"...Invisible Search," she attempts.

The little blob forms, and seals itself inside a mirage-like distortion in the air, and darts off. By the time it reaches the hall, it's completely invisible, but still transmitting its location to Bella.

"Cool!" She dismisses it again; she is already pretty confident about Lexi's location. "Okay, is there a spell to fly without you helping, I want to be able to do that."

"Maybe," he says. "I wouldn't even know where to start, though. I can fly naturally."

"Lucky you." Bella closes her eyes and tries just wanting in an upward direction, like she did when she had the aurora-colored wings at her heels.

This does not work.

"Well," she says, "just wanting doesn't do the trick. Maybe I can make up an incantation for it. Does it have to be one that isn't - already in use somewhere?"

"Nope, doesn't matter," he says.

"Flight," says Bella insistently.

Her feet acquire little sprays of multicoloured light-feathers.

"This feels - effortful. Not a lot, just like - carrying a fork across the room or something, but I notice it," says Bella, hovering slightly and peering at her footwings. It doesn't seem to matter how she moves her actual feet; the mana-feathers are largely cosmetic additions.

"I like the feathers," says Brilliance. "Yeah, like I said, with me you get it for free. By yourself it takes effort."

Bella settles back to the floor and dismisses the spell. "Uh, am I likely to, like, run out of - something? And fall out of the sky?"

"Mana," says Brilliance. "And I dunno, probably not unless you flew for six hours straight, but unless we're linked I can't actually tell exactly how much you've got."

"You didn't check when we were? Or did that not qualify as linking, what's linking?"

"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?"