"And we appreciate what you've done for Su!"

"Seeya in the morning!"

While Su-Yeong showers, Tobi makes up the couch for Hali.

"See you in the morning."

...She might be up a bit longer; she has designs to draft before the inspiration vanishes like morning dew.

Valid of her!

Tobi gets up at about six and goes to work; Su-Yeong sleeps in for about an hour. When she emerges from the bathroom she's dressed in her own clothes and holding a bundle of laundered and folded clothing.

"Morning!"

Hali makes a noise that may or may not be describable as "Good morning", in response, as she blinks awake.

The nearest flat surfaces are absolutely covered in papers full of runes.

Giggle.

"Oops, did I wake you?"

She… would like to set the bundle of clothing, which is the borrowed outfit from yesterday, down near the couch, but - papers. She decides to set it down on the nearest not-papered flat surface. She peers curiously (without actually touching the papers) at the strange alphabet on them.

Well, it's not actually an alphabet!  Runes are logographic!  But it is, certainly, quite strange!

"I think you might've, yeah.  It's fine, though, like...I think I got enough sleep, at least."

The clothes, after a bit of ink shifts on Hali's arm, are picked up in a gesture and secreted away in her bag.

"Thank you for returning those."

Either way, she can't really make heads or tails of them. But she didn't really expect to.

"That's good. And I can try to remember, if you end up staying here longer. What is your camping setup, out of curiosity?"

She watches with interest as Hali lifts the clothes into her bag.

"Tent with runes, bedroll - the usual stuff.  With extra magic."

"Huh, what do the runes do for the tent?"

"A bunch of comfort things.  Keeping the heat or cold in, and the bugs out.  Etcetera."

"Neat! There's probably similar stuff for sale here, but I've never been outdoorsy enough to go looking."

She flexes her hand experimentally, calling forth a burst of magic.

"What kind of stuff do you like to do with magic, normally? I feel like I'm so used to doing stuff the regular way - or the long way around, or however you wanna call it - that I'm kinda coming up empty when I try to think of things to do with all this magic."

"Moving things with my miiiiiind," she jazzhands, "is, like, definitely the thing I do most often.  Heating and cooling stuff.  The message stones count, probably?"

Nod.

"I guess I can work on getting good at moving stuff without touching, yeah."

She lifts her key off its hook experimentally.

"What's the plan for today?"

(She feels - weirdly itchy, not sure what to do. Part of her is convinced that she should be going to work right away, since everything else is so - normal.)

"I have experiments to run, there is science to be done - you need a proper tutor."

Nod.

"Yeah, I agree. I just don't know how to find one, since pretty much nobody I know socially has magic and even if it wasn't a really bad idea to go to the Vasillia place and ask for recommendations, they'd probably recommend someone who charges way more than I can afford. There's, like, one person I thought of but I haven't seen him in like five years and have no idea how to get in touch - he might not even live here anymore."

"Mmmm.  It can't hurt to check, if you have any idea how to find out how to get in touch - perhaps start at wherever you know they frequented?  Their house?"

"I - might be able to find out how to get in touch?"

Sigh.

"See, what happened is… Tobi and I grew up basically on the streets. But we weren't completely alone, we had a friend. His name was… Morgan, actually. And a little before he turned twelve, he got magic. Someone scooped him up as an apprentice - see, there was this one cop, Officer Rothart, who was nice to us, and he was dating this scientist. The scientist, Dr. Malliet, took Morgan on as an apprentice, and Morgan started living with him and Officer Rothart. And then, after a couple months, we never saw the doctor or Morgan again. I think I still see Officer Rothart, sometimes, or someone who looks like he could be him? But he never tries to talk to us or anything. I don't know where he lives, and I'd feel… weird, walking into a guard station."

"Oh, that's - I find myself equally concerned and hopeful.

"...Do you know what color he is to - really high precision?  I mean, I could try the idea I had anyway, but it would be - harder."

Another nod.

"Yeah. Uh… Dr. Malliet and Officer Rothart were both blue - Officer Rothart's was a lot lighter. And then Morgan's was raspberry pink."

She shuts her eyes in focus before manifesting a shimmery illusion. It's hazy, both because she's not practiced at illusion magic and because the memory is five years removed, but it shows a fair-skinned man with blonde hair in a ponytail, royal blue eyes, and a peacock with a darker-featured man with baby blue eyes and a hamster. A preteen boy with sleekly wavy dark hair and deep magenta eyes smiles nervously up at the blonde man, cradling a cygnet in his hands.

"Does that help?"

"Oh, yes, very."

She can capture the light from that!

"And - oh, I can probably filter for swans, too -"

Runes spread across a blank page, some producing glowing shapes in the shapes of corresponding animals, including Su-Yeong's red in the form of Goat Morgan - at which point, a circle spreads out above the page, showing a red goat in nearly the center, and, hopefully, other animal shapes in their corresponding animals' magic colors!

She's even managed to make a 'sensitivity' dial out of sustained magic, which she will twiddle with should there be no results.

At first, nothing comes up. There's a couple of other folks with similar, if not quite identical, colors - a girl about fourteen years old with a poodle, a fortyish-year-old woman with an ocelot, a middle-aged man with a mantis - and plenty of other folks with birds, even waterfowl, but nobody who has a match for both magic color and familiar type.

"...Well, that's not a good sign..."

What if she searches for only magic color, instead?

Still the same handful of dark reddish pink magicians, at first. Once the sensitivity is adjusted to account for people who don't currently have magic, however, some more people prop up: mostly young kids, but also…

This guy! They're sitting on a bed in a room nearly as big as the living room Hali and Su-Yeong are in, cheerfully chatting with a silky white cat as they mend a shirt. There's lots of fabric in this room, in the form of articles of clothing in various stages of completion as well as bolts. A tailor's dummy stands in the corner.

Magically speaking, they don't quite look like anyone Hali's already seen, magic user or no. Their magic color seems to be not there, not just dormant like that of black-eyed mundanes, though in a paradoxical, almost after-image-like sense, it is a dead ringer for Su-Yeong's illusion.

A wispy black swan sleeps fitfully next to them.