"Move your wings together. You might want a running start. However good you are at reading while flying, don't do it on day one." He lands; his computer becomes surrounded by a nice-but-battered-looking leather case and goes back on his belt loop. "The important thing is to keep air under you with lots of surface area and glide as much as you can; flapping is tiring and also cuts your surface area for part of the time you're doing it, so only flap if you have to."

"I... can't easily tell by looking when you're using magic for it or not, which doesn't help me give you tips. I can take off from a still start, it's not necessary to be moving, a lot of people just find it helps."

"That's when you stop moving your wings together. Which way do you wanna go? That wing goes down, other one goes up -" He get a bit ahead of her. "Watch." And he smoothly swoops left.

"If I fall out of the sky, appear something squishy below me, please." And stop flapping, get used to gliding for a bit - woah the wind changes, well of course it does - and she dips one wing, raising the other, to slooowly bank left.

"All right." He flies nearby, not close enough for his wingbeats to foul hers.

She ascends some more, and practices sweeping left and right a little more sharply. "I was right. This is thrilling! With the stream you're just pulling yourself along, but this is like - playing soccer against the air or something."

"This metaphor is new to me."

"I don't know. I'm not really thinking about words much right now. Hey, you can see the mainway from here. Opri's over there, shall we head in that direction?" Point.

"Sure."

Fly, fly, fly. She does a shallow dive, but holds off on any more daring tricks. "Say, what're you reading?"

"More advanced theoretical magic stuff."

"Ah. I've probably read half of anything on construction or thermo-kinetics you find. Half of my job as civil service administrator is researching better spells and double-checking everyone's work. Is it giving you any ideas on how to make my employees' jobs redundant? Because that would be pretty great, given how many people are tied up in this. Maybe we can get the compulsory labor repealed if workforce needs drop far enough."

"I mean, maybe, what do your employees do with themselves?"

"Work the water pumps and monitor the water quality. Operate the public elevators. Light up public areas at night. Make and repair buildings, bridges, roads, tunnels. Deal with snow and other inclement weather. Deliver letters and packages. Keep stores of food for emergencies. Keep emergency services ready to respond to fires and injuries. Attempt to predict earthquakes. Maintain the magical infrastructure for all these tasks."

"I can spruce up your water handling, I can make elevators that don't need a person in them, um, electricity is a thing, I can make buildings and bridges and I can under some constraints make roads and I can produce tunneling-related equipment. I can't control the weather except to add water to the system, which you proooobably don't want me doing on any significant scale, but I can do snowplows and maybe tweak your postal algorithms and supply vehicles to do mail runs in. I can make shelf stable food, although I don't want to screw up your infrastructure for doing that yourselves in any way without knowing lots more about my long-term availability and public reception. Similar with emergency services, although I can do snazzy firefighting gadgets and if I'm satisfied your police aren't evil little tyrants I can do policing gadgets too. I can do medicine, great heaps of it, I'm specially trained. I cannot predict or prevent earthquakes; what I can do is cause them in more or less the same way you might already start small forest fires to prevent accumulating tinder, but it's a risky proposition. I cannot interact with your magical infrastructure at this time."

"Electricity: tame lightning. Runs all the cool future swag. I can probably do some of your water stuff on pure mechanical if you want though."

"Tame lightning. That's a bit of a scary thought. What would be best for the water stuff is things that are low-maintenance or at least low-workforce. Is the general plan here 'improve things and deal with violence or other unpleasantness as it occurs' or something else?"

"My plan is 'implement unambiguous, safe improvements while getting enough of my bearings to make fewer things ambiguous and more things safe'."

"I'm not really... scared of an army? Like, it seems like your magic system all has to play with physics, so I expect my ability to break physics attempting to harm me will remain intact. Also I could just sort of tranquilize them all." He lands where directed. "It could get inconvenient if they did something like hold civilian hostages or invent the deadman switch but I'd still give myself swell odds."