"I think I've got time but if you're pretty sure they won't need a lot of clarification I can save it."

You could read it, ask questions, make notes on anything that comes up, and copy it tomorrow.

"Sure. Do you want to flip to the section while I cover my eyes or are we not being that paranoid about me reading more stuff than you've authorized."

The constant comments like that are really not putting me at ease here.  In case you thought they were.

"Sorry."

I'm not really holding them against you but it's like.  There are some things in here I just really don't want to teach someone after only knowing them for a couple hours.  So, I'm not going to, even though I know very well that you really want me to, and I assume, I really hope, that you're not going to try and see what methods I have available to physically stop you, so it's like, what are we adding here?  With the snark or the pressure every two minutes.  It's stressing me out.

It adds nothing besides Cam having a personality, and clearly that is uncalled for. "Sorry." Cam pages forward from the front matter to the chapter listing, finds the page number, and then turns only corners till he reaches that page number.

The jacket goes and paces.

The second chapter begins with a note on styling: as with time spans in the last chapter and with actions in the next, capitalized words in the middle of a sentence refer to specific terms of art and noncapitalized ones are more general.  Some cinnamon could be sourced from the bottom of the box of one's box of toasted cereal, some Cinnamon had better well be the pure stuff with no sugar mixed in.  A pool is any little body of water, but a Pool is the one you've done the relevant scrying spell preparation on.  A wind chime is any old thing that can be blown around to make noise, a Wind Chime is made of these materials in this configuration tuned to these pitches.

There's a strong warning that everything should either be constructed carefully or gathered naturally.  Don't try to fake stuff.  If a spell calls for a Stair Board, one had better not get out the drill, remove an existing step, slap on a 2x4, have some tea, take off the 2x4, call it a Stair Board, and put their original step back.  No cheating.  (The book fails to specify what might go wrong in the event of 'cheating', or to draw a finer line about what counts.  Nor does it offer a concrete way to distinguish that which should be constructed from that which should be gathered.)

And then there's just a whole list of objects and substances that can be used in spells, and their definitions.  Air (Cellar Air, Exhaled Air, Frigid Air, Ocean Air...), clay (Baked Clay, Dried Clay, Sifted Clay, Wet Clay...), dirt (Garden Dirt, Grave Dirt, Graveyard Dirt, Home Dirt...), dust (Abandoned Dust, Attic Dust, Sill Dust, Stair Dust...), glass (Drinking Glass, Glass Shard, Molten Glass, Wine Glass...)—there's a lot here.  Specific plants, specific crystals.  Products of specific basic rituals which can be used as components for more complex ones, defined only by the page number of the relevant spell.  Ectoplasm.

What pray tell is ectoplasm.

What ghosts are made out of.  Sometimes they produce amounts of it that can be nondestructively separated from their 'body', such as by crying, or through a ritual on this other page.

(But one of the listed variations is "Whole Ectoplasm: that from an entire Ghost.")

...probably some people are dead because they wanted to be dead and maybe they find ghosthood an unpleasant surprise?? Does this end the ghost or do they pop up again.

It doesn't specify here.

Well. He finishes the chapter and leans back in the chair.

Any questions?

"Do you happen to know if Whole Ectoplasm is" vegetarian "doubly fatal?"

Yeah.

He makes a note of that. "Definitely no secret additional layer of ghosts?"

The shoulders of the jacket move in either a sharpish sigh or a small, single laugh. 

I've seen no sign of one.

We are cutting down on the snark over here so Cam doesn't say anything.

I mostly hope there isn't.  It's been bad enough hanging out here with all my books for not even a decade.  I really don't want to have to see what happens a million years after the sun envelopes the Earth or whatever.

Maybe unless we convert all society into ghosts first.  We'll see.

"Are people who die old still infirm?"

Thoughtful tap-tap-tap...

I think not the way you mean it.  It doesn't hurt, right, for my dad to have an axe in his face.  We don't hurt, on our own.  But things still impair us in obvious ways.  If I'd died before my broken arm healed, it wouldn't hurt to use it but it'd be kind of wiggly and not as stable as the other one.

"So cataracts and wobbliness and stuff are still bad."

Cataracts moreso than wobbliness.

The jacket glides to be rather more than a little taller than Cam, at the shoulder.  It stays up there to write, in significantly worse handwriting,

ι十`s   ħo +   լ|кc ш୧ '/e  ப ട

It descends.

It's not like we're using our bodies to interact with the world much.  Although apparently telekinesis is a lot better at slamming doors than writing.  Maybe if I practiced.  Or was closer.

"Can you, like, fly, I just realized that might be an implication of being able to navigate underground at all."