Vanyel tries again – and lights up. :I can! It's - you're right, it's very diffuse, I have to...: 

It's much 'denser' than the faint ambient magic present in the surroundings, clearly visible against that backdrop, but he has to make an effort to reach for it, as though scooping up water from a shallow with his hands. Not at all like the flow of nodes or even ley-lines, which is more like cupping his mental hands under the edge of a waterfall.

He reaches, and– 

:Oh no, sorry! I don't know what I did to it: The halo of energy crumples and is gone. Some of it, though, is still held in his mental fingertips. He pulls it into his reserves. 

:That's fine, I saw it. It'll be an easy fix in two or three weeks when I'm up to doing something that delicate. Worked fine otherwise?:

:It did!: Vanyel, reminded of the fact that she is still recovering, looks down at the grass. :Er, please do tell me when you're tired and need to go rest: 

:I'll go when I want to, don't worry about it.:

Vanyel believes her. That's sort of nice, actually, knowing that unlike DZ, Deskyl just will go if she wants to go, and snap at him if he's obnoxious, and all that. :All right, what do you want to try next?: 

"Hmm." :Show me your fighting style?:

:If I were fighting you one-on-one?: Vanyel's reaction times are reasonably fast. He drops into a balanced stance and lifts his hands in front of him, brings his personal shields to full power in an instant, flings up several additional layers of shielding against both physical and magical blows, links to a nearby node and pours more energy into them and then holds the node, ready to feed its power through himself. 

:If you're thinking about fighting me the right style is 'don't',: she cuts in. :Whatever you'd use in the kinds of situations you expect to find yourself in.:

He drops his hands, clearly embarrassed. :....Sorry, my main teacher used to just accost me at random times for sparring, I...guess I do that instinctively. Um, if I were fighting a mage one-on-one, I'd prepare my shields this way to be ready for their attacks. And then I'd gauge their shields and other defences with my Sight – if they were weaker than me I'd attack with lightning, unless they were about to get an attack in first, then I'd go with fire because it's a tiny bit faster. Sometimes mages shield against magical but not physical attacks, then I can use Fetching to throw rocks at them and catch them off guard. If they were shielding really well against mage-energy and physical attacks, I might use Mindspeech – I can tap a node and boost that Gift pretty hard, and most, er, foreign mages who I'd have to fight don't shield along that channel. That's how I incapacitated the mages when we rescued the children. Gives me a godawful headache though: 

She nods. :Any of the others have side effects?:

:Um, not the ones I mentioned, unless I have to push it really hard. Although it is tiring, the energy doesn't come from nowhere for me, I can tap nodes but I still need to use my own strength to control the power. Um, Fetching is a weaker Gift for me than mage-gift, so if I do the rock-flinging I'm more likely to wear myself out: 

:Sounds good. I have all of those, except I can't teleport things at all, and I'm not in the habit of using fire - it can't carry as much power as lightning, so it's easy for Sith to overcome - but I might change that. On the other hand I can use my teekay to make myself faster, you've seen that, and I think I can lift bigger things than you. I'm generally not going to use lightning, sparring, it affects my mood if I use too much of it, and I'm also not going to use my lightsaber, too dangerous.: She pauses briefly to consider. :The obvious place to start for sparring would be reflexes, maybe shielding against various things if you can get stronger at it that way, but it might be a good idea for me to teach you some katas, too, even if we can't do melee together. A lot depends on what you already know, too.:

:Huh! That's interesting that lightning affects your mood. I think the only, er, combat technique that does that for me is, well, it's not a standard combat technique at all – it's just that one of my Gifts is Projective Empathy, and I can - distract opponents - by projecting strong feelings at them. But then I'm having strong feelings in the middle of a fight, so I don't do it unless I'm really on the spot: 

:Huh. That's a pretty stark difference in training, I can't imagine not having strong feelings in the middle of a real fight.:

:...I mean, I'm often scared in a fight, but it's not...helpful, Starwind said that there's a right amount of nerves that helps you focus but that being more scared or angry than that will just throw off your judgement. And, um, the feeling I would use there - isn't the being scared that I'm in a fight part: 

He sort of curls up a bit, and looks away. :Anyway I think practicing shielding would be good. I definitely get stronger at it with practice and I think it's pretty important? I mean, if I can hold off attacks, then I have time to plan and pick a nonlethal strategy, um, instead of panic-reacting: 

:Doing what you mean to when you're scared or angry is also something you can practice, if you want to; I'd have to think about how to best do it if you did, though. We can start with shields, anyway.:

:...That would be really good. I want to be better at that. But it does seem dangerous to practice – um, the problem is that my Gifts are really strong, if I panic I can do a lot of damage really fast by accident: The fact that he's kind of ashamed of this fact is obvious in his mindvoice. :Shields first seems good. Um, normally Savil and I would practice combat techniques in a Work Room, even if we're just drilling it and not full-on sparring: 

He makes a face. :For some things it's an advantage that if I'm behind shielding I can't grab the nearest node. But if your attacks aren't too, er, messy, then out here could be fine as long as I warn Savil: 

:It wouldn't be dangerous to do it out here, but it'd be a shame to scar it up with scorch marks. I am gonna want to see what you can do when you go all out, though, sometime. If you don't mind showing me, anyway.:

:I don't mind showing you but we ought to do it somewhere that's not in the city. And, er, when I don't have anything later that day, I would be really tired afterward: For now, no one is using the main Palace Work Room and he can take her there, if she wants to practice now. Later is also fine. 

Just a little while, maybe. Healing doesn't really leave her in the mood to fight, even for practice. :Would you be tired from using up all your energy reserve, or something else?:

:I think that? It feels pretty similar to being tired because I ran for a long time:

:I'd guess the opposite from that, actually. I ask because once I figure out how to make mage-energy you'll have a pretty much unlimited supply with me around.:

:Oh: Vanyel seems intrigued. :That's true – but it's true of nodes too, and I still feel really tired if I fight using node-energy, even if I can tap the node when I'm done to refill my reserves. It means that I can fight at all when I'm low on reserves, and that I can throw around a lot more power in total, but...there's something that still gets used up and I'm not fully sure what. Part of the problem is that node-energy takes a lot of wrangling, it's sort of fast-moving and turbulent and I need to do a lot of finessing getting the right amount and keying it to myself so it behaves like reserves energy. The one you did was less like that: 

:That'll be handy, then. For the other part - imagine you were fighting someone by throwing rocks at them, with your hands, not with your magic. You could run out of rocks, but you could also have your arms get too tired to keep picking them up and throwing them, and I think what's happening is more like that. And then my technique versus node energy might be like if you have all the rocks you want but on one pile they're all the right size and shape to throw and on the other you have to sort through them to find good ones; you'll be able to do more with the better pile, since you aren't wasting your strength on sorting, but your arms will still get tired eventually. And that's probably trainable, too, if I'm right about it. No idea how much of a priority it is, though.:

:That seems right: Vanyel frowns. :Which part did you think was trainable - the 'arms getting tired' or using your 'rock pile'? And, um, presumably you'd have to be wherever I am in order to do it, for it to help in an actual fight: That feels like a big thing that he's uncomfortable asking of her, and also it's not necessarily up to him. :Um, it still might be good to practice, but...I sort of want to know what Savil thinks: