"Thank you. I bought it when I hit fifth circle."

Mahdi has shielded his whole house against teleportation except by him and conjuration except by him and scrying; there are alarms that make a loud noise at intruders and alarms that silently alert him of anyone meddling with the other alarms, two of those braided together so ideally if one is disabled the other can alert him to that; around his rooms themselves there's a magic lock on the door and a trap spell that should knock unconscious anyone trying to get in and some kind of intricate working that his spellbook seems to slot into.

Huh. Vanyel describes what he’s noticing. “What is that?”

"It makes it faster to prepare spells if I'm at home. Once I'm retired I'll probably prepare and sell Teleports so I'd like to get quick at that. I also use the scaffolding when I'm doing spell research, being able to play with everything without any power in it is important for improving efficiency or making alterations without blasting myself in the face."

“Ooh, that makes sense! I guess I can just cast my spells with less power, for tests, but your magic doesn’t work that way.”

"We have some control over how much power we put into a spell and more for how much we put into an artifact but not that much, yeah." His unseen servant finishes dragging the contents of the bag onto the floor of his room and stacking them. "I'm ready to head back now if you are."

Vanyel nods. Takes a deep breath. Gating is much faster than refilling the spell and takes comparable power over the distance they’re crossing, so it clearly makes sense.

That’s an interesting note, actually, and he asks about it once they’re back and the Gate is down and Yfandes is delightedly prancing in circles around him again. “Teleports are the same power requirement, regardless of how far?”

"If it's short enough range you can do it with a fourth-circle spell but if it's a quarter of a mile or more you need a fifth-circle one, and that's much more range, about nine hundred miles, and the same cost for any jump within that range. There are higher-circle variants with even more range but I've mostly only tinkered with the spell in the spirit of squeezing more efficiency into the fifth-circle version, I am statistically very unlikely to ever be able to cast sixth-circle spells."

"I think I still don't fully understand the limiting factor there. It's something to do with intelligence, and also...enough experience casting under battle conditions? It's weird, though; I mean, that's definitely a thing with my kind of magic, but you end up with mages who can cast really well in a comfortable Work Room but freeze up in a fight, not that they can't cast advanced spells at all, that's just repetition and practice." 

"I am not powerful enough to cast sixth-circle spells unaided, even if I understand them. I can't channel enough energy. I can cast them if I understand them and have an external power source. I had a scroll of Teleport on hand for emergencies even when I wasn't powerful enough to cast fifth-circle spells on my own.

When they're starting out, wizards become capable of channeling more energy on their own, over time, just through practice. But that method levels out around second circle and you can't get past third that way. But if you're using magic in combat regularly, then you continue improving on that front. Combat or - other emergencies, evacuating people from a disaster works as well as fighting in it, as long as you're using your magic, fast, under pressure.

The dominant theory is just that you have to be pushing yourself past your normal capabilities in a way that people are mostly not capable of doing deliberately in safety. And some people aren't capable of it even when in danger - most wizards are first or second circle. But it's frustrating because introspectively, I am mostly not pushing myself in combat, I actually try quite hard to do things calmly in the same fashion and from the same state as I do them in practice."

"Interesting. It sounds like pushing yourself in that way actually does something equivalent to strengthening Gift potential. That happens at all for mages in my world but mostly it's just innate and fixed. I was this powerful the day my Gifts awakened, I was just hopeless at using them. Anyway, that makes me wonder if I could channel power to you, to cast higher level spells?"

"- huh! Quite possibly, though we should find a first-circle wizard and see if you can get them second-circle spells that way, if we try it with something sixth-circle and mess up somewhere we're going to both have a lot of regrets about our choices."

"Er, yes, let's do that. We can put that aside for later experimenting, I guess." 

"Once we're back in Sothis it will take a few weeks to sell all of this and we can experiment in the meantime."

"Right." Vanyel yawns. "I should probably sleep, unless there's any other planning to do with how to use my magic versus yours?" 

"I'm sure we'll think of more as we go. Good night."

Vanyel curls up in his bedroll next to Yfandes and checks his shields. "Wake me when it's my turn on watch, then." 

He manages not to project, but he has a lot of nightmares that night, including some of the really bad ones that he hasn't had in a while. Thinking about Tylendel this often isn't helping with anything. 

They are not attacked by any spiders in the night, and in the morning they can Dimension Door back down and keep exploring.

Which of the three remaining doors do they want to have a go at first? 

"Pharaoh of infesting people with fiendish vermin, pharaoh who raised a dragon from an egg and then had it murdered and mummified to guard his tomb- which is the pyramid south of here, so probably there's not gonna be a dragon here - and Pharaoh of Numbers, no guesses what that's gonna be as a fight but I bet it's the most dangerous."

"Let's see whether Vanyel can make his spells Good, that'd be useful against the fiendish vermin."

"Do you have a spell you can demonstrate for me that we won't need in the fight after? Although I guess I could just put it back again, if it's one of Mahdi's." 

"Protection from Evil." Fazil can cast it too but that's not going to teach Vanyel much. 

The magic does look different than normal in some hard to describe way.

"Interesting." Vanyel frowns, focuses on it, and tries just shaping some magical energy to 'look' the same, before actually feeding it into a spell. 

"Protection from Chaos," for comparison. This one also looks weird but slightly differently weird.

That's so fascinating. Vanyel keeps poking around, seeing if he can shape his own magic to match it, either when he's gathering it up to cast or in the spell itself. 

"What do those spells actually do?" he asks, absently.