"It's free because it doesn't cost me any money?" Lorelei hazards, sounding confused. "The scrolls are expensive, so if you use one you need to pay for the replacement. That's only fair, right? And I wouldn't regularly teach someone the absolute basics because they'd have spent months learning how to do it without Detect Magic as a racial ability! Why should I waste your time by not teaching you? I haven't even taught you anything interesting yet."

"Your time costs money? Uh, I suppose your salary as a professor here might already cover that?" Maybe she's a stereotypical absent-minded professor, tenured and tending to forget money exists so long as cash isn't visibly changing hands. Normally she'd want to use her time for more interesting research and not teaching novices, but right now she just wants to SLEEP and Tanya feels bad taking advantage of that. On the other hand, insisting someone take payment can also be insulting! "Anyway, I'm grateful for your instruction! And I'd like to go on."

"I've heard different things about that, from the cicerones. Some of them say time costs money, and that's why laborers get their silver at the end of the day come rain or shine. Others say that time doesn't matter at all, you only pay for what you get. That always made more sense to me. Back when I was—" yawn "— an adventurer, we got paid by the hit, not for the hours we spent hunting. One time I tried to find out which was right by reading the Order of Numbers, but it was no help at all! I got as far as the story about men trying to guess what type of hat they're wearing before I gave up… that's not important. You can pay me what you think is fair, once you cast True Appraisal on yourself."

Lorelei hands her the scroll of Blindness/Deafness.

"This spell renders the target blind or deaf. Not both. The default in the scroll is blindness, because if you're casting it in a hurry that's probably what you want, but there are situations where deafness is more useful. If it goes off by accident it will almost always hit you with the opposite of what you were trying to accomplish, so in that sense it's quite safe. Anyways, don't make it go off by accident, undoing it is a pain. I want you to start casting it – there's no somatic component; the verbal component is 'Typhlos' – and try to halt the spell at the second stage. If it gets to the part where it looks like it's melting, stop it immediately the way you practiced."

Tanya almost slaps her forehead in frustration. Of course the answer to Nazir's test / riddle of 'how much to pay for a service' is 'however much Abadar's spell writes into your head, that's what I gave it to you for'! Abadar is running a tight ship and his junior employees don't get to authorize expenses on their own! And he will make sure to also tell the correct answer to Professor Lorelei when Tanya pays her with wand charges, to prevent Tanya from claiming the amount owed is too low and pocketing the difference!

Tabya is terribly embarrassed that she didn't realize this on her own, and really hopes Professor Lorelei will kindly forget this embarrassing episode. Perhaps if she applies herself diligently to her studies and doesn't mention payment again until she finally casts the wand's spell, they can both pretend to forget this little interlude?

"Typhlos."

Blindness/Deafness is a manifold of genus 3, which is to say that it's a pretzel rather than a doughnut. Apparently this renders it significantly more powerful. Trying to manipulate Blindness/Deafness once it's out of the scroll demands Tanya's full attention and then some – she can hold it in place without dropping it, but it's melting into a series of sinister organic shapes uncomfortably fast and shows no sign of slowing down between state transitions.

Oh no it's melting! Tanya attempts to abort the spell by throwing it away.

This is another spell-related-action that can probably be done with just your mind after some practice, but throwing it away does cancel it. The pretzel reverts to its initial state and flies back into the scroll.

"Using a spell higher than your own circle is challenging," Lorelei notes. "The scroll provides the spell, which you otherwise wouldn't have, and your spell scaffold isn't developed enough to hold one comfortably. Try again?"

Tanya tries again, with extreme care, focusing on how the spell seems to react to her mind. It's normal to have to train for a long time with a new spell to perfect it, and then to keep getting better for a long time with experience. No risks are taken without necessity, because they will compound over tens and hundreds of hours. Given enough 'safe' failures one will eventually result in an explosion.

Explosions are painful, expensive, and, yes, often temporarily blinding or deafening, but worst of all they constitute a public failure. Tanya would rather fail to learn bonus material in the allotted time than waste the scroll and the Professor's time.

Of course, she would much rather succeed. And she does have rather good control over (her own) magic. So: can she get this spell to behave without melting or exploding anything?

