Then she can successfully grab food and get away!  At least one big strong bare-chested man eyes how Opalyn's arms are now full and non-self-defending, but he does not, visibly, follow her out of the refectory.

All right then! Swiftly to her room, and if no one waylays her, she'll go inside, set down the books and the food, and immediately try to lock the door from the inside.

How many tokens does she want to use to charge the lock?  Rules that somebody has probably explained to Opalyn at some point:

- Locks persist until successfully canceled by an intruder.  You can go in and out without canceling the lock.
- Somebody else, if they try to get in, has to guess how many tokens to try to use for an unlock.  They spend all of those tokens, win or lose, and it cancels out her lock if they spent more than she did.  If they didn't spend enough, their hard-earned tokens vanish without any effect.
- You can't cumulate lock strengths with repeated chargings.  If you want to charge the lock with more tokens than before, you need to pay over the whole greater fee.
- Lock strengths decay over time on a slow exponential curve, losing a third of their strength every 81 Capital days.

Hmmm.

She would really not like to be interrupted tonight.

But she's also trying to last up to twelve days without earning any more tokens, and she expects to be able to spend all of her money on books without really trying. Moamo put her in something of a bind, here, limiting her budget in this way.

As Opalyn sees it, the meaningful choices are:

- 0 tokens, and just see what happens -- if it's terrible, she can lock her door after that;
- 1 token, to defeat looky-loos who just try the door, and hope that people will not want to waste their money trying to intrude upon someone who is obviously rich;
- 2 tokens, to defeat people who were trying to defeat the 1-token strategy;
- All the money she hasn't already spent on books, to give herself the best shot at privacy.

Obviously there are sums betweeen '2' and 'everything' but without more information about the frequency of attempted invasion, how bad Opalyn's subjective experience of invasion will be, and how much budget people have for this kind of thing, it's pretty hard to reason about it.

She also wonders what happens if she spends all her remaining money on locking her door and then doesn't return her library books, thus incurring additional borowing fees she can't afford.

Probably something dramatic. Or lewd. Or both.

Opalyn goes for the two token strategy. She expects she'll pay more on locks in the future, if she's here long enough to build up some financial reserves, but for now books remain a higher priority than utter privacy.

She locks her door.

Aaaaand she sits down on a comfy chaise sort of thing with a cupcake and Spellcraft: You're Doing It Completely Wrong.

Nobody bothers her for a while.

The author of Spellcraft is going sufficiently far back to basics and using sufficiently detailed diagrams that at least one of the spell exercises here, a simple 2D-flat shield, feels like Opalyn could maybe try to construct it, based on Orphan's memories.  Does she want to unlock her collar and take a shot?

Yeeeesssss? She thinks so?

Does she have any sense, either from reading the book or from Orphan's memories, whether she'll be able to dispel this extremely quickly if anyone bursts into her room?

There's a limit on how fast a human can react to anything; but Orphan's memories suggest that for minor little magics she could utterly vanish it around as fast as, say, you could reflexively slap something.

Then she'll do it!

She triple-taps her collar, pauses to notice if anything immediately feels different, and then tries the shield spell.

- It does feel different, though not alarmingly so; she has a tiny tiny bit of her magic back.  It's the difference between being paralyzed, and being able to lift your arm using (one assumes) somewhere around 1/14,348,907th of your usual strength.

- Okay whoa wait suddenly back up over here; Orphan's memories are kind of useless because when you are barely Baron-level, magic does not instantaneously obey your every whim even after you cast it, the way it does when you are the level between 'Prince' and 'Dread Emperor'.

Oh gosh, what an adorably tiny amount of power!

Does the spell work at all?

Not on the first try, because Opalyn is going to have to learn precise emission of magic nearly from scratch.  Orphan had zero spellcraft of this sort because she never needed or used it for anything.

She can output the magical energies that are supposed to start off the spell -- indefinitely, the spell is designed for sub-Baron-level wizards and it's not like Opalyn's stamina is inhibited.  She can't get past stage 1 in terms of having the emitted energies interact with each other in the way that constructs the force-construct at stage 2 which she's then supposed to bounce more energy at and get to stage 3.

