"Sounds good."

She writes it down. And then they can do the rest of the medallion batch, now with scientifically unnecessary handholding.

Handholding is nice. Though a little hard to maintain when she collapses.

This is true.

Time keeps passing; there's a bunch of back and forth with the real estate people but eventually they're convinced by a combination of phone calls from Margaret's mother and a very large cashier's check. Now they have a school, but no students.

Bella amuses herself shopping for furniture and school supplies while they mull over how to acquire students.

"I think the first question is, are we okay with a lot of critters knowing we're running a runecasting school but not anything else about it. Because if we are we can recruit publicly and get a bigger set of people to choose from."

"Hm - knowing that somebody is running a runecasting school, or that it's us?"

"Or possibly that it's me and we leave your name out of it; you might still be in a weird legal situation. Which is very unfair and you should get your share of the credit eventually."

"Thank you. I'm fine with any of the options but it's possible we need a lawyer."

"That's a good idea. I think I've been thinking that if we try to bring an adult into this they'll decide they're in charge, but the nice thing about lawyers is that they work for money and if you stop paying them they stop being interested."

"I hear this about them, yes. You want to hire one or should I?"

"You're probably busier than me, so unless you already know any critter lawyers I can do it."

"Enjoy and let me know if you need backup on that then."

She finds a nemean lion who's a lawyer. Critter lawyers don't specialize as much as human ones, because there are so few of them, so this one does a little bit of real estate and a little bit of contract law and a little bit of a couple less-relevant things. Her name is Genevieve and she thinks they're unlikely to face any consequences from being known to sell runecasting lessons as long as they cross all their Ts and make sure their students are informed of the risks. She can provide templates for a lot of documents she thinks they're going to need: safety waivers and NDAs and intellectual property agreements about who can do what with whose spells. Most of it is straightforward but Bella should probably look over it too, because another pair of eyes can only help.

Bella is happy to look it over. Well, as happy as a non-lawyer inspecting legalese can be.

Legalese: the worst parts of software combined with the worst parts of natural language. But eventually it's clear enough that all their bases are covered (that the lawyer knows about, anyway; she's assuming that the secrets they want their students to keep are proprietary spell diagrams). Also, the resulting stack of documents is intimidating enough to scare off most high school age people who didn't already think of runecasting as serious business, which is arguably a bonus.

"I don't think we can copyright our species. ...can we? Anyway, probably not without elaborate measures that aren't identical to keeping rune diagrams a trade secret."

"Well, the NDA is supposed to cover stuff beyond just intellectual property. Companies use them for things like 'you can't tell anyone we're planning to launch a new product soon,' and that's not copyrightable either. It's supposed to be anything declared confidential that someone learns as part of having the job or being a student or whatever. I guess if you're worried we could explain my species but not yours, since mine is more obviously relevant, but that might worry people more than knowing we're one of each."

"Yeah, I think learning about just one of us would concern people, because what if the other kind pops up and there's a problem."

"Yeah. If you occasionally recharge diagrams we use in class, then the fact that you can do that and why should still count as confidential school information."

"It's a good thing you checked there aren't more."

"How so?"

"Well, then I'd be worried a little about some distant branch of one or the other family turning up from, I don't know, Singapore, and being irritated at us peacefully coexisting and bent on changing that."

"Yeah. If I had distant relatives who hated you or vice versa, us working together wouldn't necessarily make it worse, but I'm glad we don't have to find out."  Even if it would take off some of the pressure to have children she still doesn't feel remotely ready for. "Is there anything else in the paperwork you aren't alright with?"

"I think the rest of it looks all right."