That's... not how anything works? If Tanya ever missed her aim or lost a spell because of a (small) amount of unexpected pain, she'd become a laughingstock!

Apparently, rigorous training to keep moving her body and controlling her magic through disabling amounts of pain does not help with controlling her thoughts. The part of her brain that interacts with this granted magic isn't one she has had to exercise before.

How annoying. This may take a few more tries to master.

Is her leg functioning normally? Does it feel like another weird, externally mediated misunderstanding in her brain (presumably fine if it passes quickly) or an actual electric shock to her foot (need to check for skin marks) or something in between (peripheral nervous system damage, hard to heal, potential lifelong impact)?

Tanya remains undamaged by the incident, and with the spell dropped the pain (?) coming from the divine focus is gone. The shock sensation doesn't seem to have been electrical. She is definitely under a spell effect, like the one giving her the ability to speak Osiriani, but it's not immediately clear what it's doing or how long it'll last.

Lorelei is wearing a big gaudy ring that wasn't there two seconds ago, set with a two-tone opal (half black and half white, like the uniforms). She would normally allow her students to come to their own conclusions about incidents like this, but given the specific spell effect that Tanya is working on it would be counterproductive to let her think it through entirely on her own.

"That was a misfire. Don't read into it too much, it happens to everyone."

"It attached some magical effect to me," Tanya points out. "If it's not the intended one, can you tell what it does? ...what happened is that I felt a sudden sourceless pain and it distracted me at a crucial moment from directing the next transformation. I don't know what I did wrong to cause the pain, though, and while I should train to avoid losing control over this novel, uh, mental motion it probably wasn't an intended part of the process?"

It was painful? Brandishing a holy symbol hurt her? Lorelei studies Tanya's upper body for a moment, just to make sure she's actually breathing. She is alive, right? Or at least politely pretending?

"It's not supposed to be painful. Even for spells that need a focus, it shouldn't be painful. You don't seem to be injured…"

What does Detect Magic think of the outcome here?

Tanya's aura is one of faint Divination, faint Divination (transposed), and moderate Universal.

… okay.

Lorelei casts Guidance again. "It's an inverted True Appraisal. I don't know what the transposition matrix for that spell looks like in practice but it'll probably give you some difficulty with thinking about prices, similar to doing it under extreme pressure even when you're safe and relaxed."

Difficulty with thinking about prices? Not just estimating prices but any kind of thinking about them? Is it a mental curse?!

Tanya does some mental arithmetic in her head and checks the results with the orb's calculator function. Then she tries doing the same thing except this time she pretends the numbers are supposed to refer to balancing a budget.

Her ability to do arithmetic is totally unimpaired! The calculator agrees with her results even when she mentally appends currency symbols to the numbers.

… the content of the budget is tricky though. The numbers all line up, but trying to convert those numbers of yen, marks, or scarabs into salaries produces white fuzz. Reflecting on the long list of equipment orders she's participated in over her life furnishes zero additional insight. Tanya spent nineteen copper pieces on coffee and food this morning, and in retrospect she can't be sure that was even the right order of magnitude.

Oh shit. "Can you remove it?" she asks urgently.

"Yes?" That's a surprising amount of distress for what is essentially a harmless side effect. Why would you need to urgently think about prices while you're training? Those are two completely different activities.

Getting rid of an inverted True Appraisal is a profligate use of a dispel, but if there's one spell that's not in short supply inside the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, where mages of every persuasion spend their days experimenting with magic, it's Dispel Magic. Lorelei raises her hand hesitantly. "If you're sure…?"

It's a harmful, untested magical effect which is interfering with her cognition! Of course it's urgent to remove it!!! 

Thinking about prices isn't some esoteric domain of expertise she can just avoid using until the magic goes away (if it ever does)! Prices are costs (*), and everything one does is mediated by cost and benefit! What if she drinks coffee an hour before bedtime or robs a bank or something, because she's incapable of noticing the cost? What if she goes entirely catatonic, because one does things for some benefit which is just a negative cost if you think about it - she is not going to think about it!! she is just going to say "yes please" as quickly as she can!!!

(*) That is, a combination of costs to you and to the counterparty, with benefits being negative costs. This argument may be wrong, but Tanya is having trouble at the moment with thinking about it and deciding that it is wrong and she is safe.

Dispel Magic wends underneath Tanya's other spells to take out True Appraisal with surgical precision.

"There you go! Try not to do that again." She sighs. "Not sure what could be causing the focus backlash, though. Some kind of intrapersonal magic interaction? Horrible curse laid by your enemies? I can read your mind while you try again, if that would help."

Her brain is working correctly again! Blessed relief.

(Of course she checks the mental exercise before relaxing.)

What could have caused this? Tanya doesn't have any enemies around here! Well, there's the gnolls, but presumably if they could have cursed her at all it wouldn't have been to do that in particular.

There is one actor who plausibly wants Tanya to fail to learn to use wands, thus sabotaging Nazir's proposed method of contacting Earth, and who can affect Tanya's ability to use granted magic and would do so via Abadar's focus. And she needs to prevent Professor Lorelei from learning this, or even learning of the likelihood by reading Tanya's mind about it, since Abadar hasn't explicitly forbidden the plan for some reason.

"I'm sorry, I would prefer not to do that." Hopefully this culture has some notion of mental privacy, even with all of the telepathy and mental-affecting spells flying around and despite being ruled by allgholthu who might not understand individuality very well. "Are there any other avenues to try?"

