He's so upset about it. 

His people are dying, and more people are dying from the damage left in the war that he was, in some sense, responsible for. He tries not to dwell on it, because it remains the case that there's very little he can do. Even if he went to Iomedae's church right now and tried to communicate with Her and reveal who he was, it's unclear he could actually do anything. He has a name, and a handful of memories, and - negligible power and resources. 

He doesn't speak of it, but it has to be noticeable to Parmida how much it eats at him. 

She figures he probably has family in Cheliax, and doesn't ask, and hugs him when it seems like it might help. She can do a couple of first-level spells a day, and mostly has an Unseen Servant do the cleaning, and does Charm Person when they want to be able to communicate telepathically.

He accepts her hugs - they help a little - and he works even harder. He spends extra time with the children who are slower to master their first cantrip, partly because it seems important for his school's reputation, partly because he thinks drilling down very hard on pedagogy will help him chunk spells more effectively in his (newly small and weak and limited and blind) human mind. 

He thinks that Saba should get Detect Magic. It'll be a stretch for him, but he's getting a lot more deft with Prestidigitation, and being able to see other people's magic - especially once he's at a school surrounded by other children casting all the time - is going to help him learn faster in future years. 

His second-level spells don't feel particularly difficult to prepare, anymore. He thinks about preemptively paying to copy a third-level spell, even if he can't cast it yet he's sure that he's close. He knows a number of spells he could obtain, at this point; he's inclined to go for Suggestion, which compels a subject to follow stated course of action. Mostly because he can see, in the moments he spends a little cleverer, that this is almost the same magic as Charm Person and Detect Thoughts, only scaffolded from a slightly different angle, and if he can grab this angle too and shove it into his mind then he'll see - more - of what's really there... 

On the other hand, it may not be the most money-making spell, he's not actually sure if they can charge for it as a service at all. He could go for one that's worth a lot instead. Discern Value is an obscure spell that lets you analyze the monetary value (to the average trader) of objects in a certain area, picking out everything worth more than a certain amount, and the item worth the most. (This is such a bizarre specific arbitrary way of carving up magic and the world - casting as a human continues to be frustrating for that reason along with so many others...) He's sure they could charge for that service, giving valuations to merchants or something. He asks Parmida what she thinks. 

"- third level is supposed to be the level where you never have to worry about money again but I don't know why... well, part of it is Fireball, right, you can be a ship's wizard. I guess you don't want to be a ship's wizard. You can make scrolls of Fly, or Dispel Magic....I guess if other people are doing that it's less profitable, doing something more obscure might work better."

Nod. “A good choice of third-level spell will pay for more, I hope. I think I will try selling scrolls of Discern Value since I have not seen those for sale elsewhere, and then I should also pick up some of the more popular spells. I could go ask the shops I sell my items to if there are other obscure third level spells that they would pay extra for scrolls of...”

He does that.

There are various spells that they've heard of but can't themselves cast or source, but of course they can't let him copy those because they don't have them. Mostly they don't want to have a lot of scrolls on hand of things that aren't top sellers, because inventory management is a challenge and magic shops a popular target for thieves, but they could write him down as a person who can fulfill commissions they get for scrolls.

He is happy to fill commissions and will keep them appraised of what spells he has. He goes to libraries and tries to read up and find out about more obscure spells that also sound really useful. 

–there's a spell that specifically makes a tiny house? Well, not exactly a house, a sphere of force that protects from the elements. Lasts two hours per caster level, so at this point his should last...ten hours. He starts scoping out whether any acquaintances-of-acquaintances might know it, because rediscovering it himself from the huge space of absurdly specific, arbitrary human-caster spells is really not going to be worth the hassle. If he can find even a rumour of someone he could copy it from, he'll go ask the shop-owners if they think they could sell scrolls for that, even if only on commission. 

They will definitely send him commissions for that when it comes up! He can copy it off an acquaintance of an acquaintance if he wants. 

When he comes home one day there is a twelve year old girl sitting on his front steps.

