He nods. "Anyway, I should, er, finish exploring this place then take you to somewhere less ruin-y than this?"

"And I'll poke some of the magic around here and see if I can do stuff about artifacts."

"Tell me what you find!"

And he walks over to the stone tablets and stares at them.

So about this door... She brings out her notebook and maps her impressions of the thing. A real live artifact, gosh.

It's actually rather simple magic, relatively speaking. It opens and that's about it.

She can tell its function easily enough, but what she's really after is trying to figure out how to touch its magic. Trigger it. Refill it? How artifacts work, with regards to her own magic.

The trigger is apparently some other artefact but if she pokes this part it works, too. The artefact isn't so keen on being refilled with her mana, though.

She saw this guy do it... Twist and grab and push...

It closes, and startles the boy out of his reverie. "Did you do something?"

"I can activate artifacts. Might want to watch you convert my mana and charge one to see about that."

"I can do that."

She pulls out a notebook and pen.

"—I'll still need more mana in that amulet, though, I converted all of that into arcanist mana. Unless you want me to get it directly off you?"

"Hm, I do want to try that. For science. The amulet, I already gave you most of what I thought I could spare today - can you turn it back?"

He tries.

...Nope. And if he can feel for the 'why' on that 'nope', it's because he is too male.

He cannot feel that, no, not without looking harder. He does notice that—" It looks like there's something about me, in particular, it doesn't like?"

"I don't think I can tell what magic 'likes'. Mostly what it actually does and how it does it, less about the details of operation? But like I said, only girls have magic in my world."

"—oh right you did mention that. I wonder if that's it... I could switch and test."

"...Switch?"

"I'm genderfluid," he explains, "and I have a spell that I use to turn into a girl when I feel like one."

"...I heard of a criminal case, that reminded me. Someone turned a witch who wanted to be a boy into one with their spell, and the transformee lost their magic, the Catholic Church got involved and wanted both killed, and the UDF sued them and got them geased to not use it except with explicit government approval. It was a whole thing."

"...why'd the Church want them killed, and why was it a crime if it was consensual?"

"Rejecting the body God gave you is obviously immoral, you see. And the UDF was mad it lost a Witch."

"What exactly is this UDF?"