And she starts channeling into the sapling. Earth first, then Nature, c'mon, make that pretty little double helix for her. She watches carefully for when it starts to resist her, and mentally pings the other Pirates to add a bundle when it does. Little by little, they get the sapling twisted into the form of a Wand Shaper.

The process takes around fifteen minutes, and the resulting tree is about twice as tall as Sable, but the planter they picked seems just about big enough to hold it. The tree's leaves gleam with a faint light, and there's a zone in the middle between the twin spirals of the trunk that seems to shimmer like a mirage.

According to the wandcrafting notes, to make a basic wand you cut a length of wood of about the right size, shape it into the approximate profile of a wand, then place it into the Wand Shaper's active area along with your other ingredients and channel Nature to shape the wand, finishing with just a smidge of the wand's desired element. (There are no notes on how to craft more all-element wands like Mg. Aspen's.)

The naive guess there is to try materials of every element and channel every element, but that's an experiment for another day. Sable hums. "Okay. We can source copper for Lightning easily enough," she fishes a spool of uninsulated copper wire from all of their various electronics projects out of a pocket, "and Maya can go get a stone chip from the rubble, and Hailey can harvest from the phoenix's kiss. So that's three of four first-pick wands off the bat."

She tosses the spool to Ruby. "Cut off an appropriate length of that? Neo, help me cut some wand-length branches from one of the other trees?"

Maya nods and starts inspecting the rubble for a likely-looking stone chip.

Ruby conjures a familiar wire-cutter from their old tool set in her pocket and cuts out a good several inches of wire and coils it up, then helps with branches.

Hailey carefully starts picking some phoenix's kiss.

And Neo and Sable lead the branch-cutting, picking out good-sized pieces of wood, poking into everyone's memories and carefully sizing them to preference. Neo tucks her wand-blank into her belt.

While Sable gets started making the first wand. She goes with Ruby's first, since the wire is already cut. In go the wood and the wire, and she starts feeding Nature mana into it, waiting for the right moment to finish it off with a dose of Lightning.

The original rat has returned to its burrow while Sable was growing the Wand Shaper, but another one pokes its nose out of a different burrow to munch Gutberries while everyone is preparing to make wands.

The wandcrafting process goes pretty straightforwardly. Nature tension builds up in the wand, a little bit like it did with the Wand Shaper, as the wood incorporates the metal and its shape gradually changes to become smoother and more wandlike; and then after a few minutes it fairly abruptly undergoes some kind of phase change and starts feeling distinctly like it needs a little Lightning mana.

Then she'll give it some Lightning mana. Just a touch at first, feeling how much it wants to be happy as a wand.

A touch is all it takes. There's a loud crackling sound, the wand's shape violently rearranges itself into a jagged zigzag like a stylized lightning bolt, and for a moment it's haloed in a searing golden light before the glow settles down into a mere gentle glimmer peeking through the grain of the wood. It feels perfectly complete, smoothly rejecting any further magic.

She plucks it from the work area and tosses it to Ruby, then holds out her hand for Maya's chip of rock.

Ruby catches her new wand! Does it like her?

Maya passes Sable her small bit of rubble.

And the process begins again!

Ruby's new wand doesn't bond instantly like Sable's; there's a moment of tentative, questing connection, and a sense that she could either lean into the bond or refuse it.

When she accepts it, she gets the same mental clicking-into-place feeling that Sable did, and the same sevenfold sensation of open elemental channels—but unlike Sable's harshly limited equality of options, Ruby can very definitively tell which of her new elements is Lightning; it seems to spark eagerly, inviting her to cast it. Air is pretty easy to pick out too, though not as insistent as Lightning, and Fire and Dark are also separating themselves from the pack just a little bit.

The process for crafting the Earth wand goes much the same, except that the sound effect at the end is more of a low, solid boom, the glow is a much softer grey-brown and fades more slowly, and the wand's final shape has the blocky profile of a stack of rough stones instead of the sharp back-and-forth of the Lightning wand.

Okay this is going great. That gets tossed to Maya. Does Hailey have fire flowers for her?

Totes. Have some phoenix's kiss.

In goes another wand blank with them.

Like Ruby, Maya finds that her wand's most easily distinguished elements are the ones whose mindsets she best vibes with, besides Earth which comes out firmly ahead regardless. Fire and Dark are pretty dim for her, though she can dig them out if she focuses; Nature and Water are prominent.

The Fire wand ends up with a sort of swirling, flamelike profile, the red-orange of the Phoenix's Kiss petals visible in decorative patches along its surface as well as glowing from the depths of the woodgrain. The sound when Sable finishes it is like a roar of flame, and the bright glow comes with a wash of heat like someone just opened an oven, though it passes quickly.

Awesome. She'll toss that to Hailey, and then back to the book room they'll go. Can she find some practice exercises in there for the three newly-wanded girls to work on while she recharges herself and then does another round of filling the Mana Font?

Hailey finds Earth and Lightning trailing only a short distance behind Fire in sensory immediacy, and Air and Nature in last place, overshadowed by the rest.

The best way for a new student to practice their elemental casting is using a Learning Stone, which absorbs all elements equally. To build it, you will need a good amount of stone, Earth magic to anchor and shape it, and unformed magic to give it purpose. First, mark out a circle three paces wide...

That's... very useful but not immediately so. She doesn't have somewhere to put one, what with the lack of unoccupied rooms. Any advice on building things, especially buildings?