"Whatever," says Brilliance, and he shifts down again.

Bella laughs ruefully and starts outlining a practice plan for working with magic on the pretty sand planet. "Hey, did you figure out what percent of my mana I use on stuff before I went and flew in front of Charlie, Brilliance?" she asks.

"...nope," says Brilliance. "I forgot."

"Oh. Well, it was very brief, can we get an estimate to work with?"

"I'll start looking again," he promises.

"Maybe I'll recover to a hundred percent over dinner." The air has begun to smell of frying bacon.

"Maybe!"

Write-write-write. "Hey, given that you sense with magic, does that give you any irregular abilities like - seeing through things?" she asks suddenly.

"I could probably make a spell for it, why?"

"I just mean normally. There's nothing I need to see through. I just wanted to know if my notebooks or my clothes or whatever are transparent to you, because that'd be awkward."

"Not visually," he says. "If you put me down on top of a notebook I could probably, I dunno - count how many pages it has, even though I couldn't see them, that kind of thing. And I can tell what's going on around you when I'm in your pocket. Oh," he adds, "and when you wear your Barrier Jacket I kind of am it, but I don't get any human-style senses from it, just movement and damage levels."

"...You are my Barrier Jacket," says Bella.

"This is one of those things that's not weird to me but it is to you, isn't it," sighs Brilliance.

"Yeah. Apparently it is. If you didn't get that it might be weird why did you specify that you only get 'movement and damage levels'?"

"I can see why it's weird to you," he says, "I just don't think that way naturally. And it would be weird even for me if I was being your clothes and I got human-style tactile feedback from it."

"Okay. Well - I don't know about that. Had to save the world that one time, we were in a hurry, it's all right that you didn't stop to explain; maybe it won't even come up again."

"It'll come up if you ever have to fight anybody," says Brilliance. "I don't know if you'll ever have to fight anybody, but if you do, wear the damn Barrier Jacket. It's standard mage gear for a reason. You should probably wear it when we're fucking around with experimental spells too, just to be safe, but it's not as big a deal if nobody's actually flinging lethal damage at your face. ...Although it'll let me monitor your mana consumption better, so..."

"Yeah, if I get into an actual fight go ahead and jacket me, some weirdness is not competitive with being armored. The spells - didn't you say they might do weird things but probably not harmful things? Like if I heal somebody I might get a bizarre result but I won't accidentally hurt them?"

"If you're trying to make a spell to heal somebody," he says, "you won't accidentally hurt them instead, that's not how magic works. But if you're, I dunno, practicing manipulation of inorganic matter and you lose control of the spell at the wrong moment, you could accidentally drop a big rock on your head. Barrier Jacket'll handle that for you."

"Even though it doesn't come with a hat," Bella says.

"It's protecting you magically, not physically, is that really hard to understand or something?"

"Well, I'm just not clear on why it involves a costume change at all if that's what it's doing."

"It has to exist in order to protect you," he says. "And it can't just look like whatever other clothes you're wearing every time you put it on because it takes extra effort and mana to change its form and you don't wanna be doing it every time."

"That doesn't explain why it's an outfit and not an accessory of some kind that can go on over whatever I have on."