There's someone who's watching someone else who's particularly busy!

She can go and watch too. What are they watching, exactly?

The particularly busy someone else is holding a... thing... made of several wood pieces connected to each other by string and frowning, looking from a notebook to the whatever-it-is and back. Someone else turns a page for them.

Some kind of sculpture, or possibly a tool of one sort or another. Huh.

She quietly asks the other person, "What's this, if you don't mind me asking?"

"No clue," she whispers back, "he's been at it for an hour now and none of us have any idea what it is."

"...Huh. Well, I'm really, really new at this, I don't know what three quarters of the stuff here is."

"—oh, are you here to join up?"

"Yeah. Unless there's more requirements than 'be an enchanter and want to actually study it'?"

"Nah, that's all." She notices Kaede. "Is your friend joining, too?"

"Oh, no, I'm not an enchanter," Kaede says.

"'Kay." Back to Gren. "Wanna do it now, what do you know about it, how long've you been one...?"

"Like a week. I have - an amulet that's way too bright, and a toy carriage. I don't really want to go crazy experimenting before having half a clue what I'm doing."

"Yeah, reasonable—more level-headed than I was when I Expressed, I did all sorts of useless and inefficient stuff."

Shrug. "I hung out with some scholar types a couple years ago, ran errands for them. They beat prudence and planning into me through the power of words. I did make a tree branch fly around a bit but I'm not going to keep giving it mana now. Well. Probably not."

"A tree branch," she laughs, and the person turning the notebook's pages glares at her. She purses her lips and motions for Gren and Kaede to follow.

Gren, at least, follows. "I thought it would be more like riding a horse than doing it to a chair or something."

"Yeah that totally makes sense. It can carry you? Does it have any settings, how fast does it go?"

"It reacted to how much weight was on it, and was controlled by leaning forward or back or left or right. Tricky and dangerous in hindsight..."

"Past tense? You don't have it anymore?"

"Not going to use it anymore. Going to make a better one, eventually. It's out of mana and I left it in the wilderness somewhere, a few miles out."

"Out of mana already?"

Say it was extremely inefficient and you tried to make it need less mana but ended up making it store less mana, suggests Kaede. Artefacts start with a certain amount of mana as soon as they're created.

"I think maybe it was really really inefficient. It took a surprising amount to keep it going long enough to get to a town when it started flagging. And I tried to make it use less mana, but I think maybe that just made it start with less or something."

"Huh. Well, we have people who can teach you how to do stuff to start with."

"It's different for everyone, yeah? How much can you teach, like, best practices?"

"A lot, even if it's different for everyone there's a bunch of stuff that transfers, if you learn how to best think about it when you do it."

"Having a better control scheme than leaning, for example."

"Right! And it's all fundamentally about sufficiently descriptive—descriptions. Lots of details and stuff. How you organise them in your head is important but more marginal compared to that."