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If Max rolled his eyes any more today, they'd tumble right out of his head. If she was this concerned about people failing her class, maybe she was just a shitty teacher. Especially with such a piss-easy subject. Was dowsing seriously that hard for the riff-raff that weren't [i]blessed[/i] with Taldrin magic? Maybe those leeches that went wild over it had a point, if normal mages had to be trained to do anything beyond manipulating what was directly in front of them. Professor Mara raised a decent point though, if only indirectly. Max had never actually tested his range to its limits yet; he hadn't needed to. The ability to count every single metallic object on a city block was, quite frankly, not something he ever figured he'd need.

Max briefly flirted with the idea of pretending to struggle with the exercise, but he supposed he might as well get [i]something[/i] out of the class since he clearly wasn't going to get a nap. At the very least, he'd have a head start on the higher courses where the professor wasn't an insecure hack. The brunette shifted his posture to something that passed for upright at last, closed his eyes, sucked in a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. What little tension there was in his frame melted away as his shoulders sunk and widened in mirror of his magic creeping further and further outward. At first, the field grew effortlessly; his energy, no longer restrained by any of Max's will to remain nearby and useable, washed across the immediate rows of seats, hungrily worming its way into every metallic trinket and chair frame in its path. Before Max had a chance to grow confident he could rip the piercings out of every woman in the auditorium at once, the easy flow of energy soon became the arcane equivalent of a tight stretch as the quicksilver currents that had filled out his dowsing field once again settled with the rigid surety of steel.

With another deep breath, Max tensed his muscles against nothing as he internally willed the magic out of the metal reservoirs within his field that it had instinctively inhabited and pushed it against the stubborn threshold of his sorcerous bubble. There had to be a more efficient way to do this; he was functionally managing hundreds of individual objects at once, and he wasn't even [i]doing[/i] anything with them except trying to leave them alone. He could handle pushing magic out of his body, but every single dorm key in the room too? 

As if to taunt him, his magic returned to its mercurial fluidity once he released the pressure he had exerted on it and it shrunk back to a more comfortable radius around the mage. Like a fucking string he'd pulled too tight - except he knew it wasn't too tight, his magic just loved sitting in pen tips and shit. Naturally, the most obvious solution was to just remove all the extraneous distractions.

Max raised a hand languidly. [color=8585ad]"Do dowsing fields always manifest as a sphere or are they shapeable without excessive effort on the caster's part? It seems like it'd be inefficient to project magic backward too if you knew the object you were dowsing for was in front of you."[/color] Or better yet, just snake the field around the chairs entirely.

[hr][@Hero][@Achronum]