He makes notes so he'll be sure to remember!

There is a lot about focus and pressure and from context he can probably glean the background detail that the common metaphor is that how magically powerful you are with respect to a branch of magic (there's some spillover, but generally the three accumulate power separately) is sort of like pressure, and how well you apply your mindset tot it is like how open a valve is, in response to how much magical power goes through.

That seems like a pretty reasonable metaphor to have.

There is a lot of speculation; no one knows for sure why exactly the three branches of magic hurt the way they do; there is a general categorization of each branch's "oddity," despite the fact that they're pretty sure the three are unrelated (conquest is instantaneous where the other two are not; sympathy hurts in a wide variety of ways where the other two do not; effort can theoretically be pushed beyond your practical power level in a way the other two can't). A lot of theoreticians think the three must be connected somehow, but mostly because a connection would be so tidy; there's no empirical evidence for it.

The siren lure of thaumatology is so compelling!

Look how scientific all these thaumatologists in these books are! And how few of them are dead, and those few of old age!

Paradise.

Oh except this one was written more than five hundred years ago by a Great Mage now dead, she was probably murdered.

How unfortunate for her.

Yep. Oh, hey, it's public works/possible shadow ruler lady.

Huh. Cool lady. Public works and thaumatology are some respectable pastimes.

The book does not contain enough personal information to discern whether she would have cared either way about his opinion of her.

If he ever meets her he'll be sure to find out. Sure, she appears to be dead, but Milan does not plan to allow that to be an insurmountable obstacle indefinitely.

Speculation on why the obstacle has not been surmounted does not come up in class but may be noted on the syllabus.

Ooh. He might have to do some independent research.

Eventually class lets out.

And that's the last class in his afternoon block. Time to go look up all the things that intrigued him over the course of the day!

There is kind of a lot of chemistry to look up to make sense of stoichiometry!

Fun! Science!!

Exothermic and endothermic reactions! Exothermic reactions are why Odette's sodium explosions! Fire is an exothermic reaction!

Science is so good!!!!!!

Eventually Odette shows up. "Did you forget to eat dinner?"

"...maybe."

"Is that a yes hiding behind an insufficiently concealing curtain?"

"Yes."