"Well that's annoying."

"It's a pretty low cap, too, if it's mana. Unless it varies from person to person, maybe it does."

"Yeah. Unless the flame thing happened differently and ate a bunch or something?"

"It... didn't really feel any different at the time."

He shrugs. "I mean, it lit on actual fire, so. Something must have been different, but it might have just been that you ran out of mana and it reacts badly to that, dunno."

"I kinda wanna try to run out of mana, too. I wonder if it goes faster with papers than spells. Or if spells even eat mana or that's strictly the papers. ...hey Juniper, do you feel weirdly tired?"

"Nnnkinda. Erm." She gets up and walks across the room then leans against a wall. "...not exactly tired, but it's like I could get tired now."

"… Whereas before, what, you were adrenalined or whatever?"

Maya notes the observation anyway.

"No, it's like, you know when you're not tired but you almost are, just before bedtime, and even getting off a chair is hard, and you couldn't run if someone paid you...?"

"Oh, like, low blood sugar?"

"Yeah!"

"Huh," he says. "Hey, Sadde, was it like that for you or was it actual regular exhaustion, because it might be something different about the two?"

"Nope, that's kinda it, yeah."

Noted. Consistent results, always nice.

"Okay cool, so, now we just test a bunch of these with the various phrasings? See if the ones done by different people have any different effects – and actually, see if defacing them destroys them or something, like if we mark on the edge of the paper something else, or if we strike through the word?"

Tyler makes a line through one of his 'time' things.

Nothing seems to happen to it.

And if he scribbles over the letters? Or goes and grabs a black sharpie and colours over the lines?

Nothing continues to happen to it.

"Defacing seems to do nothing visible, though whether it'll still work is… not really obvious from just this."

"Did you have a spell in mind to test with it?"

"Not with time, so it would probably have been a better idea to deface one of the wind ones. Not that it probably matters much either way."

"Okay, so, test one of the wind ones to make sure stuff's still working usually," says Theo, grabbing one and then saying the shortest phrase.

Yep, working.