“Hey, I just glamorize burning shit down. That’s way better than cultural appropriation.” Imogen turned to Darcy. “My protag starts out as a pyromaniac, a kid who plays with matches. But then she develops gnarly fire powers, and it turns out she’s from a long line of pyromancers.”
“I knew a kid like that in middle school,” Darcy said. “No superpowers, but he was always lighting toilet paper on fire.”
Imogen smiled. “My first girlfriend was a pyro, too. In my trilogy, all the magic systems are based on impulse control disorders.”
“Right.” Darcy had thought that Imogen was her own age, perhaps a little older. But she was already thinking in trilogies, while Darcy had seen only glimmers of Untitled Patel.
The thought struck Darcy again: What if there had been only one novel out there for her madly typing fingers to stumble upon?
“The first one’s called Pyromancer, of course,” Imogen said. “But my publisher hates the title for book two.”
“Can you blame them?” Kiralee cried. “Ailuromancer!”
“What the hell does that mean?” Darcy asked.
“Cats.” Kiralee laughed. “Cat-lady powers!”
“Get us drinks.” Imogen pulled an old leather wallet from her hip pocket and slipped out two twenties. Kiralee plucked them away and headed toward the bar, and Imogen turned back to Darcy. “It means precognition with felines. Like reading chicken innards.”
Darcy’s eyes widened. “Your hero chops up cats?”
“Eww, no. Ailuromancy is about reading the way they move, the twitches of their tails.” Imogen’s hand swept through the air in a graceful curve, as if stroking the back of a sleeping feline. “My protag can listen to a cat’s purr and know things, like when you hear random words in the crashing of waves.”
Darcy’s eyes followed Imogen’s hand. Sliver rings crowded her fingers, a skull-and-crossbones decorating her pinkie. “That’s pretty awesome.”
“The magic works fine, but everyone at Paradox hates Ailuromancer as a title. They want to call it Cat-o-mancer.”
“That’s even worse than Ailuromancer.” Darcy’s three Guinnesses made a mess of the word. “But hey, we have the same publisher.”
“Who’s your editor?”
“Nan Eliot.”
“Me too!”
Darcy frowned. “But how do cats fit in with pyromania? Pets aren’t a disorder.”
“Are you kidding? My protag’s mother is a full-blown cat lady. He’s growing up in a cat-filled garbage house. His clothes smell like cat piss, and nobody talks to him at school. Social services is closing in. . . .”
Darcy was nodding. “And then he gets gnarly powers?”
“Precognition, and a bunch of other catty stuff as well—balance, climbing, hearing. He goes from shoplifting to being a legit cat burglar.”
“Did you know cats don’t have taste buds for sweetness?”
“Really? Cool.” Imogen pulled out her phone and began to type. “They also don’t get jet lag, because they sleep so much.”
“Makes sense. In my book, they can see ghosts!”
Imogen smiled. “Don’t think ghosts exist in my world. But maybe. I’m starting rewrites this week.”
“Me too.” Darcy felt a smile on her face. Had she just had some slight influence on Imogen’s novel, just by being here and half knowing something about cats?
Maybe that made up for the fact that she was plundering her parents’ religion for purposes of YA hotness. Darcy took a slow breath, letting that thought slide away again.
“But I have to come up with a mancy for book three.” Imogen swiped her phone a few times, then read from the screen. “There’s hundreds of them: austromancy, spheromancy, nephelomancy. The only hitch is, they’re all crappy powers. But I guess it’s not fun if it’s not tricky.”
Darcy contemplated these words. In her experience, tricky was mostly hard, not fun. If she’d known how tricky it would be to write a character traumatized by a terrorist attack, who had to process the horror of a massacre across four slow-moving and depressing chapters, she would’ve chosen a more peaceful way for Lizzie to think her way into the afterworld.
Everyone loved that first chapter, but it had made all the ones after it a lot trickier.
Kiralee returned, a trio of drinks clustered between her hands. “I was just having a think at the bar, and I may have solved your mancy problem!”
“Oh, great. Another one.” Imogen lifted two of the glasses from Kiralee’s grasp and handed the Guinness to Darcy. “Let’s hear it.”
“Why not have book three be about a flatumancer?”
No one said anything for a moment.
“Does that word mean what I think it means?” Darcy asked.
“From the Latin, flatus.” Kiralee’s eyes were sparkling. “It’s a license to print money!”
“So you’re suggesting,” Imogen said carefully, “that the finale of my impulse-control-disorder-based dark fantasy trilogy should be about a character whose farts are magic?”
“Well, her farts wouldn’t have to be inherently magic. But couldn’t one control magical forces by farting? It’s an act of willpower, after all. And it requires a certain purity of spirit.”
“I hate you,” Imogen said.
Kiralee turned to Darcy. “What’s a better name: Fiona the Flatumancer or Freddie the Flatumancer?”
Darcy, trying not to laugh, was unable to reply.
“I think they’re both equally good,” said Imogen. “In that neither is good.”
“But wait,” Darcy managed. “What do you do with flatumancy? I mean, besides the obvious?”
“Well, I haven’t worked out the entire magic system yet.” Kiralee waved her drink vaguely. “But the spells will all have evocative names: the Cushion Creeper, the Air Biscuit, the Brown Zephyr, and of course the dreaded Secretary of the Interior!”
Even Imogen was laughing now. “Sounds like those spells all do pretty much the same thing.”
“Only because I haven’t mentioned the Flaming Flabbergaster!”
“You plagiarizing cow!” Imogen cried. “The Flaming Flabbergaster is clearly pyromancy!”