"Mostly where you're at already, and a quick summary of your approach to magic."

"I haven't gotten much past sensing, and right now I'm just trying to feel things out. Meditate, and all. I don't remember ever actually using magic, so..."

"Then I suppose we can start with teaching you my method, and modify if it seems needed."

"Sure!"

So she explains acts of will, and knowing what is, and visualizing what should be, and different methods of concentrating to bridge the gap.

Loki takes notes! She discovered fancy hard bound journals, and rather likes writing in them with a variety of colorful gel pens. So her notes can be color coordinated, but also so she can put little pictures next to the important bits and doodle when she's bored.

And Professor Maximoff gives her some exercises to do - preferably with supervision at first, but she also explains how to tell where the safety margins on these are. They're mostly extensions of the meditation Loki's already been doing, and the first few, like lighting candles and changing the color of the flame, can be done in the classroom.

Then Loki can settle in to making an arrangement of rainbow flames! That change colors in interesting patterns.

Well, trying.

She gets a rainbow by the end of the period, but the flames tend to wink out when the colors change.

Their teacher helps a few other students with their own projects, doles out compliments and constructive criticism, and then dismisses them for the day. This particular class meets every class day barring emergencies (and when their Professor's called away they usually meet anyways to work without her), so she'll see them again here tomorrow.

Loki will collect some candles, put her notes together, thank the teacher, and then look around to see if anyone's looking like they want to talk to her.

There's two! Both teens, the younger of two a brunette who'd been playing with some circuits.

And a redheaded girl who'd been chanting lowly the entire class. The redhead walks up to Loki first, hands in the pockets of her pants - white with a loud floral print - and a friendly smile on her face.

"Hey! I'm Raine. You're Loki, right?" the redhead says, cheerfully.

"Yeah! New student and all that."

The technomage finishes packing away her stuff and comes over. "And I'm Mal," she says. "Good to meet you. You wanna hang out, maybe talk magic some? I've never really met anyone else who uses alien magic. Well, some, but not who'll talk to me."

"Yeah, that sounds fun! I don't know a lot of Asgardian magic, but I've got a feel for it, and I can probably bug Thor for some tips once I've gotten started."

"Awesome! Come on, I know a good group study area in the quad off the library."

She slings her backpack on and leads the way through the winding halls.

Loki follows!

"What kind of magic do you guys use? Where'd you get your magic from?" She has a weird thought in her head, both that technically all humans can use magic but that most never bother or even know it's possible. It's not like they're not good storytellers, good liars, but -

She doesn't know. She hasn't been around humans enough yet, so say why they are the way they are.

"I do incantations and all that, though I'm trying to ease into blood magic. It's more powerful, and I think easier for me. I'm a mutant, and my mutation interacts with magic somehow. Mostly makes it possible to do by accident so far. Also means I sometimes grow random feathers, but, hey, mutations."

"I'm a technomage, so I'm doing magic with circuitry basically. I'm not a mutant or from a long line of witches or anything like that. I'm just stubborn and too clever for my own good, so I ended up here."

"Neat! I've just been figuring out the basics. Professor Maximoff was helping me with just will magic... It's like telling the universe a story, you know?"

"I guess that's one way of looking at it!" Raine says with a laugh. "And yeah, we saw you with the candles. Pretty fun first step."

"It's not too hard to go from candles to light bulbs, you know," Mal says, also grinning. "Though easier if you know some of the relevant physics."

"So mages get to have the coolest decorations?"

Also she is totally planning to mess with people's electronics to spell funny things, now. No use pretending she isn't.

"Pretty much how it works."

They reach the library courtyard, a little nook screened by a trellis laden with spring vines. Mallory settles in to one of the corners, propping her backpack up beside her and pulling out a case with some assorted electronics.

"There's not a lot of good technical terms for magic that I've found - some mysticism, but I think those are mostly metaphorical rather than useful - and I was wondering if you knew any? Otherwise I'm left coining them."

"There's ones in Asgardian, but I think words from human languages would work best for humans picking them up. Still, you can probably just translate ours, since we kind of already did the classification work?"

She describes Asgardian terms for magic, what she can get of their etymology from Allspeak's historic modules.