She wonders if it's too narrow to be useful. Maybe if it isn't Shyish based enchantments do a lot of careful finagling to keep Shyish in that range? It would probably be easier to manage if you were doing it with something as- mechanistic as an enchantment. But actually, unless the enchantment is doing lots of circulating of the Shyish within it it would naturally be very firmly within the clinging range.

Crin seems content to simply repeat the exercise for as long as Alethia cares to observe. 

After a few repetitions, she'll say, "Is it okay if I ask questions?"

Crin pauses, and directs the shyish to fan out into a diffuse cloud away from anything but air. Sufficiently diffuse, it evaporates.

Crin looks over at Alethia and raises an eyebrow. 

"Go on," she says.

She will endeavor not to shrivel up in embarrassment. And to speak quietly enough not to wake anyone. She maybe should have thought of that earlier but she was so curious and it had been a while of the same exercise and she and Crin have good enough hearing they can keep things quiet and not wake anyone. Probably.

"So, Shyish is sort of sticky and difficult to start moving when it's slow, right? And then if it's faster it sort of races forward. But- it looked like there was a narrow band of flow rates where it behaved a bit more- intuitively? Like water. Was I, uh, actually seeing that right? And if I was, is that band useful to stick around in, or is it too narrow to be useful?"

Crin's eyebrows shoot way up.

"Yes," she says, "That's - that is a quality of it. Managing Shyish safely in that narrow band is an advanced form of control for high-power spells - what the Orders call Battle Magic. It's too finicky to manage effectively for most casters and grows more difficult the more Shyish you draw. But you understand the basic principle."

The Crin eyebrows go up! She has received a good grade in Magic Student!

"I suddenly want to ask thirty more questions but I'm not actually sure whether that's the best use of your time, or way to learn."

"You have astonishingly strong sensing for a beginner, or else are playing at something. If it's the latter please stop, I don't want to waste my time teaching someone who already knows what I'm about to say."

"I'm genuinely a beginner, I promise. I've heard more about the Winds than most people in my position, I think, but that's it."

She is not at all offended by the suggestion that she might be faking it. Crin does know that she's hiding some stuff, it's only natural to guess that that might be part of it, after she picked that up so quick. Also, it's flattering. And also, Crin is not making an unfriendly facial expression, which is the kind of thing that matters far far more to her than it probably should.

"If your sensing is that good as a rank beginner, you're likely to overdraw when you first pull Shyish. I would teach you how to manipulate it, but I need a good set of nails to slam excess Shyish into when you inevitably grab too much. I was expecting to need to train your sensing ability extensively; since you already can, the exercise is much less useful than expected. If you'd like to watch the behaviour some more and get a better feel for the transition states from observation, I can keep demonstrating, but it's a little marginal on teaching value."

"I certainly won't turn down the opportunity to watch some more, it's beautiful. Hmm. Would it be possible to- actually, I totally expect my clever idea to be something that would immediately kill me due to something I don't yet understand, but in the interest of learning how I will state it out loud anyway. Would it be possible move the tiniest bit of Shyish into a spot slightly in front of me, move the rest of the Shyish farther away, and assign me the task of trying to move that little bit of Shyish a very small amount? Since I'd be able to, you know, still see the very small amount of Shyish, and so interact with it, in a way that most beginners wouldn't be able to?"

"If your control is as good as your sensing, yes, that would be safe. Generally they are largely uncorrelated. What does correlate with sensing is power. So you could crush it to Dhar with too much force, pull an excess amount from the environment with a sloppy grab, miss the clump entirely and pull Shyish from either your body or mine, pull even the small amount into your own body..." 

She raises an eyebrow. "I could go on."

"So, the good news is that I was right about the death. The bad news is also that I was right about the death."

"Indeed."

"Control can be learned, however, and with your strong sensing abilities it'll take you much less time than for most. On average it takes a full year to develop sensing enough that it's safe to begin doing control exercises. We'll be able to skip that entirely."

"That's lovely."

With Anything You Can Do it wouldn't have been a full year, but it still would have been a few weeks. And now she simply gets to skip it! And learn more things faster!

"That's quite the smile. Happy to make a difference?"

"That's a lot of it. But honestly, a lot of it is just that it's fun to learn things, and learning more sooner is better. Learning is just- it's so good. You start knowing fewer things, and then you know more things! And you have a thousand questions and there are all these holes in your understanding, and you don't even know enough to know where those holes are. And then you form enough of a structure to understand where the pieces you're missing are, and then, depending on whether the field in question is a breadth-based one like history or a depth-based one like mathematics you either fill out more and more and things cross back over on each other or you build higher and higher until you've got a structure so tall it's hard to believe you were ever building the foundation. And of course all fields are some of both, but there's leanings you know- I'm rambling. I should consider rambling slightly less."

That gets the biggest smile Alethia's seen from Crin. 

"If that's how you feel about learning, then I think you'll make a fine student. There's still things to be settled between us - your complicated story, and so on - but now I'm eager to get there." 

Oh no, in addition to being Impressive and Intimidating and Pretty the vampire is also Cute, she is Doomed

She smiles back.

"I suddenly find myself very annoyed there isn't uncomplicated truth magic to deploy to solving the problem of trust. If Ishaza could just make a little circle on the ground that one could step into and become unable to lie this would very rapidly solve several problems. I do in fact expect that we're going to end up trusting each other enough for things to just be settled, but there probably isn't a simple way to get there outside slow accumulation of evidence."

"There are abilities that could make it less likely. The lore of Hysh is sensitive to truth, and close observation of it can be used as an aid to sensing honesty... But most things you could be if not a genuine ally would be able to overcome such a step. It eliminates a few small cases."

"Indeed. Truly, this state of affairs wherein I have to be moderately patient before learning the secrets of magic from an expert is the grandest tragedy I have ever suffered."

She grins a self-deprecating grin, and then that grin shifts to a soft, gentle smile.

"Even if magic is the shiniest and most interesting thing, there's a whole lot of things I'd have to pick up at some point, you know? It's not so terrible to shift those things earlier."

She's saying it half to herself, but, well, she's saying it to herself because it's true.

"A healthy attitude, I think." 

Crin settles back in. "While observation is not likely to help you progress much, the exercises I do are helpful to me, so if you wish to continue watching I shan't complain. Or you could propose another quiet activity for the night."