"You've got to be kidding me, Syl. You can't go. You're an eye! It's ice skating! Not eye skating!"

I'm up in Sylvie's room now, with a lock spell on the door and a soundproofing spell on the walls, sitting in front of her full-wall mirror with my shirt off, glaring at my girlfriend while drinking the hot chocolate her mom insisted I take up with me. 

{WE CAN FIGURE I}

"Figure what out?" I fidget with one of her hair clips, resisting the urge to pace so I can keep translating the morse code. "I mean, I'll try my best to eat enough so you can regrow your body before the competition, but that only gives us like, two weeks? Even if I ate, like, two kilos of monster meat every day, your entire body including all the fourth dimensional bits was like, what, half a tonne? More? There's no way anyone could eat that much that fast, right? Like... hang on, let me look up the record, so I can compare-"

{ADHD}

"Yeah, right, thank you, that's a tangent, don't need to go there now. The point is, there's no way we can have your new body ready for the competition. It's just not, like, thermodynamically possible."

{WHAT ABOUT U}

"What about me?"

{U CAN GO}

"Go- oh, no, no no no, you've got to be kidding me."

{IN MY PLACE}

"I don't know how to skate like you! You're, like, a skating goddess! I can barely stop myself!"

{U WATCHED ME}

"And I don't have an eidetic memory. I can't just watch someone do something once and figure out how to do it."

{I LL GIVE U 1}

"Wait, can you? That would be amazing, you know how terrible my memory is... no, no, no, that's actually a terrible idea. Have you ever messed with someone's brain before? Like, a regular human one?"

{FINE AN AUX BRAIN}

"An auxiliary brain?!"

{FOR MOTOR CONTROL}

"That's not a thing. I mean, it is, but it's just an alien thing."

{OCTOPI DO}

"Seriously?"

Two blinks.

"Oh shit, that's really cool."

{RIGHT}

"...fine, let's follow this thought experiment. Let's say you can give me some auxiliary nervous system to remember how to skate for me. I'd still need to know how to do the moves in the first place."

{CALL ALEJANDRA}

"Who- No wait, I remember, your private skating coach?"

Two blinks.

"Does she know your whole routine?"

Two blinks.

"...and will she help me cheat?"

She squints at me. 

"Yeah, I thought so."

{PRETEND TO BE ME}

"How's she supposed to believe that?"

{AMNESIA?}

"...you want me to pretend to be you, with amnesia, have her teach me your routine, grow me a second alien-octopus brain so I can repeat it, and do your whole performance for you?"

Two blinks.

I stare at Syl.

She stares back.

I stare at Syl. 

She stares back.

I blink first.

"This is some peak magical girl bullshit, you know that? Like, they're going to be telling the new girls about this in training forever if any of them find out."

She turns her pupil into a heart.

"Love you too."