"Protection from Evil adds shielding specific to Evil creatures. It makes it harder for them to hit you and much harder for them to control you, it's particularly protective against spells that affect the mind and the will. Summoned Evil creatures can't touch you at all. Protection from Chaos does the same thing for chaotic creatures - Hagan will have a harder time shooting me now -"

Hagan claps his hand to his chest, looking wounded. 

"...and I don't know the spells Protection from Good or Protection from Law because they don't come up much."

"And I can't cast against alignment so I can't show you those two either."

"Oh, huh, so Mahdi can cast spells that aren't his alignment but you can't? Your system is so weird, although if it's a god giving you power I guess that fits. Anyway, I'll keep playing around but if I can't get it in the next five minutes, either my magic doesn't work that way or it's going to take weeks of fiddling." 

He keeps playing around. 

A minute or two later, he looks up. "Wait, so if I had Protection from Evil on me then the devil that was summoned before couldn't actually attack me?" 

"Couldn't physically make contact with you, her weapons still could have though there'd be additional shielding they had to get through."

"All right, good to know - I was in fact mostly worried about her weapons, I don't think she could've gotten through just my personal shields unarmed, but I had a bad experience once with some enchanted throwing daggers, magic weapons sometimes do get through shields." 

Nod. "Yeah, I'd assume most stuff in a place like this is - not designed for you specifically but designed by people who had in mind that their enemies might be hard to hurt in a hundred different ways they don't specifically know about, and if you can possibly avoid letting them hit you you should."

“Yes.”

He keeps trying to shape his magic into the hard-to-describe Good format. 

"Would it help to explain what 'polarized' means, it's kind of complicated conceptually but it'd at least mean you know what you're trying to do."

"Um, sure, that might help." 

So Mahdi makes an illusion as a visual aid and starts talking about the sort of waves that you get in a rope when you start moving it back and forth, and then claims that light is similarly made up of waves, and then demonstrates what it looks like for all of the light wave oscillations to occur in a single plane instead of being spread out in three dimensions like they normally are. 

"And you're doing the same thing, except with magic."

"Ohhhhh. That's fascinating. I should tell, er, my friend back home," (Leareth), "we know about light being made of waves - well, a few scholars do," (they were probably all Leareth), "but not about that part. And, yes, that does help me get a feel for what I'm trying to do here." 

He tries it again. 

It is unfortunately hard to tell by watching if he has it down - "we could tell whether you have Law down by you trying to hit both Hagan and one of us with something, but we don't have a way to tell for Good at all -"

"I think I can guess by just looking whether I'm - matching what I see. If I can get it for Law then I'd give it greater than even odds I can get it for Good, although we wouldn't want to count on it. Also I might want you to demonstrate again, I can put your spells back for you." 

"Then I can definitely demonstrate again."

"And I expect mine are harder to copy from but most aligned spells are divine spells, for obvious reasons, so I can show you a wider range including some offense ones." And he demonstrates the spell Arrow of Law at Mahdi, which flings some magical force at him that does nothing at all  - "but if I do it to Hagan it'll hurt him quite badly. And if I did it to you it'd hurt you half as badly as Hagan, at a guess."

"If it got through my shields, it looks like the kind of thing that in my world's magic would be easy to shield out. All right, I think I have something on getting my magic to match - should I try? I can do a really underpowered levinbolt, so it won't harm you even if it gets through." 

"Sure."

Then Vanyel will try to make his magic Lawful, form it into a very tiny levinbolt that won't do more than zap and startle them, and nab both Mahdi and Hagan with it. 

"Ow. I guess I would think that even if you'd failed and it was a normal levinbolt though."

"I think I felt anything but not, like, 'ow'."

"Oh, a normal levinbolt would knock you unconscious at best. It seems like I don't have it down entirely but I can get it at least partially 'polarized'? Maybe I should practice some Good ones... Hmm, we have people here who are both Good and Neutral, that might make at least some difference, right?" 

"Yeah, stuff aimed at Evil will hit Mahdi a little bit."

"I could summon Evil mice or something, if that helps."