“So what is your power. Like I’ve seen you appear out of thin air but your power is weak mind control?” said Alice. Obviously she had a lot of questions after that little performance. “Oh, that? I basically tell people to ignore me and they do. I’m not teleporting in, I’ve been there all along. Hell I’m not even invisible. Someone who’d been staring at me the whole time would even be able to remember things like me scratching my nose. They just… don’t realize I’m there.”

  “So you’re the one who attacked them in the forest on Friday?” she asked. “Yeah” I said. I pulled out my butterfly knife. A gift from a gentleman I met on my third and final day on the street. I had wiped it down after but it still had a reddish tint. Alice flinched. “Why do you need that? Why not just do what you did to Leah?” she asked. “Because killing people is a dick move” I stated bnkly. Surely that’s obvious, right?

  “She wasn’t actually dead though, was she?” asked Alice. “Dead as a decent Journalist” I replied. “But… how… your power is mind control, right?” asked Alice. “Easy enough to stop a heart with mind control. Can also start one, though that’s much much harder. And being medically dead for a little while isn’t the end of the world. Not ideal obviously. But I’ve been dead myself for a lot longer than 4 minutes and while I’d never want to go through that again I was fine in the end.” I mused.

  “Wait, you mean to tell me that you died and got brought back to life!” asked Alice incredulously. I chuckled. “Its not actually that uncommon. And you don’t exactly need magic either. Modern mundane medicine can restart a stopped heart more reliably than any positive vibe I can produce. If you die in a hospital you have something like an 80% chance of being resuscitated. Hence why after my little head injury I made sure to spend a few days in one, in case I happened to kick it again.”

  Alice was silent for a minute. “How did you die?” she asked quietly. I frowned. This story was painful. Well, the context was painful. The story itself was positively happy by comparison. “I ran away from my abusive father and he almost caught up to me and my options were let him catch me or jump off a bridge. I took the bridge. Landed in freezing cold water, which was lucky because cooling the body quickly after death reduces the likelihood of brain damage. It was a pretty rough river and I was thrown about a lot. I… drowned…”. I took a breath to steady myself. “After that my body washed up in a ke near a tourist resort. Lifeguard saw me. Dragged me to shore. Performed CPR till the Ambunce arrived. They didn’t have much hope but they kept on pumping till they heard me scream. They asked for my name. Someone to contact. I used my powers to make them stop asking”.

  I sighed. Alice was crying. I chuckled. “Oh, that’s ancient history now, and its my trauma to boot. No need to get so worked up about it” I ughed. She didn’t respond. She just threw her arms around me and squeezed all the air out of my lungs. Probably not the most sensitive thing to do given my past and recent past experience on the matter but I appreciated the gesture.

  After lunch we made for the gymnasium. “That’s where the the people who can’t roughhouse go” expined Alice. “What do you mean roughhouse” I asked. “Well, the people like Leah who have powers that let them take a lot of punishment py outside. They get to use their powers to their full extent and have a football match where someone might get their arms ripped off. But its fine because they can just grow them back. Everyone else pys inside and has to restrain their powers to non lethal only. Not sure if stopping someone’s heart counts as lethal or not. You’d have to ask the teacher”

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “No, killing someone is the literal definition of lethal Alice. It definitely isn’t allowed.” I replied. “Well being invisible isn’t exactly going to win us any tennis matches and making my boobs jiggle only distracts the boys” she pouted. “Oh use your imagination Alice! I could make them fall asleep. I could make their legs turn to jelly. I could make them strut up and down and cluck like a chicken. I could make them forget they’re pying tennis. The real trouble’s going to be using my powers without ruining the fun.” I said with a roll of my eyes. “Huh… why didn’t you do anything like that to Leah?” asked Alice. “Because I wanted to scare Rose and honestly because she joked about killing me like it was funny.”

  Our first opponents were a girl who could teleport called Jessica and a boy called Riley who could mess with the way light refracts which in practice meant he could do slightly fancy shadow puppets. Jessica was a short and slightly chubby girl with bronzish skin and her hair tied back in a bun and Riley was a thin boy who might be able to replicate my power of erasing my presence just by looking boring. I expected the teleporter girl would just teleport into the path of the ball but instead she decided to use her power to teleport to right beside my ear and scream loudly any time I looked like I was concentrating too hard on the game. Apparently this was allowed so long as she didn’t actually touch the court on our side. After the third time she did this to me I internally screamed “MAGIC ISN’T REAL IDIOT” and she forgot to teleport back. Which was a problem because she had teleported in upside down so the noise would be closer to the ground while giving her more time to scream and or teleport back. She nded quite painfully and the teacher had to be called over.

  The teacher decided that disabling someone’s powers did not in fact count as lethal on its own and this was entirely Jessica’s own fault. I still felt bad, but the teacher assured me she’d be fine after a quick trip to the nurse who apparently had the power to accelerate other people’s natural healing. I noted it would be best if she went to a hospital but the teacher told me that was too big a risk. That didn’t sit right with me, but it was one thing refusing to participate in this town’s culture of forsaking the outside world and another to try force that onto them.

