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"I do have a question for you," Ballister said to Nimona, currently lounging around the lair as a lanky, longer-haired version of his teenage self. "Can anyone else do what you do?"
"Shapeshifting?" Nimona replied, his voice deliberately sounding like a squeakier version of himself, as well. "That's advanced work. It's not easy to reconstruct yourself into something else and stay who you are." He shuffled into a chameleon form. "Most animals don't have the brains for speech, much less doing magic, so you have to figure out how to look like the thing and leave enough space for you to stay what you are."
"What about magic in general?" Ballister said. "Maybe not your favorite kind, but something else?"
"Oh, yeah," Nimona said. "The basic stuff I can teach to anybody. Anybody that I like, anyway," they added. "Even the meathead. It might be easier to teach him, since I know he's one of Gloreth's, and she picked it up pretty easily once she knew how."
Ballister let a smile creep onto his face about the possibility of his boyfriend being able to do magic, before he realized what the implications of that might be and resumed a more stern expression.
"Perhaps it would be better to teach someone who you know will be responsible with it." he opined.
"That knocks you out, boss," Nimona said, having resumed a more customary human shape. "I'd expect you to be pretty villainous with magic. Maybe petty villainous, but definitely not responsible."
Ballister took this with what he thought was good humor. "Who would you teach, then, if you expected them to be responsible with it?"
"Nobody," Nimona said. "I taught Gloreth, remember, and then you saw what happened to her." There was less bitterness in her voice these days about the subject of her ancient crush, but it was not gone. "She went and became some kind of hero, and then a cult developed under her, and then I blew it all up when I had the opportunity."
"I helped," Ballister said.
"Yeah, you did," Nimona said. She then shifted into Ambrosius Goldenloin, Ballister's boyfriend, although he left him with an exaggerated walleyed face and a child's drawing of other features just to make sure Ballister knew his opinion of him. "You reminded me how much you love this dolt, and asked me to do something constructive instead. 'Oh, Ballister, don't let the terrible demon destroy my perfect hair,' he said, and you fell for it." While speaking in Ambrosius's voice, he rattled the head so that the exaggerated irises bounced around and spun as if they were unattached to anything.
Ballister smothered a laugh. He didn't want to give Nimona the idea that gross caricatures of Ambrosius were funny and that he should do more of them.
Nimona resumed her most familiar form. "Guess we're both dolts, too, getting swayed by pretty blonde locks and then having to commit great violence when those locks led us astray. Well, okay, I committed plenty of violence. You have this really weird idea that violence is a last resort, instead of a first one."
Ballister sighed. "There's a time and place for anger and destruction, and it's usually after all the other methods of getting someone to do what you want have failed." The Director’s betrayal of him and all the other knights had taught him about persistence, and the Director’s fall and death had taught him that anger was unsustainable as a method of exercising power. Except, as with so many things, for Nimona.
Nimona belched a small stream of flame, interrupting his thoughts. "That's not any fun. When you get hurt, you hurt the people responsible. Do it right, and they won't hurt you again."
"And that worked out so well for you." Ballister stood and strode toward the door. The Great Beast that had come to throw herself on the sword of Gloreth had done so out of rage, but a rage turned inward instead of outward. Ballister was trying to help Nimona let go of hers, but it was proving difficult, not least because to convince her to leave her rage behind, he had to do the same for his own past hurts.
"Where are you going?" Nimona asked from the couch.
"We," Ballister corrected her. "You said it might be easier to teach Ambrosius magic. I'm scientifically curious if it's true."
Nimona shifted into a sloth and spoke with exaggerated slowness. "I was going to stay in and watch the screens."
"I'm surprised you're passing up another opportunity to make fun of my boyfriend," Ballister teased. "Suit yourself."
He waited outside the door for a short while, and smiled when a hound dog bolted outside, tossing off a casual "Race you there!" as he ran ahead. Knowing that he could not possibly outrun the hound in front of him, Ballister followed at a significantly slower pace, one meant to cause maximum annoyance in Nimona, now that the opportunity to make fun of Ambrosius had been dangled in front of him.
