She takes them and applies them.

"Proteins! I've been trying to figure out what all the different kinds of protein are for. The integral proteins are swapping the potassium and sodium back and forth, I think."

"People study for years and still don't understand them all. I can talk a little about some of the most important ones though. The most important process for humans to survive is called cellular respiration and it's a mirror of a process in plants called photosynthesis." Maenik goes into a relatively beginners explanation of what's involved though tailored for being able to look at the proteins and organelles involved.

Anþasta absorbs the explanation, occasionally poking at the slowly dying leaf in her hand to get a first-hand feel of things.

"It seems so ... delicate," she marvels. "I was sort of expecting it to be simpler. That's why I started with plants — it's hard to think of anything more abundant and straightforward than plants."

"Living things are like that. Each of us started life as a cell around the size of the ones you're looking at there."

Anþasta twirls the leaf in thought for a moment.

"So you said humans do the opposite of this — converting the sugar back into energy and some byproducts. Is that part of how the anti-starvation template works? Just putting the energy into your cells directly, without needing the sugar?"

"Plants do the reverse too. Just enough less that they make an excess. And yes, that is the bulk of what it does by the amount of energy it uses."

"How do you know that?" she asks. "I tried looking at a template while it was running, and I could see that there was more magic in the areas where it was working, but if what it does is spread out through the whole body ... it just seems like it would be hard to observe."

"In this case it's mostly common sense this is what's making someone's body work while everything else is tweaks around the edges but I don't think that's really your question. The answer you're looking for is how to do it in general and I'm afraid the answer there is more templates."

Anþasta laughs.

"Maybe I should ask a different question, then. You showed us the simplest templates to use to get started using them. But what is the simplest template to get started learning about templates?"

"Well, for that it depends on whether you want to learn the hard way that basically everyone can only use for simple templates or if you just want to learn the way people usually do it?"

She bites her lip.

"Is this, like, a knitting versus finger-knitting sort of situation, or is this a stone-knapping versus metalworking sort of situation?"

After a beat of silence, she plays that sentence back in her head and re-phrases it.

"By which I mean, which way is fundamentally more capable? Sometimes the more complex version of a thing lets you do things that a less complex version doesn't, and sometimes the more complex version of a thing just produces an inferior product."

"I don't think it's quite either. It's the difference between... the path of a Potter who makes a hundred pots a day each just the same and someone who makes art pieces each one unique only it isn't really that either.

"It's possible to do everything with templates with the sorts of interfaces you've already used. To never go beyond the simple manipulations of unstructured magic I've already taught you. And you can make templates that way. Some of the best templates were made that way. It's a slow and methodical way that leaves almost nothing to chance because you generally plan everything you do in advance with a few exceptions."

She pauses for a breath.

"The other route, the route of learning to make and change templates with unstructured magic is safe for simple templates that you don't give too much magic but if you pursue it past those simple uses it can get dangerous faster than the other route, especially if you're changing templates while you're using them. It can also mean you have more intuition for what the magic is doing though. It's the path of making magic more like an art and less like a science. It's the path of being what a lot of people call a mage instead of a more ordinary awakened."

She looks out over the lake while she absorbs that.

On the one hand, prudence suggests that she should not try the dangerous route, because duh. If someone offers you two equally capable paths, but one is more dangerous, don't take it. But on the other hand, it's not that she wants to make templates — or, not just that. She does want to make templates. But more than that, she wants to understand what is going on.

That's the crux of it, actually. She wants to understand how magic works, and it sounds like becoming a mage might be a better way to do that ... except, intuition really isn't the same thing as understanding.

She is silent for a long moment.

"If you use templates with the sorts of interfaces I've seen, can you understand how the interfaces work? Can you make any possible template? Or do you have to use unstructured magic to really understand?"

"I'm not really sure. Does someone who knows intellectually how every last step of making pottery works at a chemical level understand pottery better than a master potter who has made pots by hand for years? Is it the other way around? The sorts of knowledge and understanding you get through templates is different from what you get through unstructured manipulation and sensing. I think they both have gaps the other one can fill.

In theory with enough time you could make anything with the methodical path if you know where you want to go. The thing about the mages who design templates is that sometimes, not often, but sometimes and more often than people who aren't mages, they think of an idea nobody else thought of before. And also once they have an idea they can try it faster... sometimes to their detriment."

Anþasta pouts. She shouldn't be surprised that this question turns out not to have a simple answer. Most interesting questions are like that. But she doesn't have to like it.

Usually, though, you can find a simpler solution if you take a step back and work around it.

"Picking up one doesn't stop you from learning the other later, does it?" she asks. "Because if so, I could start learning the methodical way, and then pick up magery later if it doesn't provide the ... level of understanding I'm looking for."

Maenik is also philosophically opposed to giving simple answers to thing that aren't straightforwardly factual but nobody has asked her the right questions to have her say it.

"You absolutely can."

"Okay, let's start with that. How do you go about making a template with a template, and what is the ... smallest working template you can make that way?" she asks.

"Well," she produces six template bubbles, "These should get you started. The standard warnings apply here, don't use them inside your body and leave the limiters intact on the trial templates until you're used to moderating how much magic you put in. Now, I can explain what each of them do or you can try to work it out."

The templates are in order:

A template to bubble converter.

A bubble to template converter.

An illusion template for looking at text bubbles.

A template for editing text bubbles.

A flashlight.

A simple telekinesis template.

Anþasta sorts through them. Several of these are obviously more complex than others. In fact ... this one seems pretty much like a subset of that one?

She ends up with what is ... probably the simplest template. When she activates it, it makes a bright light.

She looks with the fractal to see if she can figure out how.

It's sculpting her magic into a set of symbols which tell this area to emit light on these frequencies, and oscillating in a wide variety of directions.

Hmm. Anþasta drums her fingers on her knee.

"What happens if you take out the part that sets the frequency?" she asks.

"It's not dangerous so I think it's worth trying for yourself. I can explain if you want though."

Anþasta blinks.

Maenik hasn't explained anything about how to actually edit templates, which probably means that either she missed something, or its obvious. She briefly considers trying to form the symbols out of her own magic, but Maenik also just reminded her not to take the limiters off because it could be dangerous. Instead, she tries manually poking at the template with her magic for a few moments, but it's hard not to accidentally activate it like that — or, if she doesn't activate it, it also doesn't seem to have much effect.

... oh, duh. She handed her multiple obviously-not-simple templates. So perhaps they were not all candidates for 'simplest', but rather the other tools she would need.

Anþasta decides to try each of the more complicated ones that she initially set aside to see what they do. The first one reaches out for something, but it doesn't seem to want matter. Eventually she realizes that it wants a template instead, so she feeds it the light-making template. It spits out a memory bubble.

She inspects the bubble, trying to figure out what it's a memory of.

The start of the bubble is reasonably straightforward it's a bunch of fractal symbols. They don't seem to be in an order that makes any sense though. After that there's a long string of something strange. It might be numbers but it's hard to tell.

... huh. That's not terribly helpful, really.

She tries the others, for completeness.

The second template gets her a copy of the flashlight template, but the third is more surprising — a visual display of symbols from the fractal. It doesn't match the contents of the bubble that she fed to it ... but, now that she looks, it does have the same symbols.