Chapter Text
Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent in Mal's bedroom, trading spells. She and Hannah took turns with each other's spellbooks. During Mal's turns, I lent her my concentration to lighten her load, and during Hannah's turns, I watched with fascination, drinking in the subtle differences in the two wizards' methodology.
Mal worked with quiet, meticulous precision. Every stroke of her pen was careful and deliberate, and her focus never wavered. Hannah was focused too, but not in the same way. She was copying the spell as it appeared in Grandma Alice's old book—the original, unmodified familiar spell that we all agreed was almost definitely not going to call a human by mistake—and as she wrote, she seemed to enter into a sort of trance state. Where Mal's focus was intense, Hannah's was…I suppose I'd describe it as serene. Her eyes were unfocused, and she held her pen gently, allowing it to glide across the page with the flowing grace of a figure skater.
"What sort of familiar are you going to summon, d'you think?" I asked, once it was time for a break. I was lying on the desk, my tail twitching absentmindedly, with Hannah in the chair in front of me and Mal sitting on the edge of her bed.
"I haven't decided!" said Hannah (after Mal relayed my question). "I do like that corvids can speak, so a crow is really tempting. But cats are so cute!" She scratched my head fondly. I purred in agreement. Cats are cute. "But then again, lizards are really cute too. And spiders, and rats, and ferrets…"
Mal was mildly indignant on my behalf. "Hold on, surely you can't be putting lizards and spiders at the same cuteness ranking as Katie here!"
Hannah shrugged, leaned back, and twirled a finger through her ponytail. "Little tiny animals are cute."
"It's not a contest, but also, if my closest rival is a lizard, I'm definitely winning. Maybe the ferret can compete. Maybe. And don't call her Shirley," I added.
"What would you pick, Kate?" Mal asked.
"Well, for my D&D character, I'm thinking probably a bat, because I like that they have echolocation. That seems like a cool and useful ability. But I'm also strongly considering a toad for the bonus HP, just so I don't drop after one hit."
"So, a bat for the echolocation, or a toad for the HP? Yeah, those are pretty solid choices, mechanically speaking."
"Ooh, I do like toads," Hannah said. "...They're cute."
That drew a laugh out of all three of us.
"So, basically, your philosophy is that any animal is cute so long as it's small enough?"
"Right! Cuteness is inversely proportional to size. A giant spider is scary, but a little teeny spider is cute. And since the Reduce Person spell halves your size, it also doubles your cuteness. QED!"
Mal looked thoughtful. "That's…logical, I guess."
"I'm skeptical," I said. "I don't think I could accept your premises without firsthand proof of someone shrinking and becoming cuter as a result."
"What did she say?" Hannah asked.
"She wants you to cast the spell so that she can see for herself how it works. Um, she phrased it differently, but I think that's the gist?"
I nodded.
"Aw heck, why not? I have one prepared in here somewhere…" She started rummaging in her bag. "Aha! Here it is! Watch and be amazed"
Hannah held up a small Play-Doh sculpture of a little bug. She began to chant in Hebrew, and as she spoke, she stood up, and the sculpture began to pulse with yellow and purple light. Then her eyes started to glow, and the loose parts of her hair slowly floated upwards as if she were underwater. After maybe 45 seconds of chanting, her feet actually lifted off the ground until she was levitating a couple inches in midair. The smell of ozone crackled in the air around her. Then all of a sudden, she shifted several times, getting successively smaller as if she were a digital image and she'd just tapped the "Zoom out" button on herself. And then the special effects stopped—the glowing lights vanished, the Play-Doh bug melted, her hair settled down, and she floated back to the ground.
She was maybe two and a half feet tall.
It was all very cinematic! I sat on my haunches and applauded.
"Thank you, thank you," she said, taking a bow. The pitch of her voice was the same, but the timbre had changed subtly: a smidge more treble, a smidge less bass, giving the sound a slightly tinny quality—like what you get when you play music on tiny speakers.
Mal nodded in quiet appreciation. "I will never get tired of the light shows."
"I haven't actually shown this spell to anyone else yet! Hey, both of you, come on over, I wanna compare heights!"
Obediently, I hopped down from the desk to the floor, landing right next to her. "GAH! Holy fuck, you're big!" she said, nearly falling over backwards. I meowed apologetically. Relative to her, I was now about the size of a mountain lion, and I suppose I had sorta-kinda-technically just, uh, pounced, so in hindsight, yeah, that was clearly going to startle her.
