Ah. She had mentioned this earlier but perhaps it wasn't propagated - in her world magic is not the sort of thing anyone can learn. There are a few things that generally most people can, but magic is done by particular people with an inborn quality. Mariko is not a mage, as far as she can tell.

"I'm aware. I'd hoped to start with something known to be easy, and attempt to either mimic it directly or indirectly."

Ah. Well, she is not particularly versed in early pedagogy but - simple telekineses? Simple illusion?

That wouldn't be where a new mage would start, but a lot of the starting exercises as she remembers are about gaining greater familiarity with one's magic, and its foundations for later tasks, and Mariko has a different sort of power and is not unfamiliar with it. Unless she would still like to start with sensing and such pieces?

"Telekinesis is harder to directly replicate with chakra manipulation, so I'd like to start there. I'll sense you performing the exercise, then will attempt it myself, unless that seems obviously dangerous to you somehow?"

Her illusions appear to be different than theirs, if that is significant. But telekinesis is perfectly fine.

She wouldn't particularly expect danger from her side, but is not informed enough to speak to Mariko's.

"Molding chakra in new ways can sometimes be risky, but I'm used to running experiments."

(She puts some extra shields up, though does not mention this outloud.)

"Whenever you're ready, then."

(Clearly this has certain risks if it proves to work, but they seem unlikely to progress too rapidly, and in any case she is neither going to be avoiding magical work lest they spy on her, nor able to put up any proper concealment. And the scientific potential is fascinating.)

After Lee demonstrates, Mariko attempts the exercise - and she's clearly doing something with her energy, that makes it feel almost but not quite like magic - 

And she doesn't manage the exercise, nor on her further attempts, before she shakes her head and says, "If this's possible it doesn't have a blatantly obvious solution..."

(Magic-as-had-by-people, as tends to be gone over in 101 instruction sometimes, is not a form of energy (though magical energy is of course also existent). But that's for more detailed explorations than they're attempting at the moment.)

It's interesting to observe.

"That does tend to happen often. Ah well. 

If we attempt it again I should set up some sensors ahead of time."

(She continues to leave it up to Mariko to guide their interaction in any particular direction of further action.)

She nods. "I can try again now - or it might be useful to spend some time figuring out approaches, first, or to look at how much I want to budget for this, see if I can get a feel for its ultimate difficulty. You were also interested in seals?"

"You would seem better placed than I am to evaluate both your own system and your priorities, though I can provide relevant information about mine as you need.

Yes, very much so."

"I'll teach you the basics of seals now, and contact you with a list of questions about your system."

"Thank you." She presumes Mariko will proceed to say so if they will need to move for supplies or other such actions.

"First lesson - unsealing. Undoing an unsecured storage seal is by far the easiest exercise. There's a few basic concepts you'll need to understand, though..." She'll explain chakra manipulation, pulses, and how to twist it just so - like a key for a generic lock.

This is interesting, if not appearing to be the basics of seals per se. She notes information and non-physical impressions. (She isn't going to try the converse of Mariko's exercise at the moment. She's interested if she can by some means perform a chakra manipulation or something sufficiently analogous, but a first attempt is best left for when she's at least one level down in restrictions.)

Caution is reasonable. The most basic chakra exercise she knows is attempting to stick something small and light to your skin - things with a lot of surface area like leaves and paper are easiest, but it's also possible to do grains of sand. Or Mariko will be able to feel if Lee can gather chakra in her belly without moving it anywhere - and that's just meditation.

She continues to pay attention. 

"I'm quite interested in the practical as well as the theoretical, but if there isn't urgency I'd prefer to delay an attempt at it; as I said my restrictions will lesson to an extent fairly soon, and I'd rather avoid a false negative that could be averted by the wait."

"That makes sense. When would be the earliest time for you to try?"

She'll translate 'approximately 24 hours after I arrived here' into local measures of time. "I can continue with theory before that point."

