You decide that the current circumstances make using magic too risky... but you have other methods.

Long before he was the King of Evil, before he was a proper sorcerer, even before he was a warrior, Ganondorf was a thief. While you have not explicitly trained to develop those skills, your physical fitness - particularly your hand-eye coordination - is good enough to fake the basics of the larcenous arts. It's the work of but a few heartbeats for you to "drop" your enchanted pencil in such a way that the lead snaps, giving you the excuse you need to get out your pencilcase. Almost immediately, you sense the demon's attention on you, and a glance out of the corner of your eye lets you see that he is watching. Let him. You're just a boy with a little bit of untrained magical potential who's sharpening a pencil he broke by accident. It's not as if you're trained enough to sense the trap here, or possess the nonmagical skills to slip through it undetected...

Even with unfriendly, unhuman eyes on you, slipping a pencil that looks like the enspelled one out of your pencilcase when you fetch a sharpener is no problem. You grind the broken lead a few times, pile the shavings to one side, and switch pencils as you put the sharpener away. Then you write the first letter in your name, letting your aura slip very, very slightly - just enough to mimic the faint drain of the enchanted pencils. What energy you allow to bleed through, you keep as tight a rein on as you can manage, letting it spread out and settle into the paper, but preventing it from being taken by the absorptive enchantment.

Almost as soon as you start writing, you sense the demon's attention going elsewhere. Very slowly, you pull back on your aura, drawing the energy away from the paper, back up across the pencil, to your hand... and then it runs into whatever Briar is doing, and is dispersed. No, you realize, not dispersed - absorbed. Briar is concealing your excess aura by taking it into herself.

That's potentially dangerous for her - brilliant, and it probably just saved your ass, but it's still dangerous. While fairies are magically potent for their size, they're still tiny creatures of limited power. You, on the other hand, are the reincarnation of Power Incarnate, however diminished, and you're about a hundred times Briar's size. You have no idea how long she can keep this up, but you know that sooner or later, she'll start doing serious harm to herself.

You fly through the test in just under eight minutes. You barely remember the questions afterwards, because they are not important. A trusted ally and advisor, perhaps your first real friend in this life, is putting herself in harm's way on your behalf, and by Din, you are not going to make her stay there any longer than she has to. Fast as you are, you're not the first to finish. Willow gets up to hand her test in after about five minutes, and Jonathon and a few of the other recognized smart kids aren't too far behind in putting their pencils down. Amy and Cordelia are just finishing up themselves when you fill in the last circle and swap out pencils again. You take a moment to run a stream of your aura over the enchanted pencil, being sure to keep it out of contact with the paper until the energy has passed through it and dispersed into the air. You focus the flow around the lead tightly enough to generate a subtle eroding pressure, wearing the tip down as if it had been used. All of that should help reduce suspicion.

The demon doesn't look your way the entire time.

Larry is last to finish, and by common accord, his reward for coming in last is to take the tests and the pencils up to the front. The demon takes them with another empty smile, flips through all the papers he's received, counts up the pencils, and nods in satisfaction before packing everything away. Not twenty minutes after he arrived, he's out the door, a model of efficiency.

You wait another minute, moving over the Moblin and giving the demon time to get out of sensing range, before you nudge Briar. "Stop. He's gone."

The fairy's response is a tiny shuddering sigh.

"Are you insane, Briar?" you grate out. "What in the names of the Golden Goddesses possessed you to take a risk like that?"

"You're welcome," Briar grumbles. "And I'll be fine, thanks for asking. Now shut up and let me sleep."

You do so, reluctantly.

For the next couple of weeks, you maintain a state of high alert. You monitor your classmates as closely as you dare, waiting to see if any of them suddenly "move away" or experience some other change of circumstance in the wake of the test. You also observe Briar, who spends most of the three days after the encounter with the demon zonked out in the space up in your closet that she's claimed and converted into her private quarters. You don't use any magic, and you warn Amy against doing the same.

You're both relieved and vaguely annoyed when nothing seems to come of the test. Everybody shows up for the last week and a half of preschool as they should, and even after class lets out for summer, the only kids who "disappear" are the ones that were talking about going on vacation anyway. Cordelia, Aura, and Larry are among this group. You don't see anybody paying any special attention to you or your home, and Amy reports a similar lack of interest in her comings and goings.

There is one consequence to the whole incident. Even after she regains consciousness and resumes stealing tiny bits of food from the pantry, Briar goes to some lengths to avoid letting you see her. When you finally get fed up with the routine and corner her, you discover that her aura is no longer pink, but faintly red. She's also doubled in height, large enough that you can actually see her tiny humanoid body against her perpetual glow, and is wearing a halter top and knee-length skirt which appear to have been recently sewn together from parts of the pink baby blanket Zelda came back from the hospital in.

"What the hell?" you ask intelligently.

"I needed clothes," Briar says, tugging awkwardly at the skirt. "You mortals have all these hangups about nudity, especially these days, so..." She shrugs.

"Not that - well, no, that, but also, why are you bigger?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I mean, is this what happens to a fairy when you absorb a lot of magic?" you continue, not really hearing Briar's statement.

"I said, I don't want to talk about it."

Still not quite paying attention, you frown as a new thought occurs. "And does that mean the Great Fairies-"

There is suddenly a frantic fairy in your face.

"Never mind that, shut up, stop asking me questions, it's private fairy business that doesn't matter anyway, because it's never going to happen!"

Since Briar appears healthy, you graciously let the matter drop. For now.

Gained Briar E+ (F++ physical, D mental)

Summer passes, not without some nervousness on your part. After the first month, you conclude that if there are going to be any long-term consequences from that test, they'll be some time coming, and resume your use of magic. Amy is a little more reluctant to take up her own practice again, though she doesn't hesitate to work during your lessons.

OOC: Why does the nasty SB hates us when we try to post, Precious? What did we ever to it?

Anyway, on the subject of "focused" and "specialized" magical studies:
- If you study general magic, you get +++ to your Magical Prowess, one for training, one for having Briar as a teaching aide of higher rank, and one for having Past Life Experience as a teaching aide of higher rank.
- If you focus, you get ++++ to that field of magic, and + to your overall Magical Prowess due to your Past Life Experience. (Briar, recall, has only general knowledge.)
- If you specialize, you get +++++ to that field of magic.

Fields of magic include, but may not be limited to:
Abjuration: Barriers, bounded fields, wards, dispelling, banishing, and other ways to just say "no."
Augmentation: Nasu-style Reinforcement, of yourself, objects, and other beings.
Conjuration: Creating something - and potentially, anything - from nothing, or nearly so.
Divination: Any means of gathering information, up to and including mind-reading and prophecy.
Elemental: The various manifestations of wind, fire, all that kind of thing.
Enchantment: How to make friends and influence people, the magical way.
Illusion: Make people see things that aren't real, and/or ignore things that are.
Necromancy: Raise the dead, command the undead, curse the living - classic Dark Lord stuff.
Summoning: Tear down the walls of space and time for fun and profit.
Transformation: Turn one thing into something else.