Magic is amenable to practice and persistence, and repeatedly mucking around with Blindness/Deafness provides a great deal of insight into how the spell works. It obeys the same rules of algebraic geometry and fluid dynamics as the first-circle spells, though the additional homology groups have introduced new and more complicated homeomorphism rules. It's also clear that Blindness/Deafness and Forbid Action share a feature that obviates needing to cast the spell with your hands, like a spring-loaded mechanism that jumps into action as soon as a button is pressed. There's no obvious reason why Remove Fear couldn't also have this feature, although at Tanya's level of understanding there could be hidden engineering constraints.

Unfortunately, for all her skill at controlling (her own) magic, the most she can do with Blindness/Deafness is slow its progression to a crawl. Even that much takes everything she's got. Tanya is one micron shy of being able to halt it before the melting starts, but she's approaching the final hurdle asymptotically.

There's something holding her back. Professor Lorelei's first instinct is to say that Tanya's Wisdom is too low to prepare third-circle divine spells, and trying to change Blindness over to Deafness is leaning on her nonexistent training in using magic devices. It's also possible that Tanya is hampered by her arcane spellcasting tradition, in which case she might need a mystic theurge's perspective. Or maybe Abadar disapproves of Deafness, or the phase of the moon is wrong, or any number of fiddly details. There's a reason why learning how to do this is normally staged over years of practice.

But Tanya isn't normal, and neither is Lorelei.

"Do you mind if I examine your other magic?" she asks, after a particularly grueling failed attempt. "I think you should be able to do this; starting a spell but not being able to stop it is not a natural skill ceiling for mages. You might be relying on good training from yesterday that's leading you astray today."

Tanya has no operational reasons to deny her. Indeed, since she has kept using her spells throughout (she needs to fly just to reach the top of the aquarium to be face-to-face with the Professor!), she has no idea what Lorelei may have observed already or recorded for further analysis except that it's no more than anyone else with a little education to watching Tanya in public can learn.

But she remembers that observing her flight for half an hour was enough to pay a burleev who would have otherwise charged an estimated five hundred scarabs. That they never learned how much more it might have been worth to him. That she is using the granted magic of an alghollthu who knows the price of everything at market because he hands out a price-setting spell to his employees. She isn't about to make the same mistake twice in a row.

"Should I be able to use the wand now? I'd like to confirm that I'm done with the thing I came here for, and then I'll have the rest of the day free and can spend it learning more complex casting."

"Eh." Lorelei makes a so-so gesture. "Wands internalize everything about casting a spell, including the incantation – there's a word you have to say, but it's more of a password or a safety lock than a functional requirement, sometimes you can ignore it. They're not exactly like rings though; you still need to make the spell undergo the right transformations using your mind. Practicing with your own spells or a scroll is easier for most people, since you can use your hands and your voice interactively… you could try the wand and see how it goes?" This will definitely waste charges but it's Tanya's wand to use as she likes. It might even be diagnostically helpful: if the problem is the spell circle being too high then True Appraisal should be easier to handle than Blindness/Deafness.

Tanya hasn't actually failed to safely abort Blindness/Deafness yet, and the wand is supposed to be easier than that. At worst she'll waste a single charge, and Nazir said he expected much worse than that.

"Dokimaze."

The wand is enveloped by a magical doughnut.

Like the ring, the wand behaves similarly to a living organism with the power to host spells on behalf of the wielder. Unlike the ring, it still expects Tanya to do the work of taking the spell from its base state to completion— without touching it. She can still see the spell, but her fingers pass right through without disturbing the magic or providing tactile feedback. The properties necessary to ascertain the next step are… inside the wand, somehow. Between that and being able to see it you can figure out what to do pretty quickly.

Actually doing it is much harder. It takes a heroic effort to get the doughnut to wobble its way towards phase two, at which point it spontaneously twists into a figure eight and locks up.

"I assume it's not supposed to do that." Can Tanya flick it away and try again or is it ignoring her hands in this regard as well? Maybe if she tries to swish the wand to flick it off?

Swish-and-flick causes the magic to go away!

Then the problem isn't her spell circle, or her Wisdom.

"True Appraisal can only affect you, unless you know the trick to convincing spells to target things they ordinarily wouldn't. Try again, but point the tip at yourself while you're doing it."

