Tea Entity, Carissa prays, if I'm not supposed to tell these people about spellsilver for some reason, please show me your will, that I may see it done. 

And Past Summoned Heroes, assuming they left behind some way to give their successors information, if you refrained from telling anyone about spellsilver, please tell me why. 

And Asmodeus, whose name is denigrated here and spoken only by the mad - if you have a plan for this world, make your loyal servant your instrument of it. 

You'd be sorely disappointed if you expected that this whole planet was, on some basic level, functional enough, for a prayer like that to get a response.  One third of it is currently on fire.

She's not going to assume from the lack of response they have nothing to say to her, but, worth a try. 

Okay. What else have the books got on - how channeling a kind of magic works, how spell creation works, how learning new spells works...

The books with children's exercises for Water, Air, and Light are... actually pretty much what you'd expect: get awoken for that Element specifically (it's presumed you've already been tested for it), then do a bunch of simple things-that-matter-to-a-child with that Element.  There isn't anything resembling an explanation of "how channeling works" aimed at either the child or the parent; you feel aspected mana running through you, you learn do that yourself, great, you're now channeling mana.

If she swaps over to the book about theoretical magic, it'll have more formal descriptions of physical laws governing the different simple and complex Elements, when they're not falling into the rut of an existing spell.  Even the Tier-3 Elements aren't as complicated in their behaviors as plain old Golarion mana, but there is respectable actual math going on at that level.

You do calculations to create spells for the first time, and channel it much more precisely than most people can manage, and maybe set up surrounding affinity mats for structural support so the mana goes to the right place the first time... and then you do it again and again and again and do it in a dungeon or a contest and eventually it's not so hard to do, anymore.

If she skips ahead to the end of the book, she'll find that if you are born with every basic Element, and you live long enough or are just enough of a prodigy to get affinity in every single Tier-2 and Tier-3 element, you can combine all the Elements, the thing at the center of all of them, and aspect your mana with that truly combined affinity... to turn it into, not Chaos, but matter.  Including Plasma-aspected adamantine, if you feel like it, though even then Creation mages won't get very much matter in exchange for a lot of mana.  But that sure is a way that Creation mages can create artifacts that others simply can't duplicate at all.

Or if you reach the end of that first road and master every affinity, you can instead walk a path that very few in history have ever walked, and use that same mastery to strip every bit of affinity out of the mana that you channel, creating something that the book calls Devoid mana, bits of the raw stuff of creatability before it gets Created; the only forces that apply to it are the purely residual forces that apply to mana of every affinity.  Doing this successfully even once changes your nature as a living being in a way that makes it impossible for you to use Creation magic, after; nor may any Creator later Uncreate.

The very few people who've walked this path say that it looks like it ought to be possible to do things with Devoid mana that are impossible to do with any form or combination of aspected mana, it's just...

...really really really hard to get anywhere with mana that you can only manipulate using fantastically complicated subtle residual forces.

There have been very few Tier-4 mages who ever could or ever did do research on it, given the opportunity cost.

At the very end of the theory book is one of the only known spellforms for Uncreation magic, a shape into which Devoid mana can be placed, if you can channel it.  That spellform will respond to your volition in almost arbitrary ways, and produce extremely weak effects that cross the lines of every Element.  And you can imagine that maybe this spellform, if scaled up, could do anything at all - but nobody has ever been able to scale it up.

(It's the meat of the Prestidigitation spellform, but without the concept of a spellbook diagram and scaffold on which to hang it, or a closed loop to form a catchable cantrip; the casters are supposed to just spin it in-place with sheer Spellcraft and fire it right away.)

Oh no.

These poor people. 

They can only access normal fucking magic if they give up everything else, and few enough people have done it that they don't know how much there is down that road. 

And if she shows them it'll be incredibly obvious she's the summoned hero. 

It's hard to have contempt for them about that, though, once you have the whole picture. Of course they're doing their best with what they have, and affinity mana is way easier to use and if it's more limited compared to just working directly with raw mana, they don't have a good way to get raw mana, and it does work for their purposes.

Almys didn't want her to turn his world on its head again. Until she can ask more people, she's inclined to listen to anyone telling her not to dogood. It's also what the Church would tell her, if for different reasons. 

Carissa reads, and thinks, and plays with her Earth-aspected mana to see if she can do the spells the book recommends.

Of course she fucking can.  Spells are trivial.  It's probably going to annoy her how, if she makes a small mistake, the spell snaps into place and works anyways because it wasn't a large mistake.

Yes, that's very irritating. She masters all the spells in the book and considers burning herself for getting them wrong before deciding this might lead the universe to get confused in some bad directions. 

If she's reading the book right, she can't be a Creation mage, which is too bad, and a data point about other Summoned Heroes. Presumably it'd be mentioned somewhere if they were always Uncreation mages. 

How does someone who has Tier-1 of some elements pick up Tier-2, do the books say that?

When you can channel somewhere around 80 thaums/sec of two compatible Tier-1s, you'll be able to awaken and do around 1 thaum/sec of the combined Tier-2, where 1 thaum/sec is about where a normal person starts out being able to channel at all.  There's a sense in which Metal mana is much Earthier than Earth - though not in the sense that it acts like 80 units of the corresponding Earth mana as an element of spellforms - and you need sufficient Earth-grooves worn in yourself to make something that Earthy.

