"Just this morning? That's wonderful!" Another colossal yawn. "Congratulations, felicitations. You'll understand if I don't come to the celebratory party, unless it's on the beach." She smiles radiantly. "If you want to synergize your two magic sources, I'm afraid I can't do much for you. There are other mystic theurges who can help with that. But for just learning the ropes, it may be easier than you think. Does your first magical tradition use Wisdom as the primary casting ability? A form of druidry, perhaps? That would make it very straightforward."

"Thank you!" She'll have to ask someone later if a party is actually socially obligatory. Nazir doesn't seem like the kind to care (and also seems to be in a terrible hurry most of the time). Maybe she can find Iomedae again. "I don't know if a beach party is, uh, advisable given the local weather, but if I organize one I'll make sure to send you an invitation."

"I'm afraid my tradition isn't a locally known one and doesn't have an Osirian name. I can tell you it relies on an inborn ability, which then requires study and training to use effectively and to master new spells. I don't think wisdom is the most important quality; those would be - mental precision and agility, memory, building mental reflexes and a subconscious understanding of each spell's behavior. And I can see the magic around me, although I don't know enough to recognize or understand all the local traditions' spells yet. Earlier I was loaned a ring of telekinesis as an experiment and I could see the magic it released on command, which let me activate the spell without blindly using the precise hand-motion I was demonstrated. But I have no idea if that has anything in common with using wands. I'm working with Cicerone Nazir, who recommended me to Abadar, and he expected it would be harder than that and that I'd fail the first few times."

Tanya didn't actually tell Nazir about the time she used Iomedae's ring, but Iomedae certainly didn't expect her to fail ten or twenty times. ...did she? If wands are as easy as rings and Iomedae simply didn't care because the ring didn't have limited charges, Tanya is going to kick herself for not trying the wand at least once herself before paying a huge sum for tutoring. Well, too late for it now, but at least she hasn't yet offered Professor Lorelei all of the remaining charges in the wand even if that turns out to be forty-six of them! (She doesn't have to tell Nazir how many tries it takes her to learn, does she?)

Beach parties are not a longstanding tradition in Sothis – the ocean is simply too far north to reach on foot. There is the canal, which has historically been used for swimming on particularly hot days but is mostly dedicated to commerce. The addition of beaches specifically for recreation is a public works project that happened in Lorelei's lifetime, and took place in the metaphorical and literal shadow of Pharaoh Xerbystes I's earlier, grander, and ultimately doomed attempts to do the same. It's not clear what the current pharaoh said or did to convince the water elementals not to destroy the city's beaches this time around, but who can complain? Certainly not the beachgoers.

"You must be casting from Intelligence, rather than Wisdom," Lorelei surmises. "Intelligence is the ability underlying learning and reasoning – Wisdom is ability underlying willpower and intuition. Maintaining the correct spellform will rest on a different faculty than you're used to using. Have you measured your Wisdom? It's often very similar to your Intelligence, in humans." There is a bit of a selection bias, in Intelligence-based magic users, but Tanya already implied she wasn't a wizard, so no need to infer anything from stereotypes just yet.

"I have not. At least, not with any method calibrated to local metrics." Taking a psychometric (?) exam will take some time, but such is life.

(Is Professor Lorelei sending her away on an excuse so she can nap some more? Tanya can hardly blame her if so; from Lorelei's perspective, Tanya will likely still be here tomorrow.)

It would be a waste to force Tanya to go through the indignity of being Dazed repeatedly until they got a sense of her Wisdom score. If it weren't adequate for casting cleric spells, Abadar wouldn't have picked her.

"It's not so hard," she says. "Once you've felt the right way to do it, you just do it that way every time. Now, two of the major divisions between magical schools are magic source and casting ability, which are correlated. Most of the time, spells you learn are cast from Intelligence, spells you receive are cast from Wisdom, and spells that are innate are cast from Charisma. There are many exceptions, but that is the pattern. The third axis is preparation: are you used to picking your spells from a longer list of possibilities during a discrete period of time and casting from that chosen subset of spells later, or can you cast any of your spells spontaneously?"

"Spontaneously." This is technically inaccurate because she could pick up a different model orb to get a slightly different selection of spells, but she's definitely not used to doing that. Inasfar as the local categories apply to her, 'spontaneously' seems a better match. She definitely isn't doing the thing Setareh did where she had to spend an hour preparing to cast the spell that called Djed.

"Entirely different. That can be good for synergy. Or bad, I've heard different things from different mystic theurges. And you wouldn't have had time to prepare spells this morning… but you can see magic! I can work with this."

Lorelei holds one hand straight out, and a blob of magic seeps out of her skin. It behaves the same as the ring, except she's not wearing a ring and the blob has only the barest surface details rather than an intricate structure waiting to be teased out. It also doesn't have any perforations.

