"It's nothing serious. I need you to help me out with something. How well can you control your mana?"
[My mana? Pat, is this some sort of joke?]
"It's not. I need you to tell me how well you control your mana."
Pat already had a hypothesis about why he couldn't see Mark on his scans, and he needed Mark to help him out with figuring out whether or not this was true. Pat's system worked by scanning the atmosphere for the residual frequencies left behind by the mana leaking out from a superhuman or anima. According to research done on superhumans in Germany, there was no superhuman in the world that could prevent mana from leaking from their body, no matter how good their control was. Pat figured out that this mana that was leaked left behind a strange frequency that showed up as inversed sine waves when scanned using infrared light. So Pat was sure that his system would be able to use this residual mana to find out where any superhuman or anima was.