Work Place Accidents...

She really had thought the girl was ready to do more on her own. Clearly she had been wrong. Some important information had been skipped in her training. 

Like how to read a basic map. 

She should have done a few tests when she took over the mentorship. She definitely would now. There would be a battery of checks to see what all the girl had learned and had not learned with her first mentor. She also would never again make the mistake thinking that they all taught the same basic things to start. In fact she'd be sending in a suggestion to the head office for some benchmark requirements. Mistakes were meant to be learned from and she was learning a lot from this one.

But none of that was going to help her clean up this mess. As soon as she saw what was happening, she had thrown up a bunch of scaffolding to keep everything still. Now she was trying to figure out how to slowly move everything back into the right place without too much jostling. One slight wobble and it would all crash down. And this time she wouldn't be able to stop it. 

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

She took a deep breath. Again, this was as much on her shoulders as it was the girl's. If not more, actually. The girl hadn't known any better but she, she should have never let her work unsupervised. 

"No. What I'd like you to do right now is compare the map you used with the map I have laid out on that table. Then write down a few notes about what is different. What you can use to tell them apart from one another."

"I'm really sorry I..."

"I know. Don't apologize. Learn."

She watched the girl for a few moments until she recognized that moment of "aha" cross her face. The one where now that she knew exactly what was different, she would never again make that mistake. She knew she would make more mistakes, but never that one again. That was what learning was all about. 

After all, she herself would never again assume that an apprentice of hers knew to never ever lay out a spell using fault lines instead of ley lines. 

Now to make sure California didn't fall into the ocean a few hundred years ahead of schedule.