[i]I will show him.[/i] Anna had previously had A LOT of practice at focusing on certain things. So she cupped her hands the way the master had shown her and focused on it. But nothing happened for a few seconds, and she almost gave up. Then it occurred to her to look inside. After all, the needles had poked holes in her body to let the magic in, so surely it must have been stored inside her. So instead she imagined like she was looking [i]inside[/i] her hands, and found tiny streams of a pale [color=B0E0E6]blue-gray[/color] light. She poked one of them, and it poked her back. She tried to pull it up to the surface, but it just parted around her imaginary hands. Then she remembered the wizard's warning and let go and instead started a game of tag with it. [i]This is insane. Am I really playing tag with a stream of magic?[/i] But she didn't realize she'd had the thought until afterwards, so intense was she on her task. She got the stream to chase her up up up into the wind and light, and when she realized that was what she'd done, she let go of it. Now she was back in her own body, holding onto a dancing line of magic. She wanted to draw it into a ball, so she once again focused on the stream of magic, no, this time she was inside the stream of magic, guiding it like she'd guided her pony some days-- no, no don't think about that. The stream wavered with her lack of concentration, and she pulled her mind back into it, into it, into it. There. Now she had control. She carefully started winding it around itself, twisting it and turning it, until she thought the stream knew what she wanted it to do, and she had a ball about the size of an apple. She returned to her normal eyesight to see a glowing pale blue ball about the size of a youth basketball cradled in her hands. She thought to the stream of magic, [i]I think that's big enough.[/i] and it went back to flowing uninterrupted under her skin, so now she was cradling a stable ball of energy. That whole affair had taken her less than fifteen minutes.
"Is that satisfactory, sir?" she asked the magician. Sweat was streaming down her face and she was swaying exhaustedly on her feet, but she still maintained control of the glowing ball. And then she remembered another question she wanted to ask. "Sir, the magic, it was responding to my slightest thoughts and feelings... Is it sentient? or is it just that finely attuned to me?"