"So no really baked in commitments up front."

"Yeah. I think buying a building is the only thing it would be really hard to change later. Well, that and who we take as students."

"We will be so picky about our building."

"I have some prospects picked out; you can take a look when we go back to my place."

"Sure. Where've you been looking?"

"Wyoming, Montana, a couple in Colorado. A mix of internet postings and going there to buy newspapers, though I haven't actually toured any properties yet." At some point she's going to need to get over house-shopping at seventeen and actually talk to someone with a building to sell.

"I wonder if we should bother noting local and state politics at all."

"Oh, yeah, good point. We wouldn't want to reveal magic to the world and and then get in trouble for teaching without a license. Or were you thinking of something else?"

"Liberal private schooling regulations are one thing but there's probably anywhere with laws on witchcraft still on the books, or inconvenient zoning, or something."

"Oh, yeah. I think witchcraft laws are mostly a European thing, but I'll look up that and also the rules on running a business out of your house."

"Thanks."

"No problem. I'm about done with my ice cream; want to head back now?"

Om nom the last of Bella's ice cream vanishes. "Yeah, sure."

One of the many nice things about Boston: it has a lot of little alleys suitable for teleporting out of. They can get their medallion batch out of the way real quick. "Oh, that reminds me--starting a business turned out to be kind of complicated because of all the secrecy. Do you want me to just PayPal you your share of the medallion money?"

"It's not actually obvious to me how to get money out of Paypal again."

"Would cash or a check work better?"

"Either, yeah."

"Here, I've got checks somewhere, let me do it before I forget again . . ." She rummages for a moment, finds the checks in the desk drawer under the rune dictionary and her learner's permit, and writes Bella a check for her half of the money. It's a decent chunk of change, at least if you're not someone who extorts billionaires as a hobby.

She pockets it. "Thanks."

"Okay, so, real estate. Here's the sort of thing I've found so far."

In addition to the first handful of postings, she's found several more, including one with a weirdly large fraction of its square footage taken up by a movie theater, one with a tall fence all the way around the property, one with an inconvenient floor plan but an outside that looks way more like Hogwarts than a house in Wyoming has a right to (labeled with a Post-It note saying "bad house, good turret"), and two that have been on the market oddly long for their very inviting price to square footage ratio. One of those has hints between the lines that there's a legal dispute going on; the other is attached to a newspaper article claiming it's haunted.

"I kind of like the theater one, we're not using it for a house, it's a school, does it have lecture amounts of seating? The castley one is aesthetic but we can, like, make renovations if we care that much. I guess renovations would also get us a lecture hall. Is haunting seriously the only thing wrong with that one? I guess it could really be haunted. Kinda want to go check it out but I haven't frozen eggs yet."

"I like the theater one too, we'd want to replace the furniture but then it would make a great lecture hall. And yeah, I figure the haunted one is either loud pipes and carbon monoxide and we can get it at a bargain even after repairs, orrrr it's weird critter stuff and we're the last people who should go there, it's very annoying."

"Yeah. It's hard to freeze eggs at our age, did you know, they get weird about it."

"I haven't gotten around to trying yet. But it's weird that they think it's their business. What nefarious thing do they imagine you could be up to?"

"Oh, they don't think I'm nefarious, they just, like, ask me if I have a health problem of some kind, wouldn't this interfere with school, can't I wait till I'm twenty, where are my parents."