A 5'3", athletic girl with a wild bob of black hair tumbles out wearing a midriff-bearing black tank-top with a spiky-looking pattern on it in green, a pair of tight denim shorts, and combat boots. She looks around curiously, green eyes bright.

A 5'8", curvaceous, mocha-skinned girl with glowing orange eyes and coalfire hair stands gracefully alongside her, wearing steel-grey yoga pants, elegant-looking flats, and a low-cut tie-front crop-top in a soft orange.

A slim, five-nothing girl with a gymnast's build bounces to her feet, hair half pink and half brown with a white streak. She wears sleek brown slacks in a shimmering athletic fabric, a pink button-down blouse, and tri-color ankle boots with a short heel.

A silver-eyed girl of 5'2" rolls out of the pile wearing a knee-length red skirt, a black bustier, a cream-colored blouse, a black choker, combat boots, and a red cloak.

And the remaining girl in the middle shifts

Through a few faces

Before settling into a 5'7" girl with modest curves and purple curls and eyes.

"Heeeeeyyy~, look at us."

"Yeah! I look like me!"

She tackles Hailey into Sable's lap and kisses her, then Sable. "Jade! Sable! I look like me!"

"You do, my little darling." She squeezes Hailey and Ruby both tightly, then opens her arms to the others. "Get in here you two.

Neo bounces into the cuddlepile as well, grinning wide.

And Maya wraps her arms around her loves tenderly, sighing warmly.

After several minutes of happy snuggling, Hailey rolls out of the pile to peer at the pedestal and book. "So let's see what this thing is and where we landed, girls."

The book has a fin along the spine, claws or fangs lining the edge of the cover, and a big eye on the front. The chest at the foot of the pedestal still has that faintly glowing latch, and there seems to be a note pinned to the top.

"Book looks decidedly ominous. Very 'monster book of monsters' vibes, minus the snapping and biting. Well, I haven't touched it yet, so it may yet try."

She pokes it.

Neo, meanwhile, leans over to peer at the note.

The book flexes its cover slightly but doesn't do any more than that.

To whom it may concern,

The fog came on faster than we expected. I've done the best I could with Mg. Rowan's notes.

This chest contains my wand, which if all goes well should allow you to wake the Mana Font and use the Student Summoner. Your top priority should be learning and enacting the ritual that pushes back the fog. The lock will open to one who can wield the wand, and the book will open to the wand's wielder. You will need students if you mean to survive.

Magister Aspen

Neo snaps her fingers to get Hailey's attention.

"Shit. So we landed in a mess with an ongoing threat, this 'fog', and we need the book and the wand to push it back and summon students, who presumably help us push it back. Okay. Well, given how well the powers seem to have worked out it stands to reason there's some hope we can get this handled, just on narrative grounds, but decisions to make girls."

"Right. Which of us tries the wand and book first?"

"You know my vote, darlings: Sable or Hailey."

Sable points at Hailey.

Hailey points at Sable.

Neo points at Sable

And so does Ruby. "Sorry Sable, you're it."

Sable laughs and bends down to the lock. "Betrayed by my own headmates! I see how it is."

She tries the latch.

The latch shimmers and pops open. Inside the chest is a straight length of carved wood, with a handle sized for a human hand; the handle has seven spiraling grooves for grip, and the wand part has seven flat spiraling sides and a slight taper toward its point. The wood seems high quality, with a slight gloss from some varnish or oil, but the design is fairly plain.

"Nothing for it," she murmurs, and reaches down to pick up the wand.

There's a sensation like the click of suddenly understanding a difficult puzzle, and in its wake, a subtler sense of having more mental motions available than she did a second ago. The new pathways seem to route through the wand, and come in seven different flavours, though the sense of them is faint enough that it's hard to pick out any detail.

"Well, the wand seems to like me."

She pushes the dim sensation of the mental motions at the other girls.

"Huh. Different flavors of magic, maybe? Wonder if we can all wield it. Check the book while I try it?"

Sable passes Hailey the wand and carefully opens the book.

Sable, separated from her wand, has an insistent sense that she's missing something important and it's over thataway; Hailey, holding someone else's wand, feels a sort of muted staticky sensation that's mildly uncomfortable but not too much of a bother.

The toothy cover creaks open under Sable's hand. The title on the first page reads in clear, bold letters, A Record in Brief of some few Rituals which may prove Useful in these Trying Times.

"Hm. The wand definitely imposed a sense of... attachment to it. Book has rituals."

She starts paging through them.

"Doesn't feel like the wand likes me, either. Probably we each need our own. Maybe the book'll have a guide on how to make one."

