Siobahn is growing ridiculously fast in so many ways. In some senses, this seems like just reasonable. She is hardworking, extremely intelligent and a creative thinker. She has a unique perspective and a strong drive to move forward. She has resources many do not. She literally has more hours in the day to work and study now.
But none of this explains how fast she keeps passing Thaddeus Lacer’s tests so quickly. She figured out how to extend her output in a ridiculously short period of time. She learned how to to do her light based gestura spell in like a couple weeks. Her Control is over her will is likely growing faster than
Prof Lacer’s did when he was at similar point in his training. And not just moderately faster, but given his expectations she keeps smashing, much much faster.
And given what we know, I think there is a good reason to explain this. She can split her Will. The brillig were all free casters and could all split their will. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think it is much much easier to do magic with control and clarity when you literally can do parallel processing. Regular humans are only single threaded so something that takes much more time to learn certain skills, like free casting, than Siobahn should because she can think two thoughts at once.
It might be one of the reason her grandfather was so interested in the People, but I think the main reason is how she’s lived her life.
She had to get creative really quickly to make the best of what she had, without a lot of the preconception about magic that her peers might have that may limit them (like using a conduit anywhere on her body, or some of the mental blocks other have when trying be learn some aspects of freecasting). She did not have the safety net the Crown Family children have while most likely having more opportunities to learn, and definitely to practice than the other commoner students.
The pressure she had to get stronger, to be smart in her use of magic against stronger opponents during her first semester was crazy, it’s better now but she’s still pushed really hard, she still has the strong drive to get stronger. I doubt there’s any student more motivated then her in the university, Damien and Ana talk about her studying obsessively at one point (ch 81), and that’s because of her peculiar situation.
For her not progressing fast enough could be the difference between life and death.
And with all that she’s doing it’s giving her a lot of experience that other students don’t have so it’s compounding. And it helps being the apprentice of Thaddeus Lacer !
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Also she’s the main character, of course she’s going to progress quickly !
