"If you hadn't heard of it how did you know how to help Pierre?"

"I didn't! I just felt bad for him and wanted to try."

"Noble of you."

"What can I say, I'm great."

Taharqi grins. "And did you succeed?"

"We made progress! The best way to do it, it seems, would be for him to learn some basic lightningwork the hard way and then get Lightning Bolt in a partial slot with a strengthening of his lightning fingers filling up the rest of that slot. That way he'll be able to sort of make his lightning fingers spell count as if it were the first step of Bolt when it comes to building up to Thunderstorm, so that he won't need to have Lightning Bolt as strong as he otherwise would've for it."

"...you know, I have absolutely no idea how Skill dependency works for spells."

"How does it work for your Skills?"

"Well, it's, you know. ...guess you don't. Uh." Man how does he even describe it. "If I'm fast enough to double attack then it's just a matter of stretching the motion sideways to double strafe? ...assuming I can use a bow, I guess, which I can."

"That's not dependency, though, right, you can learn either of those before the other."

"Alright, Triple Attack, then. You practise Double Attack enough that you find it."

"So the way it works for spells is that—okay, like, no one really knows knows this is how it works but the way lots of people think it works is that there's a—web? Of all possible Skills, and who knows where they come from, there's theories, but anyway each Skill is a node on that web and the connections between them can be, uh, thicker or thinner? When you're getting a Skill you attune your mind, or your soul, to a node, and you can do that more and more, and eventually your soul is sufficiently attuned to that Skill that it starts becoming easy to explore neighbouring nodes and find nearby Skills."

He's heard similar spiels before, yeah, but it's always seemed a bit... mystical. Disconnected from practicalities? "It doesn't really feel like I'm doing anything like that when I'm practising a Skill."

"The theory goes that when you try to do something with your body that is in the vicinity of the Skill you want to get that sort of—points your mind that way? It might make more sense in light of how it works for spells."

Taharqi sits up and wraps his fingers together and looks at Vallynn expectantly like an attentive student.

Vallynn grins and sits up, too, pulling himself back to rest against the wall. "The way it works for spells is that you have to point your mind or your soul in the right direction when you're meditating on a Skill, and for a basic Skill it's hard to not flail in the dark because there's nothing to hold onto. You're meditating for a new Skill and you can sort of feel the way the various spells are different from each other but it's a bit freefall, and the kinds of things you read about are what you should be feeling for and what thoughts help. And a lot of it varies per person, right, but for example for Lightning Bolt I tried to think about thunderstorms and lightning hitting specific things and a sort of—goal-directed mental impression? It's hard to explain and so explaining it usually uses a billion examples."

"Okay..."

"But when you move you know exactly what that feels like. You know what your arms and hands are doing, you can be in your body and focus on that while meditating for a new Skill, and that is basically sufficient to almost always find the right Skill. And then when you're good enough at Double Attack and you try to fish for Triple Attack your mind slides very easily in the correct direction because you know what it feels like, you can fish around in your soul for the Skill and it's easy to go 'ah there it is, that's Triple Attack, it feels like what I feel like when I'm trying to do it'."

"Thought you didn't have any physical Skills."

"I don't, I'm repeating stuff I've read and watching your reactions."

"Ha. Fair enough."

"So once I have Lightning Bolt down I know what it feels like and it's a lot easier to get to the next one. I want the Skill that feels like Lightning Bolt but more. Or sufficiently similar. So the thing about physical Skills is that you have direct access to your own sensorium and can find the next Skill easily, and for magical Skills it's a lot harder, but the fundamental thing is still fishing around in this—web—for a nearby Skill and using various methods to identify the correct node you're trying to attune to."

"How does anyone even know all of this?"

"Oh I mean there are many theories. This is just one of them. There's a theory that actually Skills are created by humanity's collective unconscious and the relationship between them is only purely about similar ideas in, like, how people as a whole relate to them, and there's a theory that this is all embedded in the fabric of reality suported by Yggdrasil and what you're doing isn't so much attuning your soul to anything as it is strengthening your connection to specific leaves of the World Tree and..."

"That all sounds like just different ways of saying the same thing."