"For you personally at a guess it would be to compensate for the heat thing or something? Themes usually mean something, but they don't always mean the same kinds of thing."

"I'm also from a really cold country?"

"Also plausible!"

"Where do you suppose your themes came from?"

"I have problems sometimes with how inefficient language is as a means of communicating the inside of your head to anyone else and Emily thinks magnetism is super nifty."

"Communicating stuff like what?"

"Like--if you want to say what something smells like, you can compare it to stuff, but unless it smells exactly like something else that the person you're talking to knows, you can't transmit exactly what it smelled like. And then there's stuff like emotions where you can't really be sure that someone else has felt the exact same thing to even have that option. And it's so easy for something you say to sound like you meant something other than what you did."

"Makes sense."

"So I'm very fond of my mental powers, since I trust myself not to abuse them, and Emily does metal sculpture with hers."

"What applications do the mind powers have besides not having to explain your it's complicated in words?"

"Well, they're not general mind powers, they're discrete spells," and she starts listing them.

Annie wants to know what they all do.

She explains them!

"What's Soul Aria good for?"

"Accurately communicating my emotions?"

"It's just communicative, it doesn't - paste your emotions on top of somebody else's?"

"Oh, no, that would be gross."

"Just checking."

"Yeah, fair enough, if it had been it would be bad."

"I don't really know what I'll do if I do - discover something bad," sighs Annie.

"I hope it doesn't come up."

"Me too."

"I can't promise I'll never get a horribly problematic spell by accident but if I did I could just not cast it."

"You can tell what they do precisely in advance?"

"No, but if a spell doesn't do anything to inanimate objects I can get an informed volunteer--as informed as possible under the circumstances, anyway--to test it and if the test shows problematicness I can refrain from ever casting it again."