"You're welcome," she says. "...is Shadow where you want to roll out wizardry? You don't want to start with one of the worlds color-coded 'boring' on the map, see how that goes?"

"I almost certainly want to start with one of the worlds color-coded boring, but I want to start there with the aim of developing a rollout procedure I can eventually use for Shadow."

"Why's that?"

"The short version is that I think you all got very lucky recently and there is a lot that could have been done to make it less up to luck and no one else seems competent to navigate this so I'm doing it. And the more productive it is to get resources through official and cooperative channels the less likely Midnight just steals a library, or worse asks a demon for a copy."

"We got very lucky," she agrees. "Although for whatever it's worth a demon would have some inconveniences trying to copy our library. Why is giving Shadow wizardry one of the things that seems like it would have made it less up to luck?"

"Me running Shadow is one of the things that'll make it less up to luck and he'll let me if it means his world has access to the resources that he knows it is currently being denied because of him."

"You think he'll let you run the place outright?"

"I am sure he will still want to wear a crown, I'm equally sure I can have more or less arbitrary authority over what he does with it."

"Hm. I'm inclined to run this past the other Maitimos but it seems likely that the reaction will be 'but that doesn't seem to involve Midnight being dead at all', so maybe it's a waste of time..."

"It seems like a bit of a blind spot of theirs. I was King of my Noldor for a time, I have seven thousand years on Midnight and access to more resources than he does, I'm not going to get outmaneuvered. And he doesn't want people to get hurt or trust me, people would have gotten hurt by now."

"Okay. The new enrollment batch at the school starts in six weeks and that seems like the simplest way to teach you wizardry, if not the soonest. It's a three year course if you specialize early and five if you don't, comes with optional Materia sociocultural context lessons."

"Thank you. That's everything."

"You want to enroll just you, nobody else?"

"Depends if we're rolling it out somewhere boring first. If you recommend that then yes, just me; if not then it would be useful to have a few dozen people."

"I do recommend that, but boring doesn't necessarily mean a particularly small population, I'd still expect you to be spread a bit thin."

"Given the other things I'm currently working on, I do not expect that in six weeks I could find somewhere and orient myself sufficiently to identify people who would be good candidates for three to five years of wizard school."

"I meant you could enroll people you already know and bring them somewhere boring with you to help you pass it on there."

"Have you ever found that Elves who aren't Feanorians or excessively exposed to them are very slow-paced?"

"Yes. Do you mean they'll take more than six weeks to decide to attend school or that they'll take longer than three to five years to complete the course?"

"I mean that I would expect them to take at least a decade to decide; they'll be perfectly efficient about it once they get to doing it."

"All right. I'll just enroll you, then." She does something at her crystal ball.

"Thank you very much."

"You're welcome. You can get a course schedule and an orientation packet from the registrar's office."

"Thank you."

"Also, in three to five years we might actually have more of a here-have-wizardry procedure for you to crib from."