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A lot can happen in thirty minutes.
A television cast can go through an entire crisis and return to the status quo.
A movie can fail to even complete its initial setup for the main drive of the film in that time.
Or- if you're in one particularly cheap part of town- you can complete a ritual to cross the wires of reality and set up a Supernal forge on top of a card table.
It's the latter that's been done tonight. Liezel's spent the whole time singing by her window- quietly, but constantly- the somber tones of a dirge leading her through movement after movement before coming to a crescendo as the ritual completes and Twilight descends onto half her card table, the space delineated with a bit of string so she can easily mark her workplace. With the "forge" set up, she takes a moment to sing another brief verse of a requiem over the coil of copper piping she's got sitting on "her" side of the card table- and then picks up a perfectly ordinary pair of cheap scissors and starts to shear the piping into small segments for what comes next.
The blinds are mostly drawn, to prevent Sleepers from watching her, but the song- well, her voice is pretty distinctive once you've heard her sing once. She's skilled, if not necessarily talented.
Sometimes you get a little taste of being a bird from being a hummingbird and think 'golly gosh, it would be so cool to be a bigger bird, I think I want to hunt tonight.' And then you decide '_heck yeah, I'm gonna be a bird, let's be... AN OWL' and then you decide that being a barn owl is not enough you want to be A VERY BIG OWL so you're a GREAT SNOWY OWL which is local to Philadelphia mind you and then you ARE ONE and it is AWESOME and you're FLYING and then you hear a familiar voice and you swoop down and sit on a branch just outside the window.
And it is your friend (everyone is your friend until they're not) Liezel, and she is singing. And so you hoot! Because it is lovely, and you're so happy to hear your friend sounding happy. Hoot!
That's how it is in Fox's world now. Exactly like that.
Well- at least she sounds happy after she finishes her casting! Those songs before? Those were mournful, but she seems perfectly fine, humming to herself while she clips segments out of the pipe, setting each segment in the bottom of a dixie cup. After she's got about eight set up, she starts to sing one of those sad, mournful songs again, but pauses at the hoot, looking up with a blink.
Her hair's down, on account of not being out and about and as a result... well... literally having let her hair down. It falls in curly waves, framing her face to either side as she moves to the window and opens it, blinking at the owl.
"Looking for a snack? You'll probably do better if you're quiet, friend. Prey goes to ground when they know the predator's about."
Hoooooot, answers the owl, and spreads its great white wings expansively. Owls don't normally have green-and-gold eyes, mind. Perhaps Liezel doesn't know that. Perhaps she does. Perhaps people notice that Fox always keeps her eyes green-and-gold when she shapeshifts unless she's trying to be very subtle. Perhaps they don't.
Liezel smiles at the hoot before pausing as it spreads its wings. This is an awfully friendly owl. With... interesting eyes. Eyes she's seen before, on foxes, and Foxes, and...
"..." She squints suspiciously and steps back from the window, completely clearing it, and waiting.
With a fluttering of massive white wings, the owl takes off, and looks -- for a moment -- like it's flying away. Because, well, it is flying away...
... but then it banks, turns, and, tucking its powerful wings in against its body, dives through the window...
... and just as the owl passes Liezel, turns into a Fox, tumbling across the floor with a sound that starts out as a twittering and ends up as peals of laughter.
Liezel's smile fades as the owl flies off, only to squeak in astonishment as the huge owl plunges through her window, only to tumble itself all the way round the evolutionary tables into a Fox! She smiles again, then, a little thing that's pleased with a plan come together, and moves to shut the window again. "Hello, Little Fox. You seem to have been having a good evening?" She moves to sit back down, singing again for a few moments- at which point all eight chunks of pipe promptly liquefy, settling into thick disks at the bottom of each paper cup.
She smells like the wind, like petrichor, like fresh-cut greenery. Fox has a backpack on her back, no shoes on, and she's got her legs splayed out in front of her on the floor. Fortunately she didn't knock over any of Liezel's work! "I'm having a fantastic evening. I spent like... hours flying around, and I had spent some time with Vasily before that, and I was a hummingbird earlier, and now I'm sitting on the floor in my friend's house and it looks like you were doing amazing work! Tell me about it. Is your night good? I want to hear about your work." She scrambles up to her feet.
