"Potions specifically created with stuff arranged around and not just in the container."

"That is...I am sure much less remarkably specific in your familiar context than it seems to me."

"It's 'arrays' and 'arrangements', depending on the stuff around the beaker or vat or what have you, and, yeah, there's lots of them."

"We have potions, and there are different ways of making them, and someone might have more talent for one method or another, but it wouldn't be--it would just be, like, having more of a knack for doing things one way than another, it wouldn't be more magically effective for them to do things the way they're more comfortable with."

"I mean, I'm not necessarily more effective at it? Somebody else's arrayed potion could be just as good as mine, especially if they had some other alchemy-related affinity but even if they didn't and were just good in the lab. It means I - remember how to do them more easily, and can push mana through them a bit more efficiently, and am less likely to make a mistake. It means I'm better at writing new recipes that way instead of a different way. But if me and Bella or Aadhya do the same recipe and none of us fuck it up the potion will be about the same."

"It also wouldn't cost less mana!"

"Do your affinities have nothing to do with mana efficiency or do they just not include stuff like Caio's?"

"There are ways to improve mana efficiency but none of them have to do particularly with affinity, so far as I'm aware."

"What does affinity do for witches then?"

"'Easier to learn' isn't just a matter of a knack like what I was talking about with potions. It takes me half as much practice to develop a kind of magic that's in-affinity for me as one that's not--and for an academic it takes half as much study and for a warlock, half as much favor from their patron. The practices we use to develop our magic give us a sort of--intangible resource, which can be invested to develop what we're actually capable of. An academic could spend weeks studying complex rank-five runic rituals, and at the end have moved from being capable of rank-one rituals to rank-two rituals. Most people can never move beyond rank three in any particular discipline."

"This intangible resource is a separate thing from mana?"

"Right. Mana is about using abilities you already have; this thing is about gaining new abilities."

"...huh. I think for us there's just - learning to do it, and then having enough mana to do it."

"That's definitely an advantage. --I wonder if your mana and our mana are similar enough that you can use Kisses."

"I'd be happy to try it, my power sharer hasn't worked since we graduated and I miss it already."

What a power sharer is is a question she can ask later. She pulls out a small copper coin and hands it to her. 

Bella takes and inspects it. "This is mana? What do you do to get it out, bite it or something?"

"--No, you just--draw on it."

She will attempt to draw on it like it is its own tiny power sink.

There is a little bit of mana in there! 

The coin vanishes when she pulls it out. 

"Ee! That's nifty. Barely a sneeze of mana, is it more for you than that -?"

"Nah, I gave you the smallest denomination of coin in case you couldn't use it but it still got messed up somehow."

"Sensible. It takes six minutes to make this? I think I could build that much mana in a minute and a half, maybe, if I went with a fast method."

"Generally it does! There are ways to cheat. But the fact that they're so inconvenient to mint is why they're so valuable relative to the amount of mana involved; I could regenerate from empty to full in, like, an hour, but there's a limit to how much I can store."

"And this is the only way you have to store mana?"