Huh! She will get a very small bit of rock and experiment with different ratios - presumably at some ratio you can get, like, sand, and then a little more than that would be like wet sand, and then you want it just slightly more cohesive than that, right -

Increasing the amount of hard/brittle in the mix makes the liquid stone sticky like cornstarch or molasses, and then at half and half it's a nice moldable putty that doesn't deform on its own, and then at higher than half it forms tons of little crumbs and shavings with little or no provocation.

At some point Loril marches up and announces, "That technique is most useful to allow stonemasons to do the detail work for you."

"Detail work like decorations or like - what, wouldn't it revert to its usual properties if I handed it off?"

"Like smoothing walls, making non-slick patterns on stairs, and yes. Decorations. It will remain malleable so long as the binding is active and cease when you dissolve said binding."

"But it all has to be contiguous, right - is this normally done after the building is constructed, I'd expect it to affect the ability of the rock to bear weight."

"Yes, it'll collapse if you do it stupidly. Who said it has to be contiguous?" She makes her trademark dismissive wave. "You can do it in a thin layer along the surface. I've even seen machines that roll rock putty out and cut it to make hundreds of identically sized oval rocks, for drainage or... Something."

"Oh, right, it can be very thin, that makes sense. Does any of this change what kind of rock it is, transmute it instead of just temporarily altering its texture?" She has it at a pliability she likes now and is trying to smush it into a pyramid.

"Moving soil with earthwisps ruins it. Some specific kinds of stone can have their properties changed this way, but most rock is amorphous enough it doesn't matter. And you'll ruin crystals too. You should make sure to remove all the tiny pockets of air and water. That's good practice, good for structurally sound foundations."

"How do I remove them?"

"You can simply will a binding to end. You don't get any stored imbuement back."

"I mean the air and water pockets?"

"-Ah. Well, that can be our next practical demonstration. It's easier to show you. Mostly, we are carefully moving the stone, since another thing you can do with earthmotes is move stone. Air and water pockets can be pushed to the edge with a steady reshaping. Come this way."

She demonstrates on some of the rocks Nicholas was using earlier. (He has his own pile a bit away.) Mostly it's about feeling for voids and pushing the surrounding stone to push them to the edge- without creating bubbles of vacuum in the process.

"What's bad about vacuum, just that it's not very structurally helpful?"

"Just that, yes." Loril hands her a rock. "This one has some water and air pockets. Go on, try to clear them out."

Okay, it's tempting to visualize that as moving the air and water bubbles themselves, but that won't work when she's dealing with the earth motes. So she tries to specifically direct the motes to flow from the outer edge of the bubble around to the inner edge, letting the fluid inside reshape itself accordingly till it's exposed to the surface.

This works pretty well!

Loril watches and makes an occasional small critique of her process. For example, combining the bubbles into big bubbles first can help.

Huh, it doesn't seem obvious that would save time but she'll try it and see.

The little bubbles of not-rock inside the rock kind of glob up like dew sliding down glass, so she only has to focus on one little piece at a time as the void she's manipulating grows larger and larger.

Yeah, but if it doesn't reduce total time spent moving bubbles around it doesn't seem like it would obviously help and the bubbles aren't guaranteed to be near each other to start out. But if it does turn out faster this way so much the better.

It's not really faster on this little rock. It's probably much faster with a big rock.

That makes sense. She practices joining up bubbles and moving them and pouring the water out.

And then they have practice exercises for all the remaining wisp types as well. Just basic control and getting used to making bindings in different shapes, for now.

It's fun!

Loril finishes off the day's training session with a quick rundown introduction to simple standard binding diagrams, and gives her homework to make half a dozen to spec.

It's late evening in standard bubble time by now; Does the same rough start time - about 4 o'clock, with a short food break, until about 8 - work for Bella going forward?

Sure does!

Is there anywhere else to go besides her own bubble and the practice one?