"Conflict with prior magical experience, blockage from prior magical problems," Lorelei counts off on her fingers, "which could be a curse or an enchantment or a malicious false focus, although those would have to be very well done because I'm not seeing them. I can use a spell to boost your Wisdom by two standard deviations, which might help if you have difficulty focusing but not if it's hurting you. I can use a spell to make you better at using your existing Wisdom to solve problems, which is even more likely to work if you have difficulty focusing but will also not help with the mystery pain. There are more advanced spells for analyzing mage auras that don't entirely overlap in function… Legend Lore, if you think a short biography of yourself would have the answer, but that only works if you happen to be famous… you could buy a Commune if you have a yes-or-no question that would narrow it down…" This is getting into expensive territory, but maybe Tanya can afford it?

"I can't do anything about my prior experience. I doubt that anyone would have cursed or enchanted me in this paricular way, unless it has other effects I haven't noticed yet, or that Cicerone Nazir gave me a boobytrapped focus, same." It would have been much simpler not to have Abadar employ her in the first place, and locate any mysterious trouble there! Now you have Employee Tanya running around publicly having this mysterious problem and trying to solve it because it's public so she can't act on subtle hints!

"I... don't think knowing my biography would help to explain this on a mechanical level. For reasons that I can't explain quickly. Let's put that aside for the moment. Do you happen to know if the focuses need to be different for different species, or variations of the same species from different countries or planets, or people with different kinds of inborn magic ability?" Maybe the symbol isn't tuned to Earth humans or mages.

"Without any expert knowledge of local spells, my own instinct is to try to bound the problem more precisely. Test casting a scroll with the focus, if it's supposed to help there too, with a scroll I can cast without it. Test a wand of some other spell. Test the abilities I'm supposed to be able to use with the focus alone. But with such a dangerous backlash, assuming it could take a different form next time, I'm not sure it's worth the risk, at least not yet."

Tanya's reaction to Legend Lore is to say it wouldn't help? Is she actually legendary? Why wouldn't knowing— yes, there is an obvious reason why Tanya might not want Lorelei to hear a Legend Lore about her, assuming it would work, but Lorelei will accept the premise and move on.

Things Tanya should know about holy symbols: "They need to be dedicated to your patron; there's a ceremony for it. I know of some geographic variation – Abadar's symbol in Varisia takes the shape of a key, and in Katapesh a balanced scale, and in Azlant it was almost certainly something different – but they're functionally interchangeable for us. You could use any dedicated focus as long as you knew what it was for. Even the medium isn't fixed; people who are worried about being disarmed will sometimes pay for a tattooed version. I don't know if that has been tested for different planets, but different countries and species are no obstacle.

"Out of all those tests, the simplest and fastest is testing your channel. There is no skill required, only the focus. And in the worst case scenario, in which you injure someone rather than healing them, that someone will be me, and I will be fine. Just be sure to keep yourself out of the effect radius." If Tanya is both Evil and alive, a possibility Lorelei can't readily dismiss, then she channels negative and could theoretically kill herself by being careless. Lorelei, on the other hand, is a fifth circle cleric. She can take a full negative channel from a baby cleric right on the chin if she wants.

Upon hearing this, the assistant hastily leaves the room.

"I do not think using a healing spell, whose miscast inverse would be harm however specified, and hoping I can keep myself out of the effect despite being at the epicenter and despite not being qualified to cast it is a good idea," Tanya says severely in the tone of voice she used to use with Dr von Schugel. (May the Allies paperclip him swiftly. This isn't a treasonous thought; using von Schugel as a Trojan horse to blow up the Unified States is one of the few ways left to win the war.)

"I was thinking of one of the other, what did Cicerone Nazir call them... Domain abilities. I have two that require touching someone or myself, and Nazir said the most common ones are of protection or stability but that it would be safest to test them on a cheap lab animal the first time. That was without taking the miscast chance into account." 

"Those are Resistant Touch or Touch of Law, most likely. Abadar hands out the Protection and Law domains frequently. There are some less common Abadaran subdomains that could also be touch-based, but none of those are particularly harmful either." Most spells to conjure up a giant block of stone would be begging for trouble in this room, filled as it is with glass objects, but Sheltering Walls is inherently defensive. "It is… not impossible that Abadar gave you a nonstandard domain based on synergy with your prior magical tradition or the circumstances that brought you to him, so if you have one of the domains commonly associated with— " yawn "— animal husbandry or manual labor or what have you, that would be informative." If it does something totally unrecognizable, Lorelei is going to give up and tell Tanya to seek an audience with the pharaoh or Kalit Maron.

She is also not especially worried about the deleterious consequences of using herself as a guinea pig, but Lorelei will be considerate of Tanya's desire to be considerate and procure a test subject. She raises the mahogany stick over her head with both hands and beseeches the terrible powers of the deep for aid in a tongue not spoken by terrestrial men.

An Obari reef octopus crawls into existence! It flops into Lorelei's outstretched arms, tentacles wrapping reflexively around her wrists and elbows.

She deposits the octopus on the rim of the tank, and it lets go obligingly to grab on to its new perch.

"Here is your test subject!"

Teleporting test subjects! It seems entirely too friendly and trusting for a lab, uh, octopus, in its place she's be terrified. Maybe they use Remove Fear to calm them down?

Tanya presents the symbol of two curves, touches the octopus with the tip of her finger (putting only the bare tip putside her shield), and initiates one of the new muscle-memory bundles. By the nature of the beast, she has no idea what comes next in the instinctive sequence of actions. This means she needs to prepare to ignore any sourceless pain and do whatever she'd be doing if the pain wasn't there, without actually knowing in advance what that is.

Nothing untoward happens! The octopus glows briefly, and one of its eyes rotates independently of the other to glance at Tanya, and then nothing.