Cassandra’s eyes widened suddenly as a hand glided over her shoulder, and dropped a scrap of paper.  In the same motion, the hand raised up and its owner asked a question.  This gave Cassandra a reasonable excuse to turn back and see who had dropped the note.  It was a nice looking guy, close to her own age, with long hair.  When she looked at the note, she smiled and after he had finished asking his question, she flashed a subtle thumbs-up over her shoulder to indicate the affirmative.

The lesson continued, and Cassandra had to scribble out where she had written “Alfonsi Model” at the top of her current page, and write “Varissean Model” underneath it, continuing her notes from there.  

While this class would clearly lean more toward arcane magic, they were still focusing on how that would fit together with affinities.  While an important subject to some, Cassandra felt her grasp over her element was as firm as she needed it to be at this point, and was wishing they would get onto a more generalized topic.  

That is, until she saw the video of a mage being Consumed while utilizing a basic primary magic.  Her eyes widened in horror; her tutors had never shown her anything like that.  She had been able to shrug off the pictures of injuries and conditions caused by dissonant kickback.  Maybe that was because they were still photos, and she didn’t have to witness the damage occur, but mostly this was because she figured she wouldn’t have that problem since her affinity was a primary.  

When the floor was opened for questions again, Cassandra once again joined those raising her hand.

[color=f26522]“So a focus cushions, or buffers the mage from dissonant kickback.  Does it have any help to prevent resonant over-drain?  Or is there like, maybe some kind of [i]anti[/i]-focus that could stabilize the resonance to a manageable level?”[/color]

She went from dismissing the idea that she would need a crutch like a focus, to desperately hoping that such a thing would help her in less than a minute.  The thing was, overextending her magic was exactly the kind of pitfall Cassandra knew she was likely to step into.