The city seemed to be doing better, now that the wall had several gates carved into it. With more ways in and out, the people of the city had expanded rapidly into the space around. Some perspectives hadn't widened with the reintroduction of the world, but that was fine. They could believe whatever they wanted to about his villainy and the inevitability of the return of the monster that Nimona had become. At least for now, people believed that their great champion and hero, Ambrosius Goldenloin, had neither been a willing ally of the Director's reign of terror, nor of Ballister and Nimona's villainous desire to take her down. As he often had, Ambrosius emerged from the wreckage without any stains on himself, metaphorical or literal. Perhaps that was the magic he had, the ability to get into the most filthy situations and never end up with anything sticking. He wondered if this was because Gloreth had done the same, and passed that down through her line, or whether Ambrosius’s combination of good looks and completely sincere behavior made everyone treat him with the same forgiveness and patience they would treat a child that had tried on adult clothing and paraded themselves around in it.
Stepping through the front door of the repurposed Institute, Ballister gave a cheery wave to the clerks and looked for Nimona, expecting her to have shed the hound shape as soon as she was out of his sight. He didn't see anything obviously out of the ordinary as he made his way toward where Ambrosius kept his office. He almost said hello to Todd before spotting that this "Todd" had the same walleyed look that Nimona had shown him when making fun of Ambrosius.
"Are eyes difficult for you?" Ballister asked, trying to make it sound like a genuine inquiry.
"No," Nimona said, turning around quickly and then turning back to give Ballister a perfect copy of Todd's face. "But it's much funnier when they rattle around, isn't it? When you look like this, it seems like you want to be taken seriously."
"We usually want to be taken seriously," Ballister said.
"And that's what makes you funny. Every last one of you wants to be taken seriously, and none of you can manage it, not even with a thousand years to try and perfect it."
Ballister ignored the dig and knocked on Ambrosius's door.
"Make an appointment," Ambrosius's voice called from in the office.
Ballister opened the door and stuck his head in, looking at the mountain of paperwork currently stacked on Ambrosius's desk. "Very hard to make an appointment when your secretary isn't at his desk."
"Really?" Ambrosius said, looking up. "What time is it?"
"Time for a break," Ballister said, fully entering the office. Nimona, in her usual shape, followed behind him.
Ambrosius looked at her and back to Ballister. "I hope you're here to help me deal with all this paperwork."
"Nope!" Nimona said cheerily. "Time to find out if you're actually one of Gloreth's, or whether everyone's been saying that about you for no reason."
Ambrosius looked at both of them, waiting to see if either would provide him with any more context or understanding.
"I asked if it was possible for Nimona to teach either of us magic. She seems to believe that you're more likely to learn it than I am," Ballister finally volunteered.
"If there's some magic you can teach me to make this paperwork do itself, properly, so that I won't have to spend days with the royal bureaucrats changing words, letters, and figures to give them a more accurate picture of what it's like here, I would like to learn that first." Ambrosius put a stack of paperwork aside. "I could use a break. What have you got?"
Nimona changed her form into Ballister, although he made his prosthetic arm look like it was a child's crude contraption of cardboard, he kept the rattling, disconnected eyeballs, and he added a bobble to the head to make the eyes rattle even more. Ambrosius laughed, although he quickly tried to smother it.
"Now, scientifically," Nimona said, putting on her best ‘boring professor’ voice, "magic is the way that I make a lot of people confused by breaking the rules and laws they think reality operates under. For the next three hours, I will bore you with theories that nobody actually cares about before I allow you the belief that you might be able to get to the practical parts of this exercise, and then I will make you deal with three more hours of my boring lectures before telling you the practicals start tomorrow."
Ambrosius smiled. "It's not a bad caricature of you, when you get in your lecturing mode," he said to Ballister. "The rattling eyes are disturbing, though. Does Nimona have problems with eyes?"
"No, he thinks it's funny. And his caricature is nothing like me," Ballister said dryly. The look on Ambrosius’s face said he wasn’t entirely convinced it was true. "Anything else?" he added, addressing Nimona.
"Science. It's for boring nerds who don't have magic!" he said, transforming into an oversized toad. "So if you want to be part of the cool kids club, you can leave your boring old science behind."
"And how do we do that?" Ambrosius said, reaching out to try and capture Nimona. They croacked and glared at Ambrosius, then resumed her most familiar shape, with her legs dangling off of Ambrosius's desk.
