Isaac comes back over with a blue, four-armed boy with very large ears. "-a mysterious old woman."

Arjun furrows his brow. "Really?" He looks at Morty seriously. "You really should have mentioned this earlier."

Morty glares at him. "I'm sorry that I don't consider weird stories about why my family's poor to be vital information."

Arjun ignores him, and all four of his hands start tracing patterns in the air as he mutters.

"What are you doing?" Bella asks.

Isaac responds. "He's doing a magical analysis. Most mutant wizards can see the flows of magic naturally, but this curse is hiding somewhere inside Morty. So he needs to look a little closer."

Arjun finishes waving his hands and chanting. He squints at Morty for a few seconds, then nods. "Cursed. Very cursed. I can probably remove it, but I want to check with Circe first. And I want to bring you with me."

"Why?" Morty whines.

"Because if I fuck up you might die."

"...valid," Morty admits. He stands up reluctantly.

"Good luck?" says Bella.

Arjun and Morty walk off, presumably towards Circe, whoever that is.

Isaac sits back down. "Well, that was fun. Where were we?"

"Before we started talking about Morty's problem? I don't remember. Uh, do you have any opinions on what classes I should take? I need to figure that out. I'm taking the recommended martial arts course plus computer literacy but I don't know what else."

Isaac hums. "Well, you're going to be taking Intro to Powers, too - that should help you understand what everybody's talking about with 'Avatars' and 'Paladins' and 'Energizers' and all that. Otherwise... Morty said you're already in college, right? Does No Science World apply to math, too?"

"I think math is understood to be safe, but I haven't studied any advanced mathematics so I'm not sure if they're avoiding some topic you study carelessly here."

"Algebra, geometry, trigonometry? Is that not taught in your high schools?"

"Yes, I took them."

Isaac nods. "Alright, then you're good on math unless you want to go for calculus. Obviously you're going to need to start from the bottom up on science, but fortunately, Whateley also gets kids who don't know anything about science from this planet, so there's remedial classes that go pretty deep. Same for history. You might want to take a Lit class, get a look at our culture; on the other hand you might not. Morty mentioned you were interested in magic, that means Intro to Mystic Concepts. Then you've got one two more optional slots, depending on if you took Lit. You can either keep those as free periods, or pick something else to go there, like Home Ec or an art class."

"Home Ec might be useful since I assume you have completely different kitchen appliances. I can postpone art for when I know more about what-all the fuck. Probably you don't have any classes about subtle arts or my kind of magic, though honestly there's enough going on here that I wouldn't be astonished..."

"Never heard of subtle arts," Isaac says. "And we don't have any classes in your kind of magic, at least not yet, but I'd bet if you told what you know to one of the really high-tier Exemplars they'd be able to rederive it from first principles."

"Subtle arts is also called psi. And I know high school level arcana and half a semester of Arcane Defense, so maybe they can, with science?"

"Oh. We have something called psi, but I don't know if it's compatible with what you do. I mean, alternate universe and all. You could take a class in it and see, technically you can learn it without having a mutant power for it but it doesn't work as well like that as magic does."

"Is there a... placement test?"

"Oh, yeah, you have to go through placement tests before you can even sign up for classes. There's not a placement test for psi but if it's part of your powerset they test you as part of powers testing, which happens at the same time."

"Oh, cool, I have an appointment for that tomorrow, I'll remember to ask then." She writes this down.

"So that all sounds like a schedule!" Isaac says.

Ethan speaks up. "Be careful if you're going for magic and psi. I'm taking psi, magic, and gadgeteering classes, and there are not enough class periods in the day."

"Well, I don't think I'm going to take gadgeteering, at least not in my first semester."

"Probably a good policy," Ethan says. "Especially with you not being a gadgeteer."

"I'd think so, yep. Maybe I can do some kind of independent study about my own magic, see what I can rederive based on what I know and the textbooks they're gonna summon out of my plane for me."

"Ooh, textbooks," Ethan says. "A whole different magic system does sound fascinating..."

"If you pick up another field of study your teammates will start hitting you with a rolled-up newspaper," Isaac predicts.

"Oh dear."

"He's the only psychic on the team," Isaac explains, "but he keeps dividing his attention between psi and magic and gadgets and everything else he gets into for like five minutes. -it's a really weird team anyway though, they're all gadgeteers or devisors who just happen to have other abilities. They're gonna get trashed when they go up against a team that wasn't just thrown together by the sorting algorithm."

Ethan sticks his tongue out at Isaac. (It's also green.)