"Stone Shape is lower circle for clerics, though I think wizards can get it - I can't yet - and it's not great at fine detail."

"Dang.  How much did you get done last night?"

"Couple hundred pages."

"Not too shabby."

"It's not one of the spells you can really eke out a lot of performance improvements on once you have it down."

"Even by making your actual handwriting smaller?  Not that - uh, I assume you've already done that sort of thing."

"I have pretty small handwriting to save paper but it doesn't make the scrivening any quicker, no."

But if it's already small, then that's even less reason to keep at trying to figure out how to make a printing press work.  "Okay."

"You look... moody, is there anything I should be doing for you?"

...Huh.

"I don't think so.  Unless - there's a way to make my life not be made up of lifting rocks and tripping through the dark, and then sitting alone, in the dark, for my entire day?  With short conversations in between you doing other things.  - But it's fine.  Like this."

"I mean, Rynaeri doesn't think you sped her up much, you don't have to go to work with her again, but I can see how given that list it might not help. Do you not like Yin and Via?"

"They thought I was funny."

"And... that's bad?"

He nods, face getting red.  "Because of...  - Will anyone notice that I don't have the time in light to be writing books?"

"- the idea here is that you had them on you when I acquired you and I am hoping you will eventually write another one, not that you are actively writing more all the time."

Oh.  "That makes sense."

"Hoping you'll write another one does explain a Continual Flame purchase if they sell well enough."

"That would be nice."

"But in the meantime if you want light I do recommend hanging out in the kitchen. You could read my books, that would be a reasonable thing for me to be letting you do under this story even if letting you try my spellbook isn't."

"Okay."  If he's lucky, maybe they'll mostly ignore him.  Or if they think he's a writer, instead.  It's got to be pretty bad to make reading worse than doing what he did last night, every night.

She pulls out a novel for him and goes to school.

Wait is he supposed to lift rocks today.

....He guesses if he goes and reads in the kitchen he'll at least be available to find if Rynaeri wants him.

Rynaeri does not appear to want him. She does pat him on the head on her way out.

Weeeeiiiiird.  And do the halflings snicker at him this time?

Oh yeah.