He smiles.

"Yeah, it seems kinda fun, but– I hope we can get proper results out of it instead of having to leave a legacy for future magical users or something." Shrug. "I mean, presumably we will because of what we can do already, but still. And it might be nice to try to find a community of magic users so we can benefit from collective research or something. If there's one available. Which, you know, if there is, it doesn't seem to be doing a great job yet."

"In absolute terms, though, the kinds of things we can apparently do with a full mana bar's worth of magic are very narrow and weak compared to what even the most boring of cards do."

"… I mean, so far we've only tried doing, like, flight and that's turned out okay although limited in length. And it gets stronger with extra words, though that might just make it take more mana, and likewise with the symbols, and we can do sorcery with concepts that we don't yet have cards for, so… possibly but maybe not?"

"I think, being flight, limited in duration—and how easy to control it is, that changed, too—is a very worrying thing. I would definitely not want to, say, have it end while I was a hundred metres up."

"No, but I wouldn't expect to do that sort of thing in any actual dangerous scenario unless it were worth the risks – like, if we can heal with it, maybe that'll have horrible side effects where it undoes after a few minutes, but that'll presumably be better than leaving someone to bleed out, and with flight, it's not like I'd want my first run to be 'flying in the middle of the sky' unless I was literally flying away from something even worse than potentially falling out of it."

"I know, I'm just saying, compared to the Fly, which can last pretty much indefinitely and is really easy to control, these spells are very poor and very costly. None of us totaled even an hour in the air, I think."

"Okay, yeah," she says. "But it's not necessarily narrower, since the cards sound like they're kinda limited in application where as this is– not necessarily? We haven't tested it enough to know, I don't think."

"Fair enough."

Shrug. "Anyway – uh, should probably start gathering data then. If we wait until you guys get the feeling again, then you drain it and set a timer and see how long it takes to get the feeling, do it again and see if it's approximately the same, then see how long it takes for the feeling to disappear?"

"I think I prefer doing that in the morning."

"Me, too."

"… Okay, yeah, that's fair."

Shrug.

So Sadde settles back in to watch the rest of the chick flick.

Theo will… yeah, probably do likewise and snuggle up to Sadde.

That sounds like a good idea.

Sigh.

And eventually they all go to bed and sleep in because it's a Saturday.

Woo!

… And then presumably they wake up and can do magic right.

Indeed!

Cool!

… And are they able to do magic, they are, right, so she can get involved?

Well, Theo can test it! Nothing horrific seems to have happened to him, right, and he can just try to charge a piece of paper with the word 'change'?

Ayep. Lookit him go.

Woo! That's good.

… How many things does it take to get him down to worrying levels of mana, though? Actually, on second thoughts, they should probably think of some useful things to do with the magic rather than just expending it on random stuff as they do it.

"Okay, so, I'm not sure what the most efficient way to go about this stuff would be. Like, repeatedly writing 'change' on a piece of paper doesn't seem like the best use for mana at the moment, but we should probably do it to get a baseline 'number of change papers from X hours of sleep'?"

"We could do that and see if it's a different number for each of us, and we'd get the added bonus that we'd have a bunch of change papers charged up if we ever needed them. But maybe we should use something broader, like, Sun or Moon or whatever."