"The same way you've been disabling the others."

Theo blinks a few times. "With Windy and Shadow? And then swinging the staff in their direction? Because I really don't get how I'm meant to swing the staff at the both of them at once, unless I squish them together really hard and hope that works?"

"You don't really swing your staff at them, you just swing it at some invisible magical surface that appears in the air in their general direction."

"… So I swing the staff at them, and then it hits an invisible magical surface before it gets there. But still. It's not like I have multiple of Windy? Unless Windy could hold one and Shadow could hold the other, which is a possibility."

"No, that wouldn't work, they'd escape."

Theo looks a bit annoyed. "Okay, so, do you have any brilliant ideas for how I could capture them if or when we finally stumble upon them? Or is it going to be another case of oh, look, Theo has to get lucky and somehow capture cards again, what fun, followed potentially by my horrific death because I'm way in over my head?"

He shrugs.

(So puntable.)

"Well, at least this time we have advance warning," he says, not looking at Kero. "We might be able to come up with a plan."

"Yeah. And even if this isn't the work of the Twin, it'll hopefully apply in the future when we actually do encounter it." He nods. "If we come up with a plan, will you be able to guess if it'll work, Kero? Or should we just pretend you're not here?"

...he looks kinda hurt by this. "I can guess if it'll work."

Well, obviously that was mean of Theo, but it's not like Kero has been particularly helpful. He'd expect some sort of magical guardian of the cards to be a little better at gathering the cards back up if they escape, but he supposes it's not technically in the job description.

He looks back over to Sadde. "Okay, so, we need to do something to them both at approximately the same time." And then back to Kero. "Something like, maybe have Windy attack one and Shadow attack the other?"

"No, they're too different."

"Too… different? So we need to take the Twins down with two of a thing that is really similar, at about the same time?"

He shakes his head a bit. "Sadde, please tell me you can duplicate yourself or something?"

"Trust me, if I could duplicate myself, you, me, and myself would've had quite a lot of fun together already."

Theo snorts. "Well, if I could duplicate myself..." he says, then smirks.

He shakes his head, then continues, "So, how similar do the things have to be? Like, two punches at about the same time, or like them both being shocked by electricity from the same cable, or like... using some sort of sonic boom? Not that I have any way how we'd do that."

"If you could duplicate yourself we would also have had quite a lot of fun together already."

"Two symmetrical punches would work," he says, trying to distract the teenage boys from teenage boy conversation. "I think electricity doesn't need to be from the same cable, probably, if it's simultaneous, and the sonic boom would need to be from the same distance from the two of them."

Theo thinks for a bit. "I'm not having any super great ideas about how to apply this. Like, maybe if we got some people who were super good at coordinating attacks, but I have no idea where we'd find them or if I really want to include them?"

He rolls his eyes. Stupid magic system can't be easy, can it.

Of course not.

"It doesn't have to be completely and totally sync'd or two punches would never work, so there's a tiny, probably milisecond window there. Hmm, what cards do we have, Windy, Lock, Sword, Shadow... Oh oh oh idea idea!"

"Idea idea? … Please tell me it's not making one of us into a mindless slave of the Sword?"

"I don't think the Sword can do that when it's been captured," he says, eyeing Kero for confirmation.

The bear nods.

"Anyway, the idea involves using Sword and Shadow at the same time, or, at least, something and Shadow. Shadow mimics what we do, right? And it does so at the speed of light!"

"Oh, huh, that could work? Unless the Shadow copying our attacks would be too different from our attacks themselves?"

"I... don't—"