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

[alicornucopia]

The baby looks at her skeptically.

"Do it, Kytheen," says Jensal sharply (picking up a ruby, too, but not handing him over yet) and Kytheen spreads her wings and jumps out of Libby's arms and shrieks in stunned astonishment when she doesn't hit the ground plop.

Jensal hands over the ruby and picks up a diamond.

[prima_sequentem]

"Your turn, go on," Libby says to the ruby.

[alicornucopia]

The ruby tries too.

Once he's been aloft long enough to count he tackles the gold one out of the air, giggling.

Jensal hands her the diamond and collects a red.

[prima_sequentem]

"Go on - you too," she says to the diamond and the red, because there's been time to make the wish for both of them - the bottleneck here seems to be telling them she's done it.

[alicornucopia]

They try. Jensal stops picking up babies and starts pointing. Green. Emerald. Blue opal. White. Silver. Platinum. Obsidian. Malachite. Turqouise. Black. White opal. Iron. Copper. Sapphire. Gold. Jade. Red. Garnet. White. Black opal. Black. Green.

And that's it, that's the last one.

Jensal slumps against the wall when the littlest green baby is in the air.

[prima_sequentem]

"I have eighty miracles left," she says, "before I have to go back to Ehail and get more." And then, with a slight smile, "Make that seventy-nine."

[alicornucopia]

"The others aren't urg - what, me?"

[prima_sequentem]

She shrugs. "You're right in front of me. We plan to get everyone. I didn't see any point in wasting time."

[alicornucopia]

"All right," says Jensal. "Well, let's elsewise go youngest to oldest, maybe some parents will come for their children after all - I gather from the fact that the once-cured ones didn't fall out of the air instantly that when you've miracled somebody they stay that way?"

[prima_sequentem]

"Yes," she says. "My miracles are well-designed."

[alicornucopia]

"All right. Dorms are this way. Do you need to see the children or can we just walk briskly down the hall and make an announcement at dinner?"

[prima_sequentem]

"I could probably make do with nothing but a list of names as long as there weren't any duplicates," she says. "All I need in order to miracle someone is a way to uniquely specify them. If 'the shren in this house called So-and-so' refers to exactly one person, it should work."

[alicornucopia]

"No duplicate names in the house." Jensal leads Libby to her office and produces, after a little file-cabinet rifling, a list of young shrens in various age tiers.

[prima_sequentem]

Libby reads it, and miracles every listed shren in order.

It doesn't take very long.

[alicornucopia]

"That's all until - what was the limiting factor, exactly? Did I correctly understand there to be one?"

[prima_sequentem]

She gives Jensal a considering look.

Then she says, "My miracles come from a kind of magic from my world called minting. A mint is a person who can convert any pain they experience into coins that grant wishes. Until I met Ehail, that was a strong limiting factor - the type of coin required to cure a shren is one power level higher than the most powerful type I previously knew existed. Obviously, shrens and former shrens have a major advantage in coin production. But because of that, and because making someone a mint is irrevocable, I'm trying to be very, very careful about which shrens and former shrens I make into mints. If there's someone here who you think is particularly level-headed, prudent, responsible, and likely to volunteer - with the warning that producing the right kind of coin seems to make Ehail noticeably uncomfortable - I'll happily consider them. Otherwise I'll need to find Ehail and ask her for a resupply before I can keep distributing miracles."

[alicornucopia]

"I'll volunteer if you'll have me," says Jensal. "Or possibly Rethkan, or Miski - what's the plan for in four thousand years or so when nobody's who's been through a full course of esu is still alive?"

[prima_sequentem]

"You'll have four thousand years or so to figure that out," she says. "Among other things, I expect that with enough carefully applied magic, any of you who want to be can be made immortal. I don't know for sure, of course, but it seems likely. And you seem like a pretty good minting candidate to me."

[alicornucopia]

"I suppose once we're all dragons we'll be able to get the council to cooperate on our research projects," mutters Jensal. "Thank you. What do I have to do?"

[prima_sequentem]

"I just made you a mint," she says. "You might have noticed that wishing isn't very flashy. The kinds of coin I know about look like this—"

She conjures illusions with a four, this time, of the six known types of coin in Ehail's silver. They hover in the air in a neat row.

"Threes, fours, fives, sixes, sevens, and eights. The plain polygons are more or less safe to use without any special preparation, but sevens and eights are hazardous to the wisher unless you use another coin to wish them safe first. In order to make a coin, you experience some pain and then move it across your mind; in order to wish on a coin, you touch it, focus on it, and make your wish. I'll give you the same conveniences I gave Ehail - coin storage magic so you can keep your coins private and organized and use them without risking dropping any, and one of these."

A device appears in her hand, calculator-sized, with a display showing the number 0 and a row of eight buttons each shaped like a coin. (The button for an eight is a somewhat stylized two-dimensional depiction of the three-dimensional figure.) She hands it over.

"That will give you the minimum amount of pain to make the relevant coin while you hold down a button. It would be much less convenient to make an eight without one. Since I gave you coin storage, coins you make will be put away automatically, but taking them out again, transferring them to someone else's storage, and pulling one out just far enough to wish on it should all be fairly straightforward."

[alicornucopia]

"Thank you," says Jensal. She pokes the star button first, makes a coin - not in solid turquoise blue, but in a sort of unassuming dun with faint veins of her hair color traced through it, frowns thoughtfully, and then prods the button for the eights. She doesn't visibly stiffen like Ehail did, though her brow wrinkles a little. "I see. What coins do I use to wish the sevens and eights safe?"

[prima_sequentem]

"A coin will safe one coin of the level directly above it and a whole batch of coins its own level - the biggest batch I've done so far is four hundred and twenty. It's possible but debatably useful to safe the smaller coins, too - in theory they carry the same kind of hazard as the bigger ones, in practice they don't do enough damage to be noticeable - and for that, as far as I can tell, one coin will safe any number of miscellaneous smaller coins."

[alicornucopia]

Jensal nods. "But you can't do miracles in batches?" she asks.

[prima_sequentem]

"I haven't tried yet. It might take some trial and error to find a batch size that works, and it's a little harder to clearly mark out a group of people than one person at a time; I didn't feel like experimenting when I knew that it worked fine one at a time and there wasn't a harsh limit on my coin supply. If you want to, though, go right ahead. If you make a wish that's too much for the coin you're using to handle, it just does nothing - the only thing you'll lose is the time it takes you to try it."

[alicornucopia]

Jensal nods and pulls out another list of house residents. Eventually she announces, "I can do five at a time."