When I first tried building an extension to the tower, I had to put up and tear down four practice buildings before Mg. Rowan thought I'd learned enough to assist with the real thing. I hope that you'll have better luck, or a better head for this sort of thing.

Like enjoys like. A room where you'll cast a lot of Nature should have potted plants. A room where you'll cast a lot of Air should be up high with wide windows that you can open for a breeze. A room where you'll cast a lot of Dark should be dimly lit. A room where you'll cast a lot of Lightning should have a tall roof with a lightning rod. But there's more to it than that, because Mg. Rowan insisted on every classroom being lined with bookshelves even if all the books are blank. I don't understand the details, though.

"Okay, we don't have the space for learning stones, and there are enough things that need doing that y'all will need to learn on the go. Maya, Hailey—"

"Construction practice?", she asks, having seen where Sable's going over their connection.

Ruby nods. "And then me and Neo take turns doing Air practice, since it should be kinda safer, with the fourth on heal duty for the other three."

Sable nods. "Good girls. Love y'all. I'll get to making some more space for us."

She heads back to the Mana Font, refills herself, and then starts another fog repulsion session.

While the other four girls head upstairs and start practicing.

The massive piles of rubble seem like ripe targets for a little stoneshaping.

Maya attempts to shape some of the nearest pile into a wall, channeling Earth mana at it with that goal firmly in mind. 

It turns out that Magister Aspen wasn't kidding about the differences in fine control between a Magister casting and a student, or about the likelihood of miscasts when a new student tries casting unsupervised. The magic Maya channels goes awry in both form and location, veering sideways to hit a different pile of rubble than the one she intended and knocking a fist-sized chunk off the top, which rolls and bounces down the side of the pile to finally thunk onto the ground. The startlement of the unexpected result is likely to make her drop her attempt, but further mishaps may be available if she uses that stubborn Earth mindset to focus through it and continue channeling.

Maya frowns and sighs. This is simply going to be unsafe until they put training time in with a learning stone, and while they could handle some splash damage on each other, by resurrecting with a kiss, they cannot as easily replace their wand shaper or assorted vegetation.

<Everything magical is bottlenecked on you, love.>

Sable, who had been just about to start charging the Mana Font some more, sighs. Of course it is. 

Okay, she heads upstairs. "Designs and use cases, girls."

Neo and Ruby sit down on the ground by the hatch and start sketching tower concepts.

While Maya and Hailey troop downstairs to research any other rooms they will need to make space for.

While Sable sets to practicing stoneshaping. Let's start with stable walls, and then she'll try to make 'em pretty once she has stable down.

Sable has a much easier time getting the magic to do what she wants!

When she puts up her first test wall, she can feel through her Earth channel that the magic is getting much more uptake in specific regions, some with visible cracks in them, others experiencing invisible stresses; by the third test wall she has enough practice to smoothly reinforce, redistribute, and repair the wall as she forms it, ending in a well-built stone wall with a solid physical structure supported by firm magical reinforcement.

Meanwhile in the book, the index tells of a Research Desk (Experimental), which is written about in the beginning of the book in Magister Rowan's clear, bold blackletter calligraphy, with cramped margin notes and page references added by Magister Aspen. Apparently it might be able to summon fragments of notes from other destroyed towers using Lightning magic, but Mg. Rowan's prototype was destroyed by, ironically, a literal lightning strike from the sky, and they didn't have the materials to rebuild it before the fog came; therefore the best Mg. Aspen can say about its verifiable functionality is that bits of paper did appear out of thin air and Mg. Rowan did seem really excited about them. It's best placed in a room with a lot of bookshelves (page reference for how to use Nature and Air magic to process wood into blank books, plus a little Dark to get the leather for the covers from an animal carcass; Mg. Aspen assumes whoever inherits their wand can figure out making shelves out of wood on their own).

There's also a Gruel Pot, useful for making simple stews, and a Dragon Wok, for more complex cuisine; Mg. Aspen advises constructing a room to hold both even before you have the materials for the Dragon Wok, and adding this nifty wall-mounted spice rack that not only helps you keep your ingredients organized but also has a bit of Air magic worked in that actively helps you pick up the right containers from across the room smoothly while cooking, and ambiently enhances the magic of the cooking pots.