"Sure- have a seat. I would say to make yourself comfortable, but I'm- not certain I've ever seen you not be comfortable," Liezel offers, glancing to see whether the joke landed properly or not. "Well- I like to think it's amazing. Even if it's just a little thing in the long run." She starts tipping the copper disks from the cups, and sets them over in the aril- inside the shared, Twilit space. And once they're all over there, she starts sending them into Twilight, one after the other. It's a slow process- each circuit takes nearly thirty seconds just to send them one way, and another to bring them back, so she does it while she speaks. "All this is, really, is making some things to help with the Hosts. We know they tend to attract nasty, unhealthy things, so... I thought I'd make some Brontium tokens to protect everyone. Just carrying them would double an average person's resistance to degrading things. Sickness, toxins, all sorts of things." Brontium, of course, being Perfected copper.
"Oh, I've been not-comfortable," laughs Fox, shaking out her limbs and stretching his hands up above their head. Yeah, that's right, three different pronouns in one sentence, what's up. The joke landed! "There was this one time when a really shitty dominant started acting up at The Aviary, but. That's really what it takes." She flops down on the couch, props her chin on her hands, her elbows on her knees. "What's Brontium? You'd think I'd know, on account of being a Matter Adept, but... it requires more than just Matter, as I understand it, and my studies of Matter have been limited to what I need to know as an Orphan," she admits. And then a moment later, she snaps her fingers. "Perfected copper, right? Right. I didn't know it did that."
"A shitty dominant... I don't follow. Actually, I'm not entirely sure what The Aviary is. Can I ask? Or is this one of those things where if you have to ask, you shouldn't know?" Her tone's calm, level, while she asks, slowly guiding the materials to and from Twilight. "And why did that make you uncomfortable?"
"Yes, exactly!" Liezel's interest lights up her speech patterns and expressions, and she smiles wider. "It's okay, lots of people haven't looked into the materials too deeply. For a lot of folks, just knowing how to make them Perfect is all they care about. There's a spell- you could cast it, if you're an Adept- but it's-" She grimaces. "It's the difference between getting a paycheck and getting a loan. If you want the materials to stay Perfected, you need to take your time- infuse them with ephemera over ten, thirty, ninety cycles to and from Twilight. And not only is that kind of painstaking... well, a Ghost Gate, for instance, could let you put it over there, but it'd lose its corporeal form in the process. You could bring it back using other Death magic, but it'd only be here temporarily in that case. Spirit magic might make it easier, but despite Matter belonging to the Moros, the only option is a drastic extension of the Ghost Gate spell to actually step bodily into Twilight with all your things at once. You'd need to be an Adept just to cast the spell quickly."
Sometimes Fox's mouth gets ahead of her brain, and she ends up scratching her cheek absently, visibly wincing when her brain catches up. "Well, it's a sex thing," she leads with. "So if you want to opt out of the explanation on that basis, that's okay, no judgement. Human beings are extremely embarrassed about sex, often." Yeah, Fox, that makes you sound very normal, please refer to people as 'human beings' more.
They go silent, then, their wide green-gold eyes fixed on Liezel as she explains. "Don't you have to pay back loans?" Fox asks, not seeming to follow the analogy.
"Hm? No, that's fine. I don't really feel one way or the other about sex so it's not going to bother me. Please, share? If you're okay with it on your end?" Liezel asks, glancing over and blinking guilelessly.
"Exactly. You do have to pay back loans. So when you use a shortcut to Perfect something, all that Supernal beauty you coaxed into your work? The moment the loan- your spell- expires? It all gets paid back to the Supernal, and you're no better off than you started. Which means you can't ever gift someone something Perfected, because you'd have to hold the spell forever, and even if you did, you're gonna die someday, and the moment you do, the debt's repaid and the stuff is normal again." She throws a hand up in frustration. "Which is even worse because there's fourth circle magic that CAN be made to linger permanently that you can use to create alloys of Perfected materials, but those effects are destroyed if their components ever un-Perfect!"
Liezel shakes her head. "I want to leave things behind when I'm gone. I want everyone I gave gifts to, to still have those gifts after I'm gone. I don't want to just magically take back every Perfected present I ever gave just because I was too lazy to do things the Right Way. So instead of casting one spell to make these copper disks into Brontium," she concludes, "I'm sitting here passing them through Twilight, one at a time, almost a dozen times apiece." She sounds proud of herself, not frustrated with the tedium.
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