah and I have been working on a wizard spell called an analysis that we think ought to be able to look right at your magic and see what it's doing. We'll probably have a first version ready to try in a couple of days, and maybe then we can get some answers."

[missnicegirl]

"That's so cool! How does it work? I want to hear all about it!"

[alicornucopia]

"Analyses are pretty advanced wizardry. If you can teach your magic to do any simple wizard spell we can get into the curriculum and work up to complicated stuff, how about?" chuckles Terali. "But I can cast the analysis on you when it's ready, if you like, and you can look at your own magic with it."

[missnicegirl]

"That sounds like fun!"

[alicornucopia]

"Mm-hm! And as long as I've gone and got you all excited about analyses I can look up one for witchcraft and you can look at that while you work."

[missnicegirl]

"That will be really nice and really useful, I bet, because I have to check now whether I'm doing real witchcraft or the witchcraft my magic learned that might not be the same at all."

[alicornucopia]

"Well, there you go. If the analysis can see it, it's real witchcraft."

Terali goes and looks that up and then casts it and hands Matilda off to Raha.

[missnicegirl]

"Hi, Raha! We need to be extra careful today because I think my magic learned how to do witchcraft and I don't know what happens if my magic and Elcenia's magic are doing it at the same time," she explains. "I think I'm mostly going to try to only do the Elcenian kind, but I also want to try my magic's kind some to see how they're different."

[alicornucopia]

"Your magic learned how to do witchcraft?" asks Raha, furrowing her brow.

[missnicegirl]

"Yeah! Witchcraft didn't work at all on Earth before, but I got it to work there this morning, except that doing it felt like doing my own magic and not like doing real witchcraft."

[alicornucopia]

"Huh! How strange. I wonder if it learned the whole thing or just the parts you know?" asks Raha. "We could find out. I could give you a recipe with ingredients you haven't learned yet to try at home and not tell you what it does."

[missnicegirl]

"Ooh," says Matilda, lighting up. "Yeah! More than one, to really make sure, I think."

[alicornucopia]

"All right. I'll fix that up while you're working on your vitamin potion, how about?"

[missnicegirl]

"Sure!"

Matilda works very conscientiously on her vitamin potion. She is fascinated by the new look at wizardry she gets through the analysis spell, and as far as she can tell she isn't doing any extra magic on top of the witchcraft.

[alicornucopia]

And Raha finds some advanced but basically safe recipes with exotic ingredients, and copies them over without too many hints about what they are supposed to make.

[missnicegirl]

Matilda double-checks that all of the ingredients are things she has heard of or expects to be available on Earth. (Her vitamin potion is coming along beautifully. She is an excellent student.)

[alicornucopia]

Some of the ingredients are not things she has on Earth. Raha packs up little jars of those for her.

[missnicegirl]

Home she goes with her little jars.

Over the next two days she completes her homework, and then she comes back with all of the potions finished. They all came together fine, but of course she needs Raha to verify that because she doesn't know what any of them are supposed to do.

[alicornucopia]

Raha investigates! Are they respectively a painkiller, something that clears smoke out of a roomful of air when misted, and a purple hair dye? (She has a mouse to test the first and last on.)

[missnicegirl]

They are exactly those things!

"Did they all work right?"

[alicornucopia]

"They did! That's very interesting."

[missnicegirl]

"It is!" agrees Matilda.

[alicornucopia]

And it has been long enough that while Matilda is still at her witchcraft lesson, the wizards turn up with a finished draft of an analysis for Matilda's own magic.

They have already cast it on themselves; they cast it on her.

[missnicegirl]

Matilda's magic is something that she goes around having a lot of all the time, even when she isn't doing anything in particular with it.

When she floats some objects by way of demonstration, her magic acts upon the objects while she's floating them, and then slowly fades from the objects after she sets them down.

When she whips up a batch of elixir base being very careful to do only witchcraft, her magic doesn't interact with it particularly.

When she whips up a batch of elixir base using witchcraft as well as her magic, her magic acts on it while she's working and sticks to it afterward, and in addition, the liquid has a faint shimmery glow that elixir base is not normally known to have.

"Well, that's interesting," says Matilda, peering at it.