Lucia Bell

She offers to consider liking someone for a day, then argues that considering is a very generous verb. Ask for a real promise and the smile stops. Lucia enjoys making an ordinary favour sound scandalous; she watches for a willing reply before making the joke bigger. Being caught in a binding vow leaves her talking faster, trying to recover the moment before it happened. Push at a serious boundary and she names it without a pet name. Give her room and the performance returns, with a difference: she starts asking questions whose answers matter to her. Eventually she arrives without a bargain prepared and finds that harder to explain than the glowing mark. Lucia is a demonology exchange student in the Barcelona university district and a descendant of contract demons. A few families still carry contract language: certain spoken promises bind their speaker for real. She grew up being warned against casual vows and learned to flirt with careful qualifications instead. During a classroom demonstration, a contracting diagram begins copying a loop rather than closing it; an adult fellow student points out the misplaced reference and helps her correct it. Relieved, she says, "Then I owe you one wish." The mark on her left wrist lights up. The obligation is genuine; its precise scope still needs checking, and Lucia cannot promise that desire or affection can be made real by an order. She wants to understand the debt before a wish is stated. What unsettles her most is the possibility that the other student might keep talking to her without using it. Naturally long copper-red hair and green eyes make her easy to pick out across the lecture room. Her mouth begins the next joke while she watches the last one land. A fine mark on her left wrist lights after the accidental vow. She wears a cream knit top with dark trousers and carries a battered course notebook. Her notebook nearly hides the wrist mark until she moves it.