"Yeah, I felt the Skill up."

Ame retrieves her neglected sandwich.

"I mean, I tend to get things quickly once I know what I'm trying to do. I've always learned fast. But... yeah. Everyone would have Windsight if it was usually that easy. I think this is the thing that taught me to summon's fault. That's when I got the mana-sense."

"I still wanna know more about this 'thing'. And whatever spooked you earlier. It's safe to say that the answer to 'would Elizabeth want to know this?' is 'yes!' pretty much always."

"Alright. But not where we might be overheard. For either thing."

Shrug. Nom. She finishes eating quickly.

"I don't really have teaching skills but I can try to copy how I was taught. I also don't have a workroom. Oh, and I found us a job offer! Caravan going north that'll pay to have a healer and a summoner on hand in case they get attacked."

"Caravan guarding. Nice."

Ame gets up from the table. "I'm gonna get my Pelt of Caeris book, I'll be right back."

She returns shortly and drops the book next to her food, propping it open to read while she eats.

The book is pretty short. It describes the characteristics, limitations, and risks related to the spell, then walks through a five step process to shape ghur into the final flexible shell that forms the phantasmal armor. It's heavy on metaphor and light on math or diagrams. She doesn't know how to shape ghur at all yet, though.

...this is vexing.

And the book doesn't say anything about how to shape ghur, either? Friggin' rip-off overpriced bullshit...

Well, what is ghur? Which one was that again? Amber magic, the primal, the bestial.

Alright, that's a familiar state of mind for Ame. Survival. Hunger. Lust. Instinct. And the base joy of primordial fulfillment. These are things that Ame knows intimately, the foundations of the human animal. She wraps herself in it, and mentally shoves it out the same mental channel as her Windsight.

She violently gathers traces of energy from around the room and-

Elizabeth reaches out and scatters the energy, then flicks her hard on the forehead and whispers intensely. "What are you thinking you'll miscast in the middle of a crowded room! Let's get out of town if you want to try this, and maybe ask for actual instructions from me?"

Ame nearly catches Elizabeth's finger as she slaps her own forehead in reflex, before shaking herself out of her focused state and coming back to (the rest of) her senses.

"I was just trying to figure out what ghur felt like!" Ame protests in a harsh whisper. "I wasn't going to cast anything!" Pause. "On purpose." Awkward pause. "What was I even doing that you had to interrupt it?"

"You were channeling. Gathering up energy as if you were about to cast something, or store it for later, or something. It probably wouldn't have been fine but 'probably' is a bad habit."

"Maybe there's, like, a list of warnings every kid gets told to never do with regard to the Winds that I missed, but."

"So... channeling. Explain channeling? How to do it safely, how to not do it by accident?"

"You'd get this whole speech if you were an apprentice sorcerer, I don't even remember all of it. You looked like you had the mentality for ghur down alright. There's an element of intent, it's mostly practice. You'll probably make dhar and miscast few times, but if it's little bits of it you should be mostly fine. Uh-"

She peers at the book.

"Of course. Amber magic in particular is hard to learn out of books because it behaves kind of like an animal. The metaphors are taming instructions. Sort of. I don't know much Amber magic. I think I should take you out to a field somewhere and teach you the noise cantrip. Sorcery is a very practical, hands-on sort of thing, you know?"

"People say the same thing about sex," Ame says wryly. And then freezes as she realizes what she just said.

She grabs the book and flips back to the five-step casting process. "Taming instructions," she repeats under her breath. "Like guiding someone into their kink... It's not about building something with five parts. It's about following a narrow path through the heart and mind, a journey with five legs..."

"That... Sounds fairly insightful, actually? The biggest ghur spells I know are track scent and beast made whole - they're both a partnership with the amber wind, a dance even, more than making it a tool. Let's get out of here already, you clearly really want to try this."

She stands up and pays for their food.

"I really do, but I'm kind of expected back at the prostitution guild building, first."

"...Mm. Guess I have a couple of hours to kill, then! I'll follow you in that direction then come hang out and read there after a bit."

Ame leads the way back to the guild building, and resumes healing her fellow whores for the rest of the afternoon, or until she runs out of patients, whichever comes first.

The patients slow down a lot after she's done a couple hundred, but don't seem to actually run out at any point. More loved ones and retirees and support staff keep showing up at a trickle as they get off work or hear gossip.

Elizabeth shows up and sits in a corner reading, looking much more cheerful, after a couple hours.

Once the flow of patients slows to a trickle, Ame announces last-call; she'll finish healing the patient(s) in the building, but no more new arrivals. Not for free, anyway.

"Alright," she says to Elizabeth. "Let's go find somewhere to experiment with amber sorcery."

Ameron might notice that Elizabeth is more full of ghur than she was before, especially around her hips and waist.

"Let's! No proper lab space to drain errant Winds away but I secured a farmer's fallow field for a couple coppers."

Elizabeth leads her just outside the town walls. "Much safer out here. As long as you stop if I say so and let me dispel whatever you were trying, nothing serious ought to happen. Want to learn a cantrip, or have me show you ghur working, or go ahead and try Pelt of Caeris to see if you can do it off nothing?"

The meaning of ghur in various places is not something Ame has the knowledge to interpret, yet. But it's not like she needs Windsight to tell that Elizabeth recently enjoyed a good fuck.

After a detour to collect Ame's spell book, they arrive at the farmer's fallow field.

"Show me ghur working," Ame decides, "and explain, like, what narrative meaning you're using? So I can have a better guess if I'm interpreting the metaphor right."

Elizabeth works through track scent, explaining each step along the way. First, you gather up ghur from wherever you can get it. It's an effort of will to sort of direct and command it, but the Winds are capricious and independent, and if you're too harsh or too lenient ghur will do its own thing. There's a happy medium, and you sort of get to know it after a while. Then you can sort of turn it into strands like this, that's what the 'muscle' metaphor is about, and then...

She keeps doing this for a while, running through metaphors with a worked example of twisting the magic, holding the partially-complete spell as still as possible in what is clearly non-trivial effort, until finally it completes and settles around her head.

"I chose track scent because it doesn't just happen and then be done, it has a duration and I can end it."

Ame watches and thinks this over for a while.

Something about Elizabeth's explanation nags at her brain. It feels... incomplete.

She re-reads the five steps of casting. Yes. 'Muscle' is the wrong interpretation. This is a scene. A path of feelings. This part should be 'flexing', and not the physical act, but the motivation of displaying one's physical superiority. Every step in the process is like that: motivated, not demonstrated.

Ame closes her eyes and channels ghur. It comes to her easily, even moreso than the first time.

And then she uses the ghur to tell itself a story in five acts about how she is unbreakable.

Ghur is wild, animalistic. She is not in control. It bucks and rebels at her attempts to corral it. It tells its own story of hunger and fear and drive.

But it knows this story. It will deign to follow where she points it if things are framed correctly, if asked just the right way, after a few aborted attempts where it turns and snarls and goes off on its own tangent, patiently dispelled by Elizabeth before it can do anything unpleasant.

She has the pelt of a mighty beast, proud and unyielding. (Elizabeth is taking notes.)

Control has nothing to do with this. Ame doesn't try to 'corral' it in the first place. That's the heart of her revelation about this being a scene. Its story of hunger and fear and drive is at the core of every story. She just has to show it that the story it is already living is also the story of Ameron herself being mighty and unyielding, the same way she'd guide someone who was in denial about their kinks down the path to their true nature.