something she can use

[alicornucopia]

Ehail blinks, when she finds the bar instead of her room.

She goes in.

She looks out the window, at the exploding things.

"I don't think this is my planet," she observes to herself, tucking silver hair behind her ear.

~~~

with Elysse

with Lazarus

Comments

[prima_sequentem]

"So that seemed to work as expected," says Libby. "Somewhat more than that should get you a four - still not an amount usually associated with serious injury. Fives are about broken-arm level. Sixes are a ways past that. If you don't feel like breaking any limbs, I can probably come up with a magical solution that will let you generate pain more conveniently without damaging anything."

[alicornucopia]

"I don't think you have lights here so it would be inconvenient to have a broken limb if I were going to use it. It's pretty hard to walk on a broken leg or pick up anything heavy with a broken arm." She bites her thumb, just barely not hard enough to break skin, and produces a silver square, then puts both coins on the table.

[prima_sequentem]

"All right." Libby looks thoughtful for a moment, and then a dark purple pentagon flickers briefly into her hand, and in the same moment that it vanishes, an... object... appears on the table. It's a black rectangle with rounded corners, about the size of a pocket calculator, but under the display at the top (which currently reads 0) there are only five buttons, each in the shape of a coin, from three to seven.

She expects that its use is probably self-explanatory, but if Ehail seems confused she can explain.

[alicornucopia]

Ehail picks it up and looks at it. "Do I hold the buttons down or just press them once...?"

[prima_sequentem]

"While you hold down a button, you get the minimum amount of pain required to make the appropriate coin. The number says how much that is, on a scale where one is the minimum for a three. I've never bothered to find out the exact proportions before, so I decided I might as well make it show them while I was at it."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay." Ehail holds the triangle, confirms that it reads '1', and then proceeds up through the other buttons, one at a time. "It goes up by powers of ten," she says, lining up a row of stars on the table calmly.

[prima_sequentem]

"I see that," Libby murmurs.

She scoops up the silver sevens and vanishes them to wherever her coins go.

[nonbird]

...Lazarus blinks at her, but doesn't say anything.

[prima_sequentem]

A moment later, she produces a silver star, holds it for a moment, and then shakes her head and puts it away again.

"It didn't work. But... hmm."

[alicornucopia]

"What didn't work?" asks Ehail, still producing stars one by one.

[prima_sequentem]

"Trying to - complete you, with a seven. But it occurs to me," she says, "that it's very unlikely that anyone has ever tried making the next coin bigger than a seven, if you'd need ten times a seven's worth of pain to get there. So there might be such a thing, and I wouldn't have heard of it. And if there is, and you can make one, it's certainly worth trying."

She produces a second gadget. This one has a sixth button - an octagon with a slightly raised outline and a question mark embossed in the centre, since if there's such a thing as an eight-pointed coin, Libby doesn't know what it looks like.

[alicornucopia]

Ehail puts down the first pocket calculator gadget and picks up the second one and pokes the octagon button.

This one's enough to get her to stiffen a little, but she makes a pointy silver... thing... and puts it on the table. And then another and then another.

[prima_sequentem]

Libby scoops them up, and vanishes them, and...

[nonbird]

Lazarus abruptly sits up straighter. "It worked! You're the rest of a dragon!"

[alicornucopia]

Ehail's eyes open very wide and she stops holding down the octagon button.

"Really?" she says in a small voice.

[nonbird]

"Very definitely really," says Lazarus. "And you are impervious to slurpy contagion. Your magic looks much happier now."

[alicornucopia]

"Can I - is there someplace I can go try - it's not that I don't believe you but -"

[nonbird]

"It would probably be moderately inconvenient for a dragon to be seen flying around above Toronto," he says. "People might be alarmed. Libby? Clever magical solutions?"

[prima_sequentem]

"Coming right up," she says, smiling slightly. "Let's see... I could teleport us to somewhere extremely remote, and make us temporarily invisible to the rest of the world. Would that suit?"

[alicornucopia]

"Yes," says Ehail. "...There aren't any dragons anywhere around, are there? If he's wrong?"

[prima_sequentem]

"There aren't any dragons anywhere around," says Libby. "As far as I know. It seems very unlikely that someone else from this world would happen to have brought a dragon from your world here from Milliways just now and would happen to bring them to the same remote location I teleport us to."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. Oh - um, when I shift there will probably be a few hundred years of lost scales. Is that a problem?"

[prima_sequentem]

"No. I'll teleport us now," she says, and then they are somewhere else. Specifically, they are on a large flat grassy area with no other people and very few notable geographic features in sight.

[nonbird]

"...I did not know Earth locations came in this much flat," says Lazarus, looking around. "That is a lot of flat."

[prima_sequentem]

"I thought it might be reassuring," says Libby. "Now, in the extremely unlikely event that a dragon somehow showed up in this world, we would see them coming from miles away unless they also happened to teleport directly on top of us. But in case of passersby, we're also all invisible to anyone but each other until I take us back."