"...you sure you want to test it - actually if the idea is to test it so I don't have to maybe it should wait until we are not stuck on a bus together -"

"I wasn't planning on testing the limits right now but I should at least be able to figure out if it's the healing thing or the unknown thing."

Okay. Transfer.

She bites her lip, hard.

"Healing thing," she reports thoughtfully.

"Inconvenient," says Annie, and when Emily's lip is better she takes it back.

"I'm really curious now what the unknown benefit is but there's really no good way to test that."

"Two mystery benefits. The only ones I've found are healing, languages, the sense, and the sharing, and my speech thinks there's six."

"Oh, right, I forgot."

"Although I can't guarantee that the love one is not a weird edge case of a 'benefit', they're not always the sort of thing everyone would agree unambiguously on."

"That'd leave you with one whole artifact missing, wouldn't it?"

"Yep. Could be both of its effects are trigger-based like the singing one. But it's more likely that the love thing is the drawback."

"Good luck with the benefits not being dubious at best."

"Thanks."

...she's still hugging Edie. She does not unhug upon noticing this.

Edie doesn't unhug either. Hugs are A Good.

Good.

Eventually just hugging starts to get boring--Edie would take out a book, if she had one, but she doesn't, so she decides to start filling Annie in on how magic works here.

Ooh. And how does magic work here? Annie has this silly dress and no idea what she's doing.

So Edie explained that there are three kinds of magic, right? Artifact users bond to and wield magical artifacts, magical girls are empowered by the mysterious thing that gives visions, and sorcerers muck around with some kind of underlying magical patterns in the universe.

The mysterious thing that gives visions seems like a good egg with a tacky aesthetic. What should Annie expect to be able to do with being Crystal Snowflake?

Magical girls get spells! You get one to start out with, and others when you hit nigh-arbitrary milestones of personal achievement--she and Emily got new ones after the General was dealt with but were too tired and then too near things that shouldn't be collateral damage just in case to find out what.

"It was very weird how I knew how to cast my - uh, is it safe to just say the name of it?"

"Yeah, you won't cast it without meaning to."

"It was weird how I knew how to cast the Crystalline Ice Lance. And transform in the first place."

"It would be sort of weird if you didn't! Think how much less useful being a magical girl would be if you had to figure those things out by trial and error."

"It'd be really inconvenient!"