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This is a city, if your standards for "city" don't require skyscrapers, electricity, or plumbing. She's landed on a side street; to her left, the crosswise thoroughfare has people hollering about their things for sale, people hurrying on foot and poking along on horseback to get here and there, storefronts and apartments in two and three story structures. The street she's standing on is quieter, houses and less customer-facing businesses, though it has its share of spillover traffic; she has not yet been noticed, by that fellow leading a goat or that woman with a basket of laundry or that family all holding hands so as not to lose each other. It's a cool day, a little misty.
Deskyl in Cefax
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Greenmages are unanimous that they would much rather remember to blink, it's far too frequent a need to offload to their attendants.
to better see the light
Of course. It takes a few days for her to figure out the complementary change, and a few more, focusing on usefulness over easiness, to be able to swap remembering to eat for sneezing when going from shade to sun, in both directions.
There are underlying principles, she says; it will take a while for her to be able to move dwindling around in arbitrary ways, but she'll get there, and then she'll just need to figure out how to generate the resource they're using when they do magic.
Greenmages will be delighted to not sneeze when they go from shade to sun, considering.
to better see the light
She fixes the greenmages; by the time she's done all of them, she's worked out how to reinforce the relevant thing in the younger ones, too, so they'll lose their sneezing instinct rather than their eating one when the time comes.
Moving dwindledness around without any extra to use is frustrating; rather than do more of it, she switches to working on reversing it. She expects to need a technique in the same class as the one she uses to heal the whitemages for it; unfortunately, she can't do that sort of technique in quick succession with the technique she uses to block dwindling, but needs at least half an hour of meditation in between, and more if she's been doing a lot of magic that day.
The mages appreciate her. Their servants bring food to her cottage once a day.
to better see the light
It's appreciated right back. (DZ has been learning to cook; she's been making progress but... well, she's been making progress.)
The new technique is slow to come together; after a couple weeks, she asks a few of the most dwindled whitemages for permission to study them more closely; this doesn't involve anything but letting her meditate near them kind of a lot.
Some of them allow this.
to better see the light
She's out there kind of a lot. A couple times they find her curled up outside the whitemages' houses, signing to herself in her sleep.
None of them have picked up her language, so they don't know what she might be saying.
to better see the light
She doesn't volunteer it, whatever it is. She does get calmer, noticably, and friendlier, more prone to noticing when something interesting is going on and showing up to check it out.
The mages and their servants tolerate her dropping in on their lessons and supervising their games and stuff as long as she doesn't try to follow anybody into a housekeep.
to better see the light
She doesn't, and she doesn't stick around if her presence at things makes anyone uncomfortable.
Some people do not seem to appreciate her being around, though none of them says anything.
to better see the light
Even if they don't, she's a telepath.
One of the whitemages she's been meditating on goes a week and a half without needing to be healed. It's not unprecedented, but it's interesting. She starts paying extra attention to her - two weeks. Two and a half. Three.
The whitemage goes about her business - intermittent appointments, mostly just looking after her family.
to better see the light
When it's been an entire month, she declares success. Slow success, but success.
The Temple-Guild appreciates that very much!
to better see the light
Yeah.
The other whitemages she's been working on shouldn't be too far behind; who's next?
She gets a priority list, one with just whitemages and one with all the mage types on it for when she can do more sorts.
to better see the light
She starts on two more whitemages and the top two from the general list.
Falling asleep during the early stages is probably part of the process; that starts happening again.
People become accustomed to finding her napping in odd places.
to better see the light
She declares the remaining whitemages from the first batch done within a couple weeks of the first one, and the two new ones don't take much longer. It takes three weeks for the bluemage from the other list to start showing visible improvement, but it goes quickly for him from there, and the redmage isn't far behind.
The bluemage has a bit of a difficult adjustment. He and his attendant have some stuff to work on.
to better see the light
Deskyl notices, and has DZ ask if there's anything she can do to help, or any advice he has for her for future bluemages.
"I don't know if there's really anything you can do," says the attendant. "He's just gotten in a lot of odd habits from being dwindled and now he's not any more and the habits feel strange now."