She does want supper, and then she thinks she's all set to try! "I have never done this before and in particular do not have much experience with how the whole being a child thing works," she tells her subject, "so it's possible I'll mistarget, what age do you want me to aim for?"

"Hmm. Thirty? I think that was my favourite age, and if you go too young by accident I won't come out as a teenager." 

"I'll do my best. Do you have a mirror? I can try to go slow."

A somewhat warped hand mirror can be found and brought in. 

And slowly the mage becomes less old.

The woman oohs and aahs as she watches herself in the mirror. The Healers watch, transfixed. What does it look like to Healing-Sight, if anything? 

It looks like the healing she does normally only on a much smaller scale!

Huh. Wow. Can Sapphire get her Sight to go in closer and closer, and see any better what's going on? 

That is between Sapphire and her Sight.

"I should be able to do with less staring time going forward now that I've tried the technique."

(Sapphire can't get in close enough to have a hope of replicating it, but she's going to keep trying!) 

The other elderly mages are pleased about the faster progress, not that they would have begrudged all the staring, it's such a cheap price for getting to not be old anymore. 

She looks at the remaining subjects and asks them for target ages and one at a time, each holding a mirror while she goes nice and slow, de-ages them all.

Leareth comes up to watch the last few, and is so impressed. 

"There."

Leareth is watching her intently. 

"How long do you think it would take for an intelligent mortal to learn sorcery well enough to do that?" he asks her. 

"If they're as smart as me and were aiming specifically at this a couple years I guess?"

Leareth looks both relieved and faintly disappointed. "Then - people will still die, I think, while we are scaling up. I do not think we can cover the whole continent with you alone - just logistically speaking that is not feasible. But perhaps not for too many years." There's a distant, hard-to-read look in his eyes. 

"Yeah. And I don't think I can do anything about accidents if there's not an uninjured healer handy."

"How long do you think humans would need to learn the healing-sorcery that you were doing before?" 

"Almost as much time but with about the same curriculum, won't slow them down much."

Nod. "And what kind of teaching is this timeline premised on? Self-study, or tutoring from you or a skilled teacher, or some teacher feedback but mostly practice..." 

"Books like I had and focusing on it instead of also needing to forage and make their own clothes and stuff, plus some occasional asking questions of me. So I'd need to go get a book. I won't have to copy them all out if I can trade them, is there anything reasonably - innocuous -"

"Probably not here at this library, but I am sure I can obtain you some very innocuous books of childrens' stories and ballads and such, if fairies would like those." 

"Libraries aren't picky. If they don't have it they'll want it."

"I will work on obtaining that for you, then. How many do you want to trade?" 

"Well, do you want anything besides sorcery books?"