He's so cute.

He's back almost immediately, too, with the scroll. "I didn't even read the dangerous ones," he says.

"Good," she says, "I am very proud of you, I bet that was hard. So what this spell does is, while it's running, it lets you do all kinds of silly little things. It isn't very strong or fast or complicated, but you can control it with your will. And it lasts for a whole hour."

"What kinds of silly little things??"

"It can move things - only about as well as I can move things with telekinesis, which isn't much - and change their colors, and conjure flimsy objects that aren't good for any practical purpose, and it can clean things or dinge them up again, and it can do gentle temperature effects and change the flavors of things, and most of this stuff disappears after the hour's up although cleaned things stay cleaned and moved things don't go back where they were."

"How long is an hour in terms of Trees, do you know?"

"I don't know. I think a full treecycle is close to a day and there are twenty-four hours in a day. The sound illusion spell lasts six seconds for people who aren't better than me at wizardry and sixty seconds is a minute and sixty minutes is an hour."

He nods as if processing these numbers in his head for a while. "That would probably be long enough to convince Ata that I can sit still and can leave the palace without running off. Though you should also ask him about a bodyguard."

"Do you think it will work better if I mention it before, or after you sit playing with a prestidigitation for an hour?"

"Probably after because he'll be pleased with me. He's pleased anyway. My mother is here."

"Yes, I know she is."

"She's almost all better except she's like me and as bad at pretending as I am and she's pretending to be happy to see me, she isn't really happy."

"I'm - I'm going to try to think of something that works better."

"This is good. Ata's happy."

"That's definitely an improvement."

He's fiddling with the scroll. "I probably have to sleep before I do more magic but I really hate sleeping. I was hoping writing would count as quiet enough but I don't think it does."

"Yeah, it's not really about being quiet or even still, it's about not doing anything effortful."

"Being quiet and still are way more effortful than writing."

"I guess effortful's not the thing either. Restful. I assume you're pretty quiet and still when you're sleeping, however little you do it, and the closer you're behaving to as-though-you're-sleeping the better."

"Can I discover a way to do magic without running out of energy like that?"

"Well, if you found one it would definitely be a discovery because I've never heard of anyone who didn't need to rest or wait at all."

He sets his jaw stubbornly. "That's how I'll be epic, then."

"It would be very epic. Although even without figuring out a special recharging trick you can get to the point where you can pretty much use magic all day - lots of practice to build up your reserves and making magic items to do it with when you do run low. And there's magic to make it so you need less rest, though not none."

"I don't need rest anyway! Except to do magic. And I like the idea of being epic by inventing something instead of fighting things."

"There's epic artificers but they still only technically count as epic if they can use their gear in a fight. You can be awesome without fighting things, don't get hung up on 'epic'."