"You know what? Maybe you're not one of Gloreth's after all. She wasn't the kind to touch animals without checking to see if they were safe." Nimona stopped and thought about that for a moment. "No, wait, she absolutely was. There was a time where a nest of griffs had set up right outside her village, and she wanted to know if they were as fluffy as they looked from afar. I helped her find out, but she nearly got herself pecked to death when it woke up and took offense at being treated like a domestic animal."
"Good to know," Ballister said.
"So, magic," Nimona said casually. "It's not easy to learn, but once you get the hang of it, you can use it for just about anything, so long as you understand what you're doing. Just reach out and grab the fabric of reality and twist it until it looks right."
"And that's it?" Ballister said.
"Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I wouldn't recommend doing it until you understand what shape you want it to look like in the end. Otherwise you might end up like me." Nimona transformed into a miniature version of the Great Beast that had been the stuff of both legends and nightmares. "You know this is what I really look like, right? You're going to be learning magic from a monster, and it's going to turn you into one eventually."
"We're doing better," Ambrosius said. "There are people who live outside the wall now. And, at least so far, we've only met wolves, big cats, and other entirely natural hazards outside the wall.If there are other great monsters out there, they haven't taken an interest in us."
"Oh, there are other great monsters out there. They just mostly look like this," they said, shapeshifting into a perfect replica of the statue of Gloreth still standing. "You'll think you can make friends with them, but the first time you try to help them and it goes wrong, they'll turn on you, blame you, and run away."
"What did she really look like?" Ballister said. "All we have are statues and tapestries."
"Small, and scared," Nimona said. "I only saw her when she was small, before she grew up and became a legend. She was probably the most awkward teenager in the world, with this undeserved heroic reputation. I'll bet she just wanted to see her friend again, but she couldn't just go and do it, because she had her responsibilities." Nimona waved her hand, indicating the stack of paperwork still undone. "Both of you have this weird idea in your head that you owe other people your lives, instead of recognizing that you can just reject it all and be free."
"We're both knights," Ambrosius said. "We gave our word that we would protect the people from things that threatened them, and give them our assistance when they call. We had differences of opinion on how to go about that, because of the Director's meddling, but we've both been ultimately trying to do the same thing."
"Threats like me?" Nimona said, transforming into a venomous snake, hood raised, fangs out, and ready to strike.
"No," Ballister said. "You're not a threat that needs a knight to banish."
"Even when I hurt you?" Nimona said, sinking their fangs into Ballister's prosthetic arm. After a few seconds of convulsive twitching, they let go, wriggling on the desk for a bit. "Metal!" she said, eventually shaking herself out and resuming her customary form. "I didn't think electricity was that good of a rush. I should try that more often! Got any batteries I can lick?"
Ballister checked his arm to make sure Nimona hadn't bitten anything vital, flexing each finger and watching for sparking from the holes the snake had left. "If you'd actually wanted to hurt me," Ballister said as he observed and tested, "you would have bitten my flesh arm. Somewhere important, instead of somewhere you can get a rush from." Satisfied that there were no critical issues with his arm, Ballister returned his attention to the still slightly twitchy Nimona. He’d once thought she was prone to impulse and poorly-thought decisions, but the longer he’d been allowed to stay around her, the more he had to revise his thinking and try to see it from the perspective of a being that could change shape at will and had enough power stored that the thought of blowing up the entire city, inside and outside the walls, without breaking a sweat would see it.
Mostly, he came to the conclusion that Nimona did seemingly-random things was because he was bored and looking for new experiences, but there were enough times where it wasn’t boredom, but some other purpose, that Ballister could never be completely sure what motivated Nimona at any time.
"I should be returning to my paperwork," Ambrosius said. "Unless this was all supposed to be some kind of secret training on the use of magic."
"Boring," Nimona said. "Fine. Sit quietly with yourself, find the spark inside, all that kind of thing. That's what I actually taught Gloreth, and she managed it after a few times."
Ballister leaned against the wall and thought. His mind liked to think about the future, about new projects, and was always working on some puzzle in the background related to one or another thing he wanted to build, to create, or to learn. There was no shortage of possible ideas that he could try to build or create, an entire cavalcade of possibilities demanding his attention and work to bring them into being. Most never left his head, but it made it a noisy place.
