"The- personal kind, that no one writes down but everyone knows."  Dish dish not looking at Txell this was a terrible idea she should have just gone to Kenabres- stop that.  Breathe.  "Men one oughtn't be alone with, things which- aren't forbidden but anger unusually the commander, arguments that have already happened a dozen times and mustn't be revived...?"

"Oho. All right. I'd steer clear of anyone in division eighty-nine, the commander would've traded them to another fort if we weren't having such a weird time. He hates it when people are drunk, it's forbidden on duty but he has no patience for it even if they're off and they do anything dim, we've been all but out of booze for a while but if you get one of the magical booze spells bear it in mind. We're not to go after anyone who used to be an Asmodean cleric - not just Artigas but the others too, they're supposed to just be martial soldiers now like any others, if you just go on not knowing which ones they are that'd serve but you might want to know just to have in mind that they're the kind that were..."

Is that it, did that just work?  She ducks her head and smiles up at Txell, softer and warmer than her practiced coquette smirk.  "I thank you very much.  Eighty-ninth, booze, not to single out the former clerics."  She owes Txell an open-ended favor, file that one away in her mental ledger, and... she ought to be cautious and doublecheck before she asks anything more sensitive like who's sleeping together and how much they let it influence them.  (Also because her heart is already kind of racing.)  Dish dish dish dish.  "...does the commander just sheff- shuffle all the problem men together, or did the eighty-ninth start out that way?"

"He shuffles 'em together but the eighty-ninth was new, a trade from a few months before that might've settled out to work here and didn't."

Nod nod.  "...and the First Arcane, do things anger unusually him?"

"He's Artigas's man. I'd think they were fucking, almost, but I actually think they're not. But he likes it if you're quick with your mid-day prepping, when you need to fill a slot you left free, and he doesn't like it when you pretend not to know what he means - I don't know how being bad with Taldane'll affect that."

Wince and a rueful laugh.  "Well, I will certainly not pretend to be worse, then."  Dish dish.  (She files away for later what's almost certainly a sex word from the context.)  "They said the fort gives lessons, but-"  general wave at the concept of how eventful the last couple days were.

"Sure, there's lessons, you've got to sign up for them and they're assuming you start from Chelish but it's something."

"Perhaps I'll learn some Chelish by going backwards, then."  Dish dish dish.  "-must one go to all of them in order, or may one attend occasionally?  I'm yet unsure how often I'll be sent elsewhere."

"You want the ones Taberner runs, he's usually got a theme in mind but doesn't go in for prerequisites, the others are working out of a textbook."

"Taberner.  I thank you once more."  

Dish dish dish dish dish- 

"Oh shit," she blurts out, and switches back to Taldane, "I was meant to find the First Arcane- or he me- I owe the fort a scroll."  Or the labor for two scrolls but she doesn't really need to clarify that.  "I ought go."

"Yeah-huh. Steady hands," says Txell, collecting Khalida's dish pile to add to her own.

"And you as well!"  And she checks her scarf and dashes off.

Anyplace obvious to look for a First Arcane, if you're supposed to meet him but not sure when?  (While she's at it, where does the schedule say Khalida ought to have been today?)

Grec's got his own office, she could try there! She's scheduled for scroll scribing, of course, after whatever Endure Elementsing she can fit in the same day's slots.

Oh nice, someone's updated the schedule already, they're very organized here.  She'll Endure some patrollers definitely not procrastinating, it's on the schedule first and everything and then go check if Grec's in his office. 

Yup, there he is. "You're here for the ink?"

Nod.  "I- fear I need also a scroll parchment."

"That we have aplenty, it's not the best quality because we make it here in the cold out of full grown oxen instead of somewhere pleasanter out of lambskin but it'll serve." Voilà.

And (unless he wants her to do it supervised, which would suck), she'll collect the materials and flee.

