"I'll want to see them later, then. But meantime, did you want to cast more analyses? And perhaps do some more wizardry?—and how early do you have to go to bed, I wouldn't want to make you miss a morning class or something."

"I have a couple more angles before I really need to sleep. I can load you up with analyses, are they going to interfere with each other - most people don't like having more than one or two on at once but maybe you can keep it all straight?"

"I probably can, I'm pretty used to having a lot of extra information overlaying everything, although it's usually less... directly visual than that."

"Okay, here's another wizardry one, this one's specialized for breaks." Cast.

"Specialised for breaks how?" Squint.

"It's supposed to make it easy to see small imperfections in spell structure you can attack."

"Spells have imperfections?"

"They can, yeah -" He casts this analysis again. "Okay, see there where the library spell is attached to that green book over there, it's a little thin? Somebody was inattentive when they cast it. It works okay but it could be broken there."

"Huh. What other kinds of things cause imperfections?"

"Mostly just not holding the spell in your mind correctly; if you say it or gesture it wrong it won't work at all."

"Well I'll add that to the list of things I want to watch someone doing."

"...what, cast spells? You've seen me do it."

"Cast spells that are imperfect somehow, that have failures like that."

"I haven't been being that careful. There's - hm - in your dragon magic analysis there's a little fracture in the - here." Point.

"—oh, I see it. But yeah, what I mean is, now that I know failures exist I want to pay attention for them in casting, they'll help me understand the—moving parts of the spells better."

"Failure isn't really the right word. The spell works fine, it just wouldn't hold up perfectly if someone competent at breaks - and that's hardly anyone - pushed on it in the right place."

"Sure, vulnerabilities, then, or whatever you want to call them.—also the second easiest thing for a metamancer to do is breaking magic, I wonder if I could use that to get back home."

"Oh, sure, if you can break the summon you're all set to go home. Co-casting makes it harder, though, it's all tangled up, see?"

"...yeah, yikes. Also I kinda don't wanna do it before telling Keo or someone who can summon me back, I don't want to be gone forever."

"Well, I could but students aren't allowed, you'd have to get one of the teachers."

"Aren't allowed, even when the subject's okay with it?"

"Yeah, students aren't allowed to summon at all, people in general aren't allowed to summon unwilling subjects."

"Why?"

"Which?"

"The former, it's pretty obvious why one wouldn't be allowed to summon unwilling subjects."