The working idea at the moment is there are three...I guess 'major' elements to Frederika's character:
- There's the bubbly, high-strung perfectionist who goes into meltdown when things backfire (her as a person).
- There's the know-it-all, learned scholar with a thirst for knowledge and status (the results of her apprenticeship).
- And then there's the source of her gift itself - something old, and earth and stone; something in her blood or lineage.
The Terram focus comes from that last bit. An earlier draft that I was playing around with had Mythic Blood, but Flawless Magic ended up sounding more fun. Her magical heritage ended up being expressed in some of her other virtues/flaws: the specialisations in Terram, her apparent inability to age, what was her weak magic resistance, but I shall change that to Deficient Form (Auram) for the same sort of feel.
With a chunk of her apprenticeship bound up in her studies (likely being taught by a private tutor) - and a lot of the rest doing general apprentice stuff - the growth of her terram is just her (and her parens) focusing on something Frederika has a knack for. That and I want to cast fancy earth spells; I think this is also a good reason for it.
Still! It's not like she's lacking for general utility magic. With Magical Choreography and her scholarly bent, a lot of low-level spontaneous magic is effortless for her to pull off even with her art scores the way they are. A minute of fiddling, and she can magic any level 3 spell spontaneously without a roll. And risking the chancier spontaneous magic, she can get within striking distance of any level 10 spell...assuming she's not in a hostile aura anyway.
Which is the real magical legacy of her Misc tradition! Possibly a proto-spontaneous magic system; demonstrably inferior to system incorporated into modern Hermetic practice because it takes far too long. But it's safe, reliable, effective and as the boundaries of human knowledge expand so too does this tiny tradition!
Really though, I don't think it's necessary to have formulaic spells reinforce the scholar concept too hard. Frederika is already a very learned individual. She'll probably spend a lot of her time reading, writing and talking about books. She'll make efforts to go searching for lost libraries, and old magical secrets - and get excited when she finds stuff, and supremely grouchy when she comes up empty. It's why she has book leaner, and good teacher. Why she's perfectly fluent in latin, fully versed in rhetoric, and can probably recite some of her favorite classics word for word. I don't think she needs her formulaic magic to hammer that home even more!