It is supposed to be a difficult exercise that helps wizards labeled adequate by not this author, to become more adequate than that.

Okay, what does she need to do to get the emitted energies to interact with each other correctly? Is that explained in the book, or can she figure it out from whatever first principles she's got?

Sorcery works by WANTING and FEELING. What does she do here instead? Is it by any chance REASONING or CALCULATING?

There's included diagrams for how the series of mana-structures constructed are supposed to end up looking at each stage, if you did them correctly.

If Opalyn wants to understand the details of how her own structures are ending up looking different from that, she might need to find a book that says how to do calculations about magic--like that book on layer 1 of magic items, say, which didn't explain how to emit anything exotic, but does describe how various kinds of manas interact with each other.

The Spellcraft book is mainly about building magical dexterity, and mostly assumes you already know basic formulas about physics-of-magic, like which kinds of mana interact with each other in a way that depends on inverse-square or inverse-cube distances between them.  The Spellcraft book does sometimes derive physics-of-magic formulas for particular spells and interactions; it doesn't slow down and explain them.  In particular it has calculations detailing all the Bad Things that will happen to you, if you are not dextrous on particular steps of common spells.  Let these two forms of mana get to within a too-close distance d of each other, like bad wizards usually allow, and they will radiate waste energy and lose mana according to this function of the distance d, for which the author has included example numbers working out to 0.3%.  The author has not however explained where the formula comes from; the wizards she's talking to are supposed to already know, inadequate as they are.

Physics-of-magic calculations already included in Spellcraft could potentially serve as a validation check on any cross-referenced attempts to figure out calculations from scratch using other books, maybe.

Opalyn is feeling great about her choice to check out lots of books!

She switches to The First Layer of Item Engineering, has another bite of cupcake, and taps off her collar for now. She'll make a habit of keeping it off when she's not actively trying an experiment.

Things she's specifically looking for:

- whatever physics-of-magic she already encountered in Spellcraft but didn't yet understand;
- any discussion of what types of mana there are and what is different about them;
- whether mana type and perceived output magic type (e.g. fire, force, falash, etc. are the same thing);
- any discussion of the wizardly way to construct any of this magic

She also wonders why it's called Item Engineering; like, does it show you how to make persistent magical artifacts?

The book does tend to assume you come in already knowing what types of mana there are, but in the course of describing how pairs of mana types interact, it does tend to at least mention the existence of a whole lot of mana types.

There is not a neat taxonomy of basic magical types the way there is a taxonomy of 511 chemical elements; there are standardized kinds of magic that get used in common spells, but they are not ontologically exhaustive.  It's like chemistry where you don't know about atoms, and instead you stare at a particular chemical that a sorcerer or another wizard or a magical artifact output, until you can make something the same flavor yourself.  It's like kitchens; there are standard spices but they are not exhaustive of all possible spices.  It's like painting; you can find a color or sheen of paint that isn't a standard paint and do something exotic with it, but that is mostly not where extraordinary paintings come from.

Falash isn't mentioned in the book; it may possibly be a thing for when you want sorcerers charging your artifacts, and sorcerers are quite rare.  There's discussion of a different kind of magical charging port that would take less complicated wizardry from people who can't just will magic into place; and then a simpler yet kind of battery that can be charged by complete yahoos throwing magic at it without knowing any wizardry at all.  Not very efficiently, but sometimes you care less about "efficient" and more about "works on a planet where education is very rare".

The book includes complete blueprints for some very simple and not incredibly useful magic items, like a textbook on very basic electronics that will at least show you how to construct a crystal radio.

Opalyn remembers some science of cooking books from Earth. They'd talk a whole lot about, say, eggs, and what happens, physically and chemically, when you perform the standard cooking operations to an egg, perhaps in combination with some kind of fat or sugar. And then there'd be a chapters about milk and beans and leavening agents and emulsifying agents, and so on, such that a reader would have a good working vocabulary about how all of these common ingredients actually function within recipes, and which way to alter a recipe if it's not quite giving you the result that you want.

And then there'd be a few recipes along the way, maybe, but that was not the main point of these books.

Is it kind of like that?