Ambrosius seemed to be much better-suited to emptying his mind. Ballister did not envy him the paperwork. He thought it would probably be a welcome respite to shove all the matters of running the city out of his head for a few minutes, so that he could get back in touch with whatever idealized version of himself he carried around with him. Or maybe even shove all the expectations about being one of Gloreth's descendants out just as firmly as he was not thinking about the paperwork and the worries of administration.
Ambrosius had always had a surety about himself that nothing could dislodge. He was meant to be a knight, he was meant to lead, he was going to be great. He was descended from the hero who defeated the Great Beast. Ballister had been born of common people and was slated to be the first common-born knight. He'd been bullied, refused, and told he was never going to be accepted. And then he'd killed the Queen. Even with the later revelations that the Director was responsible for all of it, had used him, and all the fallout that came from that, and from Nimona, it always felt to him that his presence was tolerated because Ambrosius loved him and refused to push him away. Ambrosius had been given the same choice as his distant ancestor, and instead of banishing the one he loved the most to the shadows, Ambrosius had embraced him, told him how much he still loved him.
And then promptly set him the job of being the city's Official Villain, to find ways of ensuring justice, even if that went outside the usual methods and means. With Nimona's return, Ambrosius had made her Official Deputy Villain, a position they took to with relish, enthusiasm, and a significant amount of lobbying to try and have Nimona named Official Villain and Ballister be Deputy Villain, based on their relative abilities to cause problems on purpose. They hadn't had much to do, since Ambrosius turned out to be a competent administrator and a good judge of character for who should be put into various positions of power. Which left Ballister to tinkering and Nimona to causing mischief, so as to make sure there was something for the other people in the city to do.
A buzzing sound near his ear interrupted Ballister's reminiscence. Reflexively, he reached up to shoo it away, but before he could, a pink mosquito darted away to buzz around Ambrosius, who had his eyes closed and looked to have found whatever inner peace this exercise was supposed to induce. The mosquito buzzed around his ears, too, making his eyebrows twitch and his face grimace, but he managed not to try and swat her away.
Nimona redoubled her efforts to buzz and annoy Ambrosius, but he continued to ignore her, even though the effort was getting more difficult with each pass. Ballister concentrated more intently on Ambrosius. It looked like Nimona might be able to do the one thing no other being had been able to do: make Ambrosius angryr. Ballister wanted to see how this world turn out.
"Nimona, stop," Ambrosius said, holding out his hand. Ballister felt a difference in his words, and watched mosquito-Nimona bounce and buzz wildly, trying to right herself and return back to aggravating him. She could only get within a foot of him before there was a flash of light and she bounced away again.
"Guess he can do it," Ballister observed. "Or something like it. Metal." He would contemplate why he felt disappointed that even Nimona couldn’t pierce Ambrosius’s aura later, when he could give the question an appropriate scientific inquiry. All knowledge was good knowledge, even if this particular piece felt like he’d been the one getting bit by the mosquito.
After a few more attempts to pierce Ambrosius's barrier, Nimona popped herself back into her customary form.
"See? Not so hard, right?" she said, grinning.
Ambrosius, for his part, didn't open his eyes, but his voice dripped with annoyance. "Your methods could use some refinement."
"Can only do it the way I know how," she said. "Buuut, from the look on your face, I think Boss and I are going to take a tour of somewhere else."
"Good idea," Ambrosius said, his voice already faded back down to annoyance from the upset it had been at moments before
Ballister gave him a kiss on the cheek. "Don't stay up too late working," he said.
"The same to you," Ambrosius replied, his voice at its usual calm, then waved them out.
Once they had left the building, Ballister said casually to the tortoise by his side, "So why did you think I wouldn't be able to use magic?"
"Sorry, boss," Nimona replied. "It takes serious amounts of will to make the magic work. I haven't seen you that dedicated since you were trying to take down the Director."
"Ah," Ballister said, nodding. "However," he added, "I have scientific curiosity, and you have now piqued it."
"You're not turning me into an experiment again," Nimona told him, taking a snap at the air.
"No, nothing like that. I saw how well that worked the first time." Ballister shuddered at the memory of the shadows burnt into a wall of a laboratory where a previous attempt of the Director's had failed miserably. At least, Nimona had said it was a previous attempt, but Nimona was not exactly as bound by time as the rest of them, making her "previous" anywhere from months to centuries.
“I think you might benefit from adopting Ambrosius’s attitude toward life,” Ballister suggested.
