"...why not actual money."

"Oh, spare parts sometimes too. I like doing it and it doesn't actually take that long and the idea of paying students for anything will make my teachers laugh and mutter something about work experience. Because teenagers don't deserve to be taken seriously, you see."

"...that's kinda terrible, do you maybe have a monopoly you could exploit?"

"Monopoly on knowing how the heck Linux works, sure. I've subtly blackmailed people with this fact before even- When the home ec teacher tried to say I broke their system I looked at error logs and figured out exactly when he did the thing I warned him to under no circumstances do."

She giggles. "Can't you use that to extort—gasp!—an actual payment out of people?"

"I probably could if money were my goal, rather than learning interesting things and making school pass smoothly. And if you ever run linux allow me to preemptively warn you that if an online guide tells you to use 'sudo' on something... Double check. Ess-you-dee-oh, gives root access and bypasses safeties."

"Root?"

"Linux is big on user privileges and rights. Bit much to explain right now. 'Root' users can do anything at all to the computer, total administrator access, including, say, delete core required files for running Java that it would warn anyone who isn't root about if not outright disallow it."

"Oh. What's the point if you can just use a command to do it, then?"

"Security? Preventing fuckups? I... He insisted on having an account that could do it. At least I made it painfully clear that the breaking was his fault."

"How does adding four letters before a command make anything more secure?"

"Because not everyone is allowed to use 'sudo'. Anyone you haven't given permission, if they try to 'sudo' they just get an error message. So if I make a bunch of accounts for every student and don't allow them in the file that says who can sudo, they can't get at the guts of the system like my account can."

"Oh, okay, makes sense yeah."

He finishes stuffing things into his backpack. "Anyway. Bye now! See you Friday!"

"Bye, cutie! See you Friday!"

Wednesday night, Thursday, and Friday morning and early afternoon happen, but little of interest does.

Except for science!

"I've got experimental results!"

"Oh, do tell! And- Huh, should we go for proper scientific rigor? It's a lot more work."

"...mmaybe? What are you thinking of as 'proper scientific rigor'?"

"Um... Stuff like large trials, which is doing the same experiment a couple dozen times to make sure it's not a fluke or luck, blind studying, which is, hm, you coming up with an experiment for me to do and not telling me what it's actually supposed to figure out or what you expect until after. It stops me from expecting something to work better and thus unconsciously deciding that it did in fact work better. Or it actually working better, because magic seems to work with expectations at least some."

"Oh, right. I'd say 'yes' but right now I'm still at the 'come up with hypotheses' stage."

"We can do that later, what're your experimental results?"

"I think there's a mana thing going on, but it recharges. More complicated chants have better effects, repeating stuff doesn't, and you can charge papers with stuff written on them and then use them on spells."

Kero's head pops out of Terry's bag. "Clow used to do that!"

"Oh, sweet. Sadde, could you give a demonstration? I'll probably be asking a dozen questions about it in a minute, Cerberus."