"Ready."

"Go."  He points his wand at her, and then--

Opalyn's sorcery is hers again.

Opalyn doesn't do anything with it - her intention is to fully comply with the test except for sandbagging a bit - but what does it feel like, now that she's not distracted by a battle?

Much the same as before, if she isn't telling her sorcery to do anything.  Whatever it's like to be unconsciously a sorceress, in the background, that part goes on even with the collar active; it hasn't changed.  The weird collar energy running through her is gone; that's all that's different, if she hasn't done anything yet.

Oh. Well, that's less exciting that Opalyn hoped. She fights back the temptation to do a thing. She suspects this is easier for most other inmates than it is for her; they've had a previous lifetime to do things and so they're not missing out on quite as much information.

Nevertheless, she doesn't do anything. It's not the right time.

"I'm glad I didn't have to kill you just then!  I think I would've actually been sad about that, you're nice."

"Next, I'm going to create contained falash energy.  Look at it as closely as you like, then make around that much energy, yourself, in the air in front of you, and will it to be exactly the same sort of energy, as closely as you can.  You can use gestures if they feel intuitive, but don't swing around your arms to the point where they could hit me or come close to the wand.  End."

"Ready."

"Go."

He raises his hand that isn't holding the wand, and, without apparent physical effort--though Opalyn can sense the power running through him--creates an incredibly weak and faint ball of energy hovering in the air above his hand.

When she looks at it with her magical senses, what does she see, and does that inspire any kind of feeling of knowing how to duplicate what he's done?

The sphere in his hand extends through four dimensions and it contains a lot of magic packed very neatly, very precisely, all of it staying in the same place relative to a faint tether from the man who's maintaining it with an even weaker and fainter link.  It feels like an animated diagram of a standing wave (though not showing the underlying component waves), though what's oscillating is not just a scalar amplitude but a four-dimensional direction of the magic.

It's a really neat little pattern, and does not feel like it would be complicated to just... do.

All right, here goes nothing.

Opalyn attempts to just... do it.

(She has 15% on not surviving the next two seconds, if Fdera interprets her fumbling attempts as dangerous enough that he has to kill her about it.)

Almost as soon as Opalyn starts to gather power, before the sphere can fully form--

"Immediately stop!"

Opalyn immediately stops, her whole body tense!

"That... looked like you were trying to create falash but way more of it than I did.  Did you miss the part about matching quantities?"

"Oh! Sorry! I did not miss that part but I have no idea how to calibrate my own power! How do I make it smaller?"

"Your file says you were being a rogue sorceress for at least three years.  Is that wrong?"

Explaining this does not get less awkward.

"Please pretend that I've had a grand total of fifteen seconds of access to my magical power in my entire life, including the last three seconds. I realize that probably sounds weird but it is the most useful frame in which to operate."

"Okay.  Lady.  I needed to know that part MUCH EARLIER.  And I should have checked it after I found out that other information in your file was wrong.  Today both of us have been very stupid and it is good that neither of us is dead."

"Well, now you know? I did not especially expect you to believe me. Sorry for the omission."

"The rest of the Farm, especially your section, is run by complete lunatics, yes, and I'm sorry about the impression that must have given you of their general competence.  It isn't a wrong impression at all, actually.  This section is run by survivors and the next person here you tell about this issue will not give you shit about it even if they don't understand the reasons."

"Yes, some selection effects from survivorship in your population makes total sense now that you point it out! Thank you!"

"Alllllllll right.  I'll do my best to accomodate a very new sorceress.  You didn't, actually, appear to be doing anything wrong or dangerous there; you'll use much more power than that to charge the lightline."

"Is there anything else I should know about you, given that your file appears to be completely worthless?"  Under other circumstances he'd be wondering if she was jobbing it, but her file also claimed her to lack education and to generally be a backwater-planet bandit leader, so.

Opalyn stops to think for a minute. What else is relevant here?

"Well, you already know that I didn't know what falash is, but I guess I generated it correctly just now, so that shouldn't be a problem. Until now I've only ever generated fire and... 'force,' I guess is how I'd describe it. Some people have seemed surprised or even alarmed that I could make jets of fire come out of my hands without any obvious fuel source. Someone suggested that I was fueling the fire with my magic, though I consider that an unproven theory and have at least one other idea for how it could have worked."

Opalyn realizes that she may be giving the rank-game away, here, but neither Terfallen nor Iilasir immediately audibly jumped to conclusions about her rank, so she's risking it.

"Like I said before, I know a lot about math but have no idea how to integrate it with magic. That seems worth repeating."

"I would like the opportunity to regulate my own emotions and thereby sustain my magic, rather than having things done to me to get me to be emotional. I think I can probably do pretty well without external stimulus and I want to give it a try before you assume I can't do it."

"We're not messing with any of the lewd stuff on your first time out if you've got literally no experience at sorcery!  You are still going to put forth a real effort and the rules don't actually let me let you off about that part, because the rules were not written by survivors, but we're not going to get fancy about it at all."  He'll be happy, actually, if she puts forth a good effort without 'external stimulation', his bets are on her trying to undercast.

"Literally materializing fire puts you at mid-Duchess rank, assuming you were pretty excited about it at the time, which I expect you were if it was your first twelve seconds worth of having sorcery at all.  Worry about how fire works later, right now you should be solely focused on making falash."

"I'm going to give you half of a three-quarter-minute to recover and then we're going to try again."

He's continuing to ignore the part about her having learned math in a non-magical context because he continues to have absolutely no idea how that could be true, what specifically would be the state of education in which it was true, or what he's supposed to do about besides being allowed to use math words if it's helpful and otherwise treating her as an illiterate.