"I have mine memorized except for the exact layouts of circles. Those I let vary when I get dressed in the morning, and I take pictures and rate the results on a scale of one to a hundred, and we're going to try to derive a general principle I can condense into a circle-arranging algorithm I can memorize."

"Oooooooooh."

"I thought you'd like that."

"I love it! It's fantastic!"

"You can look at the data sometime if you want, see if it generalizes to anything you're doing!"

"Even if it doesn't generalize to anything I'm doing now, it might generalize to something I do in the future." 

"Yeah, you don't have anything quite like my circles thing going on. I really like my circles thing, it's simple enough that even having them all over doesn't feel gaudy, and they do a good balance of motif versus variety."

"I like my filigree motif. I won't keep it if it doesn't turn out to be my best option but I like it."

"It's pretty! According to me, maybe magic would prefer something else."

"Perhaps! I should try changing all my filigree to some other pattern at some point." She takes out her notepad and pen and writes this down. 

"I've tried non-circles. I didn't vary too far afield, but I did triangles and squares and asterisky things and stars with various numbers of points."

"And circles were the best?"

"At least while holding the rest of my outfit constant and the way I happened to implement them, yes."

"Still, worth experimenting with," she says, noting this down.

"Mm-hm! Since I'm not cut out for swarm-fighting I don't worry about it that much, though."

"Swarm fighting is a valuable and necessary public service but it still feels like a waste of time to try to do personally."

"Yes, but you have other reasons to want high performance. I can stop a car and I'm not going to be in a position to stop a kaiju, so I don't need to squeeze every iota of pretty out."

"That's true. I suspect I would be in your position, but more for research purposes than out of a desire for greater specific functionality."

"It's still really interesting what things are objectively magic-pretty and what things aren't! I take laborious data on circle arrangements! It's just not a matter of practical urgency for me."

"True. I'm very glad I got what I did."

"It's a very good power theme."

"It is!!! --It's possible your power will combine interestingly with something--if combinations work--and you might want to optimize harder then, if it happens."

"Yup, I'm open to doing that if it comes up."

"I don't have nearly enough information to informedly speculate but I have plenty enough to wildly fantasize!"

"Do tell!"