He is not reading while he eats!

Affectionate nose. Inviting yip?

"Mm?"

She hops down to her letters and explains, I like hearing you talk.

"That's an unusual preference to have!"

Are you complaining?

"Well. No. All right, what do you want me to talk about?"

I'm not picky. Whatever you like.

"I have to say, it's very flattering how you're so interested in hearing me talk. Well. How about my attempt at an introductory lecture on ritual magic? I'm not really a teacher but I'd like to think I'm not awful at explaining things."

Affirmative yip! Her need for letters has passed for now, and snuggles may resume. She summarily hops back up to snuggle him.

Pet pet.

"Okay. So the first thing you need to know about ritual magic is that it's pretty much exactly as difficult and intricate as it sounds like, and a lot of very smart people have been trying for a very long time to come up with shortcuts, so if you think of a clever way to skip a lot of the work you're probably just wasting your own time trying it. But the second thing you need to know about ritual magic is that sometimes wizards are idiots, so once you've put in the time to understand the basics, one of the most useful things you can do is learn all you can about one of the advanced specialties and then sit down and go through it all experimenting to see what they got wrong. That's most of the proper wizarding research I've ever done, although of course I can't get it published anywhere because real wizards think I'm a disreputable lunatic and writing books about how dumb they are is hardly going to help."

She gives him an affectionate nose, then nods.

"So! The basic idea of ritual magic is that it's... rigid, structured, stable, where raw manipulation of the elements is more freeform and immediate. If someone shows up on your doorstep with a broken leg, you can use life or healing to fix the immediate problem; if you want to make a wand that fixes broken legs at a touch, you need to use a ritual to bind and stabilize the magic into a more permanent form. And because it's more rigid and less freeform, it has to be much more complicated to account for all the things that you'd be adjusting for in the moment if you were doing the magic yourself every time. That's why lights are just about the cheapest artifact - they glow, and that's it. The fancier ones glow sometimes and stop glowing other times, which adds about five minutes to a two-minute ritual, and more than that if you want the light to do anything more interesting than start and stop at a specific signal. That kind of complexity is why ritual magic is such a tough subject. It's like... to make a wand that fixes broken legs, you have to make a sort of - guide to fixing broken legs, which the wand carries out as automatically as clockwork every time you use it. And doing that with life instead of healing is about a hundred times harder, which is why healing artifacts are so stupidly expensive. There are artifacts that can react more fluidly, but they are outrageously difficult to make, I can barely do it myself and I'm probably one of the ten most accomplished artificers in the world."

D'aw. He may have another affectionate nose for his trouble. Yeah, that's shaping up to a hell of an understanding of how absurd it is for someone to bother to make an artifact that can turn someone into a fox. Wow. That's. That's insane, is what that is.

But what's also insane is—don't they just then make artifacts with healing instead? Surely someone does that, don't they? That's just—that's just practical. Sure it makes some sense to learn life over healing in school, even if it's harder, because it's more adaptable. There are more things that can be done with life than healing, objectively. However, it doesn't make more sense to fight a system just to use life when someone's making something specifically geared towards healing anyway, and an insistence on sticking to life is wasting valuable time and energy. She needs to verify that these idiots don't actually do that. They don't actually do that, right? No one could be that stupid. ... Right? Right?

She hops down to her letters and says, Do they actually insist on making all of their healing artifacts with life?

"Oh, of course. Conventional wisdom is that life is just strictly better than healing. Most wizards, if you asked, would say healing is about as useful as poison - it only does one thing, and it's a thing you can almost always get more conveniently elsewhere if you need it at all. Using healing to heal is looked down on in sort of the same way you'd look down on someone for using substandard materials in a craft."

She stares at him.

But it's faster to make healing artifacts with healing instead of life, isn't it?

"Yes, but by the point where they're in a position to notice that sort of thing, everyone who might try it has already had the experience of the first ten clever ideas they came up with for making ritual magic work better being wrong and counterproductive, usually in ways that hundreds of other clever students had been wrong and counterproductive before them. It takes exceptional stubbornness or exceptional arrogance to make it all the way through the first three years of education in ritual magic and still feel like you probably know better than the accepted wizarding authorities."

She considers this. It sounds like the wizarding community is not conducting itself in the most efficient manner of discovering how magic works.

She decides, very resolutely, that she will not stand for it.

Will you teach me ritual magic, so that I can churn out hundreds of healing based healing artifacts, sell them to the populace, and aggressively flout everything wizards think is good and decent?

As she spells out this sentence, he grins progressively wider.

"That sounds like a fantastic idea!"

She lets out a little happy yip, then hops back up to snuggle him. ... Kind of aggressively. More affectionately than energetic, this time.

He giggles and pets her.

Snuuuuggle.

Okay. She will free him. He is allowed to do things in addition to snuggling his soft fox friend. She doesn't want to monopolize his time.

(... Well, only a little.)

He can pet her and eat lunch at the same time! He has this power.

"And I think that was about as much introductory lecture as I can give you without getting into the specifics of how rituals are done, and I think I'd be much more effective at teaching that if I could show you, so it will have to wait until after lunch at the very least. And you might prefer that I focus on finding your cure before I start seriously trying to teach you."

Affirmative, wry yip! Yes, being human shaped again takes precedence over her budding ambition to grab the wizard community and give them a good, firm shake.

Pet pet. "Yeah, I suspected as much."