"Now," the wizard said, looking at him curiously. "I have a question. How is ityou managed to avoid the attack spells in the forest below?"
"Eh?" Dale asked, confused momentarily by the sudden change of subject. He frowned, thinking back briefly to their journey through the woods.
"Well," he said after a moment. "We didn't exactly avoid the first one. I made the mistake of trying to scan down the road and got extremely ill. Headache, nausea, the whole bit. I managed to fight the nausea off by will alone, Galdur got rid of the headache. The wolves though...now that was interesting."
"Oh?" the wizard asked, "What happened...exactly?"

"Let's see," Dale mused, trying to remember the chain of events. "We could see them on our sensor display so we were ready for something, we just didn't know what would be after us. The lead wolf jumped out into the road ahead of us and the rest closed in from behind. Kheri stuck a sleep dart in the lead wolf and it fell down on the road. The rest got almost to where we were then just stood there, stuck. We snuck around them and left them standing behind us. They're probably still standing there growling. Then there was the ogre. Not sure if he's part of the spells or not but we just rode past him and left him jumping up and down on a rock yelling."

"I see," the wizard said, nodding. "Yes, he's part of the protective spells though he's not written very well. Evidently the wolves aren't either. One thing that every graduating student must do is add something to the protective wards here. Either around the college itself, around the city or to the spells protecting the woods from invasion. The spells can be anything really, and some are quite fancy, while some are simple but effective. The wolves now," he thought, and looked off into the distance. "Let me see if I can find that one," he muttered, then made a few gestures in the air.

Lines of glowing letters suddenly appeared before him and began scrolling up, disappearing from view a foot above his head, while more lines appeared from nothing just below his chin. Jarl looked at it fascinated, and got up, then walked around behind the wizard and stared over his shoulder.
"If I didn't know better," he said, excitement in his voice. "I'd say I was looking at source code!"
"You are," the wizard said mildly, still reading through the lines. "This is the spell that creates the wolves. It does the same thing when interfacing with the magical forces in this world that what you are used to would do while interfacing with one of your machines. Except that what it causes has a vastly different effect in most cases than what such a thing does to a machine."