It seems like a good idea, and they can afford the copying fees and ink by now. She's also working out the details of the school - probably the thing to do is to rent a house in the nice part of town, parents will pay more for their children to be educated by rich people, and it'll remind them of why they want their children to be wizards in the first place, so they can make a good living and be comfortable. Probably they should offer a refund on fees if the children can't pick it up, at least at first, until their school has a good reputation - if that means taking only the top most promising students that seems all right, because it'll mean the school has well-regarded alumni.  They won't be able to afford it until he's done with his apprenticeship but that won't be too much longer. 

He pays to copy the ship-finding spell and offers the service to merchants who want it. It means working evenings or getting up very early to go to the docks, because his days are fully occupied at the shop, but he doesn't have to stick around for the full four-hour duration once he's cast it.

He checks in with how Saba is doing on Prestidigitation. 

Saba still can't manage to retrieve the energy so he wears himself out casting it every day, but that's probably good for his reserves, in the long run. He can use it to polish a clod of dirt into a marble for playing marbles with other children, and he can color things, and he can make everything he eats taste like dessert. He's so pleased with himself and the other children in his classes are very impressed.

He's so proud! Eventually he should sit down with Saba and try to explain how to retrieve the energy but for now this seems all right. He tells Saba that he can also use the spell to clean up small messes or to make his drinks hot or cold, if he can figure out how, it's an extremely versatile spell. (And thus very good for practice.)

Aroden is very busy right now, but tries to set aside blocks of time to research magic, even if it's not paying off hugely in the immediate term yet, it make him feel more like himself to understand more things. He wonders if there are any stable spell configurations that live nearby the ship-tracking spell - it's so specific, the way humans use magic is so weird. He stares at the shape in his spellbook until he goes cross-eyed, he sketches out notes, and then he casts the cleverness spell on himself and tries to mentally explore the space of nearby magic, looking for any cross-sections of it that will make working human-castable spells. 

There are a couple of them, though they look - not in a way a human would see - mostly useless, like they'd track some object people care about less than ships, or that moves a lot less than ships do, or that doesn't hang together as a discrete entity the way 'ship' apparently does...

- there's the more general form, like ship-tracking with less scaffolding, that's probably not useless.

He writes out the general form, but without buying ink for it just yet, and then on a different day a while later he uses the cleverness spell again to look at it some more and check that it's definitely stable and not going to explode. And after that he can buy ink to actually put it in his spellbook and cast it, while Parmida and Saba are out, and see what it does. 

(He assumes, at this point, that he's mostly reinventing spells that plenty of other wizards in the city have, and the main advantage to spending so much time on research, aside from saving some gold he would otherwise spend paying wizards to copy their spellbooks, is that at higher levels he'll be able to find new spells, or very rare obscure ones that are closely-held secrets by the people who can cast them. And also it's a way to feel less...broken.) 

This spell is Locate Object, and yes, it's reasonably widely known, but it's satisfying to have gotten it right on the first try. 

He finishes his apprenticeship. Rumors trickle in about atrocities committed in the Chelish civil wars, about blatant (and horrendous) divine interventions. In Rahadoum some god pummelled a battlefield with meteors and hit surrounding areas and now there's a substantial anti-gods faction in the civil war, at odds with all of the various involved churches.

Parmida suggests he looks at some houses they might rent, with the money he can make running his own magic shop or selling items to magic shop proprietors independently.

He spends one of his cleverness spells thinking hard about the civil war in Cheliax and whether there's anything at all he can do. The main result is that his mind recalls fragments of the weeks leading up to his death as a god a little more clearly, and then he has nightmares for a week. 

He looks at houses. 

Parmida thinks they want a nice place unambiguously in the nice part of town, but not so far that merchants' children can't walk to it easily, with sturdy rooms for classes and two bedrooms so Saba can have his own and servants' quarters upstairs, even if for now the servants' quarters are only aspirational. 

All of that makes sense and he spends the next few weeks, in his spare time, asking about available houses for rent and going around to see them, taking notes on whether they meet the criteria. Once he has a shortlist of a few possibilities, Parmida should come look at them and tell him which she prefers. 

She is so delighted about getting a nice house, and pays attention to how well constructed they seem and to various class markers he is oblivious to and is eventually satisfied with one.

He doesn't have much idea of the details of renting a house, his host-body memories are no help here, but probably it's like his apprenticeship, and they should get a contract all in writing and both read it over, and use the cleverness spell? 

Yep, it's almost exactly like that, though a house contract's safer than a work contract since you can mostly just pay a penalty and move out if you made some kind of mistake; the penalties for backing out of an apprenticeship are deliberately beyond what most apprentices can possibly pay.

Then they can make the arrangements, and sign the contract to move in when his apprenticeship finishes, and he thinks it's reasonable to budget extra for a bit for Parmida to furnish the house with nice things, since presumably it's important that they look well-off and respectable as a wizard school. (And also it will make her happy.)

He wonders if Parmida's parents are proud of how she's doing. How is her family, nowadays? He wonders if any of her siblings would like to learn magic. They're probably clever enough to at least get to first level spells, since she is. 

Her younger sisters are married and mostly have children; her surviving brothers are trying to make their way up in the shipping business, after everything was lost a few years ago. None of them have lots of time to study magic but she'll mention it in case something changes.