Here's a page on how to make magic beds, and what kind of decor gives them ambient enhancement; the key is apparently rugs, and proper lighting, none of those dim flickering smokeless torches (page 98) like the ones in the underground chambers.

The elemental focuses for Apprenticing in secondary elements each need their own room, ideally with bookshelves and element-specific decor, but Mg. Aspen doesn't actually know the full procedure for building them all and several of the components they do know about are going to be hard to reach from this hilltop. Which leads into...

Alchemical Beasts! Indispensable for automatic processing of raw materials into other stuff. The easiest one to make is a Midden Jelly, which separates out and preserves all the most useful bits of a small animal carcass. More advanced ones for making things like cloth or glass or iron require multi-student rituals which Mg. Aspen has never personally seen, though they've dutifully preserved and organized Mg. Rowan's notes on the subject. Oh, and you can also use them to process, um, you know, certain things, into fertilizer. Here's a page reference to a section on installing plumbing. You can use Water magic to get running water, and Fire to add heated water for baths and so on.

Speaking of rituals, any good magical academy needs an Auditorium with a proper ritual circle for Graduations! There's an entire section detailing how to construct the ritual circle and all the proper decor to ambiently support it, cross-referenced back and forth with the page describing the ritual itself. Mg. Aspen notes that many other academic rituals are possible but this one is the only one you really need.

Medical Beds! You should have an Infirmary, in case of attacks by gribbly creatures from out of the fog (has only happened a couple of times, but they were very memorable) or whatever is happening in the Underschool (Mg. Aspen says that Mg. Rowan's notes were planning for taking a force of a few mages down there to investigate, as soon as they could summon that many students, which they never managed). Here's how to make a Medical Bed and the Incense Burners that serve as supportive decor, and notes on a few Medical-Bed-based healing rituals which, Mg. Aspen's margin notes cannot stress this enough, should be carried out by a Magister. You can cheat on some things but you cannot cheat on the level of channeling control that goes into your healing ritual.

Oh this is useful. Maya starts listing things off into one notebook, and maintaining a copy of it in mindspace where Neo can get at it from the surface. Then she reorders them into a prioritized list.

• Training Rooms
• Headmistress's Suite
• Farms/Gardens
• Apprenticing Rooms
• Beast Processing
• Research Office
• Dorms
• Bathrooms
• Kitchen
• Infirmary
• Auditorium
• Research Lab

Of course that won't remotely be the way they need to be arranged for proximity to one another, but that problem is Neo's job. She takes detailed notes about the relevant enhancing items and functional items and ingredients, and starts working on assembling it all into a dependency tree.

Neo grins happily at the design project and gets to sketching tower layouts with backseat commentary from Ruby.

And Sable, satisfied with her ability to make walls that function, starts working on giving them windows and doors, and making them pretty.

There's also a page about alchemy equipment but it just says that you need a lot of glass and Mg. Rowan's notes didn't get that far and Mg. Aspen really hopes that experimental research desk works for you.

Windows and doors are decently easy, as long as she has sources of all the raw materials involved; using Earth magic to manipulate metal and glass as well as stone is tricky but doable, and Nature magic works for shaping wood into frames and doors.

Conveniently, they have helped her dad with home repairs before, and done a lot of their own workshop projects, and as a result they have handled a fucking lot of lumber and glass in their lives. What do Earth mana and Nature mana think about modern glass window panes and two-by-fours?

Nature magic is a little confused by modern lumber, and Earth magic is mostly useful for shaping rather than delicate movement so she ends up needing to use some Air to get the window panes in place once they're framed and so on. By and large, though, she can make it work. It's fine if some of that wood sprouts leaves, right? Or alternately she can practice with it until she figures out how to stop making it do that and then discard the leafy ones.

Yeah, she'll retry until she can get it leafless. Conjured lumber is free. And she'll keep retrying with all of this until she has the whole mess pretty. A bit dark and imposing, a bit swoopy curves, and some nice windows. She experiments with different palettes of stone and wood: different colors of granite, some marble, mahogany, purpleheart, and more.