It sounds to me from what Morty's told me that you have a very friendly universe which lets you get away with a lot of science and doesn't kill you, just occasionally drops novel sorts of magic on you to give you a new challenge. Where I'm from, vaccinations are a science fiction thing and anybody trying a stunt like that in real life is lucky if all that happens is they get the disease they were trying to ward off and find it mysteriously resistant to ordinary magical healing.

I don't know, we haven't met socially, I just live there, but it's not the sort of thing you want to guess on if you can avoid it because the last time somebody decided to exploit the tendency of mockdragon handlers not to get pleurisy half the population of the Glorious Mountains died.

Well, we definitely don't want the Glorious Mountains getting hyperplague. Different tack, then - what about magical protection from disease? I can ward you against infection more or less airtightly, and if necessary dispel the ward before you return.

I don't know, is it normal magic or science magic of some kind? I mean, frankly I'm not sure my universe won't decide I've been hanging around bad company and squish me the moment I go back no matter what I do. I'm very tempted not to return and just live here in Science Fantasy Plane.

Liz snorts. I certainly wouldn't blame you. I don't think our magic is particularly sciency, it seems very appropriately mystical to me, but then again I'm not a malevolently insane universe-monster.

How quickly does all this need to be decided?

Not very, but if you want more than a few hours to decide, then I am going to want to put you in quarantine while you do it so that you don't either die or infect someone with space flu. We've got some very nice quarantine facilities, though. Considering.

I don't know that I need hours per se but I do need to know what my options are with respect to contacting my parents, maybe getting some subtle arts textbooks, and generally continuing to exist here if I'm going to do that.

We can arrange that. Long-term parental contact is proportionally less of a problem than short-term; the textbooks we can probably manage using you as a dimensional anchor, or if we're very lucky we might find them in the Great Library; and generally continuing to exist is quite feasible and would be generously subsidized by the Academy by way of apology for putting you in this position in the first place.

That's very kind of the Academy. As long as my parents can be convinced that I have not been vivisected by demons or run afoul of fey or savaged by ogres or something I don't feel the need to contact them on a particularly frequent basis.

That much can certainly be arranged.

What's the Great Library?

...Difficult to explain. A few decades back an unusually unhinged Devisor created a building which... structurally resembles a library, is apparently infinite in volume, and contains, to all appearances, all of the books that have ever been written in any universe. The only problem is that every book is placed completely at random, scrying is very difficult in the stacks, and going too deep can lead through pockets of badly distorted time. There are people with the talent or skill to reliably check books out of the Library, but their services are expensive and always in high demand. Our main hope is that the books you need would crop up in the front thousand shelves or so, which occasionally rearrange their contents and can be scried.

That seems like a fairly thin hope. Maybe my parents could get together a decent curriculum's worth for me and you can just bring that in?

Also an option. Probably a better one, but it costs very little to keep track of the Library entrance, so we may as well see.

Okay. Depending on how dramatic my vanishment looked on the other end I might not be missed for a day or two, and then the school will probably put a token effort into finding me again before bothering my parents, so there's no need to have a message to them ready to go particularly soon.

Carson suppresses a snort at "token effort". This universe sounds like more fun than a barrel of lemures. Well, you're welcome to write such a message whenever you think best. Have you decided whether you want to stay and be vaccinated, was that a decision?

It's probably not worth the risk to go back and pursue a career path I was mostly picking as a default anyway, given this nice science fantasy universe to live in and a way to write my parents a letter. I am going to ask them to empty their savings accounts to get me books if your library doesn't have them, though, since it sounds like you will want them all in one batch.

I'd say that we could help them out by sending them appropriate payment, but I suspect your belligerent universe would object. It being belligerent, and all.

I mean... yeah, pretty much. If there is any stuff you haven't gotten your science all over and which the universe doesn't consider inherently valuable and therefore inappropriate to conjure, I'm all ears, but they'll probably just have to take it out of not having to pay what of my tuition wasn't covered by scholarship, anymore.

Gemstones, semiprecious stones, oysters containing pearls? Gold, silver, platinum, copper? Some of our universe's slightly more accurate science fiction?

Inherently valuable and therefore not the sort of thing you want suddenly appearing in your house... the fiction might actually work.

I was mostly being facetious, but we can actually send over a cartload of out-of-copyright sci-fi, so if that works then it works.

It was not made with nonfictional science in any way?