"Sure I did," he says, "I just can't feel it now. I don't know, there's different things you might call 'linking', the kind I meant is what happened when I put you in your Barrier Jacket."

"Is my mana supply not the sort of thing that will be about the same from occasion to occasion?" she asks. "Barrier Jacket," Bella adds, want-saying experimentally.

"Would you object to checking for me? I'd rather not crash."

"Sure, no problem," he says. His cardboard surface glimmers. "Looking pretty good - try flying again?"

"Flight."

"Yeah, you've got about three hours of flying in you at that rate," he says.

"Does it matter how fast I go, or how high up, or is that all free with maintenance cost? Where does more mana come from?" she asks, touching down and turning off the flight spell.

"More mana comes from you!" he says. "It generates faster when you're not actively using any, and I think fastest when you sleep - I don't exactly sleep, so I'm just guessing about that one."

"You don't ever seem to answer more than one question at a time," Bella observes, and she gets a notebook to write down questions she accumulates so she won't forget them even if asking them all as she thinks of them isn't going to work. "Is flying faster or higher than just a little off the ground free with maintenance mana?"

"Yep!" says Brilliance. "Serious speed boosts take more mana even when you're getting the flying for free, though."

"Would that be the sort of thing I could do accidentally just by trying to fly really fast or would I be doing a separate speed-boosting spell?"

"I'm not sure," he says.

"...How long do you think you'll want to hang around here, I need to know how aggressively to prioritize."

"More or less than a week?" she tries.

"I don't know," he says fretfully.

"So you might fuck off any second and maybe I should cut school tomorrow?" hazards Bella.

"I don't - I - maybe," he mutters.

"I should maybe cut school tomorrow? Because learning magic is a higher priority than school in the short term but I wouldn't do it if you were going to be here for a month because it'd make Charlie somewhere between worried and mad and probably wouldn't do my academic prospects any favors and I don't yet know if I'm going to wind up with enough magic to make school redundant."

Brilliance sighs.

"Okay, if you have no schedule and will produce none, me and this notebook are going to spend ten minutes prioritizing - unless there is a significant risk you will decide to flee to Beijing or wherever in the next ten minutes - and then we can see about making the most of the time you've got to spend on me?" Bella says, tapping up the notebook she's been writing her questions in. She tucks her feet between herself and the desk chair and starts scribbling.

"Have you been on Earth long?" she asks conversationally while she's drawing arrows between and numbering various questions.

"Oh... probably a hundred years or so," he says vaguely. "I wasn't really counting."