Kithabel is sitting on the flat top of the tallest tower of her palace, forcing the rain to decline to fall on her, taking a break insofar as she ever takes a break. She has no constructive ends to pursue right now, so she's playing with the lightning in the clouds overhead. She doesn't want to try taking a direct lightning strike yet - she could probably take it, but only probably - but she can tell it to arc here and there in patterns, she can ball it up and watch it roll through the air, she can make it turn colors. She's making sure none of it hits the town, and if it starts a fire in the woods she'll take care of it, but at the moment it's a toy.
"Oh yes. I've wanted to be a sorceress since I was a little girl. I dropped out of school to keep up better. I'm very young to be able to fly already."
Either way, congratulations on the young age thing."
"Flying requires a fair amount of momentum, and you can't get there gradually because if you fail at it during an intermediate step you plummet to the ground and possibly die, so it's considered the cutoff for who's a sorcerer proper versus who just does more magic than most people. I think in some places they use the ability to breathe water as their cutoff."
"There's really no way to practice it gradually? You could, I don't know, learn to turn floors into soft landing spaces or something. At least if you wanted people to think you were a sorceress before you actually were, but there is no way people don't want that."
"I'm not sure why someone would want that. Anyway, if you're not already, actually, sorcerer-grade, it's pretty hard to get anything done while falling out of the sky."
But if they can't plausibly claim it, then the question might not come up."
"Some people can fly who aren't sorcerers. If, instead of doing nothing for two days, I did nothing but fly for a week, I would no longer be able to pull cute tricks with the lightning," (BOOM) "but I would still have specialist-grade momentum for flight in particular."
"If you have to keep up doing a variety of things, then I see why there aren't more sorceresses. Between the low number of people interested in magic in the first place, the number who'd give up sleeping for it, and the number who prefer sticking to a few things they're good at, I'm almost surprised there are any."
"I do sleep. Just not for eight hours at a time. It's possible to be a sorcerer while sleeping normally - but not while sleeping in."
"Sleeping in is one of the great joys of life. You should— definitely not try it sometime."
"Coffee is a necessary evil and I can't imagine anyone thinking otherwise short of having their mind magicked. No accounting for tastes, I suppose."
Chocolate could make the difference, but it's not literally magic."
"No, thank you. I would more easily believe that you are a different species from me with different tastes than that there is that much variation in things called coffee."
"No idea, really. I was aiming for another dimension entirely, for a court function I very much don't mind missing. Ordinarily I'd ask around for whether anyone needs a magician, but you seem to have that market covered."
"I mean, you seem to handle political problems that sorcerers mostly avoid. I'll be called in if there's a flood or a fire or blight, I'll stop an earthquake if one troubles the area, that sort of thing, if there were an army attacking I'd probably protect civilians rather than engage in combat. Sorcerers fighting can't end well, and we'd be staking our momentum on our ability to make it out conscious."
"Political is a fair way of describing it. Are there any kingdoms that need stabilizing, or the reverse for that matter? Walking into places with a goal and no information is what I do best."
"You'd think that, wouldn't you. And yet, it keeps working. Would probably be easier here than most places, since people will assume flying means omnipotence and won't have sorcerous bodyguards all the time."
"No, but politically important people in general have the ability to call a sorcerer over on short notice, because they're likely to notice problems that could benefit from attention, and we're always looking for things that could benefit from attention."
Are there political problems that need a magician? I'd imagine that with this much magic flying around fixing things there are correspondingly fewer negative effects from that sort of problems."