:I guess? I mean, maybe he would have been more alarmed if I'd decided I needed to organize a gryphon strike and hold loud protests but it turned out he wasn't actually that far out of line:

:...That's good, I guess. What was less bad than you thought?:

:The way the gryphons described it made it sound like he was making medical decisions for baby ones instead of their parents but when I checked the handbook it turned out that they have the same policy about humans, and the only difference is humans aren't always at Healers' in the first place and gryphons are since so many of their babies are going to need some help to start out. Also some of them have in fact flown off to do their own thing already, it could just stand to be clearer to all concerned that this is allowed. I still think he should cut it out with breeding them but they didn't seem super urgent about it, though I'll talk to more of them over the course of the book and find out exactly how hard I want to push on that, if he doesn't back off on his own. Plus I might wind up with his actual notes on the spell since the hertasi are going to be ferrying me gryphon-related materials and then I won't have to hide in the eyrie to be able to alternately source the spell for them:

:Huh. That's... I don't know if it should be surprising, but I guess I'd've expected he'd - need more persuading to change his mind on how he's done things for years and years?: 

:I think he's mostly a little careless, not, like, philosophically in favor of being mean to gryphons. And it's only a little, he did most things right, the person who made hertasi was less nice:

:Mmm. How were they less nice?: 

:They had... drafts. Nonpeople drafts, which was smart, but also people ones, maybe to test for personality. And sterilized them when they weren't how they wanted them and the book doesn't say where they went:

:I...guess I'd see why he'd want to do that for getting his project the way he wanted, but it does seem pretty bad to do to people: 

: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?