"This is an Evocation called Spark," she explains. She rolls her fingers against it and the blob begins to deform along internal fault lines. As the main mass of the spell shrinks the fault lines press out jaggedly until the whole thing looks like a caltrop, at which point it disappears and a single bright spark hops out of her palm. It hits the glass rim of the tank and dissipates.

"You see how the characteristic Evocation anteroventral ridges form without me touching them? And how I need to keep all of my fingers against the spell for the whole casting, never taking them off even for a moment? That is the difference between Wisdom and Intelligence as a casting ability. I am intuiting the final form from the shape of the scaffold, not calculating it."

"I see what you're doing, but that doesn't tell me what would happen if you did something different," Tanya says doubtfully. "I'm afraid the magic tradition in which I'm proficient has less in common with yours than you may have assumed. I don't use my hands to shape the magic, only my mind." The casting implement does most of the work; the shape of each spell is built into it, although 'shape' isn't how Tabya would describe a spell. What she sees and manipulates is a manyvalued scalar field; the 'shape' is simply the region of space where it is disturbed from its background value. The computation orb does the heavy lifting of calculating the precise values according to the user's intention with changes in 'shape' mostly used for targeting.

"When I was loaned the ring of telekinesis I had to use my hands for the first time, and it was easy because I could see what I was doing but it wasn't intuitive, because I have no experience with it. It makes sense that your development of magic went this way, since your mages can't detect magic without casting another spell, but I'm not used to this - manual interface." Hence the need for expert tutoring.

"Oh…"

It almost sounds like Tanya casts exclusively from a pool of spell-like abilities, using her Intelligence rather than her Charisma. Lorelei has never heard of such a thing before, but the world is wide and the oceans deep. Magic never ceases to amaze.

"I'll explain everything from the beginning, then. Let me get you a scroll… Muad! Write out the spell slot chart."

She ducks back underwater and swims away into one of the adjoining tubes.

The halfling starts copying out a numerical chart onto the nearest blackboard, the few rows of which look like this:

She returns a moment later with a sealed ivory tube.

"Do you know how scrolls work?" she asks, after spitting out another fountain of water.

Tanya doesn't recognize this recurrence function.

"I've seen one used," she hedges. "I don't know how they work in any technical sense."

"What you experienced with the Ring of Telekinesis was a spell brought almost all the way to completion. You only have to do the final gesture, say a word programmed into the item by the creator, and the spell is already prepared to go. As prepared casters, we spend an hour every morning at dawn meditating or praying to receive specific spells. The spells we get have a minimal instruction set which differentiates them from raw, unformed magic, but they need more post-processing than your Telekinesis did. Wizards, who can only work with the unformed magic at their disposal, use spellbooks to store and imprint the minimal instruction set before hanging their spells for the day." Another yawn. "It's more tedious than having Abadar do it for you – or Nethys – but it has its advantages. Spell scrolls were a innovation on top of spellbooks: they store the minimal instruction set and the spell scaffold. You can pull a spell right out of a scroll and cast it exactly the way you would normally, if you know how. You didn't get any spells this morning, but I can teach you how to cast one out of a scroll. Same principle. Once you can do that, I'll teach you how to use your wand. S'what you want, right?"

"It is." Tanya doesn't know the price of a spell scroll but Professor Lorelei is the one offering to provide it, so it's presumably not much more expensive than a single wand charge.

The 'minimal instruction set' sounds like what Tanya would simply call 'the spell', i.e. everything about it that does not vary between uses. 'Minimal,' because you want to specify as few things as possible up front so as to leave more options for the moment of casting. This is half the job of the casting implement; the other half is helping you set the right values when casting and to adjust them in real-time. This has the enormous advantage of not having to replace your (very expensive to produce) computation orb to add or modify a spell, and the equally enormous downside of solving partial differential equations in real-time in order to fly. The local spells are nothing short of miraculous in some respects, though, and the tradition that produced them is literally millenia ahead of Earth's. Even if their paradigm is limiting, it's clearly powerful enough.

"A'ight. This is a scroll of Remove Fear. Doesn't make you totally fearless like an Aura of Courage, but it does suppress magical fear, so that's nice. Always know what the scroll does before you use it. The verbal component is 'Mper-er-hoti'."

The scroll inside the scroll case is covered in a thick layer of wax for waterproofing, almost to the point of feeling like a bar of soap. There's meaningless text on the paper, along with a large diagram in the middle that glitters when held up to the light.

"Take this and say the incantation. Don't—" yawn "— don't try to do anything, with it, just touch the spell with your fingers."

Tanya does as instructed, trying to pronounce the sounds as closely as she can since she doesn't know the language they're in.

