It's been a few days since Laura got out the hospital, and nothing important or interesting has happened. Except for Theo and Sadde having just captured a new card, Glow, though that's debatably quite boring. Theo turns to Sadde, as though she might have the answers. "Okay, seriously, a card that glows? First it's wind, then it's a huge bird, then you have a blue lizard, there's a bloody Easter bunny, then a shadow, then a sword, and now a card that glows?"
"Well, erm, first order of business is, I suppose, what to do. I assume Mr. Farron was okay with Tyler from his very monosyllabic answer, but there's still the matter of... I mean, I dunno, if I were in any of your places I'd want to know as much as I could about magic and get in on it and stuff?"
"We can just hang around trying to think of ideas?" suggests Jess to Willow. "And providing wonderful moral support, that too."
"Yeah," says Maya, smiling. "Knowing about magic would be nice – are there, uh, different strengths? Do I have some weak type of magic meaning I can't actually do any weird thing myself, or do I maybe have something like your things…?"
"There's magic of several different types. The Cards themselves have a hierarchy, but personal magic isn't as neatly divided as that."
"Oh, huh. So, do I probably have a weird magic thing? Or is that, I dunno, rare and I have to poke it a bit or something to get it to show up, or…?"
"Weird magical things are usually just one of the ways latent magic finds to express itself when sorcery isn't actually pursued."
"We, um. We did ask about this before, pretty sure? We asked about other magic we could do and then how to do magic without cards, and you… didn't mention this, or at least maybe you did but said you couldn't help?"
He thiiinks?
"I don't know how to do magic without cards, you're the ones with weird magical things!"
"Okay, right, so do you have any idea how we might get started on it, even? Like, is it just a superhuge amount of meditation and then blindly fumbling my way through some stuff? Or do you not even have, like, any idea of how, is this a thing that we're gonna have to guess and hope at."
Tyler feels like sighing. They've already been over this: Kero is only helpful with respect to the cards, and even then, only to a very limited extent.
Ugh.
"I know there are rituals and spells with words on them. I don't know how you invent them or use them."
Theo rubs at his eye a bit. "Maybe we'll just have to use lots of trial and error," he says. "Sounds exciting."
"It does sound exciting, though! Inventing magic from scratch, it's like science but better!"