Breakfast and socializing! More reading! If Nenio shows up before lunchtime Brenda will attempt to rope her into casting cantrips while Brenda watches with Detect Magic and possibly also into experimenting with how Time Enough For Love decides what counts as a social interaction and who is having it.

Rather than Nenio, the first interruption to Brenda's routine actually comes about an hour before lunch in the form of Horgus Gwerm. The man looks incredibly out of place compared to the adventurers and travelers who make up most of the tavern's population, but the man is undaunted and makes a beeline for Brenda and Wenduag.

"Ah, there you are! Horgus Gwerm has been looking for you!"

"Oh hi! How have you been? You and yours make it through the chaos alright?"

"Yes. The crusaders were in fine form this week, and despite the scale of the attack there was not a single scratch on my mansion from looters. I'm told you went on to assist them too, for which our fair city owes you a debt of gratitude, but before that Horgus Gwerm owes you a more monetary debt."

The man reaches into the bag he carries and pulls out a locked box, which then lightly glows at the touch of his key and allows him to open it. He pulls out a large sack, which makes a satisfying clunk as it lands on the table.

"Let it never be said that Horgus Gwerm forgets a debt."

Now that she knows how much a thousand crowns is she feels super overpaid for something she would have done anyway, but what she says is "Indeed not. Thank you, and I'm glad to hear all's well with you. I'm looking forward to seeing what Kenabres is like when things are calm."

"Inheritor willing, that day won't be too long from now."

His task accomplished, Horgus Gwerm stores his lockbox and then strides out of the defender's heart, ignoring all the stares he got from that display.

About half an hour later, Nenio makes her way into the room.

"Oh, there you are. Brenda, spider girl, and paladin girl... wasn't there someone else?"

Nenio is exactly like Brenda was before she got the Friends In Places powers and it's honestly kind of cute even though Brenda likes being the way she is now.

"Hi!! Ember's not here but I figure she's just busy. Want to help me figure out how to combine wizardry and sorcery into being an arcanist?"

"Yes! I've wanted to figure out what was going on with arcanism for a while but none of the ones I met were very cooperative about answering questions!"

She fetches her spellbook out of her pack and puts it on the table.

Brenda gets out her inks and the blank book she got from Rathimus; she doesn't want to introduce Alpina to Nenio just yet and it would feel weird to use Alpina as scratch paper anyway. 

Can she look at Nenio's spell diagrams and use Detect Magic to watch her cast some of her cantrips? 

She can! Prestidigitation looks like so and ghost sounds like so and here's Nenio's personal arcane mark. Nenio kind of wishes she had known they would be doing this ahead of time so she knew to leave more slots open, but she does have some empty slots and can also show Brenda how she hangs them if she wants.

Sorry about that; she'll plan ahead better next time. Watching Nenio hang some spells would be great!

Then she can watch Nenio hang up silent image, erase, and glitterdust! It's a bit of an involved process that starts with Nenio hooking some ambient magic on the corresponding spell diagram and then twisting it into the proper shape, using different markings on the pages to pin down different parts once they're done. Silent Image and Erase look rather different from each other, but they're similarly involved processes and take up about the same amount of magic. Glitterdust, on the other hand, has a more involved geometry; if she looks closely, she can see the bit that holds the package together long enough to get the dust to exactly the desired location and no further, or the bits that make it stick to people and objects, but even with Nenio moving slowly detect magic only has so much granularity to it.

It is, nonetheless: SO cool. If you took out that bit would the dust float in the air, or fall--ah, no, it would definitely collapse the whole spell. She knows spell development is difficult and dangerous and she isn't going to do any, but there's no harm in looking, is there.

Now the way arcanists supposedly work is that she needs to set up a sort of scaffold-for-a-scaffold, low power and reusable, so she can hang a bunch of different spells on it and cast them one after the other. Which means she needs interface points compatible with not just every spell she's seen but every spell that could stabilize at all . . . She was totally right about needing a bunch of scratch paper, her arms aren't large enough flat surfaces for this.

Once Brenda has plausible ideas Nenio can help demo them with silent image, which isn't as good as actually trying it but is much faster and doesn't require you to hold concentration while hanging a spell to see what you're doing. Illusions really are the most convenient kind of magic if you ask her opinion.

Illusions are pretty great! Brenda is excited about the potential of divination and transmutation.

After several false starts, she gets a structure that can hold any of her cantrips or Prestidigitation!

That's the hardest part of preparing spells done! Higher level ones do take more intelligence to make hang properly and use at their full potential, but for most wizards who can do it at all the biggest issues with hanging higher circle spells is their magical capacity and sourcing the spells rather than the job being too difficult. She should try hanging first circle spells, or maybe a cantrip she doesn't have with her sorcery, or making a scroll, or inventing entirely new cantrips, or-

She's not going to get into spell development until she's significantly harder to blow up but only because she thinks it probably won't be that long of a wait! She wants to learn to cast Silent Image!

Not only is Nenio happy to help out, she can also show off her own personal tweaks that make low-light images seem slightly crisper than the normal version, which she promises only blew up twice while she was designing it.

Ooooh neat! Brenda has darkvision so she can really see the quality improvement! (Nenio is so brave and clever and cool!)

After lots of joyful fiddling: success! She puts up an image of Nenio in Kitsune form from memory.

Nenio pulls out a mirror and transforms to do a side by side comparison!

"This is pretty good! I think the fur isn't responding properly, since there's still some air movement even indoors yours isn't fully accounting for, but in terms of appearance it's very similar!"

She animates the fur, then has illusion!Nenio pull out a matching mirror. Does it reflect automatically without her having to think about the details of the reflected image? Apparently not, which means she can't look around corners with it. She tries anyway and gets the hilarious result of it looking like a drawing of a mirror, featureless shininess with no image in it. She has illusion!Nenio hold the illusion!mirror up to the physical mirror and manually animates it doing the thing, giggling manically as the recursive images recede into the infinite distance.

Nenio grins and makes a glowing sphere in between the two mirrors, cycling it through the rainbow spectrum from red through violet.

She can't update the mirrors quite as fast as Nenio can update the sphere, but she can stay close on her heels for a bit until she's laughing too hard to concentrate and loses the whole spell.

That seems to be a trigger, because Nenio also breaks into laughter. Eventually she calms down herself, though, and dismisses the glowing orb.

"It really is a shame illusions can only really interact with light by blocking it. Otherwise I would use them to make a telescope, or a death ray, but thus far I haven't been able to figure out an alternate formulation that allows it."