"Huh, I guess I was assuming everybody already knew. So, uh… Representative Eudora is stepping down for personal reasons, so that means her position's opening up again. There's a contest going on right now to select the next one. It's open to anybody under twenty and they've been doing elimination rounds every Saturday."

"...under twenty?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Blink.

"I dunno, I never really thought about it?"

"Officially, it's because it's traditional. But - people have challenged the tradition before, and they never made it very far, because-"

She shakes her head.

"I don't think it's a good idea to talk about this right now. Personally."

"...That is very ominous, I hope you know."

Ivy laughs dryly.

"I'm aware."

Piper hops onto Lucy's knee next to Ivy.

"I'm going to want to know more, later."

Lucy holds Ivy protectively, but Piper nods.

"That's fine. Later."

Thierry returns! With a small stack of books.

"Sorry, I got distracted. I've got the book with the study on religious rituals, as well as some papers about magic color studies and familiar studies to boot."

"Perfect timing to defuse the ominous town tradition enforcement mechanism discussion.

"Let's take a look, then."

The first book is mainly about the history of various cultural and religious practices! They bear a surprising similarity to Earth's cultural and religious practices, though they aren't 1:1 and Hali, not being from an Earth, likely wouldn't recognize them anyway. In many cultures magicians who spontaneously manifested were elevated as a priest class of sorts. The specific rituals tested involved calling down rain, helping livestock conceive, and improving the health of crops. Calling down rain had the least effectiveness - the authors speculate that weather is too large and complex for humans to manipulate. Next was fertility, which seemed to mostly work mundanely rather than magically. Plant health rituals had the best results - and, as Thierry mentioned, people who honestly believed the rituals to work consistently had the best results, after controlling for magic strength. Generally speaking, the more willing to give the ritual/spell a fair shake someone was, the better their results. Surprisingly, even non-magicians were able to get better than useless results. The authors have a lot of speculation about why this may be, but they seem more focused on the idea that the non-magicians were manipulating the ambient magic that dissipates from magicians.

The magic color studies definitely suggest that what color someone gets is nearly arbitrary! There is a clear pattern, and it's that magic color runs in families, though it seems to operate slightly differently from other hereditary traits like hair color, height, and earlobe attachment - children are more likely to develop magic that's close in color to that of their parents than to inherit throwbacks from grandparents. It also seems that, while colors that look like a mix between parent colors aren't unheard of or even particularly uncommon, what typically happens is that people take after one parent with greater or lesser similarity:

Many people believe, or at least alieve, that magic color provides some sort of indication of personality, but this is about as accurate as a horoscope. There was a study done where subjects watched recorded illusions of various people, dressed in neutrals and with their familiars (if applicable) not present. Some of the illusions were unedited, some were glamoured with randomly-chosen eye colors, and some were glamoured to have all the eye colors be black. The subjects were able to come up with reasonable-sounding explanations, based on behavior or bearing, for why someone had a particular magic color - whether or not that color lined up with reality. The subjects who had to guess magic colors were right about as frequently as random selection. (The subjects were better than chance at identifying non-magicians, both those shown recordings of non-magicians edited to have colorful eyes and those shown all-black-eyed recordings.)

Familiar type is more straightforward, though it also seems to loosely run in families. Interestingly, magicians who were adopted or raised by people other than their biological parents for whatever reason tend to take after their adoptive parents. The same is the case with magicians who had a teacher or role model they particularly admired - they tend to take after the role model.

"Interesting.  The result where mages were discriminated from nonmages better than chance, even with obfuscation...Either it's in the bearing, in which case I wonder if it would still show with pictures, or there's something we haven't yet observed at work.

"And the plant health rituals...

"Does anyone still do them, do you know?  Because that's very interesting; I want to take a look at the process.  ...One does have to consider confirmation bias, or the power of people paying more attention to things, but - reliable increases in crop yields..."

"Bearing seems pretty likely," pipes up Su-Yeong, "because a lot of magicians are used to having their familiars on them most of the time."

"Hmm, I'm not sure. It seems like the kind of question that would be quite easy to find the answer to, though - I agree about confirmation bias, hmm…"

"You'd need to make the study itself not know which pictures are which until afterwards, I think - hmm - and I was thinking 'bearing' being more, the difference between you before and you now, Su-Yeong?  Confidence."

Nod.

"That too. I bet…"

She pauses a moment to think.

"Well, I was gonna say I bet some people would be able to tell that I'm new to magic, but now that I think of it, I think that those people probably just think they're able to tell. How would you make it so the study doesn't know?"

"Enforce separation between the people who're recruiting and the people who do recordings, have the effect that blanks eyes applied before the images are taken."

"Huh! How do you match up people's guesses to reality afterwards, then? I guess you could have a clerk give everyone a number and write down that person 1 has red magic, person 2 has green magic, and so on…"

"Applying an illusion like that sounds fiendishly complicated… although your paradigm for spell construction might have an advantage in making it less so."

"I was thinking it would be an item, truthfully; a set of glasses in quartz, perhaps."

"Oh, that would work well… I suppose at a first pass you could have it flatten everything into shades of grey, and then - you can enchant glasses to disguise your eye color; it should be a simple enough matter to invert the focus…"

"Quite!  You'd want to use a set of reference eyes though, mages glow and non-mages don't -"

"Right, right, although it's not bright enough to affect the skin around the eyes… you'd want it to recognize eyes and turn them all black, so that people don't get hints from the value…"

He is ✨ in his element ✨ after spending so long out of it. It's great!