...empty puppeted mage bodies is kind of weird to think about for multiple reasons but how about she think about that later and for now stick to the interesting things they're talking about.
She's not sure what's going on with the explosions (maybe she could figure it out with more detail?) In her experience mage training doesn't really involve explosions, but there've been mages for thousands and thousands of years and humans wouldn't really like it if mages were exploding stuff when not supposed to, so if there's some ways to learn magic that involve explosions and some that don't probably that got figured out a long time ago, and now mages all learn the non-explosion way.
She's also not really sure how power scale would work here - she's pretty powerful, for a mage, and she definitely can't explode the universe, and she doesn't know if being the kind of being that can work with the universe, and then also being a mage, would map the power level from one to the other, or not do that. For that matter she doesn't know how being not a homo sapien and also being a mage would even work, or if it works at all in reality.
Anyway, magic!
There are a lot of metaphors for magic floating around, because mages do need to talk to each other and study and stuff and if mages talk shop and humans can't understand them they get very unhappy. One metaphor that gets used is that doing magic is like crumple-folding and fastening paper into various shapes. Where the 'paper' like, coats whatever you're trying to do magic to. ...Some magic doesn't super fit under this as well, like in the moment healing, but a lot of stuff fits.
So there's some things that are pretty simple and you could usually figure out how to do them (not that anyone's allowed to do that very much, but). If you want to crumple paper into a ball, you can probably do that - it might not be the neatest ball, but it'll probably be a ball and will work for ball-like things. If you need a really specific detailed shape, you're way less likely to be able to get it without instructions, or if you do it'll probably take a while and a lot of trial and error. If you're not actually completely sure what shape you need to do what you want, then you also have to figure that out. (She's in research, so a lot of what she works on is like that.)
...Is that helpful/useful? Should she go at it from a different direction? Maybe it would help if she knew more about how dragonet-maker's magic worked, so she could do compare/contrast? Or can dragonet-maker get, like, a textbook, there are textbooks mages learn from. (She could potentially talk to a mage-teacher but that kind of has a high chance of going badly.)