"That makes sense. - hmm, I wonder if the thing you did to my Glitterdust spell structure -"

He reaches into his bag for something, frowns. "- huh! I can't recall the spell back to it! That's fascinating - uh, there's something called a Pearl of Power, you can use it to retrieve a spell after you've cast it - I can show you -" and he casts another spell, up into the sky, that produces a radiant rainbow burst of color.

He waits for the rainbow burst of color to fade away.

Then he pulls out the pearl, concentrates, and - restores the spell-structure to the state it was in and tucks it away again. "So I can cast the spell again later, right. Except apparently if you fiddle with the structure then I can't do that! Which is not a result I've heard of, and makes me wonder if you could do the opposite, and do the thing the pearl is doing -"

"Oh. Hmm. So, have you cast it, and then - grab it and fold it up and give it back to you?" 

"Yeah. Can you see what the pearl does - I can do it again if you want to watch again -"

"Sure." And this time he focuses closely on the pearl itself. 

The pearl seems to contain some magical energy - quite a lot of it, actually - in a very careful structure of its own, and it reaches out and finds the spell structure at Mahdi's fingertips and breathes all of its energy into it until the structure is intact again.

Hagan gets some potatoes and starts roasting them.

"Huh! I can't tell if it's doing something fancier than what I can See, but I'll give it a go." 

He casts the spell again. "Color Spray knocks normal people unconscious," he says in explanation while he does. "For less than a minute, but sometimes it's nice to have a minute."

"What, really? How does it do that? And, yes, sometimes a minute is very key." He closes his eyes, to better focus on just what he's seeing with mage-sight. 

"It turns out that if you flash the wrong set of inputs at your brain very loudly it gets kind of stuck! You could take down all your shields if you wanted to experience it firsthand I guess." 

Mahdi's magic constructs seem to all be contained in his spellbook, most of the time, but he brings them to his fingertips when he casts. When he's done the structure he just used is still there, just - empty.

"Weird. Just a minute..." Vanyel focuses on said empty magic construct. He touches it, very tentatively, with his Gift, and starts trying to feed in energy from his reserves; he's not sure how much it'll take. 

It doesn't take very much. It does, halfway through, get kind of stuck at a tangle in the spell structure.

Huh. He tries backing off and touching it at a different point to get the rest. 

That works.

" - wow."

"You could hang out in Sothis and sell that."

"Letting people use the same prepared spell more than once? I guess that'd be pretty damn useful, if a fundamental limitation of your magic was that you usually couldn't." It sounds like painfully boring work, though, but if it'd be high-paying and safe, he could probably bring himself to do it for a few weeks. "Anyway, I want to watch the spell preparation, whenever you do that next, I'm still baffled about that part." 

"In the morning. Sometimes I leave half of it undone so I can do it later, for more flexibility, but I didn't do that this morning because we were hanging out in Sothis and our plan for the day was to sell some spells and hit some bars and hear about interesting work."

"And then you got yanked in to deal with a dragon? I hate it when my nice peaceful day gets interrupted like that." 

"It's the worst. I bet they won't even pay us, on the grounds that we did not even deal with the dragon."

Yfandes nudges Vanyel. :Delicious food over there?: She does a horse-eyeroll at the others. :He needs to be reminded to eat a lot: 

"Hey." Vanyel swats at her, but he's smiling. 

"Eat something, on this planet we do it several times a day." He passes him a plate.

"We should maybe go ask the villagers about somewhere we can spend the night," Mahdi says, "Yfandes presumably cannot manage to get inside a Rope Trick."

"We can sleep under the stars! Unless there is a sandstorm. Or some of those stupid spider things."