And lunch is acquired, and then the plant growth form, which turns out to be very useful indeed; while it's limited to what's physically possible for a plant to grow into and doesn't have immediate effects, it can make plants grow faster, larger, and differently shaped, produce more food, tolerate poorer growing conditions or take advantage of better ones, and even make plants produce different kinds of food - tastier, more nutritious, differently shaped or colored or flavored from the original - and breed true with the changes, if the mage takes the time to make the plant do those things, which are somewhat absurdly complicated.

Wow.

This'll be huge, no one'll ever go hungry again.

Absolutely. I don't think this is ever going to be fast to cast with, even for me, but once we've got it done? Yeah.

Faster than what we were trying before.

Mmhmm.

Anything else while we're here? I want to go try this out.

Gotta learn the languages to do anything about the animals, I guess.

Yeah, probably. I don't think sneaking in and just letting them all loose would help.

Tempting, but nah.

Yeah. I'll give you some portals to listen in on them. And back they go.

And share and start trying to use the food magic!

And she heads back to the Ñolofinwëan city and tells Findekáno about the day's accomplishments and news.

Oh, that's good news, well done. I'm glad he didn't charge the place on the spot or something.

Mmhmm. I get the feeling they've sort of... I want to say grown up some, since the last time you saw them, but I doubt that makes sense.

Not really. Watched lots of people die, I guess.

Yeah. And had more things they had to be responsible for, and stuff.

I love my cousins. They also killed a lot of other people I love. It's messy.

Yeah. Lean.

Squeeze. Sigh.

The best thing about Findekáno being a mage is that she can lean comfortingly on him and also work on magic.

Yep! They can do that. He wants to get a feel for the plant growth spell form.

It is really, ridiculously complicated; it's going to take a lot of work to figure out how to use it to its fullest extent. For now it looks like they'll have the most luck if they stick to copying traits from one plant to another, for example making plants that usually don't start growing until later in the year handle the cold like ones that start growing now.

How about making plants grow faster and healthier?

Making plants use light and nutrients and more efficiently is pretty straightforward and seems like it'll work out to healthier and slightly faster growing plants, if not ones with any particular resistance to disease or pests or anything, and they can also be made to grow faster and larger beyond that by working out how big and fast-growing plants do it and copying those traits over.

This'll be such a satisfying spell to figure out.

It really will. She can spend the whole afternoon on it, if he doesn't want her to go make fuel-less fires or endless water sources or something instead.