"Yup, probably this weekend if my teacher answers her email. For secret reasons I can cast in my native language if I have to but I don't like to be in the habit and want to see if I do have to."

Great.

Has May thought about what she wants to do if it does work? Like visiting or whatever?

"Yup! I want to visit and learn about the place and probably do arbitrage and maybe move some monsters over there and all that good stuff."

Awesome. Her house doesn't have a guest room but she can't imagine Julie and Winona minding letting her sleep on the couch, given everything. And she can make a ramp and stuff.

"Yeah, that could be handy till I either know that the money spends the same or I have some local. I don't expect to visit right away, because I don't have a way to know for sure that runecasting works in your world, so if I just flung myself into it I could get stuck - I'm gonna want to find someone who's okay with risking staying and being considered your kind of cryptid - if they're a monster or if their medallion or latent medallion magic doesn't work there either. Can you tell me more about what that will be like for whoever?"

Cryptids are almost never dangerous and also don't talk, so it shouldn't be too hard to convince people they're something else. She's not sure whether it'd be better to send a boy or a girl - there aren't any magical boys, so a boy critter will be weirder but have an easier time convincing people he's not a cryptid. Also if it's a girl she can go to a Thaumatology church and ask for help and probably get it, even if people are very confused. But nothing worse than people being very confused should happen, especially if they mostly stay in one place and let people get used to them. And Dusk can have Winona keep an eye on the news and get in touch with people wherever they end up to corroborate the story, too, that should help.

"How confident are you that you would know if people sometimes, I don't know, hunted cryptids for sport or kept them in private zoos or something?"

...pretty confident? The church and the Thaum Union and everything like that would go after them big time if they did, that would be horrible. Even, like - there's a special institution for institutionalized girls who get magic, and when those girls go cryptid they still let them go.

"And you're sure this isn't your tender feelings being spared on account of you are a kid."

Yeah, Winona doesn't keep stuff like that from her, she wouldn't be able to hide that she was hiding something and she knows Dusk would worry just the same.

"Okay. I will bear this in mind when interviewing critters but I don't want to rule out the possibility that it takes me a year or three to find someone I want to ask who says yes."

Okay.

- she did remember the other day that she hasn't mentioned swarms to May, that's something someone appearing in her world needs to know about. Swarms are spontaneously-appearing magical monsters; they start out as groups of little buglike things like this, and over time they get smarter and faster and more violent, and join up with each other to make bigger ones. The ones in the ocean or other uninhabited places can get really huge. They're not a big deal anywhere civilized and not that common even in places that aren't, there are patrols that look for them and kill them when they find them, but she'll want to avoid sending her volunteer to the middle of nowhere if she can, and make sure they know to look for people right away if she can't.

"My spell already aims to drop you in a specified place but that's good to know. Point in favor of looking for critters with decent quality natural magic."

That makes it easy, but yeah, it's always a good idea to have a backup plan.

"If my spell is good enough to get you to your world but not good enough to drop you in the right place would you rather it fail and I start over, or just go ahead and drop you somewhere anyway?"

Hm.

Can she make it so it puts her like a mile in the air, even if it puts her somewhere random? She should be able to get home from just about anywhere if her magic is working, but if it drops her in the ocean and she gets soaked that could stop her magic from working.

"Your magic doesn't work if you're wet? Uh, I can aim for a mile in the air, but same question, if it can't do that should it still try or should it just not work."

Her magic doesn't work if she's not pretty enough, yeah. If she knows she's going to be in the ocean she can put on a swimsuit but then that's not great if she ends up in antarctica or something - swimsuit in antarctica is probably less of a disaster than being stuck in the ocean without her cartoons, though, switching clothes is pretty fast if she has something in mind to start with. That's probably good enough.

"Antartica is insanely cold but I guess it probably wouldn't kill you in two seconds outright, okay. Aiming for a mile above your house, if either or both conditions doesn't work still go through with the spell as long as it can hit the right planet - yeah?"

Yeah.

"Okay. I have enough French on my own that I can add the 'mile up' thing without pestering my teacher for any more words, I mostly needed her for nuances about how French handles alternate dimension fantasy."

"Anyway, that's my status update, I'm glad I have an accommodating French teacher who thinks I'm writing postapocalyptic fantasy wherein French is a magical language."

Useful grownups are pretty great, yeah.

And she has more stuff for eBay; she added some exotic wood this time, blanks for carving and a bunch of carved-looking pendants.

"Ooh. Okay, I'll see where that gets us." She hands over the latest wad of cash in exchange.