She smiles at him fondly, then returns to work. As she does, she explains what she's looking for, what factors lead to instability in spells and rituals, how they can be mitigated, and how she specifically mitigated the potential nasty effects in the ensoulening ritual.

It's fascinating! He is enthralled!

Well, then he can learn all about magic, and how multiple magical traditions can be hybridized if you work from common ancestors, or by this trickier method that involves math and mapping percentages of random chaotic failure and look she has a program that'll help her figure that out too!

"Or, if you're Chris, by reading two books and picking up a chess set," Miles remarks.

"Or - yes, that. She has to have read more than two books, though, it's not that simple. I've been imagining she went looking for the least clusterfucky magical tradition possible, which. Is not easy, see my proof, of this spreadsheet." She motions towards the spreadsheet. Color coding only mitigates the insanity. "Then from there she twisted its arm to something resembling sanity."

"I'm getting most of this secondhand and I'm no expert, it just seems like... if inventing a new way for magic to work is that easy, why isn't everyone doing it? And on the one hand it looks like everyone did, but on the other hand magic is all so..." he waves a hand at the spreadsheet, "and if people could just sink a few years into reinventing the discipline every time they didn't like how something worked, I feel like it would be even more of an enormous sprawling disaster but the individual pieces would be less individually godawful?"

"Yeah. I don't know what's causing it to be able to be reinvented sometimes but not always."

"We'd really be in business if we could figure that out, eh?"

"We really would! I feel like there's basic rules to this magic, and I don't know what they are, and everything else is just fluff on top of it. But I don't know where the fluff ends and the basic rules begin."

"Where the hell are the basic rules hiding under all this?"

"Miles, if I knew, do you think for a second I wouldn't be trying to pry them out from under their rock to beat all of the rest of this into submission."

"It was a rhetorical question. Also, you are a fountain of joy."

"Yes, I know. Thank you for noticing."

Well now she's distracted kissing him.

Who could have predicted this.

No one could have predicted this, this is utterly unprecedented!

The laptop is sort of getting in the way of properly kissing him, what with it being on her lap. She doesn't want to move it and therefore stop working, but she's sort of having trouble ending this delightful kiss to actually get back to work. Instead she's in awesome kiss limbo. Mmm.

Awesome kiss limbo is interrupted by an annoying buzzing sound.

"Mmrh?" grumbles Yvette, disentangling from Miles to search for the source.

Oh. Her phone.

"Pass that to me please, Miles? I likely won't answer, but I'd like to see if my sister found my note and stole a phone yet."

He picks it up, glances at it, and hands it over. "Who, uh, is 'Guess Who'?"

"Oh, fuck," she swears.

He looks up alertly at her face. "Um?"

She scrunches her eyes closed. The phone continues to buzz, even as she wills it to stop.

"So I didn't really, uh, do dating. When soulless. I tended to just pick up people as they were convenient and then drop them when they stopped being convenient, because I was a bit of a bitch that way. But. Um. 'Guess Who' is someone named Serafin. He is a several hundred year old vampire prince who tortures people for magical power. He could arguably be called the closest thing I had to a sort of boyfriend. If I had those, which. Didn't. Even if I don't pick up immediately, I would call him back."