"Because I don't think it's a coincidence that the seven alchemic metals are exactly the same as the seven metals of magical amplification. There's all sorts of interesting correspondences that alchemists have known about for centuries that wizards either don't believe in or don't think are important. Did you know true healing magic is easier on the full moon? Because the moon is the celestial guardian of silver, which is the amplification metal for healing. Oh, but I shouldn't start talking about healing magic or we'll be here all week."

Aysilvetea lets out a little vulpine giggle.

I did know that. She looks faintly amused. Though I didn't know why. You can talk while I bathe? This is fascinating.

He laughs. "Sure. The celestial guardians affect all the other elements too - life magic is easier under the sun, air magic under the Quiet Star, earth magic under the Crown Star and so on. But the difference is mostly subtle enough that you wouldn't notice it unless you were looking for it, so I can forgive them for not paying attention. What I find inexcusably silly is the way everyone uses life magic for healing, even though healing magic is better at it, which they'll give all kinds of excuses for but I'm pretty sure traces back to the fact that gold is a more prestigious metal than silver, which it owes to the alchemical hierarchy. It's ridiculous!"

She sets about figuring out how the bath works and how she can get it running. It's clear she's still listening to him, though, because she lets out another little giggle.

"Magic makes so much more sense when you look at the elements through the lens of alchemic correspondences. Light and life are the elements of the sun, linked to gold, sunstone, citrine, and the colour yellow. Water and healing are the elements of the moon, linked to silver, moonstone, sapphire, and the colour blue. Lightning and mind are the elements of the Dawn Star, linked to copper, garnet, topaz, and the colour orange. Last I heard, wizards hadn't even figured out that garnet was the other amplification gemstone for lightning! Fire and ice are the elements of the Blood Star, linked to iron, carnelian, ruby, and the colour red; earth and poison are the elements of the Crown Star, linked to tin, jade, emerald, and the colour green; shadow and death are the elements of the Dark Star, linked to lead, obsidian, onyx, and the colour black; and air and song are the elements of the Quiet Star, linked to mercury, pearl, diamond, and the colour white. By the way, d'you remember when I said that giving a fox the mind of a person would require an obscure branch of necromancy? That's because what we call necromancy is actually just the use of the elements death and mind. They go together like that because most of what you can do with both of them is horrible, so they have a bad reputation and are mostly only studied by people who intend to do horrible things, which contributes further to the reputation, and around it goes."

She's going to want to make a chart of this later, isn't she. Of course she is. It's a pity she doesn't have any opposable thumbs, otherwise she might be tempted to do that now. It's also a pity that her father never got the chance to talk to Isfain; she expects they would have gotten along like a house on fire. At least while discussing alchemy, anyway.

Oh no, she made herself sad. Luckily, she's figured out how to make there be water, which is quite distracting enough to keep her from being randomly sad. There's even a way to fiddle with the temperature, which she figures out through experimentation. Soon enough, she hops into the little fox-sized tub to soak and listen to his lecture.

"Please complain if I start to bore you, by the way. Anyway, so that's why I think anyone who's serious about magic should learn alchemy. And sleight of hand. And music - song is a tragically underused element. Probably most reasonable people would stop there, but I'm not a very reasonable person, so I also learned knitting and weaving and sewing and pottery and stonecarving and really any other interesting-looking craft I can get my hands on. I start to get restless if I go a few months without learning a new skill. Most of it turns out to be useful for something - magic can't ever conjure something from nothing, even the things I can pull out of thin air in arbitrary quantities have to come from somewhere to start with, so the more things I know how to make, the more things I can have. Stonecarving was almost pure self-indulgence, though, I can use magic to reshape stone however I like, I just wanted to find out how it works when you can't do that."

She isn't bored. This is still pretty fascinating, and also kind of adorable. She giggles, again.

"Anything I learn how to do with my hands makes me a little better at vanishing, though, so it wasn't completely useless."

Agreeable yip!

