She waves a hand in a 'go ahead' gesture.

"Okay so– what are we doing now actually? Just waiting for the timer so we can go do this again or what?"

"Well, you could… keep going to write something and see how long it takes for you to get the feeling again, or for you to get it so that it's noticeable at least?"

"What timer?"

"No, I mean, setting one for another three minutes or whatever and waiting for that."

"Oh." She returns to her book.

"What do we know about it? I think it's reasonable to," yawn, "suppose that the problem happens when we reach zero mana."

"'The problem' being 'the weird magical effects combined with the weird feeling', or…?"

"Yes, that. The explosion of random magic."

"It's done a bunch of weird effects so far and it seems to happen while low on mana? I'm not really sure what else there is."

"There was – paper catching fire, feathers, pink skin, candyfloss…?"

"Room got suddenly cold, Theo's paper got turned to ash."

"I can't think of any obvious link between them except 'theoretically possible with magic and not super harmful'?"

"They seem pretty arbitrary to me to be honest."

She shrugs. "Maybe there will be a stronger pattern with more things, or there will be a limited set of things it does or something."

"In any case, I think it might be a reasonable conclusion that this happens when we literally run out of mana. Or, at least, we can work under that assumption until we get conflicting evidence."

"Yeah, or it's at least near enough that it probably doesn't matter for now."

"And if it is, we could try to create a scale for mana, and see if it recharges linearly, and find the more-or-less exact zero point."

"Which means probably doing more of these experiments with the timer and seeing when you get the 'out of mana' feeling, and then when it disappears, then dropping you back down, presumably?"

"Yeah. I mean, if this is what it means then as soon as you get the feeling you have reached zero as opposed to... negatives? I guess?"

"Yeah, it suggests that. Except you can still apparently do stuff at nearly-zero, stuff that would otherwise require more than that gap, you just get a weird side effect with it that might destroy the result – like the pieces of paper that didn't get destroyed by the weird effect. And then the thing presumably takes you down into the negatives, so it'd be better to just stay in the positives anyway, but yeah." Shrug.

"If it takes a consistent amount of time to get back to zero after draining when near zero, we should see if it's actually putting us into the negatives at a certain point – like, if we wait a minute after getting back to zero, then drain, does that take a minute off the usual recharge time?"

"You know, I used to complain about this system but it's heaven."

"Is that because of the potential for science, or…?"

"Yes the potential for science!"