Nod. 

"Randi, is that all for now? Cam, we should figure out if and how you can get loose from magical traps before you go off to Sunhame." 

"I agree completely. How do they work, in - general nontechnical terms?"

"That's all we needed you for right now, Cam," Randi confirms, absently. "Karis and I will review the map - thank you - Karis, we should try to think of other things like that which he could make for us, intelligence is even more important than weapons here..." 

Savil ushers Cam out of the meeting-room and points them down the hall. "Hmm. There's a pretty wide range, but most trap-spells - let's say eight in ten kinds - work from physical force, like a mage-barrier - I'll show you one in the Work Room." 

"Alrighty then." Follow follow.

The room is stone-lined and seems completely sound-isolated, all noise from the rest of the Palace cutting off when Savil shuts the door. 

She raises a hand and shapes a physical mage-barrier, forming a sort of bubble over a corner of the room. 

"There. See if you can, er, get through that." 

He produces a Koosh ball on the far side of the barrier. "Well, I can conjure through it, that's promising..." He goes up and pokes it.

It feels like hard tough plastic - not quite as totally-rigid as glass, but with very little give - and also like it's humming or buzzing very slightly under his touch. 

Can he conjure something that intersects it, like, oh, a stick?

He can! 

Savil makes a startled "oof" sound. "Wow! I felt that. It - you didn't destabilize the barrier, but you...tunnelled through it? Like you were cutting through it with a much stronger spell than mine." 

"Huh, okay, so -" A bit of plastic pipe, hollow in the middle?

That one neatly slices and divides Savil's barrier into the main part and the little circle inside the pipe! Which immediately destabilizes, since she's not expecting this, and throws out some random sparks and static in the process. 

Cam sticks his arm through the pipe.

- Savil reacts as fast as she can and tries to block the interior with a new mage-barrier, but it's not very well anchored yet and sort of crumples when he tries to shove through it. 

"I could've maybe stopped you doing that with more practice," she says. 

"Hm. Does it matter how strong the material is..." Soap foam?

This seems to work just as well at making a hole in the barrier as stronger substances! 

Once it's there, though, Savil has a much easier time just shoving it out of the way and reforming the missing bit. 

How about something elastic, appearing squeezed to a narrow line but bouncing out into a cylinder as soon as it exists?

That behaves a lot more like a spell exerting force against someone else's spell! Savil can push back against the force, and squish and pinch it back to the narrow line, but this requires putting significantly more energy into the spell. 

"Okay, so I don't straightforwardly beat the spell but I can make it put in a lot of work - there's no reason I couldn't do hundreds of those at once - and that'll probably do the trick?"

"Good! I expect so. Want me to test a few variants on you, just to check?" 

"Sure."

"All right, this is the simplest one." 

Savil closes her eyes, concentrates in preparation for about thirty seconds, and then casts the spell. It's very similar to the original mage-barrier, except for the fact that it snaps tight around Cam's body like cling wrap, making it impossible to move. 

And if he covers himself in little barbs of frost?