"Really! Do you have - notes, on what you've observed? How long have you been here - in our town, in our world?"

"I have so many notes.  And I've been in your world for...not very long, but there are certain things that I would have noticed exploding if my magic was that badly miscalibrated for this world!  My magic-sight, for example, relies on a resonance sieve constructed about..." Hali can absolutely go on about spell theory!

:D

Hali can walk him - and Lucy, Lucy really deserves the chance to finally do magic now that it's known how that works and it ought to actually help with the not-exploding - through setting up the spell that allows wizards to tell what they're doing, then!

Lucy needs maybe a little more handholding than Thierry does, but they're just as enthusiastic - where he has a general geeky love of knowledge and learning, they're just excited to get their hands on magic they can actually do.

And Hali studies how they do it, in the process.

It takes all of them a good amount of mental focus, at first - the way that Hali tells her magic how to do things is pretty different from the way that they tell their own magic to do things. Thierry, having the most technical background and ability to adopt the correct mental posture, "gets" it first, though Lucy, who has nearly zero experience with local magic in the way, is a close second. Ivy's frog familiar, who introduces herself as Piper, comes out to help at some point - it transpires that familiars have inborn intuitions about how to do magic that aren't completely useless when working within a different system and Piper, as the familiar with the most experience being a separate entity, is able to help all the locals translate between their own expectations and Hali's.

Both Thierry and Su-Yeong contribute their own extra magic to Lucy when it's their turn to try things. They absorb Su-Yeong's magic the most readily - it seems that their system wants to shift the magic towards Lucy's own color, which is a lossy process, for best results. Eventually, they try a process where Lucy holds one of Thierry's sapphires and draws just a hint of his blue magic at the same time as Su-Yeong feeds them a stream of red.

Thierry's the first to get a refined spell to click.

"This is bizarre," he remarks cheerfully. "It feels both more and less efficient at the same time."

"That's wizards for you!  There's a reason the most common secondary descriptor for 'magic a god isn't responsible for' is 'arcane'!  And from my own perspective, this is bizarre too; how is your magic even getting colors in in the first place?"

Thierry chuckles.

"Now there's a question you ask if you want to set a group of academics to bickering, or if you want to derail your professor and think they might not be familiar enough with that trap to not fall for it. I may not be the best person to ask since I don't have a pet theory; that fact might also make me one of the better people to ask. I had a professor who thought that it mainly indicated personal temperament or magic style, another who thought that it evolved in a similar manner as hair and skin colors, and yet another who believed that it was determined by a process so complex that to understand it required an inhumanly complex mind - she might have been joking, though, it was always hard to tell with her."

He shakes his head fondly.

"I do know that there have been studies on how color correlates with various traits such as proficiency with different types of magic, proficiency with nonmagical skills, all sorts of personality traits… personally I think those studies illustrate the human capacity and love for pattern recognition and making up stories to tell ourselves."

"I think I'm almost inclined to give that third theory credence.  It's the familiar that is a reflection of your personality, and that seems to be able to consult an external record already - given at least one example of an animal not ever before seen by their mage - so why not try to rule out gods?"

Shrug.

"You're welcome to try that yourself, since you come from such a different frame of reference. I've never seen any evidence that our magic is capable of confirming or disproving the existence of gods or communicating with them any better than walking outside and talking to a tree - there are historical rituals from all over the world, of course, but studies suggest that any concrete results from those are purely an effect of one's own magical power and attitude towards the ritual: someone who believes with all their heart that they are communing with their god will succeed more than someone who's merely going through the motions to see if it works."

"...How do you mean?"

Thierry stops suppressing the urge to stand up and pace. Ivy rolls her eyes good-naturedly.

"Throughout history, nearly all cultures have come up with the concept of gods - which I'm using here to mean, broadly, entities of varying intelligence and interest in the way the world operates that have power beyond even the most powerful magician - husks being included in this definition of 'magician,' since we're still, fundamentally, human. And those cultures came up with practices that they believed would help them communicate with their god or gods, so that they could induce an effect in the world. Scientists of all sorts of different backgrounds have tried all sorts of different ways of opening a channel of communication with any god who may be out there, but there's never been anything that suggests the existence of a god who can understand and communicate with human beings. Your magic is different, though, and you may well come from a place where gods are commonplace. Does that clarify what I meant?"

"I believe so.  I was asking more about the specific results; something demonstrably happening is still evidentiary even if it's not reliably reproduced independently."

Nod.

"Ah, yes. I think I was able to salvage the book that had my favorite study…"

He goes upstairs to look for said book!

"Is he always like this?"

"No."

"Yes."

She catches herself.

"Well - he used to be."

She nuzzles Lucy again.

"I wish he was like this all the time. Maybe I could have actually learned anything about magic if he rambled about his professors or whatever instead of lecturing me about being lazy and forgetful, even if I couldn't use it."

"...He hwhat."

Hali's tail lashes angrily.

"If 'twere not for the fact that it wouldn't help, I'd slap the man.  That is an insult that I had hurled against me quite enough that I will not stand its employ again.  If he keeps behaving like that now...

"Let me know.  I'll work something out for you."

Lucy brightens up! Sometimes there's nothing better than telling someone about something that hurts and having them immediately react to say "hey, that's bullshit and you deserve better."

"Thanks."

Ivy starts to look unsettled - Lucy scritches her head.

"Listen, I know it was probably because of the huskiness. But you know that doesn't change what it felt like, Ivy. More than anything, though, I think…"

They look thoughtfully at the unlit fireplace.

"I think I wanna… get a job, actually? Something that gets me out of the house so I don't feel…"

They gesture vaguely.

"All this all the time?  Yeah.  That makes sense.

"...Hmm, what would your comparative advantage be..."

"...and, yeah.  It is probably husk-y.  Which is why I hope it changes once I've gotten him a decent prosthetic."

"...I suppose there's the job Su-Yeong recently vacated open, as unlikely as that is to end well given...what's-her-name...I don't recall if you've ever said what it was, in terms of duties?"

"It was pretty general, honestly? I did some cleaning, some cooking - I wasn't a chef or anything, but I sometimes peeled potatoes or made roux, that kinda thing. I don't think it'd be possible to avoid Philly, though, and it definitely wouldn't be a good idea to ask Mr. Vasillia if you could."