"Weird," he declares. "I am pretty sure I'm not mistaken – she knocked it, it fell, it stopped falling temporarily, it then landed."

"So if you're right it was fast enough my merely human senses couldn't detect it."

"I mean, I am pretty sure you should have been able to detect it, which would suggest either something was – or is – screwing with you or with me."

"...screwing with people's perceptions and memories is actually pretty likely. Considering."

"Yeah, which, not so fun and not so easy to detect." Sigh. "I guess I could go be creepy and stealthy at some point, maybe go to the party and watch her."

"Speaking of the party—maybe you could actually go."

"If I stayed indoors during the day it might work, but I probably can't go out swimming for much? I mean, if people are sort of going in and out I could probably do that, wouldn't get too bad in a short time in the sun, but I'd probably end up staying inside to try to be careful."

"Yeah. Could go when it gets dark, too."

"Yeah," he agrees. "She… helpfully sort-of suggested that."

"—yeah, right, she did, hmm."

"Which could have just been her being polite," says Theo. "And I definitely could be reading too much into it. But it seems sort of like she might have been trying to drop subtle hints."

"She didn't seem to react weirdly to the vampire possibility, though."

"She was – at first – mostly just discarding it out of hand, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"And we probably don't have enough information otherwise to work out if she's magic nor if she knows it. So next step is probably the party."

"I'm not sure that's even a next step, it's not like she'll do magic in public like that if she can. Probably."

"Next step could be stakeout? But it might be a long while and it might be difficult to tell she's doing magic from afar and I don't know how we'd find out without, like, confronting her about it?"

"—hey uh how likely is it that she may, like, not know it?"

"… I have no idea? But if it's probably messing with one of our perceptions I'm gonna say 'not negligibly so'?"

"Dooo we have an overwhelmingly good reason not to just tell her about it?"

"No? – The 'confront her' option wasn't being ruled out, didn't make that clear, I was just assuming that we were trying to think of ways to do it other than that and using that as a fallback."

"Right, I meant that it wouldn't necessarily need to be the fallback option. She was in the shortlist of people who we considered trying to test the magical vampire love thing with, wasn't she?"

"… Sort of? It was more 'I can't think of basically anyone! Like, I would say her because of her reputation, but I don't know her', but yeah, I get you." Shrug. "It's possible she was dropping subtle hints and we didn't respond appropriately. Or maybe she doesn't know. Or maybe I'm wrong and it's some weird vampire thing, but we don't lose much by telling her, no."

"Weird vampire thing? About the mug not breaking?"

"Perhaps my supersenses interact weirdly when I'm more than ten meters away from the source of what I expect will be a loud shattering noise. Or something. I'm not expecting it with any high chance, it was just that we have a potential magic thing here and then a clearly screwed-with magic thing, so we shouldn't necessarily be too sure there is other magic involved."