"Do you know your way around already? If not, I think I mostly do - there's a yard this way - "

"Not in detail, but vaguely." And they go out into the yard and Illia explains how to push extra strength into your muscles and how to tell when it's too much--that one requires a lot of practice, but it helps to know what you're aiming for.

There are a few loud crashes, but for the most part she picks it up.

Illia heals her when she accidentally hurts herself--that happened a lot even back home where they had padded rooms, it was pretty much inevitable--and gives her advice. "For effort, it's best if you get a lot of exercise even when you're not doing magic, partly so you'll be more used to that kind of pain and, in this case, so there's a better base to work off of for this kind of thing. You're at an advantage in that respect to most people I know from back home who aren't Effort mages, and you have other responsibilities that a normal student doesn't, so if you don't want to go out of your way to prioritize that it's not really necessary, but it could help."

"In your world most students of magic do nothing else?"

"We do other things, but they're not really responsibilities, mostly. Hobbies and part-time employment to pay tuition where your boss could replace you if you quit and social stuff and volunteer work, not dealing with logistics for an army."

"Your world isn't at war."

"Yeah. And that means that I have to recalibrate my expectations a lot, here."

"It seems to me like you're doing quite well."

"I like to think so. Let me know if I mess up."

"The war is important, helping the Elves with that is an unqualified good."

"Did you know the Enemy is torturing all of his own soldiers?"

"...no. How do you know that?"

"When I first arrived here it was not immediately obvious just by looking which side was in the right. I am very lucky that Fingon found me first. He brought up the possibility after a while that I was one of the Enemy's servants there to infiltrate them. I said I could have killed him if that was true. I hadn't demonstrated the ability to do that yet. He said he'd believe for certain that I was what I said I was if I killed some orcs. Sympathy--Sympathy's pretty good at information gathering. I checked the orcs to make sure they really were evil. One of--one of the first things that was obvious about the orcs was that they were all in a lot of pain."

She nods. "I'm glad you checked. That's awful. And doesn't seem very strategically useful."

"I have no idea why. Morgoth kind of seems...gratuitously evil, which doesn't normally happen, but maybe it benefits him somehow to be seen that way."

"Convenient for the Elves. Their kill-all-orcs-even-the-children stance would be harder to countenance otherwise."

"...Even the children?"

"Doesn't come up much, because they're raised inside Angband, but yes. One doesn't take orc prisoners."

"...I'm going to have to ask about that. My kind of magic can do anesthesia, it's pretty lossy, usually hurts the mage more than the person getting anesthetized, but mages usually have much better pain tolerances so it sometimes works out anyway, and if I could figure something out to fix it...killing kids is just--not--okay."

"Well, they're not people. They're orcs. Only bothers me because I think they only sometimes think we're people."

"Um. How exactly are you defining people."

"Elves are definitely people, the Noldor moreso than anyone else, Men are people except when it's convenient to forget that, Dwarves are people but the smelly sort you don't invite to parties, orcs aren't people."

"I'm...not sure how to engage with that. Um. That...was a list of examples, not a definition."

"Yeah. I know. I haven't seen orcs. I don't know whether it's right to kill their children."