It does! And Tyler walks over to slice his hand on it and then try composing a spell to hopefully seal up the wound.

And Theo grabs a couple of pieces of paper saying 'wind' and tries to cast the shortest spell, using both of them.

Only one of them is consumed.

Well, he'll try casting the spell again while he's already flying and see if it can stack at all, in that case.

Casting the spell again does work but there isn't a noticeable difference in the subjective experience of performing it. It does last a bit longer than it normally would, though—the extra time in the air being exactly as long as he'd been already flying before casting the second time, suggesting the second cast merely restarted the timer on the spell.

Then he will fly around a bit more, wait until the timer ends – he's going to make the most of his ability to fly, not cut it short early – and do another one! He'll repeat this until he gets some weird effect or it stops working or whatever.

Maya notes the various results.

Actually the very next time he tries to cast the spell again his skin turns bright pink.

Does it hurt? And does it look like he's been coated in paint or like he's got a horrible sunburn or…?

No, it looks like he is an alien with naturally pink skin.

"Awww you look so dashing."

He looks at the shade of pink (    ) in… well, not really with any particular expression on his face.

You might expect horror or something.

There's really not much of an expression at all. Looks like it might be a bit blank.

"You okay there?" asks Jess.

"Yyyup," he says.

Sadde walks up to him and plants a kiss on his cheek. Blue feathers and all. "So, wanna release the Sword and try to cast some more magic? Maybe figure out a way to get your skin back to normal and my feathers off."

"Yeah," he says, releasing the Sword.

How does 'water, soothe my pains, clean my wounds and heal the scars of battle' work for Tyler's cut? Also with a piece of paper that he charged with the word 'water'.

Yep, definitely works, look at him, all healed.

Noted! Water can be used for healing, that's good.

"What ought to work on feathers and pink skin?"

"Pink skin, uh, what were the cards again since those are probably good ideas for concepts…"

She flips back to the page in her notebook with the cards then says, "Well, the Change could work as a pretty good concept? Or possibly if it's an illusion, we could try to dispel it by calling upon Illusion. For the feathers, we could try ripping them off – ow, sorry – with wind and then just applying water to heal the wounds, since we know that works now?"

"I'm not sure I want to mess around with Change," says Theo. "Apparently 24-hour things become permanent with the card, and I don't know if the same drawback applies to sorcery or if we can cancel it safely?"

"Oh, right – we should probably see what sorts of constraints we can place on a spell, like, 'only do this if it won't become permanent in a horrific way' or something? Or if we can get it to fail – um, gracefully – if it would do something we dislike, probably doesn't allow precog but should also try that some time, um…"

Notes. Lots of notes.

"I think Kero said once that Clow could see the future, and the Time is a card that exists..."

"Okay, so precog presumably is not impossible, right, but I'm not sure a spell would let you have it only work conditional upon some future event – that sounds like it's just asking to be abused and– why am I even talking about this system like this, for all I know it's readily abusable and no-one's decided to mess with it properly yet, okay, we should try that."

"I'd rather like to stop looking like an alien chicken first."