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Savaross doesn't take infants when he goes out looking for apprentices; the years when they will need care and be unable to make themselves useful are a nuisance. But seeking apprentices is not the only reason he leaves the tower, and it is unwise to look a gift horse in the mouth.
He carries the babe away from the burning wreckage of the now-dead witch's abode and hands her over to the care of the older apprentices on childminding duty.
She takes a breath.
This is an opportunity. If that was good enough, then she can do better. She needs to make an impression. She knows apprentices who do well are treated better.
She looks deferentially at Savaross’ feet.
“May I speak?”
“I can do better than that. The - this technique, it’s -“
She tries to find a way to phrase it that doesn’t sound like a challenge.
“- It’s imprecise. I want better control. I don’t know if that’s a refinement of this technique or a more advanced one, but if you have a more advanced one that will let me cut out what I want to then I want to learn it.”
She focuses again, and the mess she left behind snaps back into her mind’s eye.
She drives a group of three pins in along a ragged edge, and rips.
It snaps away neatly.
(Easier, now. Is that practice, less pins, the existing damage, or that this is a kindness, not a cruelty...? Who knows.)
She nods.
(At some point, she started breathing faster than she should be. She takes a moment to deliberately slow it.)
... Pins, rip.
That’s the last of the mess gone.
- the power she’s stolen doesn’t want to stay, but she hangs on grimly. She isn’t wounding the world more than she has to today.
She checks her range again - yes, empty.
She takes a single deliberate step to the left.
She rips power from the air that’s newly in her range, once, twice, thrice, keeping it to smaller areas she knows she can cut precisely.
- she can’t hold all this. Part of it twists -
She clamps down on it, hard, and grits her teeth. It stays.
“- what happens if it gets away from me?”
"--It hasn't yet? No, it hasn't. Impressive. It will flow back into ambient energy."
She ri-
It jars what she’s holding, and she loses it all.
She sighs disgustedly.
The magic flows back into the places it left behind. It's not exactly the same as it was before; it's a lot less settled, and if she feels for it she can still tell where the borders of notmagic used to be.
... interesting.
She tries to rip it all again before it can settle back in.
It comes more easily this time.
- then she bites her tongue.
“Sir. I’m sorry, my curiosity got the better of me.”
She air-rips again, more carefully now that she’s approaching where she lost it the first time.
"Understandable."
He rips a piece out of the air himself and shows her how to direct it to produce a force against an object.
Precisely.
She tests it against the provided rock. It jumps, as expected.
She checks the magical background again. Did she use that air up, or...?
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