"Ha, I can imagine. I guess if I really needed the job and didn't think anywhere else would take me, I could swallow my pride - hell, I bet if I asked her, she'd recommend me. She's weirdly convinced that I'm basically her best friend. But… I can afford to keep my options open."

"...Having ever met people like her, I wouldn't be surprised if that's just the straight unvarnished truth.  They get lots of ass-kissers, pardon my language.  ...You sew, don't you?  Perhaps that's an idea for a job?"

"Huh, I guess you could be right… there's a couple of girls in the representative contest that seem to like her fine, but I guess they could be just after her money. I don't exactly try to listen in on their conversations."

They nod when Hali brings up the sewing suggestion.

"I could, yeah… I guess I haven't ever looked for a job sewing things because I was embarrassed about not having magic. Like, what if you're supposed to be able to hold a bunch of pins and thread up with your mind and I fall behind because I can't do that? Or - I dunno, it just felt… bad."

...Would Lucy like a hug.

"My homeworld had a lot of magic craftspeople and the people who weren't magic got along just fine.  Besides, there's artistic works which don't care about speed."

They've got an Ivy!

"Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe I could go out tomorrow, after the contest? Or Sunday…"

"You could also go out before the contest. It doesn't start 'till ten, you know."

"Ha ha, funny joke."

Su-Yeong laughs.

"For what it's worth, I totally understand what you mean about the no magic thing. It helped to have Tobi and Pea, since I know they'd never judge me for not having magic. And yeah, it was different, because they also don't have magic. But… it still helped."

"I have to admit, I'm curious about what the heck this contest is."

"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…"