"Maybe a bit like sudoku? More like those chemistry problems where you figure out what ratio of reagents will produce some product."

"I never took chemistry."

"Oh, hmm. I could show you a diagram, if you're curious. I'm curious about what Avalon schools are like, actually, other than "small"."

"Small and pretty limited. They could get us books, but they weren't spoiled for choice on teachers. They try, but they don't always know what they're doing or what they're talking about very well."

"I've heard there are colleges that do internet classes. Maybe someday there'll be internet high schools."

"There are, but I think they ask too many questions."

"Figures. School bureaucracies are like that."

"Yeah, my grandma says it used to be different but they didn't have the internet so it was still worse."

"I wonder if you could have some sort of setup where kids with medallions pretend to be kids without medallions during the sign-ups or something. But if there was a way to make that work people would probably already be doing it."

"Yeah, probably there's some reason it'd backfire. Maybe people'd get arrested for fraud."

"Ugh, probably. The horrible crime of getting a high school education."

"No, I mean the people posing as us."

"The horrible crime of getting someone else a high school education, then." She sighs. "It would be so nice if critters could just exist openly, but it's just too dangerous to try."

"Yeah." Sigh. "I mean, it'll probably happen eventually. The security's hardly perfect. But we're all kind of scared about it."

"Yeah. Maybe telling trusted humans one at a time, trying to control it . . . but you trust the wrong person one time and you're in trouble." She's not at all talking about the problems with hiding being a dragon, nope, not at all.

"Yeah. And like, to a point you can be like, ha, nobody would believe you, but if they know where to find you and they have even one friend who'll follow them somewhere..."

"Yeah. And cameras are getting cheaper all the time, and you can say a photo is fake but some people will say it isn't."

"Yeah. And you can say they altered the picture but there's just all these chances for things to line up, you know?"

"Yeah. It's scary, thinking the secret will get out eventually. And I can't think of any way runecasting could help, except maybe reinventing medallions."

"I guess how much that would help would depend on whether there's a reason they can never work for some species."

"There's so much that isn't written down, or isn't written down where I've been able to find it. Stuff that someone must've known at some point but now nobody does."

"I wonder how it all got lost."

"Maybe some of it got lost in the war, wars are pretty chaotic. Or just critters not telling their human-looking kids anything, not giving them medallions, and then dying with a head full of knowledge they never wrote down."

"Maybe."

"Did you learn about critter history in school at all? All I know is from random library books."