He flushes. "...Oops, thought I explained that this morning."

"Um. So, Windy scattered the cards everywhere for some reason. Being loose, they pretty much do whatever they want once they wake up. This is how you and Kero got switched by Change. Obviously it's now my job to catch them and prevent various brands of chaos and destruction, since I sort-of caused it, I'm not just doing it because I want shiny magic cards."

His mind runs through the cards he remembers. "Oh, shit."

"Yyyeah. I would really really like some sort of extra help on this, one teenager, two if you help, standing between The Sword and a crowd of mall-goers? But my parents would probably react badly. And I doubt we can get, like, government support."

"...uh, well, my mother's definitely going to want to help. But the Sword isn't even the biggest problem, the Earthy- the Time!"

"Yeah... I think I want more details, Cerberus, as much as you can give me. On all of them. So we know what to watch out for and can plan."

"O... kay? What kinds of details?"

"Like, how to break out of The Loop, if we even can. How to trick The Fight. Where The Time might hide. That sort of thing."

"You need to deal with the Loop at the looping place, I don't know how to trick the Fight, the Time could hide anywhere."

"Hm. Am I just going to have to keep asking questions? You can't elaborate on your own? If we get separated again like this morning, I want to already know what could be going wrong..."

"I... don't know what questions you'd want to ask?"

"...What things about the cards would you want me to know if you knew you were going to disappear and I couldn't get advice for each card when it appears?"

"I don't know! Lots of things!"

"We might... be better off just questioning him about more specific stuff."

"Urgh. Alright, sorry. I'm going to feel like I'm missing something, though."

That said, the next few questions he asks are card-specific.

Cerberus is much relieved, and can explain things about the cards in quite a bit of detail. Not complete detail, though—some cards haven't told him how they work, or not all of it anyway.

He extrapolates from available information some, discussing potential strategies and deliberately including Sadde in the conversation. Sadde will get Change for the next fight since he's much better at using it and two magic-users are more flexible than one, for example. His overall attitude is between 'serious' and 'bored', but "It's way better to have done this sort of prep and not need it than vice versa."

Sadde himself, on the other hand, is delighted about all of this and having lots of fun.

It's interesting, sure, and way better than homework, but Terry can't bring himself to see preparing for card-battle as outright fun.

It needn't strictly be, well, battle. Except for cards like the Sword and the Power, those will invariably be battled.

"Glow and Flower I might just be able to walk up to and say 'hi again,' huh?"

"Yes. They won't resist being captured, really."

"What's in-between look like? Change didn't really fight back, just ran away, about like that?"

"Yeah, or there's a trick to it, you need to keep them still for long enough that you can capture them but there's lots of ways to do it."

He asks about which ways would be appropriate for various specific cards. And writes this down.

Cerberus does his best but he doesn't really know this information about all of them, due to it depending a lot on exactly where these cards are and what they're doing, and also he's a guardian and his job wasn't exactly this.