"Did you make that one up today or did you already have an energy blast spell when I found you?"

"Made it up today," he says. "I've got other energy blast spells, but I didn't use any of 'em."

"Are either me or Lexi in any danger of accidentally casting spells?"

"Uh... maybe? I don't really know," he says. "Probably not big ones. But if I were you I wouldn't go around wishing really hard for somebody to take a lightning bolt to the face unless you actually wanna throw one."

"But not just by talking; if I decide to curse someone out I'm not going to knock them through a wall with pretty colored lights? It'd be a wished-for result?"

"Yeah," he agrees. "I can say 'fuck you' until my cards turn white again and nobody's gonna get blasted unless I'm trying for it."

"Okay. So spells happen if magic people want stuff enough - then why haven't we ever cast things before?"

"Maybe because it's way harder without a device," he says, "I know that's true. Maybe because you didn't want things enough, or didn't want them the right way, or didn't know you could do it."

"What do devices do to make it easier? And is there someplace we can go get them? Ones that don't have other plans, I mean."

"Not this planet, that's for sure," he says. "I've felt other devices around, but never more than a handful at a time, and I'm pretty sure they were just visiting."

"Okay, so we get to do without at least till we manage to travel between planets. Is that generally pretty doable or are we going to be stuck?"

"I have no idea," he says. "It's easy for me. But I'm not, you know, hugely keen on meeting anybody who manufactures devices for a living, considering what my manufacturers thought of me."

"Are they all intelligent?"

"Yes... maybe? Kind of? Depends what you mean by intelligent. I mean, at one end there's me, and at the other end there's what amounts to a baseball bat that takes voice commands."

"Well, that's kind of - dodgy, I guess, but I'd be surprised if literally all of them resented what they do."

"The more powerful the device, the more it can think for itself," says Brilliance. "At least, I'm pretty sure. I haven't met that many devices."

"Are you really going to go find someplace to hang out and do nothing?" asks Bella after a silence.

"Oh, so you are gonna lecture it," snorts Lexi.

"No. Well. Not very much. But if it's that dramatically easier to do magic with device help, and if they're hard to come by and potentially resentful anyway, it's worth trying to talk one into it."

"...I dunno," Brilliance admits. "I mean, the one thing I know for sure I wanna do with my future is not blow up any inhabited planets; past that, I haven't really thought about it much."

"Well, for the short term, it's very kind of you to help us figure out the magic we command ourselves, anyway."

"Can we magic our homework done, that would be cool, I was going to do mine with Jessica but then stuff happened."

"I really don't know - what sorts of things can magic do?" Bella asks Brilliance.

"Probably not your homework," snorts Brilliance.

"Okay, but in general - conjure stuff out of nothing? You set up a shield during the fight; can that scale? Last a long time? Could I power generators with slightly more controlled magic energy blasts if I learned enough electrical engineering?"