This lesson is on the basics of spellcasting! Some of the younger students are practically vibrating in their seats. There's a large clear space in the floor, and a couple of scholars mark out loose circles as Alidade speaks. 

"As you may recall if you read ahead in Fundamentals, or if you like many students have been eagerly awaiting this moment since you learned you were Gifted, there are three major categories of spellcasting. Spontaneous magic is the direct manifestation of a Gift by force of will; it is flexible but weak. Ritual or Avernian magic involves the use of resonant materials, diagrams, and sigils to channel raw vis into more powerful effects. Formulaic magic must be learned through extended study, but can produce specific more powerful effects mostly repeatably. Contra certain textbook authors, formulaic magic was not pioneered by Petronus, merely standardized. 

"We will not be working with raw vis today, and I don't have the time to teach you any formulas, so we'll be demonstrating spontaneous magic today. Specifically, we will practice a handful of minor spontaneous effects similar to those used in affinity testing. We will also demonstrate ceremonial casting, which is spontaneous magic that uses ritual elements, but not vis, in exchange for a small but sometimes significant boost in stability and power.

"UnGifted students will work with Gifted students in groups, and will take notes on the casting process. 

"Practicing spontaneous magic can be exhausting. I won't tell you all not to exert yourselves - because in my considerable experience that never works - but I will tell you that if you start feeling winded, take a break. Observe what others are doing for a couple minutes. Take notes. If you pass out from overexertion because you failed to heed my warning, I hereby give permission to tease you mercilessly about it for the next thirty-two hours."

In a more serious tone, Alidade continues, "And if literally anyone tells you to stop casting, stop immediately. It is the responsibility of everyone present to be on the lookout for magic that is about to go awry. If you think someone is abusing this privilege, stop casting anyway and then complain to me or my aides. 

"People sometimes lose control of their magic, and we have some experience bringing turbulence under control, so if you ever find you can't stop then call for help immediately." To drive home the point, Alidade has Alexius demonstrate this procedure, complete with a spontaneous generation of a rather concerning amount of blood that is quelled when Alidade raps a dual-pronged metal wand on her desk.

"Anyone violating either of these principles will be barred from my classes in perpetuity. I assure you, this outcome is better than bursting into flame."

Alidade splits up the class into groups by magical exercise, with several groups doing basic light spells. Alex, Alexius, and a pair of unGifted students named Kanutte and Scaevola are assigned a small list of practice exercises using Creo Corpus, starting with lengthening a single plucked hair and concluding with the ceremonial casting of a spell with ritual elements designed to temporarily mitigate the effects of injuries. Alex is instructed to observe Alexius' technique before trying his own, and to experiment with words and gestures and investigate the results in collaboration with the unGifted students.

He's done casting practice before but it's still pretty fun! Here is a newly lengthened hair.

Alex watches eagerly as Alexius demonstrates. When it's his turn he'll do his best to imitate what Alexius did. He will be quite successful at imitating any gestures and incantations but it is still one of his first tries at doing something like this in a structured way.

It turns out to be fairly easy to replicate the hair-growing trick, though the added length only lasts a moment. Further exercises involve doing it at a distance, making it last longer, lengthening a hair that's still attached to his arm, and (as difficult as any two of the previous combined) lengthening two separate hairs at once. 

Alex is able to get a couple of these working, but he gets stuck on the two-hairs task and keeps getting one or the other but not both. He feels like he could barely manage it if he just...pushed...a little...harder...

Well then he'll just have to try pushing. Alexius is watching so nothing should go too wrong right?

It works! For a moment, Alex feels power rushing forth from himself and sees the hairs lengthening obediently under his will. Then the moment passes and Alex feels suddenly tired, like he just hiked up a steep hill. 

That was absolutely worth it but he will heed the professor's advice and take a break.

Alidade bustles over shortly to check on him. "Ah, good, you heed my advice. An excellent quality in a magus, that. You'll be fine in a couple minutes, I expect. What Alex has discovered," she tells the observing students, "is that exerting oneself can produce significantly stronger effects than letting the magic do all the heavy lifting. It also, we have observed, draws down the body's own energy supply, and if he had continued to exert himself in this fashion, Alex would have found himself increasingly fatigued, and unconscious after another handful of spells. At that point there'd be nothing we could do for him but wait it out.

"Fortunately," she raises her voice and fixes a nearby group with a menacing stare, eliciting some guilty looks, "Alex recognized that he was getting tired and took a moment to rest. Now he will most likely be up and casting again in a couple of minutes."

Alidade lowers her voice again and turns to Alex. "Thank you for paying attention. Sorry to put you on the spot, but the youngsters do get so understandably excited sometimes. It's important to remind them not to overdo it, and for some reason seeing someone else do it right works far better than just telling them things, almost as good as doing it themselves. You humans are so very social, it's quite fascinating."

"I'm okay being held up as a positive example. I'm a little surprised to hear that your people aren't similarly influenced. There's always more to learn I suppose."

"It's more a matter of degree than kind. Remind me to tell you sometime about a fragment of lore that survived the Forgetting, a certain conformity experiment run on half a dozen species...

"In the meantime, keep at it, and take breaks whenever you need them. You'll find spontaneous magic is good practice for managing fatigue. Formulaic magic can be more unforgiving; if you get a formulaic spell almost right, it will often drain your reserves somewhat to make up the difference, whether you intended it to or not. And a mismanaged ritual can take a magus from fresh to unconscious or dead, though that's rare among experienced casters. Our upcoming ceremonial exercises won't have this problem, to be clear." 

