:No, today is fine.: By which he means he can't promise tomorrow won't be worse. :Thanks for waiting.:

He's more awake by evening, and greets Savil cheerfully enough. "How was your day?"

"Not bad. Glad it's the end of it now. You?" 

"Glad it's the end of it is a good way to put it." Candlemarks feel a lot longer when you can't hold a train of thought for twenty minutes. "Yesterday was good, though; Shavri's an awesome Healing teacher."

"She does seem like she would be, she's so enthusiastic about it. What did you end up learning?" 

"How to understand what I'm seeing with Healing-Sight, mostly. It's a really interesting sense; there's a lot of different things going on with it."

"Oh? I don't think I've ever heard about it in much detail, say more?" 

Abras can go on about Healing and Healing-Sight for quite a while! 

Eventually he adds, "Oh, and that reminds me, there's an experiment I want to do but I don't know if it's safe and I'd like to get your opinion. And maybe your help, if it seems like a good idea."

"Hmm. Mage-work? What's the dangerous part?" 

"So, remember when we got caught in that mudslide and I use a weather-barrier to freeze the ground but then the weather-barrier exploded? I want to know what happened, so I can avoid having it happen again, but to figure that out I might need to try doing a smaller version of it again on purpose. Because if the problem was cramming too much heat into too small of a space then it will happen again but scaled down and if it was pulling too much heat in total then it won't happen on a small scale at all. I hope that doesn't sound insane?"

"No, no, makes perfect sense. I'm just trying to think through what reasonable safety precautions would be. Usually the best safety precaution is a Work Room but I do not want that thing going off in the same room I'm in." 

"Yeah, an enclosed space seems like not the best thing. Maybe a lot of water? We could find somewhere along the river, but there's a lot of stuff by the river and I'd worry about people coming by in the middle of it."

"We'd want to get out of the city for sure - I'm just trying to decide whether north or south is the best way to go... Probably north, there's a stretch of the river where it's nice and wide and slow." 

"Wide and slow is good, yeah. We might be able to get a sense of how much heat is involved by seeing how much ice we end up with. Are there common ways of measuring energy like that?"

"Huh! No, not that I'm aware of? That would be a useful way to look at it, though." 

"I wonder if there's a practical use for a barrier full of heat. Ice is useful; it feels like concentrated heat ought to be good for something too. Beyond just heating tea and things."

"Incinerating things? Hmm. Maybe for metalwork or glassblowing? Although we don't really have enough mages to add more work to our roster." 

"That's true." Don't think about mages who aren't here because they're DEAD. "If nothing else it's an easier way to make things warm or cold than just doing it directly."

"True - Starwind tried to explain this to me once, a weather-barrier is more efficient than just a heat-spell, takes less energy, because you're not making it hot, you're just moving heat around." She strokes the tip of her nose. "Wonder if you could do that in reverse? Make the area inside a weather-barrier colder instead of warmer. It'd be nice for those really awful hot days in summer." 

"I don't see why you couldn't. It would be interesting to try."

"I always love talking about magic with you, ke'chara. You come up with such clever ideas." She tops up her wine-glass, holds out the decanter with a questioning look at him. 

"That last one was yours." He'll take a little wine and plenty of water. "I did have another weird thought, though. Has anyone ever gotten only one of Mage-Gift and Mage-Sight, or Healing and Healing-Sight?"

"Huh! Not that I recall hearing of? I know sometimes Thoughtsensing or receptive Empathy turn up without the projective element; the other way round is rarer but I think there are documented cases of projective Empathy without the receptive. So you'd think that could happen with other Gifts, but I've never thought about it." 

"Yeah. And then on the other end you have Farsight and Fetching, which are sort of like the perception and action halves of one Gift, except they don't tend to come together and aren't obviously two ways of interacting with the same thing."

"Wow, I never thought of it that way!" She chuckles. "And then there's Foresight. Hard to know what the 'projective' version of that would be." 

"Yeah, that is a weird question . . . I'm imagining something like 'causing unlikely coincidences to happen', but coincidences aren't a coherent thing like magic or thoughts or living creatures or physical objects. Maybe that's why there isn't a projective version, because it wouldn't make any sense."