"Next step: Try willpower and symbols and spoken phrases and if we think of any other things in various combinations. Let's list 'em, so we don't miss anything to try."

She finds a notebook and a pen. "Willpower, symbols, spoken phrases, what are we gonna try and vary, exactly? There were cardinal directions, we should see whether language counts..."

"Hm..."

Spreadsheet software is deployed.

It creates a long long list of possible combinations of these things.

She's suitably impressed!

"Should we try anything or ask Kero first or...?"

"Kero's not here because we might be 'kissing' right now, you see. I'll ask him later and update the grid."

"Oh, we might be, might we?"

"Well, we were earlier, so 'might' is correct."

"I meant mostly that we most definitely would have been kissing. Seeing as we did, in fact, kiss. And. Other things."

"Mmm-hmm. Kero's realized this by now so he just avoids me if I say I'll be visiting you."

"Somehow I'm failing to feel guilty about this."

Shrug. "I can kinda see his point. It's polite to keep it to a minimum if we're talking to him at least, yeah?"

"Sure, we should act around him like we'd act around anyone else, but that also means that there's a difference between three friends hanging out and a boyfriend and a currently-girlfriend making out in her bedroom."

"I forgot what point I was trying to make, anyway."

"We were talking about asking Kero some more about magic versus trying to do experiments here and now."

"Start now, amend list later. My organizational skills can overcome that much of a challenge."

"Okay, what's the first item on your list that's doable now?"

"You try changing without the Change, then do it while meditating on one of the symbols, and see if it feels any different. Maybe even time it. I'm going to try to float this eraser without the Float, and we run through all the symbols this way. Start with directions. Then try it drawing them in the air and facing the right cardinal direction. After that, we try actually writing out the symbols in a few different ways. If we haven't gotten any Interesting results by then we start running through combinations of all of the above. Sound good?"

"Yeah!" she says, grinning, and—

—becomes boy-shaped, holding the Change in her right hand.

Terry takes a deep breath and remembers what The Float feels like when he meditates and focuses on that and wanting that pen to float.

It twitches a little.

"Good sign!"

And now to do SCIENCE! To the phenomenon of pen-twitching.

There don't seem to be any changes in the pen-twitching behavior regardless of what he thinks of.

Meanwhile Sadde times her changes while thinking about various symbols and nothing at all.

Soon it's time to compare results. Just thinking about the symbols didn't seem to help Terry. The pen just twitched, about a centimeter each time.

Did Sadde have any better luck?

"Not really, doesn't seem to change anything no matter what I'm thinking about."