"The mutation makes it way, way easier. Much in the same way that Olympic athletes spend their whole lives training to be slightly better at one thing than an Exemplar-2. But you can totally use magic! I was wrong about the 'quicker' thing, actually, spells for baselines take like half an hour of chanting. But it's an option, and magic is super cool." She produces demonstrative sparkles.

"...How sure are you that fish out of water can use magic? Because unless the requirements are insanely specific, if people where I'm from can normally do spells with chanting for half an hour, I'd have expected someone to stumble on it, and no one has."

"Oh, it's not just the chanting. You have to use some magic to 'ignite your Essence', and that'll leave you as a magicky person forevermore. But you guys don't have spirits and all that, so... not so much Essence lying around to ignite."

"Are there side effects besides being able to do magic?"

"Wrong kind of magic can attract demons, but y'all don't have demons anyway, so I don't see that causing much trouble. And if you fuck it up it can have unfortunate effects, but if you're here long enough to ignite then you'll be here long enough for us to teach you how not to fuck it up. You're smart, you can swing it."

"And you're sure we don't have demons because they'd make themselves known in ways unrelated to whether anybody around is magic?"

"That and you don't have any other spirits or evidence of magic, yeah. Demons: not subtle."

"Okay. How much trouble am I going to have picking this up? Are there classes for magic-ified baselines around here that I can enter at this time of year?"

"You're allowed tutoring at whatever pace you want, and we've got a whole department for this shit, so we could totally get you an accelerated track. Maybe we can get Circe to take you on, she's got shit else to do and she's scary good. The amount of trouble you'll have varies, but the classic indicators of magic talent sound like friggin' astrology, so I've never held with that much."

"Okay. ...Is there a way to non-disastrously dimension-hop or do I need to pick up all my tutoring and, I don't know, spellbooks and talismans, in one trip?"

"I'm pretty sure if we can get you back home within the week we can get you back here without much trouble. You'd have to pay for the lessons, though. And for the transit, unless it turns out I can do it or something."

"Do relevant parties take 2004 extradimensional US dollars?"

"...Might want it in silver or something. Actually, silver'd be a really convenient currency for this, Sally can tun it into mithril and sell it at a fucking massive markup. Or just use it for whatever project most recently flitted into her head and sell like three ounces at a fucking massive markup. Or I can get Leo to pay for the whole thing if you'd run some courier missions for his mom or something."

"Is his mom a supervillain or something too? Because in general I have no objection to courier missions, but you seem to have a surfeit of people whose specific courier missions might be objectionable."

"Oh, yeah, she's totally a supervillain. But not a particularly bad one. She doesn't, like, nuke stuff, just makes ominous deals with demons and accumulates dark power for her own vague purposes. Used to sacrifice people, but she hardly even does that nowadays. Her courier shit would probably be, like, 'get me this black moonsilver athame from Saudi Arabia so I don't have to wait for it to ship' or something. Or 'smuggle this magical recording crystal into the Vatican'. She's good at giving appropriate tasks to folks with objective morality."

"...And how expensive, in silver, is tutoring, because - Alli, please look up how much silver costs, ballpark, reasons - because I might just want to bounce people around at home for non-villainous purposes and pay for my lessons that way."

"Full tuition is like 40k. You could probably knock that down to 30 since you wouldn't be living on campus. Pretty much everybody's here on full scholarships or nearly, which you don't qualify for on account of you're not a mutant and you're not homeless or fleeing from anything. This is discounting the possibility that Circe will do that thing where she takes one look at you and says 'I must tutor this girl immediately, the idea of charging for my services is insulting and absurd'. Which is possible."

"I'm not quite homeless, but the house I grew up in was recently destroyed in a massive natural disaster and I personally saved an estimated one and a half million people while helping evacuate from same, maybe that sneaks me in somewhere scholarshippy. I'm also unjustifiably optimistic that she will look at me and say that thing. Would commuting home every day - given interdimensional transit costs - be less expensive than staying on campus most of the time? Alli says silver is currently six dollars sixty-seven cents per, quote, 'OZT, whatever that means', back home. Thanks, Alli."

"Nice work on the saving people! But most of the scholarships are pretty airtight on the mutant thing. Your optimism seems pretty justified to me, you're interesting. Circe likes people who're going to do interesting things with her tutelage. Granted, that usually means 'people who're gonna die horribly preventing the apocalypse', but in this case you might slip under on the basis of introducing magic to a new word. Daily commute would get pretty expensive, yeah. Standard dimensional summoning is a pretty big working, and there's like an ounce of powdered mithril involved. It'd be kind of like a daily commute from Australia."

"So I might wind up blowing the extra few thou on room and board here, although my family will be slightly inconvenienced by my absence and inability to do the grocery shopping in less ashy parts of the world. But I bet that via some combination of arbitrage and ferrying your fancy technology back home I can come out of this in the black and a wizard and make it home for Christmas."

"...Now that you mention the ash, this may be a good time to ponder getting a high-ranked wizard or two into your world and having them do some stuff in the name of fixing up supervolcanic fallout. Because, like, magic. Super helpful. They probably couldn't fix it all, but they could stop the crater from smoking and they might be able to alter some weather patterns. Maybe they could truck some air elementals in or something to start herding the ash clouds into one place? But, like, that sort of thing."

"...I am tentatively interested. I think I would like to be very responsible about inviting extradimensional visitors over, because extradimensional visitors are not a typical occurrence and we do not have any systems set up to handle them, their return home, their immigration status, etcetera."

"Reasonable. We don't really have official systems that way either, it's mostly handled independently by Whateley and the school's variously shady government contacts. Like just about everything else the school does."

"Well, if there's going to be an semi-official system on our end, I want to be working closely with it. I'll let the Junebugs help, they know what they're doing mostly."

"Junebugs your superhero organization? I can't think of any explanations for the name, but whatever it is it's probably cute."