"Cardinal directions, sun, moon, eastern, western, there's a certain theme going on here..."

"Celestial motion, cartography? If we find something referencing the planets, maybe, hm..."

"We should find a Card that can actually talk."

"I don't think we can find the cards so much as wait for them to show up to meditation. Thinking about which one would be nice to have is kinda pointless, that way."

"Yeah," she sighs. "What else do we know about the system?"

"There's a hierarchy. Windy at the top of one category, the other elements at the top of the rest. It's amenable to being pinned down and defined, given the cards existing at all, but magic still has a will of its own too."

"Moon and Sun are at the very top, though, Windy and Watery and Dark under it. And we know it can make the cards in the first place, as well as the book, and the key slash staff, and Kero."

"The writing on the edges of the diagram is repeated, even if I can't work out what it actually says... Well, it's probably writing."

She squints. "Except for the symbol in the middle."

"At least a couple of them are the same as some on the outer ring. I'm not sure we can get anywhere with, but do you want to try seeing if you can make something magic happen with any of these symbols?"

"Like what? And you don't wanna try, too?"

"Yeah I totally will but I expect me to not get anywhere even more than you, Kero always goes on about how the staff and contract will make me terrible at non-card magic. How did you do changing before you had Change? Maybe try to extend that to something you didn't use it for before, by using symbols? I'm guessing, you see."

"Oh, I just, like... It was kinda really intuitive? I just wanted to change, so I did. Anyway, should we maybe do that somewhere more private?"

...Right they're in the library. He looks around sheepishly.

She giggles. "Back to my place?"

"Sure!"

And they arrive. "So Windy seemed to like one of the cardinal directions."

"The West. And she's affiliated with the Moon, according to Kero."

"Every card is affiliated with either Sun or Moon, though, and the other cards didn't seem to care much for any of the four cardinal directions. And there are exactly four elements."

"Four cards isn't a huge sample size, but yeah."

"It's big enough to rule out 'deterministic association between cardinal directions and cards related to Sun or Moon' as a hypothesis anyway."

He rubs his head. "This is giving me a headache. It feels like trying to learn to code by looking at Tetris and a banking app."

"Which sounds really exciting to me to be honest, it's like physics!"

"Mm. Point. And the key to physics is experiments, so... Try to find something that we can vary and test. Like the symbols. I'll go home and ask Kero how to do my own non-card magic. He'll probably say I can't."

"Symbols and sentences, I guess. Maybe there's a speaking component, too, since you have to call out things to use cards, but maybe that's just them."