... Speaking of hands. Someone doesn't have any. Um. This is maybe a problem. Soaking in a tub is all well and good, but uh. She would like to be clean. Well. He did offer to help, earlier, and it's not like she's asking someone to help her bathe while she's human shaped.

She sniffs the available soaps, selects one that smells the nicest, places it on the edge of the tub, and yips, again. Giving him big sad fox eyes.

"Aww," he says. "Sure, all right."

And he picks up the soap and attempts to help. He has never washed a fox before, but hopefully it won't be too difficult.

It seems pretty straightforward! And probably way easier than washing an ordinary fox. This one is cooperative, instead of trying to escape.

She yips at him invitingly, ears perked up. He should talk more.

"Are you asking me to keep talking about magic? People don't usually do that."

Affirmative, happy yip!

"Well, all right. Let's see, where was I - oh, this all started with vanishment, didn't it? Would you like to hear me complain about how the standard wizard education teaches the subject completely wrong?"

Yip!

"Happy to oblige!" Scrub scrub. "So the thing you have to understand about wizards is that they are terrible at acknowledging any wizard has ever been wrong about anything. Which means that a lot of what gets taught in schools is just something someone came up with a hundred years ago and decided must be true because it sounded plausible and he couldn't prove it wrong, and now we're stuck with it. My favourite example is half-spaces. A half-space is a vanishing trick: instead of vanishing something to some specific place, you vanish it to - not exactly 'nowhere', but the next best thing - and then it stays exactly as it was the moment it vanished until you bring it back again. The not-exactly-nowhere place is called a half-space, because it's not completely real. And in wizard school they teach you that every person has exactly one half-space, which you can learn to access by doing thus-and-such. Then a little later they teach you how to make a duplication space - which is like a half-space except that once you've put something into it you can take it out again as many times as you want - by doing the exact same thing with a few extra steps. So of course I thought to myself, well, what happens if I do it again without the extra steps? And the answer is, I get another ordinary half-space. I asked my teacher why he was teaching something so obviously wrong, and he said that it was traditional and anyway most people would get hopelessly lost if they tried to use more than three or four different half-spaces because the only way to tell the difference between them is by the way it feels to think about them, which is nearly impossible to write down."

Pause.

"At last count I had two dozen. I don't believe I've ever lost track of one."

She makes such a face at the story about his teacher. Such a face. It doesn't fit into their traditional way of recording information, therefore it doesn't exist? That's not how information categorization is supposed to work. Revisionism for a tidy explanation only looks tidy, while underneath it's a giant mess of lies and misinformation—

She does let out a little giggle at 'two dozen,' though.

"I could probably make do with fewer, but this way I can have, for example, a duplication space that has nothing in it but water, and then whenever I want to do magical plumbing I can link the pipes to that space without having to worry about exactly what will come out of it because there is only one thing. And another duplication space dedicated to interior decoration, and a half-space dedicated to garbage disposal - because just as it's impossible to make something out of nothing, it's impossible to make something truly disappear, it always has to go somewhere, and I don't want enormous piles of junk cluttering up the spaces I actually use for things."

This earns an approving little yip. Yes, excellent, organization. She approves.

"What I really wish I could do is subdivide them - there isn't really such a thing as parts of a half-space, you see, something is either in it or not in it and there's nothing more to be said about details of location, and I think I would probably not need quite so many half-spaces if I could for example have a space for crafting materials and then divide that into sections for textiles and pottery and so on. But I've been trying for years to figure out a way to do that and as far as I can tell it isn't possible."

Aww. Yes, that sounds like it would make organization harder. How does she do sympathy as a fox, uh...

... Hand nuzzle? That's comforting, right?

He grins at her. "Aww, thank you. Well, I think you're all clean, shall I fetch you a towel?"

Affirmative yip!

She patiently does not shake the water off of her. That would get it all over him. She will wait for the towel.

Towel! It's extremely soft and fluffy. The cuddliest towel.