"How many minutes?"

"I dunno – it hasn't been that long since you guys ran out, I don't think – and actually this probably confirms that we're not stuck with no mana so that's kinda wonderful to be hopefully rid of that scenario? – so maybe every three minutes?"

"Sounds good to me."

So Theo sets a timer.

Technology is useful.

"Anyway – if we're going to be here all night, are we going to have more food at any point? I don't mean now, but I mean since we seem to plan on staying up."

"We could have tea later, and biscuits. Ooh, and we could play videogames! The ones of us without magic anyway."

Jess laughs a bit. "Yeah."

"I think I'm gonna keep most of my magic for now," says Maya. "Just– in case, I dunno. I'm being a bit paranoid because it seems useful."

At the three-minute mark, Juniper cannot in fact produce a charged paper.

"That sounds reasonable, yeah."

"So, are we gonna do video games or just– plot what to do with our magic?"

Theo also tries charging a piece of paper at the three minute mark.

Also doesn't work.

"Do you have any new ideas? I think you wrote down quite a lot of notes there already."

"New ideas as of– when? And, uh, I don't actually remember which of these I've mentioned."

She has quite a long list of notes.

"As of now."

"Uh, right, well the symbols thing we still have all the different materials to try, and I suggested seeing if foreign languages have different strength effects on the spells, test out the weird distinction for whether it works or not, I have various things as question marks for the mana thing because we have hardly any data on it, we need to test different concepts in the spells, see if we can do something like immortality with it, presumably that takes a lot of mana or something though, see if we can specify into the spell that the nonmagical target should get control over it, see if it acts the same on magical targets, try language variants – old and modern English, different dialects – and sign languages but we'd need fluency in that, see if time and 'strength' relate, see how those things stack a bit more, test the cardinal direction thing, see if the affinities do things with this stuff, see if getting tired affects the strength, see if it's length or theatrics or what, test if card drawbacks go over to the concepts."

(She has all of this noted down quite neatly.)

"Any of those sound interesting?"

"Yeah, several, but I meant, do you expect to come up with new things tonight? I for one am pretty exhausted, probably not just because of the mana thing."

"Um, I expect I'll probably think of some things but I'm not sure how many it'll be."

"And will we actually test any of those?"

"Well it sounds fun but tomorrow is a Saturday."

Maya tilts her head, confused.

"I mean that we don't need to rush and do all the experiments tonight when we each have a tenth of a paper's worth of mana and a sleepover to do."

"Right, yeah," she agrees. "It would be nice if we could work out how the mana thing works with sleeping, so if we could uh– time how long we sleep and see how much paper you can do, then do an equivalent time awake and test that?"

"Sure—"

Someone rings the bell, and soon the butler shows up with a bag. "Ms. Woods' mother has come to bring her this."

"Oh, thanks!" she says and accepts it.

"I should probably go get some stuff, then."