Hm. Doesn't seem like there's much of a change, but it doesn't feel like it's actually responded much to the shoving.

If she tries shoving it a bit harder, it feels kinda tiring, and she might notice she's losing her grip on it.

"This is tiring. Is it tiring for you too?"

"Uh, it was when I was younger, and when I was trying to get it transparent, too. Pushing at the boundaries of what you've done before, that's usually it? Probably worse for you since you haven't actually, you know, pushed them much yet."

"Okay, so just practice."

"Yeah. And not doing anything like trying to blind people with it, in case it does actually have a personality."

"Right."

Purple continues to work on the water purification thing, and then after a few hours he decides it's probably time for him to get home.

It's become progressively more difficult for Promise to keep going with the lumen, each time she tries it in succession, but taking a break will allow her to do it a bit more and for a bit longer. She can probably notice it getting slightly more orange from what it starts off as, but it's a lot of effort to get it to that stage and keep it there.

If only she had green eyes or something. Brown's just not a good color for a light.

She practices intermittently and takes notes, labeling all the axes as she figures them out.

They seem to sort of move about, not staying in precisely the same direction each time, but it's relatively easy to get a feel for the different metaphorical texture of each movement, so it doesn't take too much adjustment each time she puts down a piece of lumen.

He's back the next day, at the agreed-upon time, and he continues to work on the water purification.

Magic practice!

Woo!

This passes by uneventfully for a few days, as uneventfully as magic practice can be, and Promise manages to get the brown to– an even stronger orange!

And one day, Thar's in his room in the mortal world, slightly frustrated and feeling somewhat restless. He gets up to go for a jog or something and then frowns, realizing he's actually– not as restless as he'd thought.

He goes to sit back down again when someone knocks at his door, so he goes over to answer it.

"So," says the person at the door. "Purple?"

"… Um. Okay, I know I said I thought there was overlap, but– how long 'til I disappear, any idea."

"No clue," he says. "I'm Blue, if it wasn't obvious."

"Hi, Blue, nice to meet you, see you soon for when I poof."

Blue walks in! And sits on the bed. "Been up to much? Since I don't really remember all you do."

Purple shuts the door in that case! "Nope. Reading, waiting, getting bored, having very little to do. Maybe I should get a job."

He leans against the wall. He hopes his memories don't disappear when he poofs. They didn't seem to last time, but a sample size of one isn't– great.

"… Doing what?"

"I don't know how much you know about the mortal world, on account of blank bits or whatever, but their math education doesn't seem too great, at least not here?"

"And you hardly speak the language, so you can hardly become a teacher."

"Well, I wasn't meaning straight away anyway, and I'm actually getting quite good at it. Immersion does wonders for language ability, and my language ability wasn't exactly shit in the first place."

"True," says Blue. "Nice contacts, by the way."

"Thanks," says Purple back. "Apparently purple is not a normal eye color. They didn't really have contact lenses to pretend to have a purple iris on your purple sclera because of some weird cosmetic decision you had in the past because you're obviously human with memory loss. I had a look at some that covered the sclera too, to see if I could seem to fit in a bit better with the white sclera, but ew no. And then, well, I would've tried for amber first, but nope, doesn't work well on purple and also apparently that's a Luna thing and humans don't have it anyway. Well, they have an amber, but it's not so much amber as, like, light orangey-yellow-brown. Which is kinda amber, but not Luna eye-color-amber."

"Gray would've probably suited you, if you went the sclera-lens route. Assuming they do gray."

"Thanks," he says, "but you weren't really available for a consultation at the time."

The contact lenses are in fact purple, meaning they display a fake purple iris around his pupil. Because he thought 'obviously purple iris on purple sclera' would look better than 'no iris, just weird purple sclera'. He can say he's got some pigmentation issue. Or, you know, he could if he could speak the language better, whereas lacking an iris would be– a lot weirder, apparently.

"I should probably take them out, since I'm not actually using them for anything right now," he says. "Any particular reason you appeared without?"