The tortoise laughed. “Ambrosius? Hah! He’s just like Gloreth was. Took a lot to get her to boil over, but once she did, oh, she would let you have it.” They sighed. “We had the best fights.”
“I don’t see how—” Ballister started, before six disturbingly plausible justifications and explanations arranged themselves in his head. He didn’t want to know which of them was true, so he changed subjects. "I thought we might go see Dr. Blitzmeyer and let her point various devices at you to record you while you play around with your magic and see if anything interesting shows up in the recordings. Nobody will touch you or try to do anything more."
Nimona considered this, before giving a small nod of his head. "Lead on—are those fire-pepper sausages being cooked three blocks over? I'm hungry." Shedding the tortoise for a hummingbird, they took off in the direction of the smell Ballister’s nose was beginning to pick up on. Ballister shook his head and followed.
Nimona had a fistful of skewered sausages in front of her as he rounded the corner, and looked ready to breathe fire on them to cook them to her desired temperature. Seeing Ballister, she exhaled without roasting the already cooked sausages, and instead sedately started to eat them in a mostly human manner. That she'd turned most of her teeth into canines to eat the sausages with was a detail Ballister didn't expect all that many people to notice, if they happened to look over her way, but Nimona did like to show those details specifically to Ballister, as if he needed reminding every so often that she was a chaotic and destructive being that chose to look human.
"You'll have plenty of opportunity to terrify Dr. Blitzmyer, if that's what you want to do," Ballister said to Nimona as she munched.
"She doesn't scare easily," Nimona said through a mouthful of sausage. "I tried to do it a few times when she was out beyond the walls. She didn't even flinch. It's not any fun to scare someone who can't get scared. Or won't get scared. I don't know which is more frustrating."
Based on their earlier interaction with Ambrosius, Ballister knew which side he would lay his coin on, but before he could comment on it, Nimona belched, a gout of flame escaping her mouth. She directed the second belch of flame toward the sky, nodding with satisfaction at the sizzling sound of the sausages in her hands.
"Good distance," she observed, eating one of the now superheated sausages. In another context, Ballister might suggest to her that having pillars of flame come out of your mouth around other humans is not a way to make friends, even if it might be a way to influence people. In this context, he suspected Nimona might rhetorically ask him where she should have flame come out of, and then demonstrate a few candidate orifices to see if he thought any of them might be better. Or, if she was feeling particularly mad at him, she might demonstrate a few candidate species and their respective orifices, to drive the point home about how much she wasn't actually human, no matter how much she looked like one.
Ballister nodded. "Do you draw some extra heat from the fire pepper sausages, or is this you enjoying the spice?"
"What, you're not even going to try to remind me about manners?" Nimona said. "Don't tell me you've given up on trying to civilize me already?" She turned the all canine grin toward him before devouring another sausage in two bites.
Ballister ignored the bait. "Hardly, but sometimes, you have to recognize when someone's nervous and let them be nervous."
"Nervous?" Nimona said, eating the last sausage. "Shouldn't you be worried for yourself, or that the good doctor will unleash something that can't be contained again?"
"Dr. Blitzmyer, unlike our late, unlamented Director, doesn't wind up beings that could destroy her, her lab, and the entire city, and then blame them for any feelings they're having about the situation."
Nimona belched fire again in Ballister's direction, close enough that someone who didn't know her might flinch and thus injure themselves trying to avoid injury. Nimona might not always admit they were friends with her words, but she was scrupulous to avoid directly harming him from her own actions. Once he learned to stand still and not try to avoid her lashing out, he had many fewer wounds to treat when she calmed down. Furthermore, because Nimona could take most forms of physical punishment without flinching, in the rare cases where she might actually hurt him from her emotions, he had been able to deflect and occasionally reflect her emotional output without worry that he was going to hurt her instead.
"Still a sensitive subject for you; noted," Ballister said.
“What makes you think you were talking about me?” she replied, before shifting into a miniature pony and starting a trot.
Having seen them devour those fire sausages so quickly, Ballister made sure he was not directly behind Nimona in case they decided they wanted to demonstrate what other orifices could shoot fire. Ballister continued at a languid pace to try and let Nimona burn off as much nervous energy and fire sausage spice as possible before they arrived at Dr. Blitzmyer’s.
