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]

"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.

[alicornucopia]

"Elixirs are not supposed to glow," say Raha dubiously. "Well, most of them."

[missnicegirl]

"I wonder what's wrong with it? Is there a good way to test?"

[alicornucopia]

"Well, we could make an elixir with it and feed it to a mouse, I suppose."

[missnicegirl]

"Poor mouse..."

[alicornucopia]

"It is a little sad, isn't it? But we get our mice from a store that also sells them to be fed to snakes. I think testing elixirs is a nobler occupation," says Raha.

[missnicegirl]

"Well, okay. That makes sense. Okay then."

[alicornucopia]

So (to control for the possibility of introducing more of Matilda's magic into the potion) Raha turns the glowing elixir base into a pep elixir, and fetches a mouse, and feeds the mouse a mouse-sized dose.

[missnicegirl]

The mouse becomes very pepped. Not dangerously so, but in a way that noticeably exceeds the strength of the dose.

[alicornucopia]

"Huh. It seems to have made the elixir stronger. Either that or this is a very peppy mouse. We'll keep an eye on it to see if there are any side effects."

[missnicegirl]

"That's interesting! And it makes a kind of sense, as a side effect of sort of doing the same magic twice on something. I have no explanation for the glow, though. The glow was weird."

[alicornucopia]

"Yes... but the base had the extra magic, not the pep part," says Raha. "I wonder why it made the final potion's effect stronger instead of doing something else?"

[missnicegirl]

"I'm not sure. I wonder if it just... couldn't think of anything better to do? But I'm not sure my magic actually works that way... I'm not sure what sort of a way to work that is."

[alicornucopia]

"Magic here usually doesn't think for itself," muses Raha.

[missnicegirl]

"Mine can learn things. Maybe it sort of knew what things witchcraft does, and making the pep potion stronger was the first thing it could do that was like something witchcraft does and hadn't already been done by real witchcraft?"

[alicornucopia]

"Maybe. I'm trying to think of a potion that is very precisely dosed - it doesn't matter very much for a pep potion, but some things would be worse if they were stronger."

[missnicegirl]

"I have no idea if my magic can learn which things it's appropriate to strengthen," says Matilda. "But now I want to find out!"

[alicornucopia]

"All I'm coming up with are medicines, and those would be a little hard to test on mice when we only have healthy ones."

[missnicegirl]

"Well, there's time to think about it," says Matilda. "I don't think it's very important to find out in a hurry, since I can still do regular witchcraft without any of my magic in it."

[alicornucopia]

"That's true. I'll think about it," agrees Raha.

[missnicegirl]

"This is exciting!" beams Matilda.

[alicornucopia]

"It is!" agrees Raha. "We'll have to think of more experiments and find out how it works."