extradimensional space

[thaumobabble]

Here is a house.

It is pretty and trim and green-and-cream and really ought not to be able to hold itself up like that, and yet here it is, somehow defying the laws of architecture. It is surrounded by a neatly bordered garden of ornamental and useful plants of all sorts: here vegetables, there herbs, there spell components, there rows of flowers.

There is a sign out front. It says only: Magic. Not, Beware, Magic or Magic Emporium or anything like that. Just: Magic.

Sitting on top of this sign is a cream cat with smoke-dark points of color on each paw, his ears, and his face and tail.

All in all, you could be forgiven for thinking that a witch lives here.

Comments

[allthebrightest]

"...I don't know," says Tony. "I haven't really thought about it."

[thaumobabble]

"Okay," says Bella. "Um, let me know if you do?"

She scoots back to have enough room to get her legs out from under her and finds a place to put her bedroll. Over there.

[allthebrightest]

Tony will just be over here, blinking confusedly!

[thaumobabble]

"Did I... put something badly?" asks Bella tentatively. "Or... something?"

[allthebrightest]

"I dunno," says Tony. "Did I?"

[thaumobabble]

"I - no, I really like you, I just think that if it winds up being that we kiss a lot for the next two days and then I look at the Skyvault and I turn around and go home by myself and that's it and that was always going to be it, I'll wind up writing your name in my notebook a lot and then staring at it and frowning trying to figure out what to do about really liking you, and - I have made the amount of that particular tradeoff I want to make, now."

[allthebrightest]

"Oh," says Tony. "Well... I don't know what the other options are? But I don't like that one much either. Let's come up with a better one."

[thaumobabble]

"Um, okay. I'm pretty much - a free agent, you're the one who might have other stuff constraining your availability."

[allthebrightest]

"I'm, uh... not really that good at planning ahead," says Tony. "Actually I'm really bad at it."

[thaumobabble]

"Oh." Pause. "That might explain why you decided to kiss a random commoner magician female while on an ostensible quest for a husband, huh."

[allthebrightest]

"I guess?" she says. "I mean, I just really wanted to kiss you."

[thaumobabble]

"I was hardly averse to it myself. That's part of the problem." Bella mutters her cleaning spell before she puts her feet on her bedroll; she hasn't been walking all day, thanks to Tony, but she has been walking a nonzero amount, and barefoot. "If I didn't like you so much maybe I could kiss you as much as I felt like, assuming that this was still a nonzero amount, and not worry about accidentally engaging pining mode."

[allthebrightest]

"I like you too," says Tony. "I just don't know what to do about it. I mean, out of me and Sherry I'm probably the one with the better chance of actually finding a husband at some point, so... but I don't want that to mean I can't kiss you anymore."

[thaumobabble]

Bella makes a face. "There might exist potential husbands for whom it wouldn't mean that, but not necessarily for reasons of their personal generosity."

[allthebrightest]

She snorts. "Or I could just keep doing it anyway, it's not like it'll matter to the succession, you said you could probably get one of us pregnant with magic but I'll bet you can't do it by accident."

[thaumobabble]

"I can't do it by accident," agrees Bella. "But if you get married you probably should not cheat on your husband. A deadline like that is the sort of thing I'd want to know."

[allthebrightest]

"I don't know if there's a deadline like that," says Tony. "I don't know if this quest is even going to work! If there were any princes around here who fit the bill, I would've married one already and saved everybody the trouble!"

[thaumobabble]

Bella chews her lip. "I don't already have a window that does husbands. It's possible I could invent one and then you wouldn't have this problem," she offers softly.

[allthebrightest]

"...How do your windows work, anyway?"

[thaumobabble]

"Divinatory windows in general are witchcraft. They're like mirrors, but they connect to objects in the environment that meet certain parameters instead of to other mirrors."

[allthebrightest]

"So you could make a window that shows me the nearest person I could marry who'd do a good job of ruling the country and give me some kids to pass it on to?"

[thaumobabble]

"I don't think I'd insert a parameter like nearest - although I could include only a limited set of locations - and I'd have to be more specific about what doing a good job of ruling the country means and I'd need to know more about who you could tolerate well enough to marry, but yes, basically."

[allthebrightest]

"I'd marry you, if you were a prince," sighs Tony.

[thaumobabble]

"I'm not a prince. I'm not either of the component features I'd have to be to be a prince," says Bella.

[allthebrightest]

"Technically you don't have to be royal," says Tony, "our fire-witch great-and-so-on-grandma wasn't, she just spent some time as a dragon's princess and called it good..."