Juniper looks at him and tilts her head.

"You look different today."

"The Change is such a useful card, isn't it," says Theo. "Anyway – I've already done one 'change' paper so it might mess with the results if I do Sun or Moon now, unless we just want a vague idea of the number?"

"Sometimes I'm a boy," he explains.

"Huh. Cool."

"Yeah! And I guess since you already did change we're stuck. Why, Theo. Why would you do that to us. Do you hate us, Theo. Do you, to constrain us so."

"Yeah, obviously I intentionally decided to sabotage our results. Nah, you can just test your own mana today and I can go do random stuff with the papers that will hopefully help us in the future, if we can think of any useful spells, instead of just leaving stacks of papers around?"

"Stacks of papers are pretty generally useful, though."

"Yeah, but if we can get stuff done with it rather than just leaving them around where they might decay, or they might get lost, or they might accidentally get triggered to do something because we don't know how careful we should be will them, then that might be better?"

"Our family has more than enough experience dealing with very rare books, we could take care of paper seals or whatever."

Shrug.

"Okay, so maybe Theo should just do a bunch of 'change' papers, since 'change' is probably a useful thing, drain his mana totally, and then we can see how long it takes it to recharge while we're awake and also have a stack of paper that's still useful though not quite as useful?"

"Wasn't the point of doing that figuring out how many of those each of us can make?"

"Yup, so we can figure out how many things of 'change' he can do today, see how many 'moon' he can do after an equivalent amount of rest probably tonight, and then that can be an approximate conversion between the two if mana recharges at approximately the same rate. And we'll have the same data tomorrow, we just can't have it today unless we all decide to do 'change', which we probably shouldn't?"

"Well, it'd be boring if we did, but I don't see that we shouldn't."

"Right, but I mean for actual utility of what we're getting out of this, it's probably better, like you were saying, to use something broader like Sun or Moon." She shrugs. "I dunno."

"Oh, yeah, true. Although it's probably all confounded by this time we've spent discussing, now, Theo probably has charged some mana already."

"Yup, but it'll at least give an approximate-ish value, if he keep doings 'change', since I don't think he'll have charged like fifteen overnight and then another five in these few minutes. Though maybe he has – maybe it ramps up your mana recharge temporarily when you do a spell, I dunno."

"Which wouldn't be trivial to test, but okay, I guess that makes sense."

"So I'm continuing with the 'change' things then?"

"I guess."

He does so!

Maya says to Sadde: "And you should probably start trying to drain yourself too, on the sun-or-moon things – uh, should probably pick one – so we can hopefully get a result from how long however-much-sleep-plus-a-bit-of-movie recharges? Then I can do some things and probably work out where my max mana is in relation to how much mana you've recharged?"

"Yeah. This is kinda fiddly and tedious but yeah."

He grabs a few pieces of paper.

Maya fetches her notebook.

"So while this is a potentially horrifying idea and whatever, it would seem that people made using the Twin have mana."