"Ahh.  Okay.  ...Spatial distortion would probably first require a circle, and then can you even move them, so that's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem...  Anyway.  What sort of things are there left to test for?"

They're walking down a street of apartments and rowhouses now.  Loud music is pouring out of a few windows, in blithe disregard for anyone who might be trying to sleep.

"To test on you?  Well, first to redo the test for geases, and then several more general-purpose magic tests... I'd ideally like to head down to Mexico and do them there - America and Canada both make it hard to look too closely at living people - but that'd take too long and I shouldn't have to look all that closely.  And you're enthusiastically joining in, which should help.  And if that doesn't show anything... I could try a few more things to check your memories, but seriously, by that point it'd be simpler and more fun to look into your dreams."

"Yeah I don't think I want to go out of the country, CBP are presumed assholes until proven otherwise even though I'm a citizen.  And yeah of course I'm enthusiastic?  Or at least very intent on finding out what the fuck is going on in my head, you know?"

Oh, Mira is a United States citizen?  So she must've been talking about the other thing... but Aeslin's not about to change the subject now!

"That's fine; I like comparing magic in different countries, but most of the Fay don't move around much.  The Commission - our government - is actually on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but there's no real reason pulling you there."

She turns aside to one of the apartment blocks, taps her wand on a perfectly undecorated door with the light out, and then fishes a key out of her pocket and unlocks it.

"Here, come on in."

"Oh, huh.  I suppose that makes as much sense as anything, though I'm still kind of surprised it's not a one-to-one mapping on this side of the planet.  Although I would have expected tribal governments to have greater magical continuity, presupposing that as a premise...  What is magical government like?"

And she follows Aeslin inside.

The door opens into Aeslin's living room, with walls lined with bookcases and debris of projects scattered over the table and half the floor.  A floor mat was moved in to draw a chalk circle on, which represents a significant fraction of the clear floor space.

There's a couch to the side, a chair to the other side piled with a dozen books, and one chair left at the table with barely any clear space (if you don't count the plate with some fragments of toast left on it.)

(There's an open doorway to a tiny kitchen, and two other closed doors on the other side.  At back is what looks like a floor-to-ceiling window with curtains drawn.)

"Er, find a seat -" Aeslin says while shrugging off her pack of staves and backpack.  "I'll double-check the circle first; this might need my spare..."

She sits!  Although in truth there is a significant impetus to take care of that toast plate because leaving food out like that is asking for trouble...  But that would be kind of rude?  So it's mostly just her looking at it.

Aeslin erases a few symbols on the circle, draws several more (with chalk on the mat), and then dives into a box to pull out something that looks like a rasp and a lightweight bow, and then dives into another box for two thick tomes.

She places the bow and tomes in a triangle around the circle, and then waves to Mira.  "Okay!  We're redoing the test for geases now.  Step on in the circle!  Oh, and take off your shoes please - it shouldn't matter, but then the last test should've worked so let's be cautious."

Sure, she'll toe off her shoes before she steps in the circle.

...String instrument bow, or archery bow, by the way?

Oh, an archery bow!  A small one, but if Mira asks, Aeslin will happily mention it's symbolic.

"All right!" she says.  She holds her wand up in one hand and the rasp in another... and then glances at the staves... and shakes her head.  "Light work this time.  I don't want enough power to do anything to you and your mind.  So, tie the weave in... I could hold a normal wand as a rasp, by the way, but actually having a real wood wand that's also the handle of a rasp is even better symbolism.  Anyway."

She starts tying knots in the air all around the circle, and an even stronger rainbow of sparkles comes up from the circle into a dome around Mira.  It wafts outward around the bow and books, and inward to dance just around Mira's head.  For the first minute, it doesn't feel like anything at all; then it starts tingling.

After several more minutes of tingling, Aeslin waves a circle in the air and lets her arms drop.  The sparkles subside.

"Good news:  No geases!  And with this setup, I'll believe it.  Now that we've settled that, the question is what was doing that earlier.  Whatever it was, it wasn't doing anything now, so..."

"It's not doing anything that your spells were calibrated to notice.  Is it possible to disguise a spell as another sort of spell?  I've seen that be a thing in some systems..."

"Oh, you could disguise one sort of geas as another, or in theory you could disguise one of them as an active memory-modifying spell probably.  But you can't hide it completely; the human mind is strong enough that any active spells on it are going to show up.  And - really, neither a geas nor memory magic would explain the active magic that we saw back there!"

"No yes I mean like - disguising a memory block as some sort of kinesis, you know?  But what sort of spell did that seem like?"

"A simple movement charm?  Or a bubble charm?  It's easy -"

She circles her wand around her own forehead, and her hair bubbles up something like the cap did on Mira.

"- but I wasn't doing the magic, so who was?  Or what was?  I could set it in a trigger-launched device to do it when someone cast a spell on you, but if so, how'd that device end up on you?  I checked for any magic right afterwards..."

"...I swear, if there's a separate masquerade for some sort of only semitransparent psionic force I will riot.  Metaphorically speaking."

"It's not impossible - I'd blame the Greater Fay - but why you and why now?

"Okay, I'll check for magic again with this circle; it's not impossible I missed something before --"

Suddenly an obvious possibility strikes her.

"One moment - magic devices don't last -"

She quickly ducks into the bathroom and comes out brandishing a comb.

"Here; why don't you look for no-longer-magical devices.  Probably around your head."

...Sure, she can see if something falls out of her hair that way.  "...I still have no idea how it would've gotten there, assuming that there is something...  But that would make some amount of sense..."

"Yeah, I don't know how either... I haven't heard of any other mage around here, but it's possible..."

"... and really, at this point I don't think any more tests for magic on you are useful.  Even if someone did modify your memories last year, that still wouldn't explain how anything got on you..."

(Mira doesn't find anything noteworthy in her hair.)

She'll...  Check her pockets?

"...Could there have been some sort of spontaneously arising magic circle in my brain?"

"Well... only if you were a mage."

"...Well...  That's a hypothesis we could pretty easily try to falsify, I'd say.  Give me some sort of basic spell and see if I can cast it?"

"... you would've known by now, surely?  Well, I mean, it's not impossible -"

Aeslin's running through probabilities in her mind.

"- your parents.  Blood parents.  Not mages, right?  I mean, it's not impossible either way, but muggle-sprung mages are rare, and most of them realize it young -- though I suppose I can't prove there aren't some who don't ever realize it - how could I prove that -"

As she's thinking, she's tapping the circle with her wand and unraveling it.  Finally, all the sparks and colors vanish, and it's just a circle drawn on a floor mat.