"I think you're telling me that on this occasion I'm allowed to wing it, see what's wrong with what I did, and then tweak it in place based on what I see. This is different from other times, when you wanted me to make a single static effort and not fix it even if it was wrong."

"Yes, unless I say to immediately stop, in which case maintain your beam exactly how it was rather than dispelling it."

"Move your falash beam, at its current intensity, to my fake charging port, then synchronize them.  End."

She tries it. Does it work?

She wills; magic obeys, at least in the sense of her beam moving to squarely intersect the circle, pretty exactly, even.  There's now magic leaking all over the place from a wild amount of dissonance as her nodes pass through those nodes, when the nodes manage to align at all (because the node interval isn't quite exactly right).

She attempts to synchronize her beam with Fdera's fake charging port. She is uncertain about this as there wasn't a demonstration and she's not entirely sure what she's supposed to be varying. Not intensity... there were three other quantities that Fdera named that all mapped to 'frequency' in her mind but she doesn't think she's supposed to change that yet either. It must just be the phase of the waves in her beam?

She tries giving her beam a little nudge, a little hop-skip, to make it be different in phase. What does that do?

She wills; magic obeys.  The beam now has a different phase on arrival, so different parts of the beam-port intersection are leaking more or less magic in different directions!

Opalyn is a little at sea here but she has one more thing she can try. Her beam is coming from a different angle than his, so maybe it needs more adjustment on one side than on the other. She could in theory do a bunch of calculation about that but she believes that's not the way of sorcery so she tries a shortcut and just wills everything to match up.

Does that work or is her shortcut too short?

It'll cause her beam's weave to tilt so that at least the angles all match up.  This actually seems to have fixed the issue with the node spacing too?  However, this intermediate step of progress is actually causing more dissension and spillage, albeit also more orderly dissension and spillage, on account of how now everything is out of phase instead of just some parts being out of phase.

One more hop-skip nudge then? With a sprinkle of magic sorceress fairy dust to will the nudge to be just the right amount of nudginess.

And LOCK.

The fake charging port brightens to her magical senses, increases in intensity, as the beam passes through it in phase and pushes the oscillations there higher and higher while maintaining the same frequency.

Hurray! Opalyn is a SORCERESS!

(And has any idea what that means.)

"Good work!  Didn't want to interrupt you before, but note, you went ahead after I said 'end' without you saying 'ready' first or my saying 'go'.  Not fatal this time!  But don't make a habit of it!"

"Now, do it again, faster if you can.  You want to learn this whole operation as something you can just will to happen."

He dispels his previous port and creates another, with a different frequency and node interval.

Some little time has passed--though with Fdera seeming increasingly hurried--and they are now at the point where Opalyn has doubled a beam frequency 32 times (it doesn't, actually, use more power, it's just the same power going faster) and gotten a weak version of her beam locked on a lightline charging port.

They are now, in theory, ready to actually begin charging.

"We're now entering the point where mistakes can get both of us killed by magical explosions, not just you killed by me, so as a reminder:  If I say immediate followed by stop, it means stop progressing through any changes you're currently making, but don't dispel or depower any ongoing effects.  If I say dispel, that means to depower ongoing effects.  If I say undo, it means use your power as a sorceress to try to reverse whatever you just did or whatever just happened."

"Clear?"

"Stop means freeze. Dispel means stop. Undo means undo. Got it."

"Dispel means depower, and not the thing I said that 'stop' meant.  Are you saying it sounded like 'dispel' and 'stop' meant the same thing?"

"No, I am not saying that. I am merely translating from the words you chose to ones that seem more natural to me, so that I will actually remember them at the moment they matter the most. I do actually believe I understand you."

The word 'stop' in Eldric applied to magic is supposed to mean the same thing everywhere, for safety reasons, but at this point Fdera has learned to let that all just pass.

"Treble the intensity of the beam end."

Before she starts cranking up the intensity, what does she believe about the current intensity? She saw Iilasir's beam with her magical senses, and he claimed to be barely Baron level. What does her current beam look like, compared to that?

Hers is about a factor of 30 weaker than his, maybe?

All right. Lots of headroom, then.

She says ready, waits for Fdera to say go, and then she goes ahead and triples the intensity.

"Treble twice again.  That means, multiply by three, pause to quickly glance at your work to make sure nothing went wrong, and then multiply by three again, so it ends up nine times more powerful than now and twenty-seven from where we started.  End."

Seems fine! That will take her just about to Baron level.

She does the ready / go dance, triples, notices that everything seems on track, and then triples again.

Does she feel any apparent strain whatsoever?

Hahahahahaha no.

"We're now at the start of Baron level.  Treble thrice--again, pausing and quickly checking your work each time--and that'll take us to the start of Count.  From there it's 81 to Duchess and then, if you can reach it, another 243 to Grand, which is where a lot of the more interesting privileges start."

"End."