Seeing as the tournament event of the Halnuemi Enkindle Festival wouldn't be occurring for the better part of half an hour, Inkaro and co decided to split up to check out different areas of the festival they were interested in.

  So naturally, Inkaro and his family went to investigate the more game-like stands, mainly at Inoni's behest. Because the daughter of Lephaelia and Kyuno would be dammed if she was going to do anything boring on her day away from school. Anazenpha ended up carrying a still knocked-out Yuuvia all over the place as she followed Kaluso around, figuring Yuuvia was simply overwhelmed by being in the presence of someone she was a huge fan of: so the demon girl made it her mission to get Kaluso's autograph for Yuuvia. And Myhail departed from the area, mostly to stop the growing crowd of admirers from growing any more unruly and causing a multitude of inconveniences for his classmates. Nuenala finally reawakened before booking it when she saw how soon the tournament was and that she wasn't ready to be a presenter; her reaction was somewhat funny, on the sole basis that her little legs moved so fast they looked like something straight out of a slapstick cartoon.

  With all that being said, Lizu was left to remain as the sole guest at Myendi and Nova's food stand. To an outside observer, it appeared as if she did so solely to get first dibs on the snacks Inkaro had crafted, and as she lethargically relaxed, she twiddled with the sun and moon earrings on her respective ears.

  :Tapestry:

  [Eclipse of the Sun and Moon][Type: Unification][Rank: U]

  -A copper sun earring that resembles a circle with eight spikes(the cardinal directions are double the size of the intercardinal ones), and a crystal sphere in the centre that has a deep pink and dark gradient

  -A silver moon earring that resembles a crescent moon with the top tip having a beige gradient, and the lower tip having a pale violet gradient

  Still within eye sight of Lizu, well... her peripheral vision, Inkaro and Inoni were at that grimoire syntax challenge stand while their mother, carrying a sleeping Paruneha in her arms, was at the trinket stand adjacent to the one the siblings were at. And given the stigmai was with their mother, it allowed the little sister to finally reclaim her rightful privilege of sitting on Inkaro's shoulders.

  However, had sitting on her brother's shoulders been the end of it, Inoni would have been boastfully content with the biggest grin on her face.

  However, that wasn't the case, far from it.

  Despite her bestest of bests effort, Inoni couldn't ignore the packed mumbling racing from her brother's mouth. Every bit of information she heard from her brother left her mind spinning, soon devolving into her head swaying in a matching tempo and her words droning into incoherence. It was simply too much for her, made all the more clear by a little bit of steam seeping out of her little ol' auditory receptors when she finally reached her processing limit.

  "Chants? Short... chants?" Inoni murmured weakly, one hand clasping her forehead and the other arm wrapped around Inkaro's head for the weakest bit of support. Had the cause of her appearance not already been clear to Inkaro, the faint blue shade plaguing her face could have been misconstrued as a sudden onset of sickness/nausea. "W-hat's the diff-rence?"

  Although still scribbling away with the provided mana pencil, Inkaro raised his head, finally stopping his rambling just long enough, only to convert the rambling from focusing on his efforts on the challenge to explaining the words he used in his rambles. The short-lived force behind her brother's head swing knocked the mental clarity back into Inoni, allowing her to fully focus on listening to Inkaro.

  "A chant is used for stability and control in a spell when a person isn't well-versed in that spell, usually kids or beginners. But when someone is at the elite level, then they can use that same chant to highly enhance an aspect of the spell or a less potent boost for the entire spell. For short chanting, it is chanting but shortened for combat or speed purposes-"

  "Yeah... but what is a chant in the first place?" Inoni murmured in a pout as she brought down a fury of powerless punches against the top of her brother's head, which managed to cut Inkaro off near the end of his first attempt at explaining.

  Follow a quick hum of contemplation, Inkaro was about to mount a second attempt at explaining, before being cut off for the second time by Morilore manifesting right in front of Inoni: "...hmmm, what Father is trying to say it: chants are words you would say to help highten the connection between you, the spell wielder, and spell holder, like grimoires and the likes."

  "Oh...," the young girl murmured as she twirled some of her locks, suddenly feeling rather skittish and embarrassed at not seeing something so obvious when the explanation was basically in the name. She sighed, weakly shuddering from the effort before beginning to scribble away at her own magic paper.

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  "Dude... this stand is supposed to be a challenge for kids... It's not that serious," the stand attendant said deflatedly as he watched the square-cut, pink magic paper Inkaro was writing on swiftly turn from its initial colour to solid dark blue.

