"The issue is unclear, but they can move their wings, just not fly with them." (A baby flaps illustratively.)

"Maybe the muscles thing will work. ...We should see if you can do any magic at all, though. Try lifting something small?"

Jensal finds a small toy and holds it in the palm of her hand and stares it down. Effort seems most natural to her.

It takes a few seconds to start lifting into the air, but even before that the slight muscle ache lets her know that she's doing something. Odette clasps her hands together in delight. "It worked!"

Jensal smiles, slightly. "Does everyone just pick whichever form they like more, or which seems suited to a task...?"

"Suited to a task, strongly weighted towards what you've got a resistance to and what you've got a talent for. I can do almost everything I really want to with Sympathy."

"Resistance to?"

"The mental side effects don't hit everyone exactly the same. Depending on your personality you may be more or less strongly hit by any given side effect."

"Is that predictable without experimentation?"

"Um, some, but not completely. I don't really know you well enough to even guess."

"What would you need to know about me to guess?" Jensal asks, forcing the toy up and up and up until it hits the ceiling and then forcing it to fall slowly.

"What...you're like? I mean I can think of a handful of features that I would guess individually would mean higher or lower resistances all other things being equal but it's awfully complicated. And it's not all stuff that's meaningfully visible on the surface--like, two people might both believe something, and the first one just sort of happens to believe it and the second one really believes it right down to the bottom of their soul and they might not act differently about believing it but the difference could matter to resistance. For example."

"Believe - what?" The toy reaches her hand. She tries Conquest to zoom it up.

"Oh--that hurting people is wrong, that names are important, that it's a bad thing that people die, that vengeance is justified...the point is less the beliefs themselves and more how different parts of your mind are anchored together, and so on."

The toy hits the ceiling. Jensal catches it. She tries to coax it up by Sympathy. "I think I require a more thorough explanation of the effects under discussion."

"I'm really not a theoretician. I know that I have a fantastic Sympathy resistance, a slightly above average Effort resistance, and a significantly below average Conquest resistance, and sometimes my friends and I would make a game at guessing peoples', but usually the way you find out is by doing small things for a few days and then figuring out how your moods have been affected."

She gets the toy to wobble upwards. "Effort seems the most straightforward to me, but I suppose that might not correlate with a resistance."

"It often doesn't. My mother was very talented at Conquest and had--not a lot of resistance for it. 'S why she doesn't practice magic anymore."

"I could probably stand to be more agreeable, I suppose."

"That's also a way people decide what to use, is which side effects they think they can best live with."

"Do the babies need to strengthen their own muscles to see if that works or can someone do that for them?"

"It's possible to have someone else do it but that makes it harder to get just the right amount so you get them as strong as you want without getting it so they damage something when they move. ...On the other hand, I can heal."

"Or we can get a light. Anything that doesn't outright kill them we can just get a light, only the younger ones would even notice a broken wing, and flying for even a few seconds will reset the esu to zero."

"I can try it."

"Try the borrowed ones first."