"I don't think I can do it right now but I may be able to figure it out by experimenting."

"Well.  That's...kind of what you have to do, yeah."

"Yes ma'am. Is there anything I should know about how to do that, for example to avoid doing Chaos magic by accident?"

"...It's all about how you think about what you're doing with the magic?  So far as the concern you've raised, goes.  Approach it with a firm conviction that this magic will do nothing you do not let it, and you'll be fine.  But have a spotter, if you can.  And don't try to cast magic inside yourself or something, because that's calling up the primordial chaos inside your body and that's just not a good idea whatsoever."

It definitely seems best not to do her first dubiously-competent magic near fragile electronics, yes. "Yes ma'am, thank you."

She nods.  "...I can probably rustle up some training tools."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Master Deskyl asks whether it will help for me to try to do something in particular, and if the light you just showed me is a good choice for that."

"Yeah, pretty much everyone starts with a magelight."

"Yes ma'am."

She'll... try, then? She still has very little idea of what she's doing but she can do a breadth-first search pattern through the options that look plausible.

The world is going to need to know a bit more about the options DZ thinks are plausible, before it can figure out what will happen, if and as she tries them.

Well, usually when she moves she lets her driver software handle the details, and that's clearly not going to work here, she doesn't have hardware or a driver for the motion Alicia showed her. But she's aware that Sith use visualization in their Force use, and that seems like a plausible approach: If she did have hardware and a driver for it, she'd probably address the driver like this, or this, or perhaps this, and she can try those in sequence.

"...Huh.  That's working fine," there is, in fact, a light-source, "but may I ask how you're doing it?  It almost seems like it's pinging off your Spirit as a stabilizer."

"I don't have a driver to support that motion, ma'am, but I can send the command anyway, as if I did."

"...Ooooh.  Interesting.  I hadn't thought about that myself, I'm working off of more of a - oop, we don't have that acronym," in this language, "in common," ...which is technically twice true, "but - a read-evaluate-'print'," with some heavily unspoken airquotes, "loop?  Just flinging raw commands into the metaphorical aether and treating that as the runtime environment.  But I hadn't even been thinking about - well, the backend of those sorts of things - it's more than I want to deal with just from having to handle the damn exceptions - but perhaps I should think about that a bit more, because it seems more stable in the longer term to internalize a proper structure..."

"It does seem like it would be useful, yes ma'am."

The other mage in the room does not say that she has no idea what most of that should even mean to an arcanist.  ...If Alicia is building spells from weird gnomish concepts that's her business.

"Then again, the key to the utility of general-purpose computation is its versatility, so perhaps what I should really be focusing on is --"

Hold on a second.

"-- on second thought, I'm not sure that anyone else in this room would necessarily have understood a word of that line of thought, outside of knowing that the words I used are words, and - we're trying to have a lesson.  ...Do either of you have questions, so far?"

"Neither of us is a programmer, yes ma'am."

"Is using the magic generally like programming, ma'am?"

"I experience it that way because that's how I approach the magic.

"Most people don't do that because they approach the same magic other ways."

"Mm.  I don't know what a 'programmer' is besides that it sounds rather gnomish, but Her Highness is right that magic is ultimately very personal, generally speaking.  It's...  You're pulling a bit of the primordial forces out through yourself - how could it not be personal, starting from that?"

She wouldn't've described addressing a driver as personal, but relative to anything a human might do, sure, that makes sense.

"What are some other basic things I might be able to do at this point?"

"...Since Her Highness seems to have gone running off after some train of thought that would no doubt make little sense to any of us but probably drastically change our magical practices again, I'll be taking over from here," Maria says, eyeing the glow of Alicia's notetaking device critically.  She might not be a proper scholar, but she's not a fool, to fail to notice the uptick in people coming down from Light-shock as of late, and there have been a lot of strange plants showing up 'from the greenhouses' (that are nowhere on the architectural plans), as of late - developing new plant strains being one of the few things where chaos magic is Villarosa's best tool, in careful quantities.  That that's happening as Her Highness arrives...  Well, some coincidences really aren't, even if she's pretty sure that the story of Alicia coming to visit her Great-Aunt for training in Void magic is also true.

"Basic things to do?  Heating and cooling, and moving objects.  Carefully.  Not in the direction of anything you care about keeping intact, and not, say, cooking with mage-heat, or heating bathwater while someone's in it.  ...And don't freeze yourself, or anything, though it is winter right now so I'm not sure why you would. 

"...Given how your magelight performed - no wobbles, no flickers or wavers, nothing but steady light until you cut it off - I figure you won't have much trouble with the basics, so long as you're keeping what you need to in mind.  Still, safety warnings are there for a reason, and it's what we don't see coming that'll bite us - so, don't, not until you've satisfied yourself and us with your control.  And your ability to maintain that control when surprised.  We're a peaceful people, but that doesn't mean that you can always have a ritual-calm environment."

(Alicia's notes contain a passel of question-marks circumscribing a directed graph of magical interactions, at this point.  That the segment with the most questionmarks is Decay<->Chaos would probably have most Villarosans burn them before reading.  Alicia's Great-Aunt, on the other hand, is not most Villarosans, or most people.)

"Yes ma'am." She's not sure how she could possibly lose control when startled, the way she's doing things, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

She spends a few moments considering possible object-modifying function schemas, and then picks a crust left over from Deskyl's snack earlier and checks if she can set its temperature (within ten degrees of the air temperature), speed (no more than half walking speed), and heading (not within forty-five degrees of hitting her or any of the humans).

...Yeah, that works, exactly as expected.  But the driver starts spitting out warning codes when the task starts to involve actually levitating the bread.