"Like I said before, the parties I attended with my father as a child, and the Magic Season banquets I attended after growing up, were all just small-circle chats. We talked about which magical materials had gone up in price again, whose mage tower had exploded again, which forbidden clauses some dark wizard had made new progress on..."
Zatanna covered her forehead and said, "I never realized I lacked so much common sense about the ordinary world."
"I'm afraid I don't think Jonathan and his old friends would discuss any actual common sense at banquets." Schiller tilted his head toward Zatanna and looked at her over the tops of his glasses.
"Yeah, Little Zha, I think you're overthinking it. The common sense they mean must be industry common sense, the kind you could publish directly in a paper. It's perfectly normal that you don't know it," Constantine hurriedly comforted her.
Zatanna shook her head and said, "Besides that, my manners were terrible too. I'm even starting to doubt myself. How come it feels like I can't do anything without magic?"
"Maybe reverse magic is just too convenient." Zatanna pursed her lips. "If I knocked over a wine bottle, I could point at it and make it float back up. If I wrinkled a carpet, I could wave my hand and restore it. Over all these years, I don't know how many things I've messed up. I could restore the others with magic, but not this time."
Constantine opened his mouth. He had originally wanted to indignantly tell Zatanna that Klein was a liar who had deliberately crushed her self-esteem, but he had not expected Zatanna to actually learn something from this.
Thinking back on his brief but passionate romance with the young magician, Constantine had to admit that Zatanna was