"Can you give some examples of the ways I could help her without magic...?"

"Advice? That knife? I'm not sure."

"Right. I'll have to use my imagination."

Because clearly somebody's not going to be any help...

"Sorry."

... Blair nods, because he doesn't really think he can bring himself to say that it's okay.

"Right, anything else, or back to meditation for me?"

Shrug.

Sigh.

Meditation!

She is getting better at this. .... Sort of.

So she will sort of see things with her eyes closed.

Well, that's better than nothing. What does she see?

The same things: magical circle, self, staff, cards, entities behind cards, Cerberus, Blair, becoming clearer and clearer—in that order—the longer she manages to stay under.

Well, she can sort of manage it if nothing new and shocking comes in to disturb her. ... Once out of every three times she actually makes it this far. Which is not often.

What exactly becomes clearer about the cards?

Their nature. Being magic and not people, in the strictest of senses. Emotions and relationships. Windy has a grandmotherly air to her, or the closest to that the wind itself can have. Libra... is pretty much a smart plant. And it seems to have some feelings about everything in the room but they can't really be described as anything more than 'positive' or 'negative.'

Well, she can maybe stay here long enough to figure out how they sort of feel about her. Maybe. Very vaguely, because she still can't stay here very long.

How do they feel about her?

Windy: Grandmotherly. Yvette is a new magician, and will one day be a worthy master, but that day is not today. There may be intricacies and details about these emotions, but they're too alien to really be understood, for now.

Libra: Well, Yvette has not lied. That is a good thing. Cerberus has lied. That is a bad thing. Blair dislikes lying. That's a pretty good thing. Once again, there are intricacies and details there, that one might expect the incarnation of truth to have, but—incomprehensible.

There is a magical connection between them and her, and a similar but not identical one between Libra and Cerberus, and a third kind between Cerberus and her.

Wait a second, Cerberus has lied?

How the hell has Cerberus lied, what the everliving fuck?

... Was it the time that he purposefully lied, or..?

Augh. This is going to make it really hard for her to meditate, now. She huffs.

"Is casting and playing with magic a viable thing for me to do, too, in order to train?"

"A bit, but just doing the same things many times won't help."

"I wasn't really planning to do the same thing over and over, I don't know my limits at all yet."

Nod.

"So, um. I'm going to go do this in the living room. That seems a better place to do it."

The backyard might attract some attention, they don't have a private fence.

She picks up her cards and staff, and heads off to the living room.

.... Blair follows! That seems the thing to do.

Cerberus follows, too.

And then they are all in the living room.

Yvette takes a deep breath, decides that actually she should have some practice with her only offensive card, and summarily throws Windy in front of her.

"Windy," she says, and she boops the card with her staff.

(.... She keeps a good hold of Libra. She's a little scared, but she's fighting past it.)

Windy appears: a tall translucent woman with a kind smile made of tendrils of magic air.

"Hi," says Yvette, because that seems to be the thing to do. She keeps the quaver out of her voice.

"Can you actually pick me up?" she asks, because clearly she must figure out if she can literally fly.