Xavier isn't dropping any hints one way or another, so off they go to Joseph's character's country to let him pay the orphanage that raised him a bunch of his share of loot.

Margaret's paladin approves of this sort of thing, and chips in some of her own loot too. Also if any of the orphans are down a few HP, she can heal now. Of course, they have to get there first.

Wandering monster! And end session.

And thank Xavier for another fun session and follow Brenda outside. "I have durability figured out, now."

"That's... really fast, I'd been assuming it took months to do anything."

"It gets easier with practice." 

"It does?"

"Yeah, spell design is a lot like a math puzzle."

"I don't find math puzzles that much easier after practicing them. Maybe you don't mean Sudoku?"

"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..."