"Could you please give me some tips on regulating how much power I use? As of now I have no idea what to do differently next time and so I would expect the same result again."

"For a sorcerer, it should be the same kind of mental motion as pushing more weakly with your hand, or speaking more softly with your voice.  Relax.  Be less tense, and put less of your tension into the magic."

"But also, it isn't actually bad that you were using more power than I did; it was a failure to follow instructions but not dangerous in itself.  So next time, you'll try to make falash and then you'll try to make more or less falash, and it won't be a problem if you overshoot."

"All right. I'm ready whenever you are."

"Confirm that you want to skip the brief rest period?"

Oh, is she supposed to be tired from that previous attempt? She's not tired. Maybe she should take the rest anyway.

"Oh, right. I'll rest."

She closes her eyes and breathes again, and finds that actually it does help.

"Ready?" he says, a brief pause later.

"Yes," she says, not wanting to say 'ready' when he hasn't just said 'end.'

It's possibly Opalyn is a little too persnickety about this protocol.

"All right!  Back to instruction-following protocol."

"Next, I'm going to create falash, and you're going to create falash in a similarly-sized ball, trying for the least of it that you can make, but it's not a problem if you end up with more than I made.  Whatever you create, maintain it at that level until you receive further instructions.  End."

"Ready!"

This is when she needs to really start to titrate. She's really not sure she can pull it off -- she's never pulled off a major bluff in her life -- but it would be folly not to try.

"Go."

He creates falash; more of it, this time, but the same size of sphere.

Opalyn draws a deep, relaxing breath and grounds herself. She forms the faintest of intentions in her mind to make a ball of falash, just a whim, really, a glimmer of an idea, and whispers softly into it.

How weak a ball can she make, when she's trying as hard as she can not to try hard at all?

Magic comes out of her and forms a sphere of approximately the correct size.  The four-dimensional weave of tiny nodes are spaced further apart than in his sphere, like a golf ball with too few dimples separated too widely.  In his sphere, the oscillating nodes have phases that change in equal amounts across each gap between nodes, and in her sphere the phase differences are less exactly identical.  As a result her own sphere is leaking power, or rather, is leaking much more power than his sphere; in her sphere maybe a percent of its energy every few seconds is radiating off through other dimensions to nowhere, while his sphere would take maybe an hour to lose half its energy.  (Orphan's memories make this feel intuitive if maybe not completely analyzed; sure, if these oscillations had irregular phase-steps, some power would leak.)  His sphere is tethered to him by a bare strand of added energy going into a few surface nodes, to make up for his tiny leakage; for Opalyn to maintain her sphere is drawing a correspondingly greater amount of power out of herself (a practiced sort of mental motion to Orphan, though, to whom the thought of being 'more efficient' does not seem to have really occurred at any point).

Her first try at the faintest possible sphere... has come out about eight times as strong as Fdera's current falash sphere.

It does feel like she could weaken it further, now that it's been formed, or that she could make a new sphere that would be the correct intensity, now that she's calibrated on willing that to happen and not just hoping for it.

She relaxes further into it, attempting to tighten up the weave and reduce the intensity.

It feels like trying to use tweezers under a magnifying glass to untie a tight knot in a fine thread. She's concentrating pretty hard while using very tiny, very precise magical movements. It's actually much more effort than the first ball she made, the one that made Fdera call an immediate halt.

"Immediate stop.  Yooouuu're doing something that I haven't told you to do."

Opalyn stops and lets the sphere dissipate. She'd forgotten she wasn't supposed to try to continue to match, and she feels guilty about it!

"Oh, sorry!"

"It's forgiveable!  At least while you're still just starting to learn!  But it actually is important that I know you can do only the things I tell you to do, and nothing else.  I wish we could take time to practice that with magic specifically but we don't, actually, have a lot of time to complete this before the Prince leaves for the day."

"You are, as near as I can see, trying to be a wizard.  That's very understandable.  Every sorcerer who isn't a moron wants to learn wizardry too.  But we don't have time for the several years of education that takes, so you need to be a sorcerer about it instead."

"Will your sphere to be more like mine.  Want it, don't manipulate it."

"Also--although it wasn't a bad mistake here!--when I say 'immediate stop', I mean to just stop actively doing whatever you're actively doing right then.  If I want you to dissipate your whole working, I'll say 'immediate dispel', and if I want you to try to intuitively undo whatever you just did, I'll say 'immediate undo'."

"Try again to create a sphere with mine as reference.  End."

Opalyn is not trying to be a wizard! Opalyn is trying to follow instructions and is completely and utterly confused about why she keeps getting trouble about this.

In particular, Opalyn's understanding of wizardry is that it has to do with math. She was not manipulating her sphere with math! Manipulating it with math is currently very far outside her capabilities as she has not yet connected the math up with the magic! She was just willing it to be tighter and weaker, with no comprehension at all about how that would come about!

This sensation feels familiar; when she gave into it as a child she was accused of 'back-talk' and spanked, so she's not going to object out loud about Fdera's instruction.

"Ready."

"Go!"

Opalyn tries one more time, aiming this time for the teeniest whisper of a sphere that she can manage, with a nice tight weave. Whatever she gets in the first quarter-second, she holds steady and doesn't try to alter. She's hoping it was the deliberate alteration that read as wizardry to him.

Now that she's got any anchor and calibration in that way, trying to produce the faintest sphere she can manage, will produce a sphere much weaker than his!  Maybe a sixty-fourth as strong?

Oh gosh! She didn't think she'd be able to undershoot at all, much less by such a large factor! She holds it steady even though it is not at all what was asked for, because apparently holding steady is more important than being correct!

"I'm guessing that you were trying to make it as weak as you could, instead of willing it to match mine.  Which again isn't fatal and sure does look like someone who's been a sorcerer for minutes and is in the baby-arm-waving stage.  The lesson is, I do often try to say exactly what you should do and hopefully you can learn to do exactly that thing."

"Now, without trying to manipulate the sphere--without, this time, trying to tighten it or squeeze it or taking power and moving it from one place to another--try to make the sphere stronger, like mine, using just sorcery, by holding in your mind how you want it to be and letting your power flow to accomplish that goal.  End."

He really seems to think that saying "just sorcery" conveys anything at all. Opalyn is pretty beaten down by now.

"Ready."

Fdera does not, at this point, have the slightest clue that Opalyn has arrived at the Farm literally not knowing what this 'sorcery' concept is about.  There are people like that on some planets, maybe, but they don't know how to differentiate a sine function.

"Go."

Opalyn doesn't think at all, just wills sameness.

And fuck if her brain doesn't sort of fill in some interpolation that would get from this intensity to that one. She's not entirely sure how it is possible to skip that.