"See you," she says. And she goes to find Skan and show him and get a ride so she can show Ranara too.

Skan is so excited! He bounces around in a circle and asks her to show him again and it takes him a couple of minutes to calm down enough that he can fly her home. 

Awwww, Skan is so good.

Ma'ar doesn't contact her with Mindspeech before their next class. He turns up on time - in fact, earlier, not waiting until the final second this time - and looking better rested. He nods to her and smiles a little. 

She waves. Maybe if they keep incidentally talking whenever he needs stuff for a while he will eventually actually like her as a person and they can be friends.

This lesson they're doing shields! Well, mage-barriers to be exact, Snowstar instructs them to start with a disk of force about an arm-length across and a few feet in front of them, and once he's given instructions and then he and the new teaching assistants have made the rounds to poke their barriers and give feedback, they're paired off. Snowstar lets them choose partners rather than assigning them. 

Ma'ar edges over to Azabel; he's pretty sure she at least won't throw their soft leather balls too hard on purpose, or throw rocks at him instead. 

Sure that works. She does ask Snowstar if she should specifically do the disk instead of her usual omnidirectional eggshell.

"...Huh. You figured out close personal shields on your own? It is worth knowing this kind of mage-barrier as well, since sometimes you want to cover something other than yourself, but generally this is also considered easiest. Show me the kind you usually do?"

She demonstrates.

He stares intently at her for thirty seconds. "Interesting! That is rather good, I am impressed, and you will have a head start when we reach that lesson. For now I think you had better practice the barrier, though." 

"Okay." And she makes a barrier, like a shield - a thin, wooden shield - only one that grew that way, not boards with cracks between - hm, not wood, it doesn't have to be thick. A leaf.

Ma'ar watches her intently. "...Are you ready?" He holds up the little leather ball. 

"Yeah!"

He tosses it. Gently, the first time, barely enough to strain her shield at all. It bounces off and rolls. "Was that all right?" he asks, anxious. 

"Yeah, that was fine - you can probably throw harder if you have decent aim, so we can see if it's good if something hits it real good -"

"I think I have good aim." He tries throwing it substantially harder. 

She keeps a close eye on her shield to see what it does - does it flex or shudder in place or hold perfectly still -

It flexes a bit and also the whole thing shudders a tiny bit closer to her, and she can feel the strain on it, it's not quite like how pressure against her hands would feel but it's similar in some metaphorical way. 

Huh. Can she - plant the leaf on a stem in the ground, so it'll sway back into place - she nudges the ball back to him. "Try again?"

He throws it again, bam right at the middle of the shield (he has very good aim). The shield flexes again but this time sways back, and Ma'ar smiles at her. "That was better!" 

She giggles - but she wants to fly, and to be able to do all her stuff up there, what if the stem doesn't actually touch the ground and she just insists to it that it can still do its job -

If she just leaves it hanging, this does not work. She can - anchor the stem to herself, sort of, focus in particular on the power flowing from her to the shield, let the shield share in her sense of being grounded in something solid - which, in fact, is only metaphorically about what her feet are resting on... 

"Hang on a sec." Can she make a shield parallel to the ground just ohhh an inch up or so and STAND ON IT.

It's definitely a lot weirder to try that; the thing that happens by default is that she stops being grounded properly and then wobbles a lot and expends a lot of energy. If she focuses in just the right way, though, she can center and ground and then stay 'grounded' even as she steps onto the barrier.