A dimmer saber during the day is probably sufficient but getting farther away from the tower and surrounded by denser tree cover would help.

She'll talk to her about it.

Deskyl has a little less availability for appointments the next week. (She's beginning to noticeably favor afternoon and evening ones, too.)

They shuffle things later in the day.

That works fine.

At the end of the week she reports that she can protect more than one person at a time; probably as many as they can fit within a twenty foot radius of her but she should try it with just two or three once to make sure, and she'll be ready to try changing around a greenmage's dwindling in another day or two.

They don't actually have such a steady appointment flow that they often have them at the same time by coincidence, but they can arrange it on the grounds that it might be useful practice for the more practical bits. She can get a white and a green working in adjacent rooms.

She's slightly more scowly about it than she has been, but it works fine.

They avoid putting her in client line of sight.

After she's been there a couple of weeks, they bring in a passel of small children from the orphanage.

Right, that's a thing. She's between appointments; she wanders over to watch.

The children are being reminded of the special rules they will need to start following right away depending on the color of the water!

Red: don't touch ANYBODY except your new mom and dad and people they say are okay to touch, like your new brothers and sisters.

Green: don't do magic! On anyone, but ESPECIALLY on yourself, because then there won't be anybody unaffected to learn exactly what you did and undo it for you. But just don't do any on anyone.

Blue: don't do magic! It might be tempting, especially if you are trying to remember something, but still don't do it.

White: ask permission from your new parents AND the person you want to heal before you heal them. They might say no, and you have to listen. If you want to heal yourself, ask your parents to make sure it's a good tradeoff - especially early, when you can probably heal from whatever you have wrong with you non-magically. Also, look, over there is Xaari Deskyl who can heal without being a whitemage, so it might be best to wait for her!

Gold: don't do magic! Even if it sounds really cool and wouldn't do anything to you till you're like super old! Still don't!

(She tries to look friendly for the kids. She's been getting a little worse at that, recently, but she can still pull it off well enough.)

One by one the kids disappear into the temple, where Deskyl is not allowed. They come out in child-sized color coded mage uniforms and are matched to parents - one red one gets parental help tying on his sash.

After the third kid comes out, Deskyl signs to DZ, and DZ goes over to the mage calling the children in. "Deskyl can tell what color the children will be, mostly, if you'd like to know ahead of time."

"- that will be much more useful the next time we're selecting a batch," the mage replies. "It will be a little useful now, to at least have a look at how good the guesses are if nothing else. What's that one?" She points at a little girl.

    "White, and the boy next to her will be blue or gold, probably blue."

In go the children, girl then boy.

White; blue.

The mage was taking notes anyway but now she adds little marks. She keeps asking for predictions till they get to the end of the batch.

There are a couple of kids she can't predict, and for about a third of them she can only narrow it down to two colors, but she's never actually wrong.

This is delightful! The mage who supervised kid-dunking thanks her and then takes home her new daughter.

Cool.

(This bunch of redmages aren't dwindled from meeting their parents and siblings, too.)

This is very convenient for them!

She keeps working on the dwindling adjustment technique in between appointments; it's turned out to be trickier than she was expecting, but in a way that seems likely to help solve dwindling in general.

They keep scheduling their appointments to her convenience insofar as their clients have flexibility, so she sees a lot of green and red and blue and as much of white as they can manage in action.

Her range keeps improving, slowly but fairly steadily, and she stops scowling quite so fiercely when she's working. After a few months, she starts seeing results at the new technique: being able to swap a greenmage's instinct to turn toward sounds for their inclination to blink isn't a game changer by itself, but she's very excited about it.