And the kobold nods, and trances, and offers Occlus her hand.

Occlus takes it.

The new instinct is the same for Occlus as it was for the Jedi: here is how to take the mental action that is 'beginning to trance', if she would like to do that.

(The kobold withdraws her hand as soon as she's sure Occlus has gotten it.)

Occlus dips into the trance.

...

That is quite a lot of new information. She sets her ghosts to the task of processing it. With their aid, she is able to begin making sense of in rather short order. She quickly determines the parameters of how to shape the field and takes the measure of all the different objects within her reach, including the kobold.

The kobold is, well, a kobold. Occlus can have all the anatomical information that goes into that, if she likes, though she might have trouble figuring out the whole egg-laying thing given only the one example. Mentally, she's very much like a human; she's clamping down on her emotions pretty hard right now, but underneath that - clearly visible, to the mage-sense - she's pleased and slightly nervous. Her actual thoughts are incomprehensible even to extended examination; there's simply not enough information available to decode them.

Occlus breaks the trance.

"How does one employ that to cast spells?"

"Once you know a spell-form, you'll be able to use it to move the patterns around; you cast spells by arranging them in specific ways in relation to the spell-form to get different effects."

"Show me a spell-form."

"Casting is dangerous for the first few months; I should explain what you need to know about that, first."

"Speak, then."

She nods. "Nobody actually knows why casting is dangerous to start with, just that it is; Bar can loan you books about it if you want to know what some of the theories are. When you start, and for about the first month if you're practicing regularly, every spell you cast will be a miscast, which means that it will act the way it should for the first two days or so, and then it'll start acting strange, and then sometime on the third day it'll break on its own if it hasn't been broken manually. If it breaks on its own, that'll kill you; again, I don't know why. Your danger sense will warn you about miscasts, though. It usually takes about three or four months of practice, and I've never heard of it taking longer than six months, to get to the point of never having miscasts, and then they'll never happen again after that. What I told you about breaking spells when we first met applies here, too; the most important thing to know is that a spell cast on a person or animal or droid can't be broken except by killing them. It's traditional for the first person a new mage casts a spell on to be themselves; the spell forms I'll be giving you can be used together to let you see magic - any kind, mine and yours both - and that's the traditional first spell for a new mage to cast on themselves."

"I see."

And the kobold trances and offers her hand again.

Occlus takes it.

The light-making spell form, eroded to near-uselessness, comes through first, followed by the magic detection form, which is much more complex - too complex to get all at once, in fact.

The kobold holds this trance, showing different aspects of the magic detection form, until Occlus breaks contact.

Occlus will stay in contact until she gets all of it.

"Why is the detection more complete than the other?"

"I don't know, exactly. That's as complete a version of that form as I have, but I don't know when or how the information was lost."

"Is there a way to regain it?"

"Not with just what I have access to myself. I may at some point look into finding some human mages from my world for you to learn from, but I don't know what kinds of magic they'd have or what would be involved in getting them to teach you; I've never actually seen a human from my world."

"Hm."

Occlus doesn't seem entirely satisfied with this answer. She takes a sheet of flimsiplast and begins casting on it.

The kobold... waits. For a few seconds.

Occlus is focused on her casting.

Shortly, the sheet begins to glow. Occlus frowns at it and rips it in half. The glowing stops.

The kobold is still there. She allows a congratulatory grin to ghost across her face.

"You can learn from here on your own, but you'll be able to cast more complex spells sooner if I come by and give you ideas and examples. Would you like me to?"

"Yes, return tomorrow."

Occlus waves a hand negligently and begins a new cast.

And the kobold disappears.

And here's the library and here's Raafi in a study room and here's the kobold hugging him and here she is in his lap - that took longer than she was expecting but that's good news, Occlus is less annoyed at her than she thought, or at least inclined to hide it which seems pretty unlikely, really; she'll give him the blow-by-blow later.

How's the books? Anything interesting?