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.

Urtho is also very excited! He's been - not incredibly on top of meeting with her in person - but he eagerly schedules lunch with her to discuss the book outline. 

She can lay it all out for him, and itemize her remaining uncertainties about which of a few possible ways to do it and what to include or omit.

Urtho is so pleased with how neat and organized she's gotten all of it, and praises her work warmly! He has thoughts on things to include or omit, but they're very indecisive rambly thoughts. 

He doesn't make any comment on her inclusion of the incomplete outline for the gryphon reproduction spell. (Azabel was not, at any point, able to figure out the intricacies of it from further notes.) 

Well, if he wanted to just hand it over he's had lots of chances, now.

She writes down all his opinions and finishes her outline and gets underway on drafting proper. And asks Skan to keep an ear out for moments she might hide in the eyrie, if anyone's likely to be granted the option to have a kid soon.

Skan will totally do that! 

Once she's properly underway on the draft and reading through in more detail, it's - notable that the section on the design of the gryphon reproductive system, which was apparently complicated to figure out given their mixed-origins anatomy, is very detailed and also...does not contain any kind of cross-referencing with the spell described elsewhere for gryphon fertility. 

Hm, that could just be him not being very good at crossreferencing but it could be that they're usually just low fertility not no fertility, or something? Or they might have a heat cycle thing, cats do. Or something seasonal? Or both? How does he reconcile this -

It looks like there's something to the low-not-no fertility aspect for males specifically. Their resting body temperature is too high? (It looks like this is less a deliberately planned restriction, and more just because, as flying creatures, they have a higher metabolic rate and run hotter than the lion source stock.) 

The females...have some sort of mechanism for going into heat. It doesn't look like a seasonal or cycling thing, though. She probably needs to read the section on their endocrine system to figure out what would trigger it. 

Well, she will need to do that ANYWAY, so what does it say.

It looks like a strong upswing in reproduction-related hormones is triggered by the female...fasting for a day and then gorging herself on as much meat as she can hold? This would need to be a day or so before an actual mating attempt for the female gryphon to be fully fertile. 

Huh.

She isn't going to IMMEDIATELY run and tell all the gryphons because it would be very obvious she did that but presumably Skan will tell her if somebody's about to ask Urtho for the spell and then she will hear about it if he says no.

There aren't enough gryphons for gryphon baby requests to come up all that often, but a fortnight later Skan very eagerly goes looking for Azabel, bouncing with excitement. "Urtho'ss doing the sspell! My parentss' friendss, the oness who weren't mature enough lasst time they assked. I guess Urtho changed hiss mind." 

"Ooh - I think the spell isn't strictly necessary but it would still be good to know, have you found a good place for me to hide?"

"Yess, I looked! ...Iss it not? How, I am confussed." 

"It looks like it's not actually impossible for gryphons to have babies without the spell - which makes sense, if you think about it, he had to use actual animals and none of the animals need magic to have babies, the spell has to do something to the biology involved and I think you could do the something without the spell. But the spell's probably easier. Where should I go and when?"

"Tomorrow night. I can sshow you where now, while no one'ss watching it." 

"Yeah, that's a good plan. And I should show up before he does."