She'll explain more of the basic theory, then - yin and yang chakra, what each is tied to and associated, transforming chakra to have elemental properties, nature chakra versus chakra as found in thinking beings, the specific ways seals interface with the world via chakra manipulation. A good seal isn't just ink and paper. All seals need a medium to channel chakra, a design, and a substrate. It's possible to make seals out of pure chakra and have the substrate be the air itself. This is hard. Most people use special inks prepared so they are more easily used as chakra conduits. The designs function like chakra manipulation in a human - chakra moved into specific shapes has consistent effects on the world. There are a lot of design theories, and it's hard to define anything as basic, but most design systems have a basic set of symbols that are arranged in relation to each other in mathematically determined patterns. Uzushio seals are more fluid than average, which favors speed and adaptability over specificity. She's only a master in Uzushio seals, but she's been learning or decoding the other design systems.

She listens with great interest, and is a fast learner. If Mariko does not mind questions she will ask them.

(What kind of hard is making seals of pure chakra? What makes inks more easily used as chakra conduits? What makes some people more or less capable at seals than others? What is an example of an easy seal, a somewhat harder seal, a very hard seal? How much time do seals take, and what does this vary with?)

Making seals of pure chakra requires prodigious control - and high reserves. Most people have one of those, or neither, and almost never both. Inks provide a natural channel for chakra, that's distinct enough from the paper - inactive seals will actually have some chakra flowing in them, natural chakra's just not usually concentrated enough to overcome their activation threshold. Some types of ink are more chakra-sensitive, and work better. Plant- or animal-based is usually better than mineral-based, as a general rule.

Being good at making seals requires having a good memory, being good at math, and having the same sorts of skills involved in being good at languages and writing - good handwriting, good intuitive grasp of grammar, good grasp of visual representations of abstract concepts. Being good at activating them mostly requires chakra control, though that varies with the seal and how beginner-proof it is.

A basic storage seal for a solid item composed of a single molecule or element is probably the simplest, or at least it's the one they teach to children since it's very concrete. She can demonstrate it. Sealing away, for instance, soup so that it remains the same temperature, doesn't spoil, and doesn't develop an odd taste is a medium level of difficulty. The hardest seals in anything approaching common use are ones meant to bind living beings, and the hardest of those are meant to be long-lasting or even semi-permanent (Mariko won't demonstrate one of those). Theoretically a teleportation or time-manipulation seal is possible, but no one's managed one.

Seals can take anywhere from as quickly as you can arrange the equations in your head to days of careful work. Size, complexity, and the seal master's own skill are the main variables. How big an effect a seal is meant to obtain and how efficiently it's designed are the main determiners of size and complexity. 

She listens and observes seals. What does the demonstrated one look like?

Why does the composition being a single molecule or element affect difficulty? (She has a guess.)

What does a living being bound by a seal experience on its end?

Efficiently?

What kinds of ways to mess up a seal are there, and how does one check to be certain it is safe to activate?

The demonstrated one is fluid - stylistic curls in a spiral within a circle around a blank space in the middle. A symbol appears in that blank space when something is sealed into it.

The easy way to do storage seals is to define what you'll be putting in it - iron or gold or water. The hard way to do storage seals is so that it'll adapt to anything you put in it, with limits on that making it easier (so you might have a 'metals' seal, which is harder than an 'iron' seal but easier than a 'solids' seal).

That really, really varies with the seal. Some are unconscious, as far as they can tell. Some are left conscious but trapped in a mindscape, or in a separate dimension.

An efficient seal uses very little space, fewer symbols, and less chakra. She can demonstrate the difference - here's an inefficient 'iron' seal, which is full of unneeded buffers and contingencies and definitions. A complete novice might find it useful, but it's better to leave some of that up to the sealer to do. Here's an efficient 'iron' seal, which has extremely few symbols and does what it's meant for as cleanly as possible, nothing else. (It's better to have two efficiently designed seals than one seal that does both functions, too).

Most seals, if messed up, will just explode when you attempt to activate them. Usually if you don't overcharge them this explosion is small, just enough to set the paper on fire. Storage seals sometimes mangle what they're meant to be storing.

Getting a sense for if a seal is going to work is kind of like getting a sense for if a particular arrangement of words is a valid sentence in a specific language. You can underchannel a seal, and feel out if there's any - sort of eddies, where chakra is getting stuck or flowing incorrectly, but not all seals can be underchanneled and still work at peak performance, and that sometimes misses more exotic ways of screwing up. 

Listening, noting.