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When Vanyel is ready for the mad science tour, he shows him the monkeys. "They're monkeys," she feels it necessary to clarify. "I know they look very human at this point, because the whole point of them is that I'm going to move into one if I ever die, but they're not people, and I have forbidden the staff to name them. I could move into one now if I had to but I'd like to get one actually looking like me in particular first, and I want to stick more Gifts into them, I got Fetching out of some Changesquirrels but further work is needed." She shows him the mice, too. "Do you suppose Jisa'd like a winged mouse? What's her favorite color?" She shows him all her microbiology eggs. "That's a flu sample from the recent plague! I remembered to take one. Those there are other flus. The white eggs have more-alive microbes and the brown eggs have less-alive kinds - there's a cold one of the staff mages had a few months ago, there's food poisoning, there's the most common kind from healthy intestines - you could get your Sight this fine, you know, I don't do heavy Healing-Gift use apart from Sight for this work."
Shielding, to the Master-level mage, feels like tugging and spinning out threads of mage-energy from the centre of his body, where his reserves are, or sometimes from the nearest ley-line, and then molding them in the air in front of him, crisscrossing, and then focusing and squeezing it somehow, turning the not-fully-formed energy into a thin shell of force.
Belrun will try that. She imagines it like the wall outside of a plant cell, almost.
The mage is really impressed. "That's the tightest shield I've ever seen anyone do on a first try! You probably want more power in it if we're trying to deflect rocks though."
It's sort of like trying to skim and catch water from the stream being poured out of a very high quality teapot; it looks smooth but it's moving fast and dipping into it with her Gift introduces turbulence and, the first time, metaphorically sprays her in the face with a mist of disorganized mage-energy. The second time she can actually pull some into her reserves; keying it to herself, so that it cooperates with her and behaves the way her reserves do, feels a bit like slowly the flow through several layers of cloth. Metaphorically.
Interesting. Okay. She is a weird plant sucking up this water and turning it into her cell wall.
"You're doing great," the mage says to her, "you must have very good natural control." He goes back to focusing mostly on the other new mage, who's having more difficulty.
:I may be able to help you with nodes: Amshalan offers. :Though you should get the hang of ley-lines first, nodes will be a lot more - high-pressure, I suppose:
:I can sort of give you some support, more oomph you can put into controlling it without hurting yourself - it's hard to explain, but if I'm in rapport like this...: It feels sort of like Amshalan's aura of mage-energies wrapping gently around Belrun from behind, steadying her. :In the long run you should probably practice doing without, it's effortful for me, but in an emergency I'm happy to cheat:
:Okay. Depends how hard the ceiling tries to come down on us: She practice slurping from the ley-line, weaving and unweaving the shield, looking at things with mage-sight. She looks over people's brains to shave a few minutes off maging another one if that seems indicated.
They in fact get nearly a candlemark and a half with just the occasional gentle aftershock, enough to startle people but barely rattling the bedframes. People are still up and gathered in the hallway, but yawning.
Then the Foreseer twitches, makes a grunting sound. "Oh no. Big one coming. I hope this is the worst one..."
Dara curls herself up next to Belrun. "At least it's not gryphons... Maybe this is worse than gryphons though."
"Well, how's your Farsight range coming in, can you check how bad the gryphons are?"
"My range is getting better but I'm still all over the place doing it from a map - I can give it a try. Um. If anyone has a map. I didn't get around to grabbing mine."
Belrun certainly doesn't know if anyone has a map. Or tea, does anyone have tea, she has not slept enough.
A map is dug up! No one has tea that's made already, they didn't want to risk going to the kitchen and lighting the cookstove when the ground might start shaking again, but there are skins of water and cups and someone has a packet of tea leaves, if one of the mages can heat the water right here?
Heating water is really simple! The Master-level mage prefers using a kettle like normal people because he's not that powerful; water sops up a lot of heat before it boils and he finds it tiring. If Belrun is pulling from ley-lines no problem then she can probably do it though. He can demonstrate the technique in rapport with Amshalan again.
She steeps tea. Mages get the first batch because subsequent batches will be weaker and they're the ones keeping the ceiling off; other usefully Gifted parties get the second batch.
The ground starts shaking again when she's still heating up the second batch.