Awakening Tier-3 requires being able to do ~120 thaums/sec of the three corresponding Tier-2s (made by mixing the three base elements two at a time).

(Creation Magic is noted to be beyond the scope of the book.)

How does one measure how many thaums they're channeling?

There's all sorts of spellforms that only take if you channel enough mana into them, which could double as thresholded tests?  That aside, any respectable wizard academy will have a crystal ball that lights up with an intensity corresponding to the affinity mana channeled into it!  The students who manage to make it light up the most will act incredibly arrogant about this, and nobles who thought they were supposed to be the best student will get angry at any commoner who manages to best them.  All of these idiots should be taken out and impaled with crossbow bolts.*

(*)  Said in a footnote.

Seems sensible, especially as being in grave danger increases your magical capacity. 

Are any of these crystal balls walk-in for the general public? It's probably not safe, lest she give an implausible reading, but it'd be good to know. 

(Is she moving Earth mana any faster than when she started?)

This is a theory book!  It doesn't cover what is or isn't walk-in.

She's... maybe channeling Earth mana faster than when she started?  It's in fact hard to tell without any sort of measuring yardstick whether you're doing an unfamiliar task 5% faster.  She can maybe figure out some yardstick now, but if she didn't set one up in advance she won't be able to tell the difference by feel.

She can definitely do Earth spellforms that are supposed to take 10 thaums in less than one second, fast enough that it's hard to tell by feel how much less than one second.

It is seeming increasingly likely that the Tea Entity only sent her now because mastering this magic system isn't going to take her very long.

Of course, it's also possible she's going to die very shortly.

She'll just do the Earth spells as fast as possible, repeatedly, and hurt herself every time she thinks she didn't hit 10 in a round. 

Almys returns, bringing food from a cheap restaurant-cart that seemed most like it ought to be safe and neutral food relative to the unknown tastes of somebody from another dimension.

It's relatively late, for a food delivery.  The extra time taken is because, before Almys picked up that food, Almys also went around and acquired (from various sources) some cheap leftover bits of mats aspected to Air, Water, Fire, Light, and Dark.  Because his liege is a fucking ridiculous person who can maybe awaken the rest of her basic affinities by staring hard at scraps of affinity mats, is his logic here.

" - well done, that was a good idea." She will eat the food pretty indifferently; it's better than rations at the Worldwound. 

Does it look like the scraps of affinity mats have a thing going on she could try herself? Does she need him to demonstrate channeling the affinities he himself has? "I don't suppose all Summoned Heroes were Uncreation for secret reasons?"

"That's the most terrifying question you've asked me so far.  All I know about Uncreation magic is that it's the opposite of Creation magic.  A Summoned Hero having that... is presumably nowhere near as terrifying and destructive as it sounds, now that I think about it, because otherwise lots of them would do it, and what you normally hear about is them becoming Creation mages."

"What did you find out about your current abilities and Uncreation magic, if I'm permitted to ask?"

(Now that she knows how to channel Earth and what an Earth mat looks like, yeah, it's not implausible she could pick up the others with a few tries by staring at the affinity mats and figuring out the corresponding affinity mana.)

"Is it terrifying? Are uncreation mages famously evil or something, is it going to be a propaganda problem? 

- working with unaspected mana is what I am accustomed to and how all magic works where I'm from."

"I got that part but I don't know what it has to do with Uncreation?  And no, I think maybe Uncreators can, like, destroy arbitrarily powerful and complicated enchantments and artifacts, but I can't remember any terrifying stories about important things that got Uncreated, that's not profitable..."

"...actually, now that I think about it, that sure could have something to do with how to put out the Fire.  But also actually no, there must be something I'm not getting here about an added difficulty.  Somebody should've taken down the enchantment that raises undead, if it's just a matter of bribing one Tier-4 into taking the less profitable combined affinity, and doing that."

"Is the enchantment that raises undead somewhere I can get a look at it?  - probably not a priority. Anyway, I think there's a bunch of - prior work - necessary to get things done with unaspected mana, my world has it, yours doesn't, yes I understand enough by now to guess you don't think I should publish a textbook even if it wouldn't put my life at risk."

"Sorry, I think I got lost on an earlier step of this conversation and didn't make it to the current sentences.  My impression is along the lines of - an Uncreator can in principle walk up to a giant force dome that's held up a flying city for a thousand years, and blank out the enchantment's protections and the enchantment and the enchantment repair system and the enchantment security protection until your flying city falls out of the sky.  Only they don't actually do that, because people who can reach Tier 4 aren't usually giant fucking vandals who'd rather destroy an ancient flying city than make incredible amounts of money."

"I agree that sounds stupid! The book says this is also the technique you use to get Devoid mana."

"I don't think I've heard that term before... wait, maybe I heard it years ago and mostly forgot.  Like Devoid is the - anti-Element of Creation, except that Creation isn't an Element - something something Magic is the anti-Element of Matter or Existence or - something -"

"That's what your world's spells are based on?"