Scroll scribing is not Khalida's favorite part of wizardry.  She can do it, everyone can, but it's finicky and tedious and takes forever.  She clears the desk to set up the materials, digs her compass and square out of the bottom of her satchel (she doesn't need them for her spellbook anymore, but it's hard to avoid with scrolls), casts Light on a random brick and also lights a candle so she doesn't startle and blot her lines when it runs out, tucks the corner of her scarf under the door so the guys know not to interrupt her, aaaaaand has run out of steps to procrastinate with and has to actually start.

A scroll is physically smaller than the same spell in a book- every one Khalida has seen is a single square of parchment- and needs finer lines... but not correspondingly, they're actually much finer than the difference in area would suggest.  This is because the charts in a spellbook are scaffolds to hold the form while it's being constructed; a scroll is the spellform itself.  (This is also why the inks for a scroll are so much more expensive by volume than spellbook ink: it has to contain the full arcane energy of the spell indefinitely, not just the scaffold while the spell is being hung.)  Scrolls can't be made from separate pages like the leaves of a spellbook, because spellforms aren't divisible: everywhere the spellform is connected, the scroll diagram also has to be.  But the other challenge for the scribe is that spellforms almost universally aren't planar graphs- there are tricks of perspective to flatten a sphere onto a sheet of parchment, but no matter how you twist or distort a torus or anything more complicated, there's no way to get it down into only two dimensions without crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed. 

So Khalida builds up her scroll in layers: fine precise lines at exacting angles, covering the parchment with as much of the spellform as it will hold without forbidden intersections, easing that part of the spellform in as she goes to match up with them until the lines hold it. Then (still holding the rest of the spellform in her head) she sprinkles the page with powdered cuttlefish bone to cure the ink, waits to make sure it's completely set before blowing it off, cleans her pen and starts on the next layer, a different variant of spellsilver in a different kind of suspension, careful not to scratch the prior layers where the lines cross without 'touching', tiny cautious dots of solvent where they should intersect.

She's appropriately cautious with the ink- dips her pen sparingly and wipes it on the necks of the bottles as much as she can before using a rag, layers out the whole spell in her head before she starts so she doesn't get stuck with weird ugly giant loops around the outside on the last layers and the lines don't come too near each other when they don't need to cross.  She's a strong enough caster by now that she could make the lines a bit thicker and have the spell last a bit longer, but she certainly doesn't need to ask whether four moments of Glitterdust instead of three would be worth a third again as much scroll ink.

The finished piece is still beautiful, it's hard for a spell not to be, but it's not elegant- not exactly dead but compressed, literally flattened, a showpiece of human ingenuity rather than a window to the underlying symmetries of the universe, like the blueprints to a cathedral instead of the building itself.  She adds one last round of cuttlefish dust, prints the command words clearly along the top in plain unmagical ink along with her best guess at a phonetic Taldane pronunciation, and is back at the First Arcane's office two hours and a bit after she left.

He read magics it.

That sure is a Glitterdust. 

"Good. And -" He has tiny scales, and would like to assess how profligate she's been with the ink.

Not very!  A bit more solvent than strictly necessary, but at least that's the cheapest one?

Yup. Here's the parchment for a second one.

Small nod.  "I thank you."  Wheeee, more work.  She can... probably get it done without rushing before she's expected at dinner, it's not like she needs the sunset channel today.  

...hells, the channels.  She needs to get on the channeling schedule even though it involves standing on a table and everyone staring at her, which is probably a question for the commander rather than the First Arcane, she's been getting the sense they're separate chains of command even if the clerical chain currently only has one link in it.  But this presents a bit of a sequencing problem, since she doesn't really want to either leave the scroll ink unattended or go trucking around the fort carrying all of it (and either way making herself even later finishing up).  She finds Tariq grabbing his deck of cards when she gets back to their room, though, so she settles for asking him to ask Omar to find Artigas and let him know that she's scribing but still has channel(s?) today and when should she do them?