"Yeah! It'd be awesome!" She grins. "Anyway. Ready to get a cutting of your tree?"

"What's your plan on that exactly?"

"Step one: be extremely invisible and most of all intangible. Step two: go to the tree. Step three: illusion the place I'm going to get a cutting of with the cutting itself. Step four: turn the actual cutting invisible and grab it. Step five: run. Step six: profit."

"It's not really nearby."

"...if I figure out how to flatten the harmonics in my world we could use it to gate to your tree. When you closed the gate from your end last time it was like it wasn't even there."

"...that'd work."

"Do you think I'd understand harmonics better if I knew some sorcery to begin with?"

"Maybe? I don't have any books with me."

"Could you teach me the basics, maybe? If there's a way you think when doing sorcery that helps with this, or if I could at least do something small a few times to see how stuff interacts."

"I can try but I've never taught before and haven't been a beginner for a while."

"It's okay if it ends up not working, I'll be able to figure it out, probably, even without it."

"Seeing harmonics should help. But you also need to register a lot of other traits about the place where you're working and what if anything you're working on. The standard first exercise is fairylights because they're only on a place and not a thing."

She nods. "Not a thing as in, they're just sourceless light?"

"Not a thing as in you don't cast them on a thing. Sorcerers can't make stuff from nothing."

"And light doesn't count as stuff that's being made from nothing? Makes sense, I guess."

"Right. Closest I can do is rapid-grow plants."

Nod. "Well, how do you make fairylights, then?"

"You pick a spot in the air and take note of everything about it. Temperature and pressure and current light including where from and nearby objects and humidity and wind and amount of dust and harmonics if you know them. And then you add the light." She makes one.

Blink. Peer. "Okay but how exactly do you add the light?"

"It's just sort of a matter of understanding well enough what it will do to the conditions of the space."

"And, I suppose, wanting it? Or does intent not matter and it's just, visualising it or something?"

"Intent matters, but it's - mm, definitely not the part you want to focus on. You can't make sorcery happen just by wanting it."

She nods again. "How do you notice things like dust in the air, though? Or is it not that fine-grained an understanding you need?"

"You don't need it that fine, or good sorcerers still couldn't act fast, and they can. But you sort of learn to taste the air, after long enough, and guess from how long a place has been undisturbed and what sources of dust are around, even if it's not well-lit enough to see the dust."

"Huh. D'you remember how long it took you to do it the first time?"