"Yo Fin! Who're your friends?" someone calls when he passes by them.

"New person and friend-of-new-person."

    "Cool! Nicetomeetcha!"

"That was Sakuk," he explains. "Nice guy." He reaches a room at the back and says, "Wait here."

"I'm going to forget all these names, I suspect. But sure."

"Yeah, there's lots of us, but it's alright, no one'll be offended if you ask their names again." Into the room he goes, out of the room holding a stone disk with a glass screen on it. "Touch this."

"...Uh, what's it do?" And what does her copysense say it does, if it's in any way discernible?

"It'll save your fingerprints."

That's exactly what it does.

"Cool! Clever way of recognizing people." Hand, screen.

It glows warmly. Then he touches it with his hand and types some things on a keyboard that appears there and then—" You're all set. Welcome to the Guild of Enchanters."

"Much obliged. Know anyone who's got free time, or a good book to reference? I want to walk through my lantern with someone to get a feel for doing enchanting properly, even if it's probably pretty simple."

"You should probably just look around for anyone who looks free," he says.

"Actually I'm free," says the girl. "—I never did introduce, did I? I'm Tomae."

"Hello, Tomae. I'm Grendyne. I've got to go in - about an hour and a half? But that should be plenty of time to start, right?"

"Right! Plenty of time." She eyes Kaede. "Trade secrets. You should shoo."

Kaede laughs. "I'll shoo. Meet you outside in an hour fifteen?"

"See you soon, Kaede!"

"Alright, do you have something you want to turn into a lantern with you?"

"No, not yet. I was thinking just a nice, solid cylinder of rock or wood or metal."

"Hmmm... we might have something like that out back..." He goes out back. He returns with one of that.

"Nice. Right size to hold in one hand, and it has a flat end at the top." She flips the notebook around. "I was thinking, two modes and a brightness choice. Shine in all directions, shine in only a cone out the flat top, and off."

"Okay so the trick here is to be as descriptive as possible about the things you actually care about and the ways they're detectable. It's tempting to both try to leave it up to the magic and to try to specify things like the specific position of the light millimetrically. Since you're just starting out it's best to not think too much about implementation details."

"Brightness increases faster the brighter it already is because we see a bigger difference between one and two than nine and ten... Only gives off the visible parts of light, not the other kinds... Controlled by tapping spots on the base, I'll carve symbols into them..."

"That's the spirit. Write down a complete description and I'll look it over?"

She writes it down in the style of a military equipment manual.

Name: Lantern Prototype

Purpose: Multi-use light source

Controls: .....

Performance Characteristics: .....

And so on.

That is... surprisingly good for a newcomer!

Shrug. "They made me read a lot of manuals."

"Heh."

But he has criticisms! This bit here should be better specified, this is ambiguous (which will still get the correct intended result, it'll just cost more mana to), this one's pretty good but should perhaps be less detailed until she has more practice doing this to know how to best translate that detail into magic instructions...

She rewrites it thoroughly. Takes style notes even.

And she's carefully keeping track of all the enchanting going on around her.

...She can feel her magic starting to generalize, instead of copying specific traits. It's a very strange feeling. Never before has she encountered so much ultimately similar magic at once and it's kind of distracting, really.

Similar in a way, very different in another—they're all different takes, this is like what magic would look like if each person there had the concept of what an enchanter was explained to them in general terms and then had to decide what it'd actually look like in practice.