"How do you pick up anaesthesia that way? Inject it into patients on a tremendous number of occasions?"

"Yes. I know of no other practicing mages with a true medical Memnodyne. This is not to say that they don't exist, but we're thinly scattered enough that we don't have weekly meetings."

"What other kinds of tools can you pick up?"

"Practically anything that can be sufficiently ritualized. One of the most common and useful ones is to make a Memnos of your own hands, which allows for short-range telekinesis of anything you could normally hold in both hands."

"Nifty. I want one. What kind of time investment am I looking at?"

"Roughly a year of study to start seeing significant results, and then four more years to manifest your first Memnos, if you do it properly. If you have a particular skill that you're already an expert at, that can sometimes shorten the amount of time spent on an acquisition - but I would not reccommend using one of those to form your first Memnos. Many new students go from a quickly-acquired first Memnos to a much-harder-to-acquire second one, and that causes the vast majority of them to give up due to the disheartening spike in difficulty."

"I know my engineering and physics and chem and medicine, but in a very demonic way, and they're pretty demonic-magic-friendly territory, so probably best to start somewhere else anyway. Teekay would be nice. I can be a fairy demon."

"I'll be happy to instruct you in how to properly pick up rocks."

"Any particular sort of rock work best?"

"You are going to pick up this rock several thousand times. Choose something not too heavy, that's easy to grip, and ideally aesthetically pleasing. Take your time over the decision: after all, you don't want to get halfway through the process and then decide you hate your rock after it slips out of your hand for the five hundredth time."

"Switching rocks ruins it?"

"Switching rocks ruins it."

"So I'd better not go with anything somebody would want to steal, either, no getting fancy with an opal in the middle of a diamond or whatever. It has to be the exact individual object, one exactly alike down to the atomic level won't do?"

Lioncourt shrugs. "No-one's ever tried the latter. I would stick with the proven method."

"Okay. Agate isn't really valuable here or anything, is it?"

"Agate's not particularly valuable here, no."

"Cool." Cam opens his hand and produces therein an egg-shaped banded agate in various shades of blue. "Like so?"

"It might scratch, I wouldn't expect it to break. If scratches are an issue I could put it in a thin layer of diamond, too small to see. ...What does polishing have to do with breakage?"

"Not much, but it is likely to make your rock more slippery. A scratch wouldn't be a disaster, but if it was at all significant it might set you back a few days as you reacclimated."

The rock gets a teeny bit sparklier. "Diamond applied."

"Really? How? It's not more of a rock than anything you'd pick up off the ground, it's just a little sturdier and pretty."

"Yes, but that increase in durability means that you won't have to compensate for everyday wear and tear. Degradation of tools slows the learning process, since you have to adjust your motion, even if it is by the tiniest of amounts."

"Oh. Cool."