The first ritual in the book is titled Repel Fog and has a brief description in a clear, bold hand reminiscent of the title, with a few clarifying margin notes in a less shaky version of Magister Aspen's handwriting. The long and the short of it seems to be that you stand at the Mana Font (Mg. Aspen clarifies that it's the big crystal formation in the next room) and channel unformed magic through your wand (Mg. Aspen has a note pointing to a later page for explanations of how to channel magic), and then the fog (there are no notes explaining what the fog is) should retreat somewhat.

The second ritual is titled Summon Student and involves channeling Lightning magic (Mg. Aspen points to the page on channeling magic again) at the Student Summoner (Mg. Aspen has helpfully drawn a little picture of it, a bunch of mysterious hovering arcs of what might be wood or metal, and noted that it's in another chamber adjacent to the Mana Font room) using a wand (pointer to a later page on wands) as the main ritual focus, to summon ("^ hopefully" - Mg. Aspen) a student who will ("^ hopefully") bond to the wand.

Does Sable want to follow any of those pointers?

She does. To start with, she will pluck her wand back from Hailey with a kiss to her cheek, "We'll make wands for you girls next," and stride out of the room, book in hand, to find the Mana Font. As she goes, she flips to the page on channeling magic. Hopefully it isn't very complicated and she can hand the book off to the other girls to take notes on the important rituals and processes.

"Fog first, girls. It sounds ominous enough that I want to banish as much as I can quickly. Y'all can take notes while I do that once I'm going."

What she carries away from the pedestal isn't exactly the book; as she lifts it away, it slips ethereally through her fingers and a ghostly copy rises in its place, open to the same page she was reading. The ghost book's weight is faint, but it follows very obligingly wherever she carries it, and its translucent glowing text is clear and legible.

The page on how to channel magic (written entirely by Magister Aspen) goes into the different mindsets, wand motions, and physical stances involved in channeling the seven elements. Unformed magic appears at the end of the list, with a note that it's paradoxically difficult to settle into the right channeling style without accidentally slipping into some specific element, but once you've mastered that, it has the lightest mana burden of all of them. To channel it, you clear your mind, stand in a neutral posture, and hold your wand steady.

With that plus the directions of the Repel Fog ritual, Sable can successfully cast the ritual at the Mana Font. A blue-white glow emanates from her wand and connects to the massive crystal formation in a thin line, and a pool of blue light begins spreading through its massive translucent base and then slowly, slowly filling it. The whole formation is about twelve feet tall at its highest jagged point, with a few scattered crystals floating in the air around it, ranging from fist-sized to head-sized; everywhere above the slowly rising waterline of the blue light, the dormant crystal is as clear as slightly frosted glass.

As the Mana Font fills, its glow begins the light the room, bringing more visibility to the spiral stair of floating stone slabs that wraps around the central figure of the Font, and the engraved mural at the back of the room depicting a crystal suffused with a crackling glow. At the top of the stairs where they meet the ceiling is a firmly closed hatch with a glass porthole in the middle showing ominously swirling darkness, and at the bottom where they meet the floor is another one.

As the ghostly copy lifts off, Sable pushes a thought at Hailey and Maya to inspect the real copy. She focuses on keeping up the channeling as long as she can (or as long as it takes to fill the Font to capacity, whichever comes first).

That swirling mist sure looks fuckin' spooky. She checks to see if the book is still open, and if it will let her flip to the page on wands. They don't need any students until they've got a better handle on things, and they might as well practice by making wands for themselves first.

Maya gathers a notebook and pen and steps up beside Hailey, ready to take notes as they read.

My own wand is elementally balanced, meaning its bearer's power is equally sharply limited in every element. An archaic curiosity, useless for serious casting—except that it channels unformed magic with exceptional efficiency. I hope it serves you well.

"Fascinating." Maya takes notes of the required ingredients for each element. "Find a primer on the basics of each element? Sable will need to make a Wand Shaper and we will all need wands."

"On it, babe." She carefully looks for references that indicate where such basic information may be found.

Ruby and Neo, meanwhile, determinedly set to exploring what space is safe from the fog, and what stuff is there.

There are three rooms on this level: the room with the book, the bigger room with the Mana Font, and the promised Student Summoner chamber. The rooms for the book and Student Summoner are both pretty small, but the Mana Font room has plenty of extra space around its centerpiece and the winding spiral stair, and there are scuff marks on the floor indicating it might have had more furniture once, or been used for storage.

The only two exits are the hatches in the floor and ceiling of the Mana Font room.

