Maya: notes this down!

Tyler thinks he'll try repeating the phrase to himself, quietly, over in this corner here. He does mean it, in case that matters, but he's intentionally not saying it very loudly.

Tyler: flies!

"If it's just long chants does content actually matter much? If I say, for instance, Wind, grant me flight, grant me flight, grant me flight, o Wind, grant me flight, make me fly, grant me flight, grant me flight..." She repeats this a few more times until she's been speaking for longer altogether than Theo did.

And she starts hovering a few inches above the floor. 

"Yeah, chant length is not enough."

"Should probably test that with just one iteration to see if it's at all stronger or if it's identical."

Ee, flight. Hopefully it doesn't stop too abruptly for him, but he will make sure to get over the nice padded area so he doesn't get hurt when it probably does stop.

Tyler: does a small bit of flying around, because it seems fun.

Jess kinda wants to try that.

"Do you think it'd work to have it grant someone else flight, such as someone non-magical? – I mean, maybe you should try it."

"Wind, I, Sadde, command thee to lend Jess aid and grant her lift! Earth, I, Sadde, command thee to release your bonds over her! Under the guidance of the Moon, breaking the shackles of the Sun! Give her flight!"

She lifts!

...she can't fly with it, however. She's immobile in the air.

"Mmmnope, seems I'm just hovering and not able to move."

She moves a bit now.

"Yeah, apparently it's under my control for some reason."

"Probably because you're the one doing the magic, so maybe you could put me down now?"

She does.

She lands, too. "Okay, let me try only one iteration now, wind, grant me flight!" Few inches. "So the long repeated thing was as good as the short one."

"Seems so," says Maya, continuing to note down the results.

Wheee.

Wheeeflomp.

Less wheee, muffled by a mat. He gets up and says, "Maybe we should time it, in case it varies between people or phrasings."

Now Tyler flomps.

"You definitely stayed up longer than I did, though. I wonder if there's a non-card way to make it permanent. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface, here."

Yay.

Luckily he was still mostly upright so he can catch himself when he falls.

"Yeah," he says. "It's… I feel stupid, really, that we didn't do this before?"

"I don't," she shrugs. "Of all the possible ways magic could've turned out to work, 'say what you mean out loud while invoking arbitrary bronze age concepts' is a pretty specific one, and we had only very slight evidence that it would work at all. I suggested it entirely on a fit of whimsy."

"It's actually pretty suspicious that you got it right on the first try."

"Maybe she has, like, magic senses?"

Theo shrugs.

"Well, we've verified Latin doesn't work, so it's not 'literally whatever we say with the right attitude,' and the content does seem to matter. What else's salient about card magic?"

"There's the symbols and stuff, on the back of the cards, which also appear in a glowy floaty way whenever he uses one of them." She grabs the Fly from a pocket and shows its back.