"That makes a lot of sense, if you've got fewer bigger fights with bigger enemies that you can actually pick who does them instead of constant ambushes. We can do that tomorrow in with the invisibility."

"If we don't have an obvious next experiment, maybe now's a good time to teach me the first things newbie wizards learn?"

"Sure! So wizardry works by learning how to manipulate magic on a scaffold, which requires a lot of attention to how it behaves so you can get it in stable configurations. I can build a scaffold, if you can watch magic then you should just be able to see what I'm doing."

"Okay." Excited magical staring!

He'll build a scaffold and start preparing Mage Armor! It's first circle, so it's not that complicated. He's manipulating mana in an odd, indirect sort of way, as if he had magic chopsticks with which he can interact with mana despite not being himself the kind of thing that interacts with mana. He's quite deft with his metaphorical magic chopsticks.

He watches how the scaffold goes together and how the mage armor goes together inside it. Is it at all apparent how one acquires magic chopsticks? They look like a better tool for this particular job than poetry.

It's not apparent. Marit twists some magic and fixes a place where the spell's getting unbalanced and then executes a bunch of turns and loops to shape the spell into its desired form and then ties it off. "Was that at all helpful? It's not how people usually learn because they can't usually see magic while they're learning."

"I think so? I'm not sure how--so you're using some magic to manipulate the magic to set up the scaffold and I can't tell how you got the very first bit. I mean, how you start interacting with magic your way at all." He really hopes it isn't something that's obvious to everyone and only non-obvious to him because people from Earth can't be this kind of wizard.

"Oh, that's what the spellbook is for, it gives you the framework to manipulate the magic. We'll make you one of your own."

"Oh, neat! It's a lot more precise than what we do; I couldn't replicate that structure exactly even if I had memorized it the first time."

"It takes some practice! You have to have a certain degree of precision just to succeed at casting the spell, but additional precision lets you do it with fewer resources and therefore hang more spells, or make the spell crisper and therefore make it work better when it's cast."

He can't try it himself until he has a spellbook and shouldn't get a spellbook until he's paid for it, either by joining their army or otherwise, so instead he's just going to ask a bunch of theoretical questions about the ways parts of the spell structure attract and repel and adhere to other parts and which steps have to be done in that particular order versus in multiple possible orders and whether there are sequences of steps that repeat across a lot of different spells such that learning a new one is easier once you know a bunch already.

It's absolutely easier to learn a new spell once you know a bunch of spells! Some are very similar, developed from variations on another, and even when they're more distinct than that you pick up a general knack. Some steps have to be done in this order but some people hang spells totally differently from other people and it's possible to notice shortcuts as you practice with magic. Some people get really really fast at spell prep, though it hasn't been a priority of his, and a lot of that is about figuring out which motions are absolutely necessary.  

This is all so extremely cool. Franklin is happy to reciprocate with theory knowledge of his own if Marit wants, even though it seems inconveniently likely that he can't use it. Also at some point he should ask questions about what being in the army is like but he isn't sure what he's worried about concretely enough to come up with good questions. What are the best and worst things about it?

"Well, we're saving the world, that's pretty cool. And they're pretty good at - exposing you to enough danger you'll gradually get stronger, but not just getting you predictably killed. No one likes the - food and the cold and the, uh, limited opportunities for a personal life, and fort commanders tend to be grumpy hardasses, and people die and it sucks. And we're not really winning."

Not really winning sucks but they weren't really winning against the mals for most of his life either. He should probably care about having a personal life but he's not actually sure how one does that or whether he wants to.

"What is . . . having a commander . . . like. Also how long do people usually sign up for, I think part of my problem is I don't know how to have any plans longer than a few years." Possibly he doesn't know how to have any plans longer than a few hours. He keeps expecting a bell to ring, or for someone to run up and ask him for help with a section of cable shielding.

"Oh, you don't sign up for life. ...some paladin orders are a lifetime commitment but not right when you're first signing up, that'd be really bad for people, you'd get a bunch who regretted it. Two years is a normal term of service. Four pays for wizardry training.

I ...don't know exactly how to describe what having a commander is like. They tell you what to do. You do it. If they say go out on an extra patrol, you do that. If they say spend the rest of the week in a cell because we suspect you were mind controlled, you do that. They aren't allowed to give you illegal orders, but anything else goes. Their job is to hold the fort, not be your friend."

That sounds sufficiently different from dealing with your enclave's seniors as a freshman that he was right not to try to map it to that but that means he doesn't have anything to map it to. "What makes an order illegal?"

" - well, like, if it's something they have no business ordering you to do, because it can't possibly be part of doing our jobs in a Lawful Good way. Torturing a prisoner, say, or - going to a peace talk under false pretenses, or falsifying a report to your superiors, or threatening someone's family..."

"That sounds like the sort of thing where ninety-five times out of a hundred the correct answer will be obvious to me and then the other five times some cultural difference will make me conclude something that under local conditions is horrible and insane. And presumably it almost never comes up because the people giving the orders won't give illegal ones, but." To live you have to be smart every day; to die you only have to be stupid once.

"Oh, you take a class when you enlist, learn all the cases and look at historical examples. Though also 'I thought that was a illegal order' is a defense if you're court-martialled for not following it. In general not knowing the laws is a defense if you're accused of breaking them, though you're supposed to be responsibly trying to learn the laws and stuff."

Nod nod. "What about orders that aren't illegal, just--weird? Like if you got ordered to do your commander's laundry. Or substitute something there isn't easy magic for." This is a weird question and he feels super weird asking it but he's literally a space alien from beyond the Void and some amount of being super weird is probably inevitable. He still kind of wants to hide in the Boston reading room about it.

"Do it, ask someone afterwards if that was appropriate? They'll get in trouble if they're going around spending fort resources on personal business, but they may not be able to tell you if there's some secret reason it's actually army business, so that's for their bosses to sort out with them."

Oh wow, not only was that a totally reasonable answer, Marit isn't even visibly judging him for asking. Tiny smile that pales in comparison to the ones from when they were talking about magic. "That makes sense. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you've thought of everything."

Marit grins back. "Iomedae thought of everything. ...I guess possibly some stuff got added over the centuries when there were situations pretty different from the Shining Crusade. But She's the one who proved you could have a Lawful Good army and a Lawful Good state and still, you know, win and not just lose honorably."