Sora quickly learned that while Light and Life magic, like their opposites, overlapped a great deal, they did not deal in the same facets of magic. Life was used for healing and restorative magic, and not infrequently by careless people who thought they could use it to bulk up without the effort usually involved. The magic aided, that much was certain, but without putting in the appropriate work it could turn bad.

Light magic, by contrast, dealt primarily with its namesake directly, altering the flow and colour of light, how it interacted with objects – it was best demonstrated in the first, and easily mastered, spell of the course, changing the light that bounced off a mirror to a different colour by magic alone.

The course also dealt in what had in earlier times been known as Force magic – using magic to create a solid, if almost completely unseen, barrier. It was a common thing to inject a little illusion magic, for those who knew, to make such barriers visible, even blending in with their surroundings.

There were, Sora noted with some interest, no desks, chairs or any other variant of the usual furniture in the classroom Roxas headed to, trying to ignore the disparaging looks he always got.

"I'm probably missing something, aren't I?" Sora said aloud, following him in.

"About what?" Roxas asked, having not seen Sora's train of thought.

"The room's empty, Roxas. You sit on the floor or something?"

"Watch," he replied, making a few gestures in the air. There was the hint of a shimmer in the air and places that looked slightly distorted, as if seen through glass that was present, yet unseen. Then Roxas quite easily sat down on what otherwise appeared to be insubstantial air, even going so far as to set out a few things on a similarly invisible table.

Sora noticed other students doing something similar, even their teacher leaving her own notes and such on a just barely visible desk of her own creation. Fascinated, he reached out to where there that slight distortion told him there was something and found something solid – and, at the same time, soft.

Roxas ignored him as Sora toured the room, examining the various similar creations of the other students, and finding that only his was softer, as if the invisible seat he'd conjured was padded and cushioned. Everyone else had some variant on the University's usual hard-backed chairs.

"Elven touch again," Roxas told him silently when he made note of this. "I use the same spell as them, and can do more with it. So I figured I might as well be comfortable. You want one too?"

"And what are you going to do when someone else tries to walk through it?" Sora asked. "Or why you made one?"

"Hey, just offering. You better be paying attention too – or at least using that supposedly perfect memory of yours. I'm gonna expect you to be able to handle the magic as well as I can, you know."

"Don't you mean as well as they can?" he corrected, looking to his human classmates.

"No. New idea I had. I gotta scale magic down to their level, right? Well, if you can help scale it down, you can also help scale it up. You cast at human levels when you're not using me, so you can scale up to match me."

"That's hardly fair, Roxas!"

"Hey – who's your teacher – her, or me?"

Sora muttered a few remarks to himself about the matter, making sure Roxas could hear what he thought about it. Roxas, if anything, tuned him out as far as he could, leaving Sora to simply listen and try to understand. He did steal a look at Roxas's work periodically, since Roxas naturally had a better grasp of it than him, but he didn't see this as cheating. Roxas had only told him not to use his memories, he hadn't said anything about looking at his work.

Their work today was a continuation of what they had been doing in a lesson before Sora had met Roxas, working on one of the many variants of the venerable Wall of Force spell, a spell that had lasted for several ages of magic and was one of the foundations of the Metropolis' defences against the outside world. A skilled mage could project a Wall of Force that was all but completely imperceptible, extending for kilometres in two directions, even changing course as the terrain dictated, and provided it was supplied with a constant source of magic, would repel everything except living tissue.

Roxas's notes from that previous lesson were still visible in his workbook, and told Sora that some had once challenged this, saying that they had not been able to pass such a barrier. The reason, it had been noted, was simple – they wore clothes, which were by definition, not alive, and therefore prevented them from passing. All they had to do was strip, and they could pass through without issue. Sora privately wondered if the challengers had actually stripped off to verify that.

While the spell was named as one of the many kinds of magic walls, that was only its primary purpose, and it could be re-purposed in many ways – the lesson today focusing on using it as a temporary stop-gap measure for fixing a device. They were led through the process of reshaping the standard Wall of Force, first from the example of a broken gear, then second from guesses alone, followed by ensuring the spell would not falter when the gear became a moving part – moving with the machinery it would then be a part of, and not resisting that.

Roxas, quite naturally, had no choice but to scale down the magic to human levels, as his use of it at the natural level would only disrupt the magic unnecessarily. Since neither of them had yet completed their work on understanding the exact differences involved, this he struggled with as usual, while Sora, to his own surprise, managed to replicate the example gear perfectly first time.

When the time came for them to be given a project of their own – everyone given a different device to practice the magic on – Roxas did not look particularly enthusiastic about it, having still not quite worked out the figures appropriately.

"Want some help?" Sora offered sympathetically, leaning on Roxas's unseen desk.

Roxas hesitated, looking over the miniature clockwork golem he'd been given, then thought, "Sure you can handle it?"

"If I couldn't, I wouldn't have offered. You tell me what you'd magic up, and I'll handle it for you. You do know the spell, right?"