Tabya has been treating all these spells as deadly weapons and not pointing anything at anyone, but of course some of them are meant for civilian use, even if not any of those Professor Lorelei has in scrolls. Tanya tries pointing the wand at herself. ...at the tip of her foot.

"Dokimaze?"

The spell doesn't lock up this time. Also a safety feature? It didn't have to do that.

However, even though aiming at her own foot makes using the wand physically possible, the amount of concentration it takes to do anything at all saps Tanya's attention away from the spell properties that are supposed to be informing her choices. Her confidence that the spell is being unfolded correctly is at least an order of magnitude lower than is advisable for handling something that could theoretically explode.

There are choices to make? How is she supposed to tell what they are without touching the spell? She has a sourceless intuition for the ma-at of rotations and translations, but she only knows where she can apply them by touching the spell! She wasn't studying what patterns in the magic field identified these points! And the intangible spell is barely responding to her mental efforts to transform it, presumably because she isn't trying to transform it in the right (or even wrong-but-permitted) way!

No wonder Nazir thought it might take her ten or twenty failures, corresponding to presumably many hundreds or thousands of attempts, to master this wand. Scrolls are so much easier! Why don't wands come with instruction manuals attached?! ...this is another test, isn't it?

(She flicks it away again.)

"Professor, I'm not sure how to intuit what the possible transformations here are, and I expect trying things at random is unlikely to go well."

That's more in line with what you'd expect from an acolyte learning to use magic items for the first time! Having Arcane Sight can only take non-wizards so far.

"I suspect your problem is that you're exerting yourself too hard. You're putting so much effort into effecting the change that everything you could feel inside your own magic scaffold is eluding you. Like throttling someone in the heat of battle, you—" yawn "— feel their pulse but can't count their heartbeats."

Most Nethysians would default to casting Owl's Wisdom in this situation. It would work, in Lorelei's opinion, but it wouldn't solve the problem. Why use brute strength to smash down a door when you can unlock it?

"Do you have a focus? It'd look like this." She makes a crossed-arcs gesture with her fingers. "I don't think True Appraisal needs one, and even if it did the wand would suffice, but it's not called a focus for nothing. If you hold it in your other hand it might give you enough edge to finish the spell."

Arcane sight would take her all the way if anyone bothered to tell her what she was supposed to look for! She doesn't even know what ma-at means!!!

And - oh yes, the thing Nazir gave her, the one he said was necessary for 'some' spells and totally failed to indicate was still helpful for some others, like the one in the wand he gave her at the same time. She has that thing! (Tanya is coming to rather dislike Cicerone Nazir's style of teaching-slash-testing new employees.)

She gets out the little medallion with the crossed curved lines on it, and holds it in her other hand as she says "Dokimaze" a third time. Does this surface another bit of knowledge Abadar installed in her brain as part of granting her spells? Or does it interact directly with the wand's spell, or perhaps cause her magically-granted knowledge of language to surface some more useful details?

The divine focus is not connected to Abadar per se. The answering entity on the other end is as much a part of Abadar as a smartphone is a part of its owner. It exists solely to perform magical calculations that are too burdensome for mortals to handle, and has exactly enough sentience necessary to accomplish this task.

(The emergency load balancer, which comes online if more than 0.0001% of Abadar's clerics initiate spells within ten microseconds of one another, is significantly more sentient, but even it does not typically respond to prayers.)

Not all cleric spells require a divine focus. Humanoids are reasonably wise and dexterous, which puts a great deal of the desired magical possibilityspace within their intellectual and physical grasp. Conversely, however, the divine focus is also useful for casting spells that don't strictly need one. Every spell has at least a few components that it can handily simplify. This is a useful crutch for aspiring clerics— provided they are ready to have the amplified signal fed directly into their limbic system.

The holy symbol is a direct line to God's own switchboard. Casting the spell feels exactly the same for the first half-second, and then manipulating the spell inside the wand becomes much easier.

This is accompanied by an unusual sensation that Tanya's brain elects to translate as "pain (?)", which causes her to miss the endpoint of the first transformation so hard that the spell disappears. The part of her foot the spell was aimed at feels like it's been shocked.