"Yeah. Might be better to see if we can figure it out without making up words."

"It makes it so much harder to do science when every experiment could straight up kill you."

"Yeah. And there's so little systematic knowledge-sharing, between the tiny number of people and some of them wanting to hang onto spells as trade secrets, so there are probably experiments getting repeated. Maybe we should publish our notes, if there isn't some secret good reason nobody else does."

"I was thinking of founding a school."

"Someplace where people could work with supervision and actually talk to each other would be pretty great, and I'd want to help, but it sounds like a major time commitment. How are you thinking of handling the logistics?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you look like you're in high school, right? Would this be a one day a week thing, or something you'd do as a full-time job eventually?"

"I was thinking the latter. Charge tuition."

"I haven't given up on eventually having a job I can tell people about, but I guess things could change between now and college."

"I don't particularly see the advantage of having a job I can tell people about. I mean, if it comes up I can say I'm a teacher."

She sighs. "My parents don't know about magic."

"Oh. Are you not a critter?"

"I am, it's just that they'd worry too much."

"Huh. Okay."

And now it's time to move far far away from the subject of Margaret's critterhood. "So if the school is a thing for a few years from now, maybe in the meantime we could publish a journal. Like Nature, but for runecasting. Publish our own research and try to get other people to do the same."

"Ooh, huh. That's an interesting idea. I wrote to the publisher of the runecasting books I found to see if they had anything else, and they didn't, but they still exist as a publisher of secret materials."

"That's convenient. What's their name, I can look up how much they charge. Might also want an internet version."

"Whisker Press."

She writes that down, remembers her burger and takes a bite of it. "I don't know if it would be better to try to charge for it, or do it as a public service and let it build a reputation to help the school."

"Charging for it means dumb ten year olds without credit cards can't trivially get at it?"

"Ugh, that's true, any given thing we could publish would make some people safer and some people less safe. Charging for it isn't the best filter but it might be the best one we could do en masse."

"There might be better but it does seem like it improves on open access outright."

"Just so. On a similar note, there's the current shortage of anything introductory--better to have more comprehensive explanations for people just starting out, or leave it and eventually direct newbies to the school?"

"I think the school. For double-checking, and using Xeroxed or stamped materials first."

"Yeah. Slower, but better in the long run."