It is indeed pretty easy to use the lantern once you have the basic idea! She did call it a baby exercise for twelve year olds.

Will? Move in complex shapes, without any external guidance, on thirty seconds of practice? Well, Sinnah can do that but Seska is just going to get a jerky tear in the feeling and then a blob of force moving in a random direction. 

It hits her in the face.

"Huh. That's strange."

That's barely a mishap, she's been dealt more damage by a malfunctioning cantrip scroll. She'll try again and see if thirty-five seconds of practice goes any better.

"What is?" Seska asks, no doubt about to get whapped by another force-blob.

This time the force blob is instead an offputting warbling noise you feel in your teeth.

"Usually minor miscasts aren't- Oh. I see what this is. The lover's-weave must be local to Tirra, an ambient magical effect that moderates miscasts into less harmful forms... Hahaha... I wonder if I can replicate it myself..."

It's painful, but so weakly so, it's like the magic itself is trying to teach her how to use it. At least in her conception of it, warped by Cheliax-influenced teaching practices. 

"It's hardly harmful at this level, it would take a half-dozen or more miscasts before it became more than I could just sleep off."

(They are still in the atrium of Ornelos Hall, because Seska wants to make sure she's publicly associated with this impressive new visiting professor.)

"It'd be deadly at higher reaches. There are ways other than the ambitious thing you're trying now, but do keep trying... As long as progress can be made towards me in a classroom."

"Makes sense, if there's more power to be released, like a badly-worded Wish..."

Taking the hint, Seska hands the letter off to an Unseen Servant for delivery to the relevant administrator. 

"There's probably a practice room free, it's coming up on mealtime so most students will be heading to the wall to eat. Hall of Evocation is probably best, since that's built for containing damaging spells."

She'll lead Sinnah over there unless instructed otherwise.

"If you want me to show off some big spells you'll need to find me someone to fuck, or volunteer yourself. Would they have introductory books there?"

'Volunteer herself'? Oh no, she's one of those teachers. Calm down, this is fine, she's a woman, Seska doesn't like women but it's not like she'll get pregnant... No, she can just get Maganrad to volunteer, it's not like he'd complain.

"Oh, for books we can go to the Hall of Seeing instead, the Cube's no place for any fragile texts. Big spells can wait."

"I'm getting impatient, may I carry you under Fly."

Eep.

"Yes, go ahead, it's the one with the big crystal ball dome there!"

Cast. Scoop. Zhooop. Unscoop. And into the hall.

"I am fundamentally not a patient person, at all. It's nothing against anyone in particular. You maybe want to wait for me to teach you about infusing chalk and then drawing a circle with runes and using that to cast light instead of continuing to try skipping straight to freehand casting. Or at least learn the usual gestures. You might learn bad habits."

What's the right level of ambition here? 

"Whatever you think is best, teacher. The gestures, maybe?'

Infused chalk is easy to come by here, assuming it's the same spell component.

Sure, she can talk about those while they navigate the interior of the Hall of Seeing and she looks around. Each hand-shape-gesture represents a rune; Each rune has an influence on the flow of will. What you do is set the runes with a slightly different mental motion, then push out will in a nice smooth circle, and the runes you set in the air, in advance, will do a pretty good chunk of the shaping for you, though not all of it. Malformed gestures and therefore malformed runes, obviously, mess this up. As will malformed circles. You need to be good at placing your hands. She does a couple of demos as they walk (and warns that getting the gestures to work while you're moving is an advanced trick). The setup of gestures for the light cantrip is like so, two here and one here and two there.

Okay, so it's kind of like assembling a spellform and then releasing it, except the somatic components come at the start instead of the end? She'll try copying the hand gestures first without doing anything more with them, just getting the finger placement down, since those kinds of precise manual motions have always taken her more practice. 

"Can you have a whole collection of air-runes ready to go, like how I can prepare all my spells at the start of the day to cast later? Or would they interfere with each other?"

It's not far to the Hall of Seeing, only the next building over. If Sinnah touches the door to open it, the image on that door will change from the scowling inquisitor robed in red and black, presenting a tome of law or evidence with an accusing gesture, into the picture of a king weeping before an obelisk and a smoking urn while a ghost looks on.

"You can make scrolls or chalk diagrams in advance that barely take any skill at all to activate, which sounds similar, but for hand gesture casting it's all in the moment..."

She makes a 'hmm' noise, then lets go of the door and taps it again, peering at the magic at work. She's better than most at teasing background details like this out, though not perfect.

They don't change again on a repeat touch. To her magical sight, the doors themselves are relatively straightforward, with two enchantments of the Golarion paradigm embedded within their material to identify those who touch them and send that information away, and to display one of 54 different images based on the reply. The part of the system that determines which image to display must be located elsewhere, deeper inside the enigmatic structure. 

"The doors always show me the Fiend, you shouldn't read too much into them," Seska says. 

"Interesting spell structure, it's talking to another spell elsewhere and waiting to hear back. I want to look at the catalog. But that probably qualifies as 'secret'. It's annoyingly tedious to do stuff like this under the Tirran paradigm, you have to have physical connections with gold wire or diamond dust infused resin or the like to connect two spells persistently at a distance."

If it's not locked or anything she'll just go in, then.

The inside has another atrium that is relatively normal, except for the ever-shifting images on the ceiling dome. A dragon - a mask - a pair of twins, or someone facing their reflection...

Stairs and corridors lead off to different parts of the structure. 

"The library is that way," Seska says, pointing to the hallway past a tray of perpetually-rolling dice.

To the library they go, then.

"Tirran wizardry to do illusions is highly underdeveloped. I think they're more technically evocations, constructs that emit or obscure light in the prescribed way, rather than acting on perception directly as these do. Some natural magics are better at it though."

"So they can't get the mind of the victim to fill in the details, they have to provide them all up-front? That does sound less effective."

The library is packed with books. One of the Acadamae traditions is to support with pride any graduate who goes on to make contributions to the literature of arcane study. The opening shelves are all full of works published by those graduates, their spines marked with the symbol of the Gilded Orrery press and ordered by the authors' dates of graduation. This does however make it much less convenient to find a work on a given topic without knowing which author to look for. 

"Some kitsunes are blessed in the art of illusion more than others. But it's innate, like sorcery, mostly. Would foundational theory on low level spells by anywhere in here? I may need a language spell of my own. Well, I can learn a language, that's a good time sink."

"Yes, for that it's a ways through, you probably want the supplementary reading around the first-year textbooks to begin with."

She'll lead Sinnah over to a better-organized section, recognizable from many of the books having multiple copies present due to the high demand. Some of the books are more practical, like Redwing's Dungeon Companion, others religious in nature like the Nethysian Book of Magic, but Seska goes for the Structure and Interpretation of Arcane Magic, a thick textbook with pages that alternate between cramped printed text and large diagrams. 

Oh, this is perfect. What a good library. Probably the really juicy stuff is locked up, but that's what she'd do too and there's a veritable cornucopia to forage on for weeks and weeks to come.

She's entirely unfamiliar with the concepts and keeps referring to things from Tirran tradition, but picks things up quick. If the two of them study this for a while, interspersed with tips on Tirran-style casting, what else might occur in the meantime?

For starters, they will begin to attract an audience: A young woman in gray robes and with a tawny cat around her shoulders batting at the feathers in her hair will soon get distracted from her own studies and start listening in on their discussion. With the speed of the Acadamae rumor network, more might show up soon.

Incidental distracted language bap.

Her lecture/questioning doesn't really change, though. Unless they start participating. Except for occasional eyeing at the cat-person connection she can faintly see.