"Thanks! Is that what I should do next or should I do the earthmotes in a rock exercise next -"

Loril waves dismissively. "Practice binding, practice more gentle shifts, try cutting it off before it wastes energy. Practically anything is a useful goal this early. Practice for a bit while I talk to Nicholas over there. He's doing it wrong."

She turns and walks over to where the quiet guy is - moving a big blob of rock around? Making a rock wall of some sort?

Huh. She'd ask but she doesn't want to embarrass Nicholas. She will try claiming more motes and doing the fire exercise more elegantly and see what shades of the colors work best.

This is a skill that responds very well to practice. She's getting visibly better with each go.

Loril comes back after a minute of standing there talking, and touching the rock blob herself once.

She stares silently at Bella for a bit, then says, "You don't have to leave them the same color the whole time, you can spike output up and or increase it slowly. Heating or cooling things too quickly can shatter them. And see that bit at the end where the binding sort of hitches? The draw goes down a bit, and then jumps? That's a sign you can look for as a shift from a high demand regime to a low demand regime. So you can tell when an area is up to heat. Time to make a lesson plan, I think. Aside from the things I think you absolutely have to learn, what do you want to do with motemancy?"

"I want to make magic items. What do you mean by regime?"

"A regime is a general mode of operation used to model the behavior of a system. For example, high-demand regimes for heat transfer can be modeled with a fairly simple formula for the expected rate of change in temperature and consumption of mana, while the low-demand regime requires more complex calculations to fully predict these values. Another example would be the flow of fluid in a pipe. Laminar, or smooth, flow - versus turbulent flow. There is a clear qualitative change in how things behave, when the regime changes. Laminar flow causes less vibration, less pressure and energy loss. But also poor mixing characteristics and lower heat and mass transfer."

She blinks slowly. "...There are broadly two kinds of magic items as far as motemancy goes. Bound tools, and forged cores. Forged cores are extremely advanced and delicate work. We will have to focus on bound tools. Fundamentally, the process of making a bound tool is not a complicated one. Bound tools are nothing more than a binding that does not decay unless damaged and activates when a non-motemancer does something. But it does require the ability to create complex compound bindings, use conditionals, and very tidy control."

"Should I be looking at a formula table or graphs or something?"

"Later. The major branches of theory will be designing bindings for specific tasks - including quantifying their performance and mana cost, writing to and implementing from standard motemancy diagrams, mote interactions in a variety of conditions, understanding of common practical uses, and also architecture and construction principles."

Bella takes a minute to catch up on noting all that down. "When I'm practicing stuff like this sometimes it helps if I have a particular goal in mind, do you think it'd be useful if I worked toward being able to make ice cream with the blue firemotes?"

This earns a small smile from her. "Make yourself a treat and call it a control exercise? Motivating. You will also need airmotes and possibly watermotes. To get the proper texture. Unless you intend to whisk it by hand, I suppose."

"Huh, airmotes make sense but watermotes?"

"For mixing the ingredients without turning it into a horrible foam." She gives that same dismissive wave, almost identical to the other times she made that gesture. "Since you seem hungry for theoretical knowledge, how about we skip basic manipulation exercises on the other seven mote types for now and do the lecture early."

"Sounds great!" Notebook at the ready.

Loril walks around a small hill to a nicely patterned stone floor with a free-standing blackboard, lecturn, and four wooden desks.

She hands Bella a book - Introductory Motemancy - and proceeds to lecture for a solid half-hour about all the kinds of motes and the proper way to manipulate them. Each comes with cautionary warnings: Firemotes can create condensed airs, which are dangerous. And heat, which is also dangerous. Water jet cutters can cut off limbs and heads. So don't do that. Vacuum is not good for living things, and neither is carbon dioxide (which is just called 'exhalation' in Common). Unstable dirt and stone structures can collapse on people; Also, worked soil tends to be ruined for farming, something about proper aeration and microbiomes. Invisible kinds of light are often hazardous, so don't play too freely with lightmotes. Adding lightning to things is rarely good for it, and adding metalmotes can make things stiff and brittle and magnetic. The biggest danger of darkmotes is that they sometimes suppress other magic, possibly including shields and life support magic.

The uses of earth, fire, water, and air are fairly intuitive- Moving it around, changing its state and shape. Forcing water to ice regardless of temperature, and forcing air to separate into components, is possible too. Stone can be made malleable, shaped, and then re-hardened. Lightmotes are mostly good for light things, like seeing, and killing dustlife, and sometimes as sensors to detect when someone opens a door or whatever. Darkmotes make areas of darkness and, usefully, can be used to detect active magic. Lightningmotes are tricky to work with; Nicholas has many ideas about them but hasn't managed to make them work yet. Metalmotes are generally used to fuck with the material properties of things, a metalmote-bound rope can have astounding tensile strength so long as the magic lasts, for example.

Questions?

Dustlife is -? oh, never mind, she figured it out. Does adding motes to things change their chemical composition or just their behavior?

"Just their behavior. Though motemancy is used in a number of chemical and industrial processes, indirectly."

"Ooh, like what?"

"Principally, refining of metals from ores. Liquid nitrogen and solid carbon dioxide, for cooling. Food processing. Timber processing. Farming. Manufacturing. It's versatile."

"Makes sense. I guess you can't get any physical imports from Earth, just us and our janky internet access..."

"Not in industrial amounts, at least. Matter transfer from Earthsea to the connected bubbles, and from here to Earth much moreso, inherently carries a cost."

"In mana?"

"Precisely."

"So it'll be more feasible if the Earthsea population can be sustained higher?"

"It'll be more feasible if the Earthsea produces more mana. Which is not necessarily the same thing." (Small huff.)

"Oh, where does the assumption break down, do people vary in mana production or are they likely to put pressure on populations of animals that do -?"