  Back over with Lizu, the dragolyte had her arm settled on the countertop of the stand, allowing her to rest the side of her head on her raised palm for support. Lizu watched Inkaro's familial interactions from afar, silently observing, not even bothering to eat the muffin she had right in her other hand, with how focused she was on the sight. The expression she wore was a strange one: a little smile that she couldn't bring herself to fully commit to, yet still found the sight comforting enough to not get rid of her smile.

  It was like the physical manifestation of bittersweet delight, all wrapped up in self-directed indecision for something that was on her mind.

  "Aren't you going to join them?" Nova interjected sharply, cutting through the haze over Lizu and snapping the dragolyte out of her bitter daydream.

  Lizu briefly glanced over her shoulder at the battle-loving princess, before lightly slumping more strongly into her palm, followed by a weak electrified crackle of her dragolyte horns: "No... I engross enough of his time every other day, so he deserves some family time"

  "Huh? But aren't you a part of their family too? You know, by you and Inkaro being each other's betrothed?" Myendi asked cheekily, although coming across somewhat perplexed, if anything for why Lizu would say such a thing. Having returned her gaze to dither on Inkaro, Lizu mused over the other girl's words, shortly followed by the crackles of her horns to cease.

  "Perhaps...."

  That was all Lizu had in the way of recompense for her decision, still adamant on preserving the purity of Inkaro's family time by keeping herself out of it, at least that's how she saw it initially, anyway. So, although conflicted to the point of scrunching up her cheeks, Lizu forced herself upright, downing her muffin in one go, before strolling up to the duo with a grin on her face, timing it so she'd arrive the moment the siblings were done with the challenge.

  "You lost, ey? How unexpected," Lizu remarked in a timidly playful way, as she saw Inkaro with no prize and Inoni proudly clutching her pale golden rabbit plushie with very long ears.

  "Bro tried too hard and got disqualified because the guy at the stand couldn't read his tiny syntax," Inoni boldly proclaimed as she hugged the rabbit plushie she had won, acting like it would cease to exist if she even showed the slightest of consideration to lighten up on her bear hug. Lizu couldn't help but lightly swish her chonky tail behind herself, snickering alongside her physical reaction, as she used a hand to loosely cover her smirking mouth.

  "You don't say: who would have considered the possibility of there being a skill limit instead of a skill requirement?"

  Inkaro matched Lizu's act of covering her with one hand at hearing her remark. He hummed a little, wondering to himself if he was still capable of writing grimoire syntax at such a level below what he had become adjusted to. That thought got him locked into a long period of silence and physical stillness, to the point of beating out a statue in a contest of being a statue. As Inkaro continued to mull it over, to the point it got Lizu laughing a little harder than before from finding Inkaro was getting fixated on something so silly funny, a certain noble from overseas was somehow more frigid in motion than Inkaro, much to Enetha's headscratching confusion when her friend abruptly stopped following her.

  Mulinai was flabbergasted; had her extended silence not been a dead giveaway on that fact, then her unmoving poker face of neutrality, which matched Enetha's usual one, would definitely make any other option out of the question. Had she not been so resolute of the inverse, Mulinai might've considered she was dreaming.

  "What is going on...," Mulinai muttered mentally, lightly pulling at her cheek and anxiously nibbling at her fingers. She was at a loss for words, physically at that, but her mind was anything but silent. "This isn't how things are supposed to play out... she is supposed to despise him, and he should be an emotionless husk that gets under Lizuranti's skin even more. I mean... it doesn't seem like a bad thing."

  Mentally clutching at her head using both hands, Mulinai almost wanted to just bellow out a laugh at the absurdity of things being so detrailed from the original plot that she'd lovingly drilled into her soul. But she knew better than to make such a scene, given her family's position in society, so she downgraded from manic laughing to a reserved huff before continuing her mental musings: "I suppose this is a blessing, given Kotou isn't here when he was supposed to be. After all, it should be no surprise that events are so different with all the butterfly effect shenanigans that have already occurred back home, so who am I kidding myself for thinking things here would be any different? Maybe even the surprise event will be completely different too, or might not even happen at all."

  She hung her head low, suddenly feeling an onset of skin prickling unease, and pulled at her face to force a goofyily stretched smile onto it, hoping to combat the ichiness of her cheeks. The act made no sense to Enetha, causing the little princess to wonder if Mulinai was doing some obscure face massage technique she'd discovered.

  Despite having her mind running all over the place, Mulinai was somehow both relieved that her future plans would, probably, be more straightforward than she initially anticipated, but she was also dreading having to go at those plans completely blind, yet again. With all those mental gymnastics going on in Mulinai's head, Enetha was still trying to pull at her friend's leg to get her moving again before Inkaro and Lizu went off somewhere else.