"No idea," he says, "I didn't design the spell. I can tell you right now, though, if I tried to make you some kind of... I dunno, Barrier Necklace... it wouldn't work nearly as well. There is something about being an outfit that makes it better at its job, I just don't know what it is."

"How do you know a Barrier Necklace wouldn't do the job as well?"

"...It's a device thing," he says. "If I'm familiar with a spell I kind of get a - sense for it, like I can tell what all its parts do. I'm not sure humans even get the relevant channel."

"Doesn't sound like we do, no. Huh."

"Yeah. So, I can tell you that the being-an-outfit thing is functionally important, I just can't tell you why, or if there even is a sensible reason."

"Fair enough. What other sorts of things do you know in this mysterious devicey way?"

"...That is a weird question and I don't know how to answer it."

"Okay, how about - why do spell diagrams look like they do, are the shapes functional?"

"They mean something but they're not directly functional," he says. "The shape is related to the type of magic, but not intrinsically."

"...Like, they're assigned when the magic type is invented but it's arbitrary?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"And ones I invent are going to wind up falling into your magic type - is that for the same reason my mana color synced with yours?"

"Um... close! I dunno, it's hard to explain. But those are pretty related, yeah."

"I kinda wish I knew what my mana color would have been before I found you."

"Who knows."

"Not something you can check with your devicey senses of such things?"

"Nope."

"Well, the aurora-ish mana is really pretty anyhow."

"Yep," he says smugly.

"So how come your human form is - well - a human form? I wasn't exactly certain last week that we were alone in the universe, but I figured the aliens would be aliens. There's a decent fossil record on this planet indicating that humans evolved here, and convergent evolution isn't that precise, I don't think."

"Not a clue," says Brilliance. "Humans seem to be it as far as intelligent biological life, but fucked if I know why."

"So you don't know if they're converged or secret forgotten colonists from Earth or colonists to Earth fossil record be damned or what."

"Nope."

"Dinner's ready!" calls Lexi.

"Ooh, soup." Bella gets up, heads for the table, and trips over nothing whatsoever.