"Uh-huh," he nods seriously.  "I definitely want to go over it more before trying anything, but what do you actually do to start sculpting with magic?  What does it feel like?"

"At first, not much. Later, slightly more, but - still not much. You have to do a lot of it by memory and dead reckoning - by the time you get the spells that let you get a really good look at it, you'd be much better at that. Detect Magic is a cantrip but it's so blurry."

"So there's not really a way to tell 'humans where I'm from can't do magic' from 'I was just wrong about how smart I am'..."

"Right. You don't strike me as dim, and you'd have to be to get nowhere with a cantrip even if you worked on it for years, so if you -" She strokes her fingertips over the lines of her spell diagram. "- and don't feel anything that will in the typical case mean that you are just not there yet, but if you are magically incapable of wizardry despite being a thinking being it will also not feel like anything."

"And I guess there's enough waiting that it's not really a huge waste to try it even if it won't work for me," he shrugs.  "So I start with the three parts here..." And he describes the process as well as he can remember it, getting as far as the inversion of the nubbins before he asks for a refresher from Belmarniss.  From there he makes a couple mistakes, two from guessing through a memory gap and one from misunderstanding the initial explanation.

Once he's done:  "Now that I know I won't be able to tell whether this is a thing I can do anytime soon, I kind of want to hear about the inverting theory stuff."

"So the wineglass-to-mushroom transformation is just one of the most obvious, right, all of these are just shapes a blob of magic can be, why not have it start on the page the way you want it to hang? And the answer is that Light is evocation magic and evocations, when they're not held in place on a scaffold, naturally go as convex as they can, like they're inflated from the inside. Evocations are the spells that bring energy into the material, it makes some intuitive sense. If you tried to start with it in a different configuration you'd be trying to stabilize a spell with no school. There are a couple spells that belong to no school and have none of their hallmarks - Prestidigitation is one, and it's a common theory that it's not harder than other cantrips specifically because you can pick it up in whatever arrangement is easiest for you instead of being beholden to its school. Conversely, Wish is one, and I have heard it opined that it wouldn't fit onto a mortal wizard's scaffold at all if it were picky and you got unlucky about whether it fit with your way of thinking about it or not how you pulled it off the page. Prestidigitation looks like this in my notation," she flips pages, "but it'd look more different than Light would in another spellbook."

"What are the other schools and what are their blobs like?"

"The traditional thing is to focus, to get really good at handling the tendencies of one school and let a couple you don't like anyway fall by the wayside, so I can't show you necromancy or enchantment. But Detect Magic looks like this," flip flip, "see how it look like it's trying to be flat? It can't get completely flat, it has these bits, but you can see the bulk of the center mass is trying to spin out flat, they tend to literally spin too if you let them. That's divinations. Resistance is like so," flip, "very cornery, abjurations have lots of right angles. Conjurations are, I don't have a cantrip example but they tend to act like gravity affects them? There'll be steps where you have to flip the whole thing over to get the center blob to settle properly for the next adjustment. Illusions, here's Ghost Sound, go through themselves like it's a hobby, you get them all folded up into their own space over and over and when you cast them you fling them loose like you're shaking out a cloth. And transmutations are my favorite, they'll do all of these things, depends on the spell if they do it in different regions of the spellform or if they do it in some kind of sequence or by reacting to stuff you do with them but they're so puzzly and they let you know right away if you've flubbed them. Or at least that's my experience with them, everybody has different favorites. The one I cast to make you trip less is a transmutation, here - so's Mage Hand - so's Scrivener's Chant."

"That's really cool."

"Isn't it?"

"How did people come up with this, if you can't feel it to start with..."

"Sorcerers can cast everything wizards can - not on an individual level, a sorcerer will only know a handful of spells, but it's the same basket of possible spells, it's not like clerics who are mostly different. And any caster can learn to cast most of a spell onto a scroll, like what you saw me copying Share Language off of. So probably if it was all mortal mediated instead of invoving gods doing stuff, wannabe wizards studied scrolls they got from sorcerers."

"Oh!"  ...She seems to know a lot more things and be a lot smarter and cooler than he had the chance to realize the last time this came up, and also... magic is real, here.  "Do gods, uh, do stuff?"

"...yeah, they give clerics spells most saliently but there's also the occasional report of visions and the much more mistakeable hint or omen."

"Huh!  Any gods from Earth don't really, uh, do that sort of thing."

"Golarion might be special because we've got Rovagug entrapped in the middle of it. It wouldn't surprise me if they were much quieter on other planets."

"I think you said that," he nods.  "But I kind of think that if we have any, they aren't the same ones as here."

"I'd expect Pharasma to be the same, the others might have much more limited operations that happen to have never touched your place."

"I think when people talk about one creator on Earth they usually say he's a guy."

Shrug. "Gods have traditional genders but I think in most cases this is not the same thing as an actual gender."

"I guess it doesn't matter much either way."

"It really doesn't. Any more questions about magic?"

"I want to run over the spell again -"  And he does, a few times, until he can manage it without mistakes.  And... then... he can... try it??

It does not work at all.

This is expected! ...."If it already doesn't feel like anything, I bet there isn't any way to tell whether I've used up my chance to practice?"