  Our next opponents were Rose and Leah. “I thought you said people like Leah py outside” I asked of Alice. “Why?” sneered Rose. “Because she’s a dog?”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Nothing like that. No, I mean don’t the kids who have healing factors or powers that make them nigh indestructible py a more violent version of whatever game in a court with less rules.” I asked. Some of the tension drained out of Rose’s face. “Oh. Right. She’s still pretty sore from whatever it is you did to her at lunch so she’s taking it easy today” said Rose. I nodded, that made sense. “Hope you get better soon” I called cheerily. Leah only grunted in response.

  I served the ball. The only one of us using their power was Rose, and to her it seemed more an exercise in control than an actual advantage. Her racket floated a few feet in front of her and I could tell it was taking a lot of mental dexterity to control it. We were pretty equally matched in spite of the age gap, in that none of us were really any good. Leah was energetic and went for balls most would write off for lost but she kept wincing in pain and I could tell she was moving much more sluggishly than usual.

  “Hey, how long before what you did to Leah wears off” asked Rose. “Well I was in hospital for weeks after my touch with death but I’m assuming her healing factor will cut that down to a couple of days” I responded. “What do you mean touch with death” asked Leah. “I stopped your heart. Medically speaking you were dead for four minutes” I responded. Rose scoffed. “Great, another witch who thinks she can tell a corpse to just come back to life”.

  “I can though. I wouldn’t have risked killing her if I didn’t know I could do it” I pouted. “Wait, so you just actually killed her” said Rose warily. “Like I said”

  “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a regur Ciapheus of the cold” Leah chuckled. “Who?” I asked. “Witch from a century or so back. 2 kids drowned in the ke. Got pulled out by someone with water reted powers. Then Ciapheus supposedly used his powers over the mind to make them just wake up from being dead. Course everyone knows you can’t bring the dead back, so they were probably just sleeping.” Leah recalled.

  “Hey, didn’t you say you drowned and then got better because the water kept your brain cold” called Alice. I nodded. “Same principal probably applies. You can’t usually revive someone from death beyond like 15 minutes. And even if you could they wouldn’t be… living so to speak. Brain damage sets in after 4 minutes and progresses exponentially from there. After 6 minutes you might be testing a bit worse on standardized tests. After 8 you’re probably not eating solids ever again. And it only gets worse from there. But cooling the body slows down that process. So yeah, its entirely possible Ciapheas the cold did revive the dead.”

  “Damn” said Rose. “Guess he was done dirty afterall”. “How so” I asked. “Well there’s this story that he insisted the boys’ mother marry him if he could raise them from dead. But after he brought them back she said since reviving the dead was impossible they must have been sleeping so therefore she didn’t have to marry him.” Said Rose.

  I let out a squeak of ughter. “Hot DAYUM! Okay… on the one hand its not good to weltch on a deal like that. But like… bckmailing a woman with the life of her children? Good for her, he would have made a lousy husband anyway” I chuckled. Rose and Leah shared a gnce I had nowhere near enough history with them to interpret and then burst into twin smiles for some reason. “You know, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry we tried to kill you. Can we be friends?” said Rose with a slight smile.

  I mulled it over for a moment. Then I sighed. “Sure, fine. I’m um, sorry I cut you up with a knife and then actually killed Leah. That was shitty of me. Also sorry for calling you uncivilized. I get like, super upset when transphobia is involved.”

  “Trans… what?” said Rose with a frown. Well… shit. I spent the rest of the match expining some of the history of oppression of LGBT people in the united states. Knowing the town was a sanctuary of sorts I thought it might hit a little close to home for the two of them and sure enough I was right.

  “Wait… so if women can marry women now, why does anyone marry men anymore” asked Leah. “I have no idea. Ask a straight girl” I said with a derisive eyeroll. “What’s a… straight girl” she asked. I sighed. “Lesbians and gay men also known as homosexuals date people of the same gender they are. Straight people or heterosexuals date people of the opposite gender. Bisexuals are happy to date anyone regardless of gender, which is why they’re the best and also makes it twice as funny when they can’t get a date. There’s also apparently asexuals who don’t want to date anybody but I’ve never met one and I’m pretty sure someone on AO3 made them up to close off a love triangle with no hurt feelings, which is cheating if you ask me…”

  The teacher blew her whistle. Apparently our match had dragged on twice as long as anyone else’s and it was high time to switch. I surrendered the match to Rose and Leah, which annoyed Alice somewhat but she cheered up immensely after we beat a team including a boy who could make you believe victory was completely impossible who had supposedly never lost a tennis match in his life. He was a legitimately good tennis pyer and his partner’s ability to make things go faster without actually absorbing any additional energy was nothing to sneeze at. However when the ball “as they would ter cim” morphed into their own mothers’ head, (and each cimed it was their own mother’s head, not the other’s) and started yelling at them for their poor performance on one of their weekend chores, neither had the reaction time to hit it.

  After school I finally fulfilled my promise and took Alice around to see my house, where having learned her yuri education was as far behind as Rose and Alice, we immediately started watching Owlhouse. (Off of a stack of DVD-Rs of course. Until I get justice for my girl Brook I ain’t giving that foul corporation a dime!)

  The TV was indeed witchcraft to Alice (metaphorically speaking, She clearly understood actual witchcraft perfectly well) but she didn’t scream or try to burn me at the stake. Which was nice.