"Some of them can talk. Windy can, after you learn to understand what she's saying. Light and Dark can even talk with sounds."

"Cool. More meditation to figure that out, I guess? I should probably take a look at Change."

"Yeah."

"Oh, how fun, I get to watch you meditate. At least you're cute."

"Doesn't have to be now. I was experimenting with Change and Float, notes on page nine, write down 'gender' and 'minds' under Change and see if I missed anything obvious and we can come up with more tests."

He does so. "Hmm, can Windy do sound manipulation?"

"Anything beyond masking stuff with strong wind sounds more like 'Voice' or 'Song,' but we can try it. Windy!"

"Well, if she's that powerful she might be able to do it anyway."

There she is.

"Can you mask the sound of my voice? Can you make an area of air completely still? Can you create vacuum?"

She cocks her head a bit at the first question, and starts shaking her head at the second.

"Okay." Scribble scribble notes. "Try to stop me from speaking for a few moments, please."

"Testing testing, one two three."

Loud, noisy wind! Nothing as fine as being able to mess with the sound coming out of his mouth, though.

"Yeah, it'll take Voice or Song. Thanks for trying, Windy, you're really helpful."

She nods and smiles.

"Okay but what other things could the wind theoretically do... hmm... You did mention you wanted to use it and Float to simulate flight, you could try to test that one now?"

He glances over in the direction of the mall. "Bit too close to civilization for my comfort, for that, let's head a little deeper and find a clearing?"

"Sure," he says, his mind totally going places when he imagines going somewhere more secluded with Terry.

Backpack gets picked up, Kero too if he's not in it, and he starts walking his bike through trees and brush, rambling about what he suspects the other cards might do and possible combos. "Time sounds scarily powerful."

"Yeah, what kinds of things can it even do?"

"He can stop, repeat, and reverse time, but he's one of the most powerful and difficult to control cards. You'll need a lot of power before you can use it well."

"It'll be a hell of a fallback plan, reversing time, if I get to that point."

"Basically a fix-anything card. You could even use it to cheat on tests."

"Yeaaah I really don't want to use something like that lightly. It's not that, like, academic integrity is all-important to me, but reversing time should be reserved for saving lives or stopping car accidents and so on."

"You could pause time to cheat on tests, though."