:Yeah. I think he should've hired an Animal Mindspeaker:

:...Oh, right, that'd be clever. Did Urtho do drafts that weren't people?:

:I don't think so but maybe I'll be surprised by his notes!:

:Maybe! Are you going to be allowed to tell me things you learn from them?: 

:He didn't say, but I'm going to... write a book... so it would be weird if I couldn't:

:Mmm. Well, I'm excited to hear about it then: 

:You can look in on my book progress whenever you like:

Ma'ar thanks her and heads off.

It takes either Urtho or his hertasi an entire week to organize his notes, but after that interval, an initial box of notes is delivered to Azabel's house along with a polite note from Urtho saying that these are from his earliest work, ten years' worth, but before he started trying to create people-gryphons in earnest. 

In her evenings she starts sifting through them and turning them into a usable outline, and between classes she takes up interviewing random gryphons about their early lives.

Random gryphons find her questions kind of odd, but agree to answer them!

The cohort of gryphons raised by hertasi in Urtho's creche mostly seem to recall quite happy childhoods. Some are still in touch with their surrogate parents, though on average they do seem to describe less strong attachment than most humans would have to their families, adoptive or not. Some recall being treated for serious medical problems as babies, which was sometimes painful or difficult but doesn't seem to have been too traumatic for most of them. 

Urtho's notes require a lot of sifting. There are some incredibly gorgeous and well-done sketches of gryphon anatomy, and a lot of tables of figures, where it's sometimes very hard to figure out what the figures are records of.

She can find plenty of references to gryphon reproduction, including a detailed diagram of their internal reproductive organs, and eventually with a lot of digging plus asking the hertasi, she can turn up a one-page specification of what's...probably the spell that makes females fertile? 

Notation for complicated magic workings is tricky and not actually standardized all the way, and the instructions do not at all provide enough detail clearly enough that she could figure out how to cast the spell herself. 

She copies them anyway - maybe with more exposure to Urtho's work it'd be usable, and at least it would clarify a covert espionage visit so she'd only have to do one of it. She can't copy the drawings and marks the ones she wants to include with colorful bookmarks to find them again later for copying into woodcut by a skilled artist once this goes to print. Mystery numbers get different bookmark colors till she finds what they're for and indexes them.

If she writes to Urtho with progress updates, she can get clarification on some of the mystery numbers, once his memory is jogged on something specific he seems to know what everything means and where further information could be found. 

Ma'ar regularly asks how it's going. He's so impressed by the drawings. 

"They're really good, aren't they? Makes me want to take a drawing class." Personally she is more impressed by her own heroic indexing efforts but she does not need to take a class on that.

Her heroic indexing effort is mostly invisible to Ma'ar, who isn't first seeing the messy un-sorted version. 

Their current session ends before she's finished reviewing everything. Urtho ends up coming to several more of their discussion seminars, and praises both of them for their contributions; Azabel still speaks up more, but Ma'ar is getting a bit braver by the end of the class. 

He learns a clever self-defence spell, a soft force-net that pins someone without any risk of injury, and he thinks it could probably be done as a trap-spell built on a focus, and maybe he and Azabel should figure out how to make that so she can wear it in case she ends up under attack and can't set-command the attacker for whatever reason? 

She supposes this is a reasonable side project, though it is not an especially high priority for her since she is not frequently attacked and isn't typically in, like, a boat, where a pirate might attack her and drown if carelessly set-commanded. She will help him out with it especially when she is between batches of notes. And go shopping for nice foci.

Ma'ar is delighted to do most of the work. He thinks that Azabel shares Urtho's inexplicable trait of not thinking very much about all the kinds of possible danger that could happen to her. Also he can try to make it a pretty piece of jewelry too, because why not. 

He decides to take the weather-magic class with the next session; it's been nine months of training and enough food, and he's grown several inches and also has noticeably more magical strength and gets tired less quickly. He thinks he'd like to take a second practical magic class, too; is Azabel particularly interested in doing a class together? 

She could go either way, what's on the menu this term?

Classes on offer this session for their level include: 

- More advanced illusion work (Ma'ar does not want to do this one).

- Long-distance communication with magic.

- Magical construction techniques.

- A more advanced class on wards for various kinds of detection

She wants long-distance communication and also advanced illusions! She will talk to her dad and get better at all the fiddly spells.

Ma'ar will happily sign up for the long-distance communication class with her, and maybe take the wards one next session. 

Oh good, it's nice to have a study buddy. She might take wards next term too if there's nothing better then.

The session gets off to an uneventful start. Ma'ar, after his first day of the weatherworking class, commiserates with Azabel about how she really had a point, it's exhausting. Fortunately the dining hall doesn't limit how much food students can eat. 

The hertasi finish sorting through Urtho's incredibly copious notes, and bring Azabel the final box worth. 

Oooh, the end is in sight! She's very excited about having the outline done and finally being able to do a proper entire draft of her BOOK.