I keep thinking about how close we are to it, though. We maybe need to have kids earlier than would normally be advisable. You at least could ask your parents for a belated baby sibling, I guess?

I can and probably should, yeah. But even if they succeed I should still be getting ready to have my own as soon as I'm out of college.

Is Margaret going to mention her sudden mental image of herself and Bella raising their kids as cousins and teaching them magic together, with a suspicious lack of other parents in the picture? Ha ha no she is not.

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure my mom was the sphinx, so.

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Yeah.

I'm sorry about your mom.

I don't know of any reason I couldn't, in theory, raise the dead.

I tried once but sphinx magic doesn't seem to naively do that.

Maybe runecasting can do it, or both in combination. Now that the medallion situation is basically stable, I'm going to start on a spell to stop aging.

That sounds kickass.

Thanks! I'm going to go through a lot of mail-order fruit flies.

What are you working on, if it isn't all confidential?

Extorting my rich people's rich people friends, thinking about a curriculum, thinking about where to physically stash the school - you have anything on hiding stuff like avalons?

I can expand the space inside a box, but only up to a smallish factor--I can't fit Hogwarts in a closet yet. But it's clearly doable somehow. Maybe a larger starting space would let me get a bigger multiplier.

Do you need a bigger multiplier per se if you can get a big enough starting space? I'm not sure you want to fit Hogwarts in a closet anyway, that'd ruin a lot of people's days at once if the closet needed to have its molding repaired.

I can make a space bigger by a factor of about ten in all three dimensions, so that's a hundred times the square footage even if we can't take advantage of the vertical. That should be enough to fit a decent amount of school into a space small enough to rent, especially if we're the only two teachers at first.

Also one way to hide it would be to put it somewhere only accessible by teleportation and give the students something that could teleport them in.

Where do you have in mind?

I don't have a particular spot picked out. In a cave or at the bottom of a lake would be cool, but probably too impractical to be better than just getting a building somewhere rent is low.

Yeah, I feel like most places you can only get by teleportation have some sort of ventilation related drawback.

Yeah. At least we'll have an easy commute to wherever we pick. What sort of space do you think we should get? I don't think we'll need any facilities you wouldn't find in an expanded studio apartment.

Probably we want to own the place, though. I'm thinking a cabin in the woods, the kind for people who don't want to go camping and do want internet and stuff.

Owning the place and not having neighbors both sound appealing. I can look at listings and see if that makes me think of any other considerations.

Bonus points if it's super in the middle of nowhere for people to fly around.

Yes, definitely. I fly around invisible sometimes, but it would be a lot safer in the middle of nowhere.

Speaking of which, I at least should probably use the school as a testing ground for telling people my species. Doing a lot of runecasting in front of people and expecting them not to notice something eventually sounds like a bad plan.

Yeah, someone could imitate you.

Even if I was careful not to do anything untested in front of students, eventually someone would see me stumble over a word or get suspicious of how I invented anything complicated.

Which raises the question, do we want to do a gradual reveal to a few people and risk one going public, or do we want to just make a big announcement about one or both of us so it looks less like we were trying to deceive everyone?

I'm inclined to the first, I think? But not that strongly.

I don't know how to filter for students who can keep a secret. Or any of the other things we would need to filter for, really.

I'm not sure either but if we find sufficiently interested students and make it a condition of enrollment that might get us a ways?