They're neither of them full, and will accept further charge, yes.

Progress! "So I can charge things too, if I twist. I can pretend to be a very unimaginative enchanter with just that, probably."

"If you stick around me I can probably make you artefacts if you ever need to pass for it, but asking people to demonstrate magic is actually rather rude and taboo so it probably won't come up."

"A relatively easy way to make a living, I mean."

"Ah, yeah. Just recharging artefacts, you could work at one of the floating cities, they need enchanters to recharge the city so it doesn't fall out of the sky."

"Would they get suspicious at how I seem to have too much mana? I think you said they build from birth, so maybe not unless I spend years there."

"Yeah, and people don't really agree on whether everyone recharges at the same rate or spends the same amount or has the same amount and stuff, you're safe."

"But I do seem to have rather a lot, especially for 'daily refresh'? It does slow down a lot as we get older, I think I mentioned."

"Yeah. And since you produce extra that you discard if you don't use, I can usefully store all of it and probably convert and give it back to you if need be, I don't meaningfully have a limit."

"Handy, that. Even the crown jewels only hold so much mana, and it decays on a scale of years. I know my amulet holds about twenty ergs, if we want to track the mana I pass to you. Which seems like a bit of a pain to keep track of, but might be wise."

"Problem is my conversion's lossy. I guess we could figure out how lossy it is, with your mana."

"Sounds like an experiment to do."

"Feel free to fill 'er up, then."

"...Filling it to capacity will put me into mana burn unless I wait about half an hour."

"Mana burn?"

"If Witches use too much power at once it causes aches, then flashes of pain, twitching, and physical burns and scarring if you push harder and harder anyway."

"—wow that's incredibly unfriendly. And. Physical."

"It's about... A hundred ergs in three hours before aches, and another thirty before twitching and another thirty before burns. You see Witches coming home with burns after hard fights sometimes. I'm sitting at seventy, eighty or so. What's wrong with it being physical? Our magic's already tied to physical things, somehow, probably. There's no, like, overall theory of magic."

"Why not?"

"Not enough science pointed at it for long enough yet?"

"And again, why not?"

"Well, we didn't have much in the way of organized global society until the Neuroi invaded. Before that... People were busy not dying of cholera or starvation or succession war. And the Churches again. They don't like science, generally, since it tends to prove them wrong."

"But weren't there decentralised institutions of research?"

"...No? I'm not sure what that even means."

"Is literally all your research done by the government?"