Evidently her enunciation is correct, because saying the magic words causes the spell to pop right out of the page. It is shaped like a doughnut fifteen centimeters across with a doughnut hole the size of a fist. There are no other visual characteristics to the thing, like the default torus wireframe in a 3D modelling program. It clings to an invisible structure centered around Tanya's right hand, close enough that she can wrap her fingers around it, but if she refuses to touch it the spell simply hovers there like a halo. Like the Telekinesis spell, the only other tangible objects in the universe are Tanya's hands.

Touching it gently reveals that the spell is in motion. The surface is almost still, but there are hidden currents inside that drag against the outer layers in a way that makes the spell vibrate beneath her fingertips. There's also a slight pull back towards the spell scroll, as though it might gravitate there if Tanya were to lose control of it somehow. There is a way to manipulate this spell into a different stable configuration, if she wants to try casting it.

Tanya reports her observations. She can show Professor Lorelei what she's seeing with an illusion, in case there's any difference from what would be expected locally. Not anywhere near perfectly, because she senses the magic throughout and not only at its outer boundary and because the field has multiple scalar values, but this spell has a very well-defined spatial boundary and she can show that and the way it responds to her touch and the changes in the field that can be represented as 'currents'.

...and, based on the way it responds to her touch, she reports her intuition - apparently that is the right word after all? - that, if she presses it more firmly in this direction, the magic will change into a different stable shape, rather than bouncing back or dissipating.

"That's good! What you'll notice is there are multiple different deformations you can pursue at any given stage. If you're familiar with wizard-style arcane casting you'll know there are mathematical underpinnings, but don't worry about that for now. Which of the next possible actions you need to take will change between uses, because they're not orientable with respect to the surface. You can tell which one you want next by the way it feels…"

Lorelei puts her hands over Tanya's and directs her fingers towards a fault line in the spell. It's a unique possible action, just like all the rest of them.

"Turn this one back and forth by a few degrees. Try to figure out what makes it different from all the others. Then turn it all the way around the axis here until it clicks."

She only actually noticed the one!

Tanya fiddles with the other way Professor Lorelei pointed out the spell permits deformation. Can she intuit anything about what will happen if she turns it as indicated without actually doing so? Or tell what makes it different from the first one?

The first way to deform the spell feels big and obvious, the way a bright red button under a plexiglass shield is just waiting to be dramatically slammed. The second way isn't nearly as flashy, but with her fingers directly over it Tanya can feel that there's a ring-shaped cross section that can be easily spun around the long axis of the torus like tightening a locknut on a bolt. There is an ineffable difference between them – the closest you could describe it in words, if you had to, is that the first way of manipulating the spell has a clear endpoint, whereas the second one does not. If the second one is turned as indicated, it will enact a smooth change in the manifold's shape, but not one that feels especially predictable.

Now that it's been pointed out to her there might actually be a few more she didn't notice earlier, just because she didn't know how to look for them? But without touching them directly it's hard to get a sense for what their deal is.

Tanya will touch the magic all around and try to identify any other ways in which it could be manipulated and what makes this one different from the others.

They vary in terms of whether the movement wants to happen or will grudgingly resist, the magnitude of the transformation that will happen afterwards, and several other properties that don't correspond to anything Tanya can really verbalize.

(As soon as this occurs to her it's no longer true: Share Languages informs her that Osirian has a rich vocabulary for describing mathemagical schemas. The fault line indicated by Lorelei is the most ma-at of the lot, and among the least as-fet. These words are completely meaningless in any language that Tanya actually knows how to speak, but they describe concepts that she is actively thinking about and thus drift into her mind as soon as she thinks to look for them.)

The actual mechanical manipulations tend to be twisting, pulling, pressing, or massaging. There's always one clear option for each point on the torus for what's supposed to happen, although you could conceivably try to fight it by tearing through the surface with your fingers.

She does see how that one way of affecting the spellform is different, but she struggles to put it into words -

No, actually, she knows the perfect word for it. In Osirian. She can't translate it, can't define or describe either the word or the pattern she's noticed using any other words, she just knows that this is the right word for it. Apparently that's what happens when you have knowledge of a language magically copied into your brain instead of learning it the slow way; some connections will still be missing.

"I think I'm noticing something different about this transformation... Also, I have Osirian via Share Language and it's informing me this is the most ma-at of the transformations I've found but I don't actually know what that means. Using granted or stored magic without understanding what I'm doing is - a novel experience."

What does it mean to understand how a spell operates, anyway? There are always more layers of physics to dig into. She has a spell that catalyzes synthesis of methamphetamine and she knows how to adjust it but that doesn't mean she has a working model of quantum chemistry in her head to explain how the spell actually does what it does. Thus philosophically fortified, Tanya rotates the ring all the way around the axis. Is there a natural stopping point to this?

The ring rotates just under 230° before the entire torus reacts by sprouting little knobby protrusions everywhere. She could keep going, theoretically, but that seems like a natural stopping point. All of the other pivot points are dragged out of alignment by the deformation, resulting in a new set of joints with a similar set of properties.