Efficiency classes: boring, and way more useful for people who aren't her. Odette would probably just pull out a novel, but if she got terrible grades in every class that didn't matter to her, it would reflect badly on her professor father.
If only something interesting would happen.
"I'm actually not sure why they're made to sound so mutually exclusive. Sympathy and Conquest seem like they could be practically synonyms."
"Okay, then, tell me how to float rocks with them and we'll see how my approach holds up in practice."
"With Conquest, you...assemble the order in your mind, and then you execute it instantly. Using the thing Atennesi Cohen showed you. And it either works or it doesn't, in that moment. With Sympathy, you sort of...I mean, you want to know what you're doing ahead of time, but you sort of...nudge at it? You ask, you don't order. And they hurt differently, of course," she adds as an afterthought.
"The intersection I'm seeing is between Conquest with a light touch and Sympathy with maximum confidence," he says. "It's the timing that's hardest to reconcile. You might have to apply them to different parts of the same problem. The mindset, though? Almost the same."
He looks over the edge of the roof and catches his Effort rock out of the air so he can focus. That rock down there, you, yes, you. Get up here, please. Milan is waiting.
It leaps into his hand.
Unlike the earlier working, which hurt as though he was lifting the thing with his own muscles and finding them strained, this working of magic jars his bones and sends a streak of what feels like burning along one cheekbone.
He calls up another one, same method.
"So, that works," he says. He can speak clearly while running at maximum; he has practice, giving orders in skirmish.
"Sympathy and Conquest drawn ultimately from the same mental state."
And now he has three rocks. He makes them all hover, one with Sympathy, one with Conquest, one with Effort.
"Adding in Effort is tricky but doable," he concludes.
"It just seemed obvious. Effort's harder, though, it doesn't proceed as naturally from the same starting point."
"I'm having trouble even imagining it, Sympathy and Conquest are pretty much opposites for me."
"It's... hard to explain. If only we had functioning telepathy," he jokes.
"I can't recommend the method, but the result is useful," he acknowledges.
She holds out her hand. A small cut appears on one fingertip, and a drop of blood wells out. "Better to start small."
He looks at it, catches his rocks to free up his concentration, and requests that it heal.
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