"Well, I have to admit, that does seem like evidence in support of your cute/scary sliding scale," Mal said, trying not to giggle.
Hannah let out a giggle of her own. "Dear Lord, I thought I was going to soil myself for a second there. Oh, I really got got! I should've been expecting that!" She looked up at Mal, who was now looming over her. "And damn, look at you! I don't think I even come up to your waist! Haha, whee!"
Mal sat back down on the floor, legs crossed. She was as tall sitting down as Hannah was standing up. Maybe slightly taller, actually. "Lucky she wasn't in tiger form, or you might have had a heart attack!"
"Ha! I totally would have!" She stroked my back. (She barely had to lean down. For her, it must have been like petting a large dog.) "Man, you're really this small all the time, huh, Kate? Smaller, even! That's so wild."
I nodded. "Yup. Are you enjoying the experience?"
"She's asking if you're enjoying the experience," Mal repeated.
"Absolutely. Look, you gotta know this about me…" She sat down. "I thrive on unique experiences. I love trying things just to try them. I love exploring, and making mistakes, and trying again. And if I fall into a rut, I start to wilt like a fading flower.
"But you know what's great about being small?" Hannah gestured grandly at all of our surroundings. "Being small makes everything new! When you're a different size, it can recontextualize even the most mundane, everyday activity into an adventure! A mountain to be climbed, a river to be forded!
"I'm still not out to my family as a wizard, so I can't always practice my spells at home. This is the first time I've cast this spell around other people. And you know what? It's cool. It's different. I like it. I think I might need to learn Enlarge Person too, just so I have the set."
I grinned. "I bet you're excited for when you can learn some polymorph spells, huh?"
"Heck yeah I am," she answered, after Mal translated. "Actually, I've been trying to research what sort of shapeshifting effects might be possible at my current level, and it's very tough to get any decent duration on anything. You know it took me like two weeks to figure out how to get this shrink spell to last more than a minute? That's why it takes so long to cast my version. And I've been poking at another spell to turn into a horse, but I can't get it to work longer than, like, 10 seconds, which is like, not even enough time to run a lap, so, I mean, what even is the point of it, then? So yeah, I really gotta get to 2nd level spells."
"It's weird because if you want to summon a horse, you can get multiple hours of uptime easily," Mal said. "But for some reason, if you want to turn into one, all of a sudden it's like, nope, can't do it, shoulda been a druid."
"Do you have the horse summoning spell?" Hannah asked.
Mal shook her head. "Nah. I was never much of a horse girl. Fell off a pony once when I was seven. Broke my arm. Haven't worked up the nerve to try horseback riding again since. Anyway, I prefer cats."
"Horseback riding was never my thing either," I said. "Too outdoorsy. And kinda smelly. I have gotten into wizard-back riding lately, though!"
I climbed on top of Mal's head, tousling her hair in the process. She laughed and brushed a few strands out of her face.
"Wow…even when you're twice my size, you two are so cute together!" said Hannah, whose cell phone camera was now pointing at us. "The people on Tumblr need to see this."
"Oh no, Kate! We're being exploited for content! Quick, we need to draw up a contract to license out the use of our likenesses so that we can be fairly compensated!"
"Pathetic fools, your contracts are powerless, for the copyright to a photograph belongs to the photographer, not the subject! This reproduction of your likenesses belongs to me now! Mwahaha!"
"Wait, isn't California, like, a two-party consent state?" I pointed out.
"Of course, Katie! You're a genius! California is a two-party consent state! That means you can't film us without permission!" Mal pointed exaggeratedly at Hannah. "Avaunt and desist, villain!"
"Oh, wait, really?" Hannah swiped her phone a couple of times. "Hmm, you're right, it says here that it could be punishable by a fine of up to $2,500 or up to a year in prison…CURSES! Foiled again!" She swiped some more. "Actually, it looks like that might only be limited to certain types of recordings, and there's some other complicated clauses in this law that I don't know if I fully understand."
"We demand royalties of one cookie for every one thousand notes!" said Mal.
"Oh no, I've been legally outmaneuvered! I have no choice but to accept your terms!" Hannah shook her fist. "But I'll get you next time! You haven't seen the last of me! Muhahaha!"