Sort of!  Like if cooking were electrical engineering, maybe?  There's more math and formulas being manipulated than in most recipe books, and way more intricate diagrams, unless Opalyn has been reading very different cookbooks from usual.

Also, the chemistry of eggs is known down to genuinely fundamental levels to a greater extent than this book seems to know about with respect to magic.  With Earth kitchen chemistry, say, you have explanations like:  Beating egg whites in a copper bowl will lead to smoother whipped whites: the whisk knocks off loose copper ions from the bowl; the copper ions bind to the sulfur groups in egg white proteins; those copper-bound sulfur groups are then prevented from forming strong disulfide bonds; those disulfide bonds would otherwise lead to tightly bound egg white proteins that would shove out water and air previously trapped inside looser bonds; and in this otherwise the whipped egg whites would then become gritty and dry.

And then the copper ions are guaranteed, if not to be fundamental, at least a sort of element that never gets altered by cooking operations.

So far as one can tell from these books, there isn't any level of magic that's known to be fundamental, the way that Eldridan chemistry has elements believed to be fundamental.

Maybe a good comparison would be a textbook on building suspension bridges?  The textbook tells you how to calculate the stresses and forces that determine whether the bridge stays up, and what kinds of materials will be suitable for that quantitatively speaking.  It's got more math and diagrams than most recipe books.  But there's something there called 'stainless steel' that's taken for granted as a standard thing that you can get and has structural properties falling inside particular bounds.  'Stainless steel' is known to not be fundamental, it has something to do with the ingredients that you throw into a furnace.  But there is not an explicit diagram of how the iron and chromium and nickel atoms are arranged in stainless steel; as opposed to a diagram of the forces on the macro level of the bridge.

That's sort of how these books are about mana flavors.  Standard mana flavors have known structural properties, but not known fundamentals that any book talks about.  There's diagrams and formulas and numbers for how to put mana flavors together, and how they then behave.  If the basic formulas used as axioms are being determined some other way than "sheerly empirically", the book speaks not of it.

This seems very promising. It seems quite useful to build up a vocabulary of magical ingredients akin to the stainless steel of bridge building; this book definitely merits further study.

However, now that Opalyn's been sitting still for a while, her fatigue is starting to catch up to her. It's still only mid-afternoon by her body clock's time, but it's been a second big day in a row. She assisted with Iilasir's lightline charging, attempted her own, destabilized a lightline, met the Prince of the Farm, saw him and her lightline monitor get executed, and then fully drained herself magically and emotionally charging the force generator.

She is probably about due for a nap.

Maybe she'll just quickly flip through Remedial Wizardry first? What are the kids supposed to know before they head off to wizardry school? And... can she tell anything about who goes to wizardry school, and at what age, and where the wizardry schools are, and how competitive it is to get in, and stuff like that?

Different people have different levels of magical capacity!  The Sorcerer level is where you can start using it instinctively, where magic will obey you as it comes out of you or even after it's left you, depending how strong you are.  Only one person in a hundred thousand is strong enough to be a sorcerer, though, and that one person in a hundred thousand is magically stronger than a hundred thousand non-sorcerers put together.  In principle, anyone can be a wizard!  In practice, only the top 3% of the population by magical potential should bother trying, unless they've got a tremendous obsession with doing the fine detail work on magic items or some such.

Also, to be a wizard (whether or not you are also a mere sorcerer), you need to have the talent for understanding things that are shaped by math.  That's another big ol' filter on top of the requisite level of magical power.  The book emphasizes that nobody can blame you for lacking in magical power, but if you were born with the magical power and can't learn math, this is entirely your fault because everyone can learn math if they just try hard enough.

Kids in the system described by this textbook seem to be taken from their parents and shipped off to wizard school at age 6, if they pass a combined magic and intelligence test.

It's from some planet where successful wizard graduates automatically get awarded a harem of three pretty members of the appropriate sex.

What is magical potential, exactly? Is it some secret third thing, distinct from both sorcery and wizardry?

It's how many thaums per second of magic you can put out!

Yes, but can that be measured independent of actually doing sorcery or doing wizardry? Or is Opalyn just thinking about this all wrong?