Meredith Blitzmyer was the closest thing Ballister had to a scientific peer, since both of them had compatible ways of looking at the world, the requisite curiosity to want to get to know it better, and the persistence to keep testing combinations and inputs to make sure they knew which situations would lead to new knowledge or discoveries and which would lead only to explosions.. They regularly traded ideas, theories, and the results of experiments with each other. In the absence of the Director and the Institute, there was no central space for scientists to share their work, but the lack of the Institute also meant more scientists were sending correspondence and visiting. Without the fear of confiscation of their work or arrest of their person keeping them away from the city, Ballister had high hopes that they would be able to build a good community. Thanks to Nimona’s stories about the world outside the wall, he also knew it would take time for everyone to find each other and start trying to learn more about the way the world worked.
When he wasn’t telling stories about his past, Nimona, for the most part, laughed at everything they thought they knew about the world. He was the asterisk to just about everything, to the point that Ballister and Blitzmyer both wondered whether the world had ever produced her, or whether Nimona was part of some other realm entirely. They had no way of testing that theory with the equipment they had, and Nimona was, as he'd expressed earlier, very adamant that one form he would not take was lab rat.
"Good afternoon, Dr. Blitzmyer," Ballister said when she answered the door.
"Ah, hello, Ballister! And Nimona! Come in, I have something interesting to show you." Without waiting for them to reply, Meredith waved them inside, then produced a pair of glasses from one of her lab coat pockets. "I believe I have a prototype viewer for the energy field commonly referred to as 'magic.' So far, it seems to work acceptably on objects that have been imbued with magic, but I was hoping to get the opportunity to observe Nimona, who seems to have a greater amount of access to the field than others I have come across. I fear we may have to do so indirectly, though."
"That's impressive timing, Meredith. We've just come back from Ambrosius, and, in the presence of sufficient annoyance provided by Nimona—"
"Like you didn't enjoy it, too," Nimona quipped, in her customary girl form, sitting on one of the lab tables.
"—managed to manifest a small amount of magic to prevent Nimona from continuing to annoy him." She was right about the enjoyment, which was proper for an Official Villain, but also not proper because Ambrosius was, after all, his partner. There would definitely need to be some scientific inquiry about his conflicted feelings on the matter. Later.
"Interesting!" Meredith said. "I'm sure we could devise some tests to see where Ambrosius's annoyance threshold is before he starts trying to get someone or something to go away by magic."
"I was hoping for a little bit of being able to read Nimona's magic, and then see if we could do the same for Ambrosius and compare the two. You're sure that your device won't be able to stand up to Nimona?"
Meredith shook her head. "Do you remember my Anomalous Energy Detector? And what happened to it when it was close to Nimona?"
"Yes," Ballister said.
"That was my first attempt at a direct magic detector, Ballister. Nimona overloaded it without trying particularly hard. While I think this new prototype will have a better chance of surviving, I am not entirely sure it will stand up to reading her directly. Ambrosius performing magic would be a much safer test."
"I think he would be more interested in some kind of device that could automatically do all his paperwork," Ballister said.
"That's what he has secretaries for," Meredith said.
"Maybe you should try your magic glasses on something safer, like mermaids," Nimona put in, having changed into a mermaid that might have come from a book of tales.
Dr. Blitzmyer laughed. "They don't look anything like that, Nimona. Much less beautiful, much more ready to drown you so they can eat you. I suspect you already knew that, though."
"That's someone who knows her stuff," Nimona said. "You should probably wear the glasses, Boss, and see her at work." When Ballister didn't respond, Nimona pressed further. "Come on, Boss, your boyfriend managed it, and he's a himbo when he's at his best. Time to admit that there's something that Ambrosius just knows how to do better than you, and—" Nimona's mouth stopped moving.
"Nimona, stop," Ballister said, gritting his teeth in concentration. "Now's your opportunity, Meredith. She won't get a word in to distract you, and the less she talks, the faster I’ll stop being angry at her."
Dr. Blitzmyer was already examining Ballister from every angle that didn't require her to look directly at Nimona, nodding and peering closely at things Ballister could only feel. Right as she was finishing up, Nimona shapeshifted into a large dog and let out a single bark at Ballister, who wobbled like the leash he had been holding had gone slack.
"It appears that aggravation is just as effective a method with you, Ballister, as it was with Ambrosius," Dr. Blitzmyer said, taking off the glasses and starting to scribble notes of her observations.
