Jess just sort of watches. She's not really able to do anything.

And it turns out that murmuring it is no worse or better than saying it out loud, and Sadde's spell also lasts the same.

"Okay, so it's looking like this is a property of the sentence itself. I wonder if we need to actually say it out loud?" She tries just thinking the sentence really hard... "Doesn't seem to work."

"… I'm curious if sign language works," says Theo. "But since I don't know any, it probably wouldn't work. Um. What about mouthing the words and not actually saying it?"

He tries it!

Nope.

"Apparently not."

"Alright, need to be spoken out loud, different people saying the same thing get the same results—actually I wonder if this is always true, it sounds weird if it's not, but maybe different spells can be different? ...also maybe Theo and my magics are more similar because we've been doing this for about the same time?" She yawns a bit.

Juniper tries the same one Sadde and Theo did unprompted. It lasts the same amount of time.

… Maya tries it too, just in case.

Yep, same.

"Seems like the same spell has the same amount of time for all of us, then, yeah. This one, at least."

Noted.

"Okay let's see if another spell also lasts the same time for all of us and if it does we can probably effectively work in parallel."

"So it's probably more like a limit on the spell itself rather than a mana thing, since we seem to be fine doing the spells over and over right after we drop down? Should possibly keep an eye on that if we do some quick-cast thing, like, a blast attack if that's possible, to make sure it's not a mana thing?" She blinks at what she just said. "Not that I'm recommending we get a blast attack necessarily, nor do I think this is a game, but like, it kinda seems it is."

"Well I think Kero said that when it comes to cards it's just a matter of having more magical capacity to be occupied by cards we're using, not some finite resource or something...?"

"That's correct, but I don't know if sorcery's the same."

"… It would probably make sense for it to be the same, I think? Or else for it to be a limit that had to be put into the cards when they were made, so cards would be on a totally separate system, which I guess is possible." She frowns. "Or it could be a weird combination, yeah, but I wouldn't expect–" Sigh. "You know what, actually, just– yeah, okay, nevermind."

"Magic is insane and opaque and we don't have enough information to guess much," she summarises.

"Yeah."

"But we can hopefully poke at it and get some interesting results and then hopefully it's internally consistent."

Tyler looks at Theo and raises an eyebrow.

"Well, the results seem to be consistent so far."

And she tries the shortest spell phrasing they tried.

"Yeah, fortunately."

Maya times it again.

It does indeed last much less time than the longer verse!

"My turn!" And she does that one verse and it lasts exactly as long as Juniper's. "Okay so yeah, depends exclusively on the spell, and is apparently somewhat dependent on spell length?"

"We should possibly count the syllables or words or sounds or letters or something, see if it's a direct link. Depending on how precise we want to be."

"As precise as possible, I think."