In your Imager, Recluce and Corean fantasy series characters are able to magically shield themselves. There is a reasonably popular sub-genre of fantasy called portal fantasy where the main character is transported from our world to a fantasy setting which you’ve approached twice I believe with Cassius in your Recluce series and Anna Marshall in your Spellsong series. Slightly tangential to that genre is one where a character is transported from one made up world to another. Fall of Angels might fit in that category. I’ve been wondering for a while now what if a character who was a highly skilled mage after years of training and experience was transported from one of your fantasy worlds to another and had to start over learning a new magical system from scratch? I wondered if they might struggle because they have to unlearn a lot of ingrained ways of thinking about magic. For example maintaining shields is something they trained to do to the point that they barely consciously think about it and then have to learn a whole new method of shielding and their old way of thinking keeps tripping them up. Do you imagine the sort of protagonist you usually write having these kind of issues or would they be able to adapt?

I haven’t really thought about adaptation, but most of my protagonists are adaptable. As you point out, it would likely pose initial difficulties for all of them, but the degree of difficulty would depend in some degree on the differences between the magic system they had already mastered and the one of the world they then found themselves in. I suspect most would not be as proficient in learning/handling the new system. This would be especially true of most who were transported to Erde, because no amount of study will substitute for innate musical ability.