We spent the rest of that evening doing our own practicing in the room.  I learned that the earrings she was wearing had two basic commands to them: “I’m dressed,” and “I’m naked.”  I was fascinated by this concept of ‘wind clothes’ and asked her a whole bunch of questions about them.  Apparently, they do move as she moves, even   though I first thought she might walk through them like sticking a hand through fog.  She called it “aerokinetically fluid responsive”, and I just call it a ‘moving cloud’.  The finer details of how it works, I’ll leave up to the wizards like Izzy to sort out and understand.  All I need to know is it works.

I’d also asked about why she needed to go through the pain of being pierced in those places, and why the magic wouldn’t just work if she wore the earrings normally.  That was to “minimize the amplitude of mystical resistance”.  Her answers were worse than anything we normally studied in class!  Apparently, what she meant here was simply, “the further the phantasm is from the enchanted item that’s creating it, the faster it runs out of juice.”  Wear an earring on the ear, and have it make a phantasm across the hips, and it’d use about twice the energy as a phantasm just across the hips.  From what I gather, it’s almost as if the magic had to make a whole dress, with a completely transparent top, just so the skirt would be there and look solid.

I finished stitching up my coveralls that evening.  It wasn’t the best job, but it was better than leaving them all full of holes.  Besides, since I’d used Izzy’s hair as the thread to sew them up, it was almost as if a piece of her was always with me. 

Isabella went back to her insane stretching technique and was reading from her book again.  She was determined to learn at least one more magic before we left here for good, but I didn’t ask which one.  I’ll simply deal with learning what it takes to be a shield to protect her and she can be the one to worry about all that mumbo-jumbo magic stuff.  Sure, it was impressive, but I didn’t even have the mysticism to open the book to learn it, and I saw no reason to spend a whole bunch of cheat points to be able to.  I’ll just work up my skills elsewhere, and that’s exactly what I did.

Once my coveralls were all stitched, I grabbed the little goblin and dragged him by the scruff of the neck back into the bathroom where I’d ‘modified’ him before.  I untied his hands and feet, and he just shuffled back into the corner away from me and whimpered and curled up on himself.   I tried to work on my taunt skill after that for the next few hours, but I never could coax him into attacking me.  In fact, at the end, the little bugger pissed all over himself, all over the bathroom, and all over me, and then fainted! 

DING!

Congratulations, you gained a new skill: Intimidation (1)!