🔥 Fire is most commonly used to cook, hunt, and clear debris. In battle it is straightforward, powerful, and costly in mana. It should be cast with vertical, curved wand motions from an aggressive, forward stance. Its mindset is direct and passionate, focusing on a specific concrete goal and an emotional drive toward that goal.

💧 Water is most commonly used to heal, clean, and perform alchemy. It should be cast with smooth, flowing wand motions from a loose, balanced stance. Its mindset is calm and flexible, conscious of a goal but open to many paths and ready to flow around obstacles.

💀 The main use of Dark magic is Quilting, creating autonomous servants from the bodies of dead animals. It can also be used to conceal things in shadows. It should be cast with wide, sweeping wand motions from a relaxed stance. I find its mindset the most elusive of all the elements, but would describe it as focused, curious, and intense.

🌱 Nature is most commonly used to care for plants and to craft wands. It should be cast with natural, vinelike wand motions from an upright, rooted stance. Its mindset is meditative and detail-oriented, attentive to the life and form of each specific plant or length of wood.

⛰️ Earth is most commonly used to carve and handle stone, and to repair and preserve walls and furniture. In battle it can provide sturdy armor against all manner of attacks. It should be cast with slow, precise wand motions from a wide, firm stance. Its mindset is solid and forceful, with a clear idea of one's desired outcome and an uncompromising attitude toward reaching it.

⚡Lightning is most commonly used to charge mana reservoirs, but is also indispensable to the Student Summoning ritual, and many mages use it to organize their research. It should be cast from a grounded, dancelike stance, with wand motions that flick rapidly between points of stillness. Its mindset is alert and open, seeking to perceive and understand.

☁️ Air is most commonly used to move small items, or shrink larger items for storage and portability. Before the fog, it was also used for flight. It should be cast with rapid, swirling wand motions from a light, mobile stance. Its mindset is cheerful and content, with a musical aspect; many mages find it easier to hold while whistling, humming, or listening to music.

Okay, that's interesting. "Probably we gotta all take different elements. Sable's wand does all of them, but it sounds like the rest of us can't easily switch between them, and we're gonna want coverage. Probably I take Fire? Ruby maybe takes Air or Lightning. Air fits her attitude, but Lightning sounds like she could use it for some kinda artifice or enchanting."

Maya nods. "And I likely take Water, Nature, or Earth. I probably fit Nature the best of any of us five, but Sable can cast it with her balanced wand. I like Earth's common uses better, and mesh particularly well with Water's attitude."

Hailey paces a bit. "Neo'll have the easiest time with Lightning's mindset, but she won't like the magic. She'd like air better."

"And Ruby can handle Lightning's state of mind reasonably well for the sake of projects."

Hailey nods. "So Neo takes Air and Ruby takes Lightning. I'm on Fire, and you take Earth because I know you can stretch to that perspective, and you'll be a lot happier with the magic. Sable can cover Water and Nature for now."

"Yes, and it will be some time before we have any need for the Quilting or concealment of Dark, I suspect."

Maya notes the tentative assignments down.

Meanwhile, Ruby and Neo have explored everything on this level. Hm. She watches the hatches to see if and when the fog recedes enough to allow her to explore there too. If both hatches clear at the same time, she'll try the lower one first.

The fog swirls, seemingly unaffected. The ritual description didn't mention how fast it would recede, or even how long the ritual would take, just that the casters should channel until the Mana Font stops filling, that this takes longer and requires more complexity the more full it was when you started, and that the high end of possible durations is "a few hours".

Neo pouts at the fog.

Then she gets up and leads Ruby back to the initial room they arrived in to confer with Hailey and Maya. They debate elements while they wait, and intermittently read more of the book.

Each student begins as an Initiate, strongest in their wand's element but capable of casting and learning every other element as well. A student's growth will depend on quickness of mind, alignment with elemental mindsets, and the quality of their wand.

Once a student has reached the initial limits of their growth, they can accelerate their mastery over a secondary element by Apprenticing in it at an appropriate elemental focus (see page 48). This may restrict their mastery of some tertiary elements, potentially allowing them no more than the minimum I am capable of - though a strong student may partly overcome that obstacle.

An Apprentice, or later Magister, is traditionally known by a title depending on their primary and secondary elements. As I have neither, I am thankfully spared this indignity. Still, for posterity, I will preserve the list here. You need not make use of these titles and in fact I encourage you not to. In short, one whose primary and secondary elements are identical is a Something-mancer, one whose primary and secondary elements are adjacent is a Conjurer, one whose primary and secondary elements are opposed is a Sorcerer, and one whose primary and secondary elements are none of those things is an Arcanist.

