Ouch.

"—which is evidence that this isn't a Skill, is it not? This spell was created by someone who didn't know what they were doing, and hasn't been refined since. Yes, I am perfectly ready to believe that Mr. Vallynn here created this, as a teenager, on his own, with no instruction."

Gaël... doesn't really have a rebuttal to that.

"Do you believe you could pick it up and improve it?"

"Obviously."

"I do, too. So Mr. Vallynn is going to keep using this spell and slowly moving the inkwell around for the rest of this lecture and you will all try to learn enough about it from watching it to replicate it. Then, hmm, two days from now, I want to see your improved versions of it. All of you," she adds, addressing the whole class now. "And then you will explain to us—and to Mr. Vallynn in particular, if he chooses to join us again—what improvements you made, why, and what difficulties you encountered while doing so."

Aah.

"How'd you do it?" asks the mage that looked curious, earlier. "Just—on instinct?"

...oh he's being addressed, uh. "Yeah, I guess. I didn't want to get any Skills before joining the Academy and I'd read up on some theoretical foundations and wanted to try something small and inoffensive."

"Wait," says Astrid. "Didn't you say, back then, when you picked up Lightning Bolt, didn't you say you'd already studied it? So you only studied theory?"

"—ah. I, ah, fibbed a bit? I didn't want Pierre to feel bad. I'd studied it a bit the day before, out of curiosity."

"You're such bullshit, Vallynn," she laughs.

"Mr. Vallynn, you might wish to start drawing from the crystal. The upkeep cost of your spell right now is outpacing your regeneration."

Wait, it is? Ah, shit. Okay, he, uh, he hopes the mental motion is obvious? He hasn't actually tried it yet... Yeah, okay, it is, he's fine.

"Now, so you don't feel like we are all just criticising you, I want to assure you that that is very impressive work, Mr. Vallynn. Developing a spell from scratch is something none of them can do yet—"

"Don't compare us to the prodigy, professor, you'll just make us feel bad," sighs Astrid.

"You mustn't feel like that. Natural variation in ability is just a fact of life, but most importantly it is washed out by experience and practice. Once all of you have a decade of adventuring under your belts these differences will seem inconsequential. Mr. Vallynn may always be better than all of us at coming up with new things on the fly, but there are many reasons we use Skills and one of the most important is, simply, that they work."

...okay, Vallynn's got to admit this professor is good. He himself has been known to occasionally act like awkwardness isn't there in order to make it go away but she's got that down to an art. Even Gaël looks sort of mollified.

"Mr. Vallynn, why don't you take a seat?" she suggests, gesturing at the armchair he'd been aiming for at the start of the lesson. "I had been planning on continuing from where we left off last class but I think your colleagues are going to be too busy paying attention to and taking notes about your spell to be able to truly follow anything I say, and I think this practical example will be more instructive overall than what I had planned."

Yeah, okay, he'll take a seat. "Why my spell?" he wonders, though he has a guess already. "There are other spells that probably work better?"

"Just so. The very fact that yours isn't very refined is a better example than anything I could come up with, and usually the very first time students encounter an unrefined spell like this is when they're trying to create their own. Even if I tried to create a new spell myself and mimic the mistakes and inefficiencies of a more inexperienced mage, I would almost certainly fall trap to assuming things are obvious or easy that actually aren't, so I didn't try." She leans forward conspiratorially and stage whispers, "And, between you and me, I believe it'd take me a lot longer than you to do it," then winks.

Yeah, that was his guess. "—can you stopper it? I don't want to spill it and it's hard to concentrate otherwise—"

"Can you not do it yourself?"

"—I mean, I can't hold two things at the same time."

"Not with your mind, but you, also, have hands," she observes.