"I'm sorry, you what?"

The gray-skinned annoyance at least had the good sense to look embarrassed. "I shot lightning."

Muttering furiously, the well-built hyena woman started flipping through an elaborately bound volume that could only be described as a "tome." Finally, she found the page she was looking for. Holding it out, she exclaimed "This? You did this?"
The indicated page depicted a complex equation next to an equally elaborate circle diagram, tightly packed notes surrounding both, arrows pointing everywhere and seemingly random sentences underlined.

Squinting, the balding goblin-esque man examined the page.

"Ugh, I hate wearing these," he muttered as he drew out a pair of reading glasses. "Not like my hairline is enough, no, I have to look even older."

"Quit the griping and look, you infuriating ditz. My arms are getting tired."

"Yeah, yeah." Standing directly in front of the outstretched tome, red eyes darting back and forth in sharp concentration, Driz examined the thick vellum sheet. Finally looking up, he met his friend's eyes. "I think I understood some of those words."

Angry, yipping laughter escaped as Tr'vel "Trix" Qinso threw her book in the air. The execution of her actions hit a moment later, and she scrambled to grab her spellbook before gravity acquainted it with the muddy ground they had paused on.

"Un-goddamn-believable. Doesn't understand ionization, couldn't tell you the difference between amp, watt, and volt, but is totally capable of doing the exact same spells I can." Here, she paused. "Well...at least some of them. Glad I'm not completely useless here."

She marched back to the sheepish Driz. "Show me."

"Why?"

"Gotta see. Compare."

Driz shrugged. "Suit yourself." Shaking his shoulders out, he cracked his neck. Attempted to. "AGH, I PULLED THE TENDON. FUCK. GET HELP." Trix rolled her eyes and slapped him upside the head. "AG-hey, that's better. How's that better?"

"Focus, you ding-dong."

Pouting slightly, Driz retorted, "don't gotta be mean about it." Finally going still, he pointed his hands forward, his 12 fingers in a complicated shape as he focused.

Trix surreptitiously pulled out her own glasses, artificer-made, allowing her to see the magic somewhat more directly. They were a bit too cumbersome for combat but were invaluable at times like this.

With a shouted eldritch invocation that gave her a slight headache, Driz finally completed his spell. Watching it happen, Trix was able to observe that, unlike her own version of the spell, which manifested in a clean line of plasma, Driz's lightning spell looked more like, well, lightning.

"Fascinating." She hadn't even noticed she'd been scribbling down notes, her charcoal pen flying across the pages of her observation notebook. "The invocation clearly isn't natural but to so accurately mimic a natural phenomenon so closely means it has to be calling on some aspect of lightning..." Driz got lost after this, her verbal excitement trailing into muttering, mixing in technical terms that gave him a slight headache when he attempted to decipher them.

He casually sauntered over, completely unnoticed as she wrote in her notebook, her entire field of vision and world tunneling into the page. Attempting to read the page made him dizzy, so he went to a nearby tree and sat down.

He stared enviously as he watched her break down what he had done, completely lost to him. He loved how his magic felt thrumming in his veins, but even as he was able to shape it (or did it shape him?) to fit his needs, he would never understand it the way she did. Couldn't see whatever way it all fit together into the larger world. He shook his head and leaned back. This would take up at least an hour, and firing off two of the bolts in a row made him tired. Plenty of time for a snooze.