Primary Fire / secondary Fire: Pyromancer. Accelerated greatly in Fire; restricted in Water and Dark.
Primary Fire / secondary Lightning: Heat Conjurer. Accelerated in Fire and Lightning.
Primary Fire / secondary Air: Blazewind Arcanist. Accelerated in Air and slightly in Fire; restricted in Dark and Nature.
Primary Fire / secondary Water: Steam Sorcerer. Accelerated in Water and slightly in Fire; restricted in Dark and Earth.
Primary Fire / secondary Dark: Smoke Sorcerer. Accelerated in Dark and slightly in Fire; restricted in Water and Lightning.
Primary Fire / secondary Nature: Flamethorn Arcanist. Accelerated in Nature and slightly in Fire; restricted in Water and Air.
Primary Fire / secondary Earth: Lava Conjurer. Accelerated in Fire and Earth.

Primary Lightning / secondary Fire: Heat Conjurer. Accelerated in Lightning and Fire.
Primary Lightning / secondary Lightning: Thundermancer. Accelerated greatly in Lightning; restricted in Dark and Nature.
Primary Lightning / secondary Air: Tempest Conjurer. Accelerated in Lightning and Air.
Primary Lightning / secondary Water: Boltgeyser Arcanist. Accelerated in Water and slightly in Lightning; restricted in Nature and Earth.
Primary Lightning / secondary Dark: Deathcurrent Sorcerer. Accelerated in in Dark and slightly in Lightning; restricted in Nature and Fire.
Primary Lightning / secondary Nature: Frenzygrowth Sorcerer. Accelerated in Nature and slightly in Lightning; restricted in Dark and Air.
Primary Lightning / secondary Earth: Joltsoil Arcanist. Accelerated in Earth and slightly in Lightning; restricted in Water and Dark.

An Apprentice who has reached the limits of their growth - or an impatient Initiate - may partake of the Graduation ritual (page 16) to become a Magister. As heir to my wand, you begin as a Magister already. A Magister may still grow in their mastery of elements, but it will take them decades to achieve what a student could achieve in days or weeks; it is advised, therefore, to wait until a student has gone a full week without increasing the depth of their channel for any element before graduating them. In trade for the slowing of their direct growth, a Magister gains finer control over their channeling, and will have a much easier time performing delicate tasks such as cooking, alchemy, and complex rituals. Traditionally, only a Magister may teach, but I judge that in extremity an Apprentice or even a bright Initiate can serve nearly as well.

Oh fascinating. They can each take a second, as they learn more? She would prefer Fire for her secondary, and suspects Ruby would like Air. 

Yep! She'll take Air for her secondary.

Hailey goes for a Lightning secondary just on vibes.

And Neo decides she kind of likes the attitude and movement of Water? And healing's alright.

The Repel Fog ritual turns out to take just over half an hour under current conditions. It's a little tiring, but bearably so.

The moment it finishes is tangible to Sable as an abrupt release of tension, a pulling-away or closing-off of the pathway through which she was channeling magic into the Mana Font. To everyone else, it's audible as a rush of distant wind, and visible as a beam of sunlight through the porthole in the upper hatch.

The crystal at the bottom of the Mana Font has filled with blue light to a depth of maaaaaybe four inches. There is a whole lot of Mana Font left to fill.

Also, Sable feels a bit low on mana, a sort of hollow sensation located in the part of her mind she's been channeling all this magic out of. It might be time for the Restoring Mana procedure scribbled in the margin of the wands section, which approximately says to reach out through your wand like you're trying to find a target to channel magic into, connect to the Mana Font or a secondary reservoir, and pull. It shouldn't take more than a few seconds to refill even a very depleted mage.

Yes, she's interested, but what does the book say about natural regeneration, and will that deplete the Mana Font meaningfully?

What does the book say about natural regeneration: if she looks hard enough, a brief footnote about mana reserves being renewed by sleep.

Depleting the Mana Font: contextually it doesn't sound like it? In the section about secondary reservoirs there's some math about the ratio between the mana spent by the mage charging the reservoir and the mana gained by the mages using it, which is already pretty favourable (a skilled Lightning mage can fill one with barely a smidge of their mana, and it'll fully restore the mana of five or ten more mages before it needs recharging), but there isn't any such math about the Mana Font - which implies that whatever depletion it's experiencing, it's either immeasurably small or at least so negligible that Magister Aspen didn't feel a need to bother writing it down.

Okay, then sure, she'll recharge her mana from the Font. She's got a lot of things to spend mana