"Okay. Do you already have a plan, or...?"

He shakes his head. "Haven't thought of one that'd work."

"Tell me all about why not."

"Mostly it's that I can't take apart his personal wards unless he's very very distracted and I can't distract him enough without going through his wards. I'm working on something for it, but until you came along I would've had to do the whole thing myself, and taking spells apart while holding one on somebody is kind of difficult. Oh, and he spies on us secretly sometimes, but I can tell when he's doing it if I look hard enough and he never does it in anybody's room, I think he's afraid to catch us having sex."

She shudders. "Good."

"It's kind of stupid of him, makes a really predictable weakness if anybody guesses, but I'm not about to complain."

"He's stupid," she says dismissively, "he killed my mother."

"And didn't immediately kill you, yeah. Same with me and my Anaseverina."

Nod. "So you're definitely more skilled than I am--I was somebody's apprentice, but he only used non-abusive teaching methods--so I need to be the distraction, do you have a particular kind of distraction in mind?"

"Yep. I call it the pain spell."

"That sounds promising. How does it work?"

So he explains about the fundamental principle of activating all the sensory nerves in a given area.

"I don't know why I'm the only person who's thought of this, it seems really simple, but all the other sensory-affecting spells I've seen that aren't just 'turn all the nerves off' - I can do that too, that one's easy - they're way more complicated because they're trying to do specific things, like only heat, only pressure, only some pain... the pain spell just blasts everything, so I don't have to fuck around with that kind of detail and I can get more refined with the rest of it."

Nod nod. This seems like an excellent thing to do to Sorani Savaross.

"I can catch birds for you to practice on."

...She does not look entirely comfortable with this, but says, "Alright."

"And you shouldn't let on that you know it, I've only ever taught one person and it was my Anaseverina."

Nod. "I'm sorry for your loss."

He blinks, caught off-guard and unsure how to respond.

After a moment, he settles on, "Thanks."

"You're welcome."

Well that was surreal. Is this what people who grow up outside the tower are like...?

He shakes his head slightly. "I should try to catch you up on the curriculum, I'm sure I'm supposed to do that whenever I'm not torturing you."

"Yeah, okay," she says, and starts describing where she currently is. Her teacher taught her a lot of the same things that Savaross taught him, but less in-depth, in a different order, and without any of the torture or animalmurder.

She definitely needs to learn how to rip animals, then, and here's a bunch of details about assorted magical practices that she seems to have missed...

She is not going to hide that she finds most of this absolutely horrifying but she's also not going to hesitate to learn it.

It's weird that she finds it horrifying, but as long as she learns it...

Torture: generally considered Really Bad, outside the tower.