"It's very magic. Translation spells from around here bounce off Draconic like you never cast them but you seem to have it down."

"Is combat a primary purpose in making Devices or is that uncommon?"

"It's pretty common. Some of the most basic Device stuff, things that are common across all Device types, has combat applications - you remember I said, we protect our wielders from harm? The thing that does that is called a Barrier Jacket, and it's basically magical combat armor. Almost any Device can do it. I don't actually know of a way to do it without one. It'll protect from lots of things, not just straight magical damage, but it's definitely combat-oriented."

"But you currently appear to be way more geared towards eating ice cream than combat applications - people who make Devices don't get to pick personalities for them?"

"They do not even slightly get to pick our personalities," Brilliance confirms. "Also, ice cream is the best."

"Making powerful people with non-custom personalities sounds hazardous, how does that get handled?"

"...Really, really badly," he says, from experience.

"I'm asking primarily from a magic theory perspective, not an anthropological one."

"Yeah, well, my perspective here is the exact opposite of theoretical. I don't know of any good way to handle it, but I've been through plenty of bad ones."

Kaylo appears to have a brief internal debate, then says, "So, where do people get linker cores?"

"They're born with them. As far as I know, there's no other way to get one, but it's not a blatant magical fact like Device intelligence, there could be some way to get them from another source. Other things about linker cores... they're connected to mana colour; the core has a 'colour'" (the word he uses is the equivalent of colour for one of his magical senses, and is clearly linked to the visual version of the concept) "that translates to the visual colour you see when somebody uses visible mana. Devices don't have linker cores but we do have mana colours; mine looks like this," and he holds his hand out over the table and deploys a small magic circle on its surface. The circles and lines of the glowing diagram ripple through all the colours of the rainbow in a semi-random order at varying speeds.

"So you can use magic without a linker core because...? What does the linker core do in a human mage and how are you skipping it?"

"Innnnteresting. Are you staying around the school, if I come up with an analysis spell that'll let me have a look at your kind of magic can I point it at you and see what I can see?"

"Sure. I mean, I might go away, but I'll come back, they give me food."

"...So I should look for you in the cafeteria as opposed to a particular dormitory room, huh?"

"Yep. Dormitory rooms are for sleeping in, right? I don't sleep."

"Device thing or you thing?"

"Device thing. I guess it's possible there's some Device somewhere that sleeps, but I don't think it's common - it's the kind of thing you'd have to build in a function for on purpose, and why would you?"

"But eating is new and you have a function for that even though it's nonessential; why?"

"It comes with the form in a way that sleeping apparently doesn't, and it's not useless - I'm getting mana from all this."

"Interesting. What's the conversion rate like - what kind of quantities and units does mana come in?"

"It's not huge, but it's not nothing. And I might just be thinking it's not huge because I'm kind of huge. I'm getting about - this is an estimate, also why does this language have a unit system for mana, I love this language - fifteen to twenty thaums from a bite of ice cream. A little spell like the one I floated my tray with is about ten thaums to cast, with negligible upkeep. A high-damage personal combat spell is maybe five or six thousand thaums. My base power level is about fifteen orders of magnitude bigger than that. It's hard to get the numbers very precise because I'm sensing it all directly, not measuring it, and I can't 'eyeball'" (of course there is a Draconic word for that concept applied specifically to his mana sense, he loves this language) "the big stuff that well."

"That's amazing. How big are most Devices, most mages?"