"It's not very nice," Ballister said, his voice returning toward his previous calm. “Also, I think it might not have been all genuine.” He wasn’t usually this quick to snap at Nimona, and she’d hurled bigger insults at him than calling Ambrosius names. And Ambrosius, similarly, had faded back to calm very quickly from getting worked up enough to use his own magic. If rage was a principal component of magic, that would neatly explain why most people couldn’t do it, and why Nimona always had reserves of it at all times.
“No, it isn't," Nimona said. "But it's very effective. Gloreth hated it, too." He jumped off the lab table and came up to Ballister, shifting into a big enough cat to make it easy for Ballister to pet her while twining around his legs.
"Gloreth, too?" Ballister said, trying to keep Nimona talking while his emotions receded back toward their normal levels. If she could give him anger, she could take it just as easily.
"Yeah. I…wish I had a better way. But I'm, well, you saw me. You know how close I am at all times to just blowing it all up or burning it all down. I don't know anything else."
"From my observations from outside the wall," Dr. Blitzmyer put in, "you're not alone at being a ball of anger given magical abilities. Yours are stronger than others, but if the other beings I have observed can find their magic without needing to run hot all the time, I have confidence you can do the same."
"Aw, thanks, Doc," Nimona said. "Do you have hope for the other two?" she added mischievously.
"Any skill, if practiced sufficiently, can become available to someone on demand," Dr. Blitzmyer said, not even looking up from her writing.
"Did you get anything useful?" Ballister asked.
"Ask me again tomorrow," Dr. Blitzmyer replied. "Until then, go ask Ambrosius to come by and demonstrate what he did earlier."
So dismissed, Ballister and Nimona headed back to Ballister's lair.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Ballister asked.
"Mm?" Nimona said, still in cat form.
"You said that Gloreth didn't like how you taught her magic. You told me you two had a falling-out when you last saw her. Was this part of it?"
"Not really. Or, at least, I didn't think it was, given how she was more than happy to sling all kinds of magic at me when I was mad about her being taken away from me."
"You do make a terrifying beast, you know," Ballister told him.
"You really know how to compliment someone," she replied, returning to girl form afterward. "What else have you got?" she asked.
"Persistence," Ballister replied dryly.
"Spoilsport," she said. "No, I don't think my teaching Gloreth the magic by annoying her and then bothering her to keep using it until she had it down contributed to our break-up. There were other factors involved. Most of them carrying either torches or pitchforks."
"That would give someone a distrust for the established order and authority figures, yes," Ballister said, fingering the holes left in his artificial arm.
"We could have had a nice life together on our own. She might not have loved being alone much, but I think she would have liked the mermaids."
"The ones that would have gladly eaten her alive?"
"Mm-hmm!" Nimona shifted into one of the mermaid forms, a scaly, finned being that seemed to be mostly teeth in the smile she favored Ballister with. "They're very cute and social, once you get to know them."
"While still trying to drown you."
"Yep!"
A memory flitted across Nimona's face. From what Ballister could tell, it wasn't a happy one, but before he could ask, Nimona's face brightened.
"That's enough magic lessons for one day," she said. "Let's go home and play games until your boyfriend comes home and I have to leave because of how nauseatingly romantic you two are. I'm looking forward to hearing from Meredith tomorrow about how much you suck at magic."
Without actually waiting for Ballister to respond, Nimona changed into a ferret and bolted back toward Ambrosius's house.
"I don't blame you for being afraid of getting close to someone," Ballister said to the empty space. “Or, for that matter, believing that magic requires anger to draw on. Meredith will probably have it all explained by tomorrow.” Ballister smiled at the thought of poring over Meredith’s notes with her later on, to see what insights could be collected and whether or not they would have to rework their entire understanding of the universe as a result. He’d have to spend some time with his arm tonight, as well, to patch the holes and to run deeper diagnostics on the insides. With Nimona’s newfound taste for electricity, he might have to let them taste a full jolt before any repair work could be done. Which was, on its face, an entirely ludicrous thing to contemplate, but Nimona brought out the ludicrous in those she chose to hang around.
Ballister put a hand into the pocket he habitually kept his key in to make sure he had it and felt nothing.
"But I will blame you for stealing my keys!" he roared.
In the distance, Nimona laughed.