"Oh! I see. So if you used it to hold your foot in place, you could step up into the air. That's clever."

Genilha continues the process of feeling it out, and eventually manages to get his own finger stuck.

"Exactly. Templates like this are the easiest to channel magic into because you can just give them the magic they need. A lot of templates are more complicated than that." She leans down and grabs a handful of sand then holds her hand flat as the sand reshapes itself into a tiny bowl before solidifying. She hands it over to Ðani. "That's the template I just used to make the bowl. It's more complicated in two ways. First you need to shape the resulting magic and second it's a two stage template so you need to feel the boundaries between the parts."

"Hmm. Alright."

She picks up her own handful of sand, and then starts trying to feel out the template inside the bowl.

"I want to ask more theoretical questions," Anþasta says, "but that can probably wait if getting a feel for it is more important. Could I have a templated object as well, please?"

Unlike the air-walking template the magic passing through the template seems to gather next to the bowl instead of spreading through the air around her. If she channels magic to both parts, and the boundary probably isn't immediately obvious, the second part seems to send out a different texture of magic. The second texture seems to mix with the first briefly and then to lose its texture and make it's way back to her.

"Sure," This time she makes a cube from the sand to store the template then hands it over. "I think theoretical questions are helpful but you do need to have a feel for the magic to use it. I don't think there's a specific order it has to happen in though."

She makes the affirmative gesture.

There's a brief silence as the three villagers explore their objects.

"Oh!" Ðani exclaims, as she shapes her sand into a rough bowl. It falls apart a moment later. "Ah."

"It looks like you got one of the two tricks."

"Right. So if I just ..."

She forms the sand back into a bowl, and then delicately tries to trigger the second part while holding the first.

The bowl crumbles a bit around the edge, but mostly holds together.

"Ah! That's not so hard."

She tries it again with a new handful of sand, and gets a significantly smoother bowl.

Genilha is experimenting with holding his rock near his foot and trying to get the foot fixed in the air. A moment later he tries to put weight on it and overbalances.

When Genilha starts to fall the magic catches his whole body.

"Congratulations Ðani."

"Genilha, if you stop using the template it'll let you go. I can also help catch you if you want."

He withdraws his magic, falling softly to the sand.

"No, no, I can fall over as well as anybody," he says with a touch of humor. "Let's try that again ..."

After a few moments more, everyone has succeeded in exercising their templates.

"Excellent. I think that covers all the simple templates, but since we specifically talked about the transformation template yesterday, we should make sure you all know enough to use that. There's two additional concepts you'll need to learn for that one. First, is perceiving feedback from a template. You might have gotten a little of that from the second part of the powder sculpting template but I can give you a template specifically for that. The second thing is how to work with memory bubbles. I'll give you the scanner template used to make the type of bubble used by the transformation template but there's some amount of skill in working with them. Ideally, you'd learn how to manipulate them unstructured but in the interests of time I'll give you a template specifically for copying bubbles."

She kneels down again and after thirty seconds or so comes up with a glass crystal, a pair of overlapping cubes, and a transparent bulb. She hands the crystal to Anþasta, "This is the scanner," the cubes to Ðani, "I'll have to get you started with the duplicator in a minute unless you want to wait until you can swap," And the bulb to Genilha, "This one will give you feedback on how much light is going through the bulb. It's not the most useful template but you should be able to switch up what it's telling you pretty easily."

Anþasta steals one of Ðani's bowls, to have a mundane object to scan. She's not sure if the scanner can scan itself, or if that would be like an eye trying to see itself.

She pushes her magic into it, trying to feel if it has a ... direction, in the way that the other template did.

It does, this one behaves a little differently from the sand one though. It seems to want to surround contiguous objects rather than taking entirely arbitrary shapes.

Hmm. She guides it around the bowl and lets it take effect.

When she holds the magic steady for a few seconds it collapses into a tiny intricate packet surrounded by unstructured magic. The unstructured magic follows its natural inclination to consolidate falling back into her body and pulling the packet along in its current.

This is presumably a memory packet. She guides it in, to nestle in her palm.

"I think I've got it — what do I do with the packet now? Will it break down? Does it need to be stored, somehow?" she asks.

"It'll stay as long as you want it to. If you have too many of them, they can tie up a meaningful amount of your magic but you'd need a lot to have any noticable impact. Even with everything I carry, I'm only using around one part in three sixes of sixes.

"As for what to do with it, you can hold it out for Ðani to copy. Watching that happen might give you a start on how to copy packets without help.

"In theory you can also edit packets but if you want to try that you'd be better off trying to make one that's more compatible with how you think. Optimized packets are really hard to read even if you know all the rules that went into making them and you don't in this case."

Anþasta holds out her hand to Ðani, focusing on her magical senses.

And Ðani tries to poke the packet with the magic of the duplicator.

The magic of the duplicator flows into the packet and forms part of itself into a copy of the first packet. Briefly there's two copies of the packet occupying the same physical location and then they drift apart.

"... huh. I guess that makes sense," Ðani observes. "Is there any way to convert a packet from one person's magic to another without duplicating it?"

"There isn't; each person's magic is uniquely theirs, different people's magic can be put to the same end and work together but you can't give some of your magic to someone else or let them turn some of your magic into theirs."