"Of course. That's not the bit I'm having trouble with. It's the energy levels, as usual. I always have trouble with them in Light magic. I can usually just about keep up, but I always gotta work on it out of lesson time to manage that."

"Well, now you got me to help, and maybe show off a little bit. You and me might be the only ones who know it was me and not you, but that's not the point, is it?"

Roxas still struggled with it for a time, continuing to look over the golem, but eventually gave in.

"Here," he pointed. "And here. This gear is broken into what... four, maybe five pieces? That's the one we have to reconstruct. And the second one there is missing entirely, without it that arm can't move at all."

"Remember where that gear goes then," Sora told him. "And take the pieces out. I'd do it myself, but people might stare. Only you can see me, after all."

Roxas didn't contest that, taking care with the pieces of the gears to ensure he didn't lose any, collecting them in their proper places.

"I'll pretend to be casting the spell," he told Sora then. "But actually I'll just be faking it and watching you. I'll correct you if I spot a mistake. You know how to correct spells on the go, right?"

Sora quickly thought back and realised he didn't, prompting a quick impromptu lesson on that. It turned out not to be necessary for the replicated gear, which was set in its proper place and carefully checked.

The missing gear turned out to be more of a challenge, as they had to guess based on the other workings around it and ensure it wouldn't cause any issues with other gears around it. Several times Sora created what they thought was the correct replacement, only to find it wasn't right – but each time, it revealed what the issue was, Roxas took notes and they tried again, drawing and redrawing a sketch that was their guidelines.

They both held their breath when their teacher came to examine the work, both hoping she wouldn't notice that it wasn't in fact Roxas's work. The workings were almost entirely his, which they hoped would lend credence to the lie that he'd done it, but there was no way to tell for certain.

"I hate this moment," Roxas silently confided to Sora. "She always leaves it hanging until she's seen everything."

"You think you're nervous? That's my work she's checking," Sora said. "No one's had to check my work before – at least not since I became this."

"Your gear teeth are just a little too fine," she told Roxas, unaware of this. "This golem, if animated, would have some rather erratic movements, perhaps moving too far or not far enough."

"It's only a temporary measure though, right?" Roxas asked. "So that wouldn't be too much of a concern, as long as it worked well enough until the replacement was made."

"This may be true," she conceded smoothly. "But the better your work, the less chance there is your replacement with damage the whole, or cause unexpected accidents from use. It is, nevertheless, excellent work, Roxas."

Sora breathed a sigh of relief, and once she'd moved on, so did Roxas.

"Couldn't have done that without your help, Sora," Roxas thanked him. "And you know what? You just did a good deed. Feels good, doesn't it?"

"Don't push your luck just yet," Sora warned. "It's a start, nothing more. I'm not completely out of my dark ways just yet."

"If I can get you started, I'm sure I can finish up as well," he replied confidently. "Now are you gonna give me a hand getting this figures right? We've got a bit of time before we're given the next thing to work with, and I'd kinda like to be able to do the next one myself."

"Now who's teaching who?" Sora teased him.

After two further devices had been given their own quick-fix spells, the lesson had finally concluded, having felt far longer to Sora – probably because he'd actually taken part for a change, he admitted. Their two devices had more than proved their capability to Roxas's teacher, the first having one part created by each of them and no negative remarks on any issues, and the second one completely by Roxas, similarly without anything bad to say.

They'd even managed to find out a few more details they could later use to work on their theory for scaling the magic appropriately, either down to human levels for Roxas, or up to half-elven levels for Sora. That and a welcome lack of attention from other students left them both in a fairly good mood.

Roxas again wanted to head to the same spot he'd last used to teach Sora a bit, but Sora reminded him Riku might also have turned up, making him detour to the hub. Riku was not there when they arrived, but Sora ensured he'd be in a position for Riku to notice him, and before long his old friend turned up, following Sora to join Roxas. Sora then disappeared, leaving them to talk.

"You're his friend, right?" Roxas asked. "Riku, wasn't it?"

"Guilty as charged," Riku quipped, an old line of his. "Used to be my room-mate before a certain little bastard got him killed. He was a good friend, before that. A bit stupid when it came to that little guy, but he did what he thought was right. Only hope you don't turn out the same way."

"Not if I have my way with him," Roxas told him. "I'm trying to teach him to be good, so if he does find out what he used to be like, he isn't going to just vanish, or whatever happens to them."

"Best of luck with that. If he's anything like Evan used to be, I imagine you've had to argue with him a fair bit."

"He wants to kill, I don't want to let him," Roxas shrugged. "But he knows what I'm up to. He wants to learn magic as well, and unless I let him cast it through me, that draws on his own energy. So I wear him down making him prove he really can do the magic I'm teaching him, and he doesn't have the strength to overpower me. That's the theory anyway; he only picked me up yesterday, so I haven't had much time yet."

"Interesting approach," Riku noted. "And if you're teaching him, you can give me a hand too. I don't need that much help," he said quickly. "But I'd kinda like to keep my own grades up. Might as well help each other, right?"

"I dunno," Roxas said, sighing theatrically. "I might as well just open my own private school for magic or something."