(He pays to copy it, if only out of sheer curiosity to see why exactly this is a stable configuration.) 

He's very distracted and almost walks into her. "–Oh, sorry. Hello. Can I help you?" 

"Hello! I want to study in your school of magic. I don't have any money, so your wife turned me out, but I will be spectacularly good at it so you ought to let me anyway."

He blinks. Then smiles, slowly. He sees so many women here being - meek, unassuming, asking for nothing - and he appreciates her confidence. "Oh? Why do you think you will be so good at it?" 

"Well, people who are smart make good wizards, and I am the smartest person I have ever met."

The smile broadens. "I see. ...There is a spell I can cast, that will let me see how smart you are, among other things. May I?" He's not sure it's a reasonable use of Detect Thoughts but he's so curious. 

"Of course!"

So he casts it. 

She is thinking that if this doesn't work then she can probably still have magic within a year anyway because she can tutor her brother so he gets the top scores in his exams and her parents said they'd consider sending him to wizard school, if he did that, and then she can steal his spellbook, but this will be faster and also probably learning from someone who came up with teaching children magic as his own idea will be helpful. 

She is, in fact, the smartest person she would've ever met; he's encountered smarter minds in Sothis but only because they were wearing enhancement headbands.

He still takes a couple of minutes to think it over. She is clearly, obviously over whatever the threshold is to learn magic at all; she doesn't even need all his special accommodations for teaching children. Though Detect Thoughts doesn't by itself gauge that she's hardworking - but, well, a number of other factors about her having showed up here point at it. 

"I will take you for a month," he says. "If you can learn Prestidigitation and Detect Magic in that time period, you can stay." 

"Thank you! Do you have a spare spellbook or do you want to give me money so I can go buy the things to make one."

"I do not have a spare sitting around, but I do have the ink for them, and the first spell you will learn does not need much of it. We can go make one now." 

She jumps to her feet and gets out of his way so they can go in.

He pulls up a chair for her and sits down at his desk and gets out the paper, unlocks the hidden drawer where he keeps the expensive ink. "I will draw this one for you, it will be faster, but you can watch me?" 

She will watch so intently!

He likes her so much already! 

Honestly, it's possible she doesn't need all the careful instruction, broken down into small pieces to fit into younger minds; he's definitely assuming she won't need the boost from the intelligence spell. He tells her as much. "I am used to teaching people who are not as clever as you are, so please do tell me if I am going too slowly and boring you." And he casts Silent Image so he can give her the usual visualizations to help her get what the magic is doing and how she has to shape and hold it in her mind. 

She has so many questions. Why is the magic doing that and not some other thing, what if she did that but exactly upside down or with left and right switched would that work, does all magic do the same thing, how did someone discover that you could shape magic like this, can she tell from the shape what the magic will do.

He patiently tries to answer her questions and rotates things around in his Silent Image when he can't put it into words. Humans can only touch a very thin part of the thing that magic really is, and as the kind of wizard she can learn to be, she needs to be able to prepare spells once and stabilize them and cast them later, which means they have to be stable, and only some of the possible shapes that magic can be will hold together like that. He can tell some of what a spell does by looking at the shape, even if it's just in his notes and not in his spellbook yet.

Sometimes he can find new spells that way, if he uses Fox's Cunning to make himself smarter and spends the duration of the spell on exactly the insight he's nearly grasping. If she gets very good at magic she may be able to do that too, but most wizards don't have the right kind of intuitions and need to do it with a lot of math and sometimes they get it wrong and the spells explode. Even he can't tell exactly, though - he recounts how he rediscovered Locate Object from Track Ship, as a broader and less scaffolded surface version of nearly the same underlying magic.

...He's so excited to talk about magic with someone who wants to understand it and can follow his explanations so quickly, but probably he should let her try to cast the cantrip now. He explains the kind of minor entropy work it does; it's extremely general, which means that to do anything specific she'll need to concentrate hard, and it will probably be sloppy at first.