She gets their house a looking-glass and a nice desk for his magic studies and an aspirational bookshelf and some plants and an icebox, and decorates the part that's a schoolhouse respectably. There's room for a shrine, in their bedroom. She gets an icon of Irori and asks if he wants one of anybody, she has noticed he's not particularly religious but still.

The question makes him go very still; the distant, almost frightening look, which rarely makes an appearance lately, is back in his eyes. "No," he says, tersely, and changes the subject.

Now that he has his days free, he lays out a schedule for himself; as always he sets aside time to advance his study of magic, and also blocks out sessions to work on crafting magic items. Interacting with customers himself sounds kind of exhausting, so he talks to several other owners of magic shops in addition to the wizard he was apprenticed with, finding out what they'll pay him for magic items, he would prefer a flexible arrangement rather than committing to a set number of artifacts per month or such. He needs to source his own materials too, if he's working independently, so he spends some time finding where he can get the best bargains.

He asks Parmida if she knows how one would usually go about advertising a magic school, aside from just telling people they know. 

They should host a housewarming party and invite her family and people they know and people she's met through the temple and people he's met through the other wizards, and have Saba there doing the most impressive things he can pull off and looking even younger than his seven years, and then do similar parties on holidays. She can make all the arrangements but he'll have to be there. ...if they Charm each other and he teaches her the speaking-in-someone's-head-when-you-have-them-charmed thing she can feed him lines, if he doesn't know how to sell himself during the parties.

Wow, what a good idea! He kisses her for it. Selling himself during parties sounds like exactly the kind of thing he doesn't know how to do, so that would be really helpful. 

Also he sits down with Saba to try to talk him through what he needs to do in his head in order to get the power from his spell back, so he can cast the cantrip without tiring himself out. If the boy is struggling, maybe they can draw out some notes and then he can be temporarily smarter to see if he can figure out how it works then. 

Even with the spell that makes him temporarily smarter he has a hard time grasping it but eventually he can reclaim his magic, though it's lossy so even when he consistently does it right he can only cast the cantrip five or six times a day.

That's quite a lot of times for a seven-year-old! Everyone is going to think Saba is absolutely brilliant. And he's so impressively hardworking - and it's got to be motivating, to be able to cast the spell more so he can play and show off and make his food delicious - Aroden is sure that he'll keep improving even without further instruction. 

He helps Saba think of some particularly showy displays of magic with the cantrip, and then they can schedule their housewarming party. 

Parmida works diligently on picking up the ability to communicate telepathically with people she has charmed. She wants him to do it to her a bunch while she has Detect Magic up, so she can try to follow what exactly he's doing. Eventually she can pull it off, and that means she can spend the party explaining to him how to act like a competent wizard who believes that he has the potential to revolutionize magical education and make reasonably intelligent children into powerful wizards, without much danger to the children.

(Parmida is very competent and good!) 

He's pretty decent at acting like a competent wizard, once he has some advice on the chitchat-y parts. He does believe he has the potential to revolutionize magical education so it's not hard to sound like it, and he speaks with a lot of self-confidence in general, and he's pretty good at sounding very clever in conversation. He needs some reminders not to get too into the weeds excitedly explaining magical concepts. He reinforces the point that learning magic is hard work, it takes diligence as much if not more than natural talent, and asks Saba to tell people about how much he practices. 

Hopefully people are suitably impressed and will send students their way? Aroden wants to assess every potential student first, of course. He can get a general sense of their intelligence just by casting Detect Thoughts, though it's not as reliable for kids, and he's designed some tests for them, aimed at assessing conscientiousness and patience with repetitive work too. 

Parmida thinks they should turn all but the most promising students away, since being known for a high rate of successes is more important than getting a lot of tuition money right now. But Saba's smart and hardworking but hardly the most brilliant child his tutors have ever seen or anything so probably they can identify at least half a dozen ten year olds who they are pretty sure they can teach. 

He's not sure he wants a class size bigger than that anyway, they'll just get up to mischief. He wants to select for diligence as much as brilliance, and especially for genuine enthusiasm and passion - hopefully it won't be hard to get ten-year-olds excited about magic, magic is pretty neat and fun, but he expects a child who stays motivated to put in hours a day of practicing tiring mental exercises, week after week, is going to do better than a smarter but lazier kid.

The children will all need beginning spellbooks; their parents will have to pay for the ink but he and Parmida can do the actual writing in of the spell. 

He has some experience from teaching Saba of how to explain concepts clearly even to young minds, breaking it down into smaller pieces, using drawings and illusion-visualizations, asking them where they're confused, encouraging them that their minds will get stronger just like a muscle, and then careful use of the cleverness spell if he thinks they're otherwise ready to make the conceptual leap. 

It's still months before any of them can prepare a single cantrip, but their parents keep paying tuition, albeit with a little bit more grumbling, and eventually one of them gets it to work, and then a couple others in the weeks after that, and then there are lots more people who want their children to attend his school of magic.  

Sarkoris, rumor has it, has been overwhelmed by demons, and the rift that they entered from is widening. Iomedae's church still hasn't organized a crusade because they are occupied in the escalatingly bloody Chelish civil war.