"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!

"Eyes are sharper than you'd think; remember how much you can see in the dark - probably better to hemispherical-blackness-dome, actually -"

Su-Yeong quietly pipes up:

"Maybe the social science stuff can go on the checklist for later? Might be a good idea to make him some husk-relieving jewelry soon…"

" - oh, yes, right, gah.  Almost forgot."  Right, if she does this and this and this -

"This will work for now.  Hopefully."

Ivy laughs and hops over to snuggle Su-Yeong.

And Thierry puts on the item!

"Ooh, that's very nice," he remarks immediately. "It doesn't just catch the magic like a sapphire, it takes it actively - it's like the difference between mopping something up with a sponge and applying suction."

His peacock takes a little longer to visibly manifest - Thierry's magic channels are more damaged, and the damage happened longer ago, and he seems like he's absorbed it a little - but manifest he does! Magician and familiar smile fondly at each other.

"Thank you very much - did you do anything different for me than you did for Su-Yeong, by the by?"

"Changed the runes that specify the animal, mostly."

"Oh, you have to specify that? How interesting!"

"We wouldn't expect that," clarifies the peacock, who happens to be named Lucien, "because of how… fundamental it feels, being the kind of thing that we are."

(Morgan and Piper both nod in agreement.)

"It might be that I could get by with 'Soul Animal', but - better specified is better."

Wry grin.

"That's understandable. Do you have plans to refine the technique? And, more broadly, what's next on your agenda?"

"Yes, definitely; I want to get it to the point where it's something I don't need to make artifacts to sustain each time.  And I think that my plans are mostly...research on that, and probably investigate the ominous tradition?  I - part of the reason everything happened...was exploitation of young magicians, back home.   And thus...Well, the rule for representative candidates is concerning."

"The rule…?"

"The way the representative contest is for people twenty and under, Thierry."

"Ah, that. I've… never had a particular head for politics or history, so this should be taken with a grain of salt, but - from what I recall, there was a particularly promising representative once who was only sixteen years old when they took up the position and went on to have quite a successful career. I don't remember how that led to the present status quo, though."

"...Well, that's better than I was thinking it might be.  I hardly like it, though; it seems too ripe for abuse regardless of intentions."

(A quiet look, shared with Ivy.)

"Yes. Particularly given the current state of the magistration."

"...If you...wouldn't mind elaborating?"