"I would love to hear more sometime. And yes I would expect so. It would be a poorly planned curriculum that risked that much on an early lesson."

"...don't tell that to some of the older magi, they might get offended. You'll hear no argument from me, though." On that ominous note, Alidade moves on.

There is another fifteen minutes or so of casting practice. During that time, there's a minor scare in which water overflows from a student's cupped hands, another involving a blinding flash of light, and a third involving the accidental shredding of a strip of practice leather, but these are quickly contained.

Alidade flits about the classroom offering bits of advice and insight and more advanced exercises to those who need them. Then she gets everyone's attention and stops the exercises to explain some of the results they've been getting. 

"As you may have noticed, some features of spells require more effort or power to produce. The power of a spell is called its magnitude. This will not be as immediately helpful as you might expect, because most of the exercises you've been practicing are of the first magnitude. Making the end of your finger flicker with a faint glow, and making it shine like the sun through clouds as long as you concentrate, are both of the first magnitude, but the latter is much more difficult." 

She goes on to describe the four primary determinants of a spell's magnitude: the base effect, the range, the duration, and the target. Base effects are something akin to a "minimum viable spell"; a specific, momentary, singular effect with a range no greater than the caster's own person. The power of the effect - the brightness of a light, unnaturalness of a weather phenomenon, or strength of a healing spell - determines the magnitude of a base effect. From there, scaling up any of range, duration, or target generally adds one or more magnitudes to the necessary power of a spell.

Standard ranges start at "personal" and scale to "something the caster physically touches", then "within reach of the natural voice of the caster", then "anything the caster can see", then "anything the caster has an Arcane Connection to." These are often shortened to Personal, Touch, Voice, Sight, and Arcane. There is also Eye, or any being that makes eye contact with the caster, which like Touch range adds a single magnitude. 

Standard durations are "momentary", "until the sun/moon has traveled its diameter in the sky" (about two minutes), "until the next sunrise or sunset", "until the next full moon and new moon have set", and "until sunrise on the fourth equinox or solstice after casting", with the last duration always requiring a ritual. Durations are often shortened to Momentary, Diameter, Sun, Moon, and Year. There is also a duration of Concentration or "as long as the caster can concentrate on maintaining the spell" which is equivalent to Diameter in magnitude, and Ring or approximately "while the target(s) remain within an unbroken diagram made by the caster", equivalent to Sun. 

Standard targets are a bit more complicated, with the baseline being either "Individual" (the base Individual varies by Form, but in the case of Corpus it's "a single humanoid gnomoid body"), or "Circle", which is literally "everything within the bounds of a diagram the caster physically traces out while casting." Circle is often paired with Ring. Then there's Part, or "some part of a natural Individual" at one magnitude higher than baseline; Group, up to ten base Individuals at two; Room, the contents of an enclosed and bounded chamber of near-arbitrary size, also at two; Structure, often glossed as "an entire edifice under a single roof", at three; and Boundary, a somewhat abstract target which includes anything with a well-defined natural or artificial boundary and always requires a ritual to cast, at four magnitudes above baseline.

The exercises they've been practicing have been using ranges of Personal, Touch, and Voice, durations of Momentary and Diameter, and targets of Individual, Group, and (in a few cases, such as the targeting of a hair on someone's own arm) Part. 

Before they move on to ceremonial spells, Alidade invites students to try out Concentration on their exercises. "Magi often describe the sensation of maintaining an active spell as recognizing the moment when it snags, applying a bit of added exertion in that moment, then holding the sense of the spell carefully and consistently. Musicians sometimes liken it to holding a note."

This sounds like another interesting challenge. He does his best to get the magic to stick to the hair. Maybe it's about establishing a flow instead of throwing a ball.

It feels less like a flow and more like...the mental equivalent of standing on one foot with one's arms held in weird static positions? It's a mix of passive and effortful.

After he's held it for half a minute, he starts to lose his mental balance and the hair begins to rapidly thicken.

He'll let it go. That isn't the intended effect and he can always try again. As he's letting go, he tries to understand why it's thickening.

As he attempts to release the spell, he finds that he can't; it pulls at him, draining his energy, like his mental balance has not only been disrupted but there's an anchor attached to his metaphorical wrist; the hair is branching and starting to look positively fluffy. (Only a few moments have passed.) 

He gasps and after struggling for another couple moments barely has the presence of mind to say, "Help!" Then he turns his attention to trying to regain control or unhook himself of really anything he can think of.

An aide rushes over with a wand. Alex does, just barely, manage something that feels a bit like disentangling himself from a weight that's dragging him under, just before he gets booped surprisingly gently by the aide.

He's left significantly winded and holding a woven lock of smooth, silken hair. 

Okay... it's good that he was able to stop it or that the wand did everything got a little blurry there. He thinks he managed something though.

He brings his attention to the hair... that used to just be one hair and it wasn't woven. How did uncontrollably growing a single hair produce this result.

He'll look to see if Alexius has any comments.

"You okay? That didn't look like a particularly bad botch but you never know." 

"I think I'm just winded, I'm confused about why there's more hair and especially why it's woven though. Especially given it seems to be sticking around."

"Botches break all the rules. Well, most of them anyway. Couldn't tell you why it came out the way it did, that's why I'm here trying to pick up more theory."