"Matter does seem interestingly distinct from magic in the sort of math it is known to obey, though I'm not sure I could easily put the difference into words -- aside from what's considered the definitional difference, namely, does it obey a sorcerer at all.  I don't know whether matter is ultimately a different sort of thing from magic, and, while I don't know if two things are the same, I shall go on distinguishing them inside my head.  I can always perceive their unity later, but once you start blurring things together it's harder even to notice that you were wrong to do that."

"Ahhh, that one of those things obeys a sorcerer and the other does not seems like a very important distinction to me!"

Opalyn can't wait to go back to her room and play with magic now that she understands the very most basic things about it, finally.

Though she fears that just walking out of this room right now might mean missing out on even more insights. Or getting stopped and spanked.

"I consider myself pretty good at telling whether or not I'm being messed with by ladies your age, and all of my social intuition tells me I'm not being messed with, but at the same time I literally do not know where in a thousand planets you hear about gravity but not about that."

"Anyways.  On to today's lesson."

Today's lesson is enchantment, specifically, building vibrators.  (Yes, vibrators, not tinglers, tinglers would be way more complicated than a simple harmonic mechanical motion.)  If you know nothing else about a human female, the first guess at an effective vibration is 89Hz ramping to 101Hz, with displacement of 0.45mm.

The task of building the vibrators is both cooperative and competive!  Opalyn has an ordered list of five enemies, and needs to build sufficiently good vibrators that they can be effectively used to distract those enemies -- there's submissive-assistants who can be told to apply a vibrator to someone, once a vibrator has been built and enchanted -- so as to impede them from completing vibrators which are liable to otherwise be used on Opalyn!  Enchanting a vibrator is a two-person job, though, so you'll want to team up with some enemy of one of your enemies in order to work together on building a vibrator to distract them.  Afterwards you get graded on the efficiency, feature-completeness, and spec-compliance of your vibrators, and penalized for any orgasms you had, and the whole class gets ranked and then the winners cane the losers.

What a practical use for magic!

Presumably her chastity belt has been disabled for the duration of class?

It seems like the students who attend this sort of class frequently will be at an advantage over others who have been denied for a long time! Can Opalyn sign up for, like, a LOT more wizardry classes?

The Facility has a financial interest in producing more magically skilled criminals, yes.  Any future problems this creates for Society are Society's problems.

So anyone who's learning and improving at a sufficiently visible rate is totally allowed to attend multiple magic classes that award orgasms to students!

The orgasms weren't presented so much as rewards, but, okay.

Next question: Can Opalyn just press her legs together or otherwise make it somewhat difficult to get vibrated? Can her opposition do that also? Should she be building, for example, spreader bars in addition to building vibrators? Spreader bars don't seem very magical but Opalyn wants to win.

She definitely doesn't want to have a whole bunch of orgasms and then get caned about it, definitely not, that's not what she's here for.

Well, of course the winners get orgasms they won't be caned for!  And no, you're most certainly not allowed to close your legs while a submissive-assistant is applying a rival's enchanted vibrator to you.

You should probably mention the reward orgasms out loud! That seems important!

Opalyn doesn't bother to ask what happens if you try to close your legs, the answer seems pretty obvious.

All right then, next question. Are these vibrators purely magical or are there physical components to them?

If the vibrators are physical, will the finished object look (to mundane sight) like a normal Earth vibrator but powered by a magical source? And where does she get the raw materials?

And if, on the other hand, the vibrators are magical, how does someone other than the wizard wield them?

People's collars are not actually being disabled for this exercise; they're doing the enchanting exclusively using tools.  This is the sort of thing that's more awkward and expensive than just having a regular wizard do the work -- economically speaking -- but perfectly possible, just like doing a factory assembly job via teleoperated robotic hands would be feasible on Earth.  It serves to teach the skill.

The vibrators have a physical component!  Lesser magics do go easier with a physical anchor!  It's the shape that it needs to be to fit its target, plus an ergonomic handhold for the assistant.

This physical component is already provided; manufacturing that part isn't what they're trying to teach today.

Okay! So, she just needs to make the business end of the vibrator physically move at the designated frequency and displacement? This makes sense!

And now these enchantment tools... is it completely obvious just from looking at them how to use them? She should probably find a partner, right? Enchantment was supposedly a two-person job.

There are undoubtedly better and worse people to pair up with in this room, but Opalyn doesn't know which are which. How about the girl who told her where to get paper? Is she still available?

There is a WHOLE complicated set of alliances and rivalries inside this room which the school-provided graph of Designated Enemies has been designed to agitate as much as possible.  Opalyn, as a complete novice and outsider...

...has obviously been given a list of five Designated Enemies whose enemies (both Designated and otherwise) include the most skilled students and best explainers in the class!  They'll need to make good use and training of Opalyn as an assistant if they want to win!

"All right, fresh meat.  I hope you're motivated to learn here and not too horny, because otherwise neither of us is sitting down for a week."

"I am very motivated to learn." No comment on the rest.

"Where do we start?"

Nally will show her how to hammer a particular kind of magic into a strip of Element-000111010 which serves as the core of the harmonic oscillator.  That's probably the most straightforward part to start with.  Can Opalyn do that part using this here tool, while Nally does the more complicated work of laying down surrounding baffles to cancel out the magical stresses this generates?  Opalyn just needs to make her hammered-in magical potency be as much of an ideal smooth cylinder as she can manage.

Opalyn gets to work as instructed, frequently checking her work with Nally at first, and then gaining in confidence as she can see with her magical sight when the work is proceeding correctly.

She wonders if there is a way to be sure the resulting magical object is truly a cylinder, all along its length, or if she's just supposed to eyeball it.

Great question!  (Says Morbledainen, who is of course listening.)  An answer, using only tools to which Opalyn has immediate access:

It's not really what this here other tool is for, but if you just tap it against your finger and make like you're trying to enchant your finger, it'll produce a pulse of dissipated magic that'll refract through the cylinder!  The disharmonies there, in principle, would be something you could learn to look at and see where the cylinder wasn't exact.

However!  The cylindricality doesn't need to be that perfect, in order for the vibrator to work well enough to bring somebody to orgasm.  Morbledainen doesn't teach the way of perfection, but the way of knowing exactly how much imperfection you can get away with.  One point to Ravenclaw for her asking, though.

Eyeballing it is, then! Though if Nally ever seems busy when Opalyn has less to do, she'll play with Morbledainen's tool the tool Morbledainen showed her.

After a while, she tells Nally she thinks the oscillating core is done.

Great and good enough, but Opalyn needs to speed up on the next part of this.  Sometimes getting it done fast is more important than getting it done right; Nally is skilled enough to correct minor errors that Opalyn makes.  They may not have much time left before their enemy starts Distracting one of Nally or Opalyn -- probably Nally, but that's still bad news for Opalyn.

Conceptually, the next component of a vibrator is a magical element that gets attracted to the central pole with variable intensity, in order to make it oscillate at variable speed.  However, they actually need to build the more complicated speed control, for that component, before they can build the component itself...

Build a speed control, quickly. Right. Opalyn will continue to follow instructions, and try to be quicker about it.

Opalyn notices that she would be completely lost without Nally. Nally knows how to use the tools already, which makes sense, but she also seems to know the components of a vibrator really well. Is that because they build vibrators in here routinely, or is Nally working from a schematic or something?

Also, has Opalyn at any point in this process needed any math beyond knowing what a cylinder is?

That stuff scrawled on the whiteboard there is, theoretically, the instructions, and Nally has been doing math in her head about how to fulfill those instructions.

Opalyn will have an easier time of understanding both the instructions and the math, he would guess, after she just builds something first.

Legit! That is actually Opalyn's favorite way to learn! When she plays a new board game for the first time, she just wants to get started. She doesn't want to read the entire 32-page rulebook first. She expects to lose the first game, but the rulebook will make a lot more sense once she has some experience going through the mechanics of the game.

Now that she thinks about it that does not bode well for how this class period is going to end, and she feels a little bit bad about that because Nally has been very kind and patient with her so far! She keeps working, faster.

(But can't resist sneaking a peek at the whiteboard. Does it look intelligible in the slightest? Like, if she tried, could she make sense of it?)

Nooooot unless Opalyn tries to look at it for long enough that Nally pleads with her to get back to enchanting.

By the way, Nally is now being Distracted and the submissive doing so is being really very mean about it, too.