[@BellBottomBlues]
"Okay! Watch this!" Marië withdrew a box of cards from her front pocket. She closed her eyes, mumbled a spell, and the cards flew out of the box. They stacked together one after the other. Then she peaked her hands and chopped the air. The cards spread out along the floor, levitating in mid-air.

"Okay...pick...a card..." she panted.

Entranced, Erudessa pointed to a card, a Clover-4. Marië clasped her hands, and the cards stacked again. She slid out one hand and put it atop the other. A single card mirrored the motion, then flipped to face the elf. It was the Clover-4! Erudessa laughed and applauded as the card burst into flame. "Well done! Well done! That was amazing, Marië. I swear, you're better than I was at ten times your age. That's a very hard magic to master, young lady."

Marië shrugged. "They don't let me do magic at the art academy, but I practice when I can." She grinned.
Erudessa grinned back. She overheard Lanik and Darian talking about her, and could make out just enough of the conversation to guess that it had turned dirty. With an innocent little girl present, reacting didn't seem appropriate, so she held her grin and pretended not to notice. The girl then stood up, braced on Erudessa's knees, and fired off a barrage of questions.

"Why are your ears pointy? Why is your hair silver? Can you do magic? How old are you?"
Erudessa chuckled. She caught the door crack open in the corner of her eye, but chose to ignore it. It was probably Lanik anyway. "My my, so many questions! I'll start with your first one: Why are my ears pointy? Because...well, they don't serve any biological purpose, per se. The Ancient Creators designed them to set us apart from the humans. Most elves can hear better than humans, so people have come to associate the pointed ears with hearing better, even though it doesn't actually do anything."

She took a lock of hair between her fingers and held it up. "My hair looks silver because it contains silver. It conducts magic exceptionally well, like an aqueduct for mana, and it makes me a really powerful mage. I suppose that partly answers your third question - yes, I can do magic." Erudessa counted off her spell abilities on her fingers. "I can do telekinesis, emberlighting, enlightening, shielding, summoning, reconstruction, regeneration, reinforcement, and a couple other niche spells." Subtly, she telekinetically slipped a card from the deck while Marië wasn't looking and flicked Lanik's nose with it.

"I'm young as elves go," she continued. "I am two hundred seventeen years old, two hundred eighteen in two months. Most elves can live for up to a thousand years. A friend of mine lived to be nine hundred. Humans normally can't live that long without magic, and I've heard of some who do just that to extend their lives by a few hundred years. It's really advanced, though, and I haven't learned it yet." Erudessa leaned forward and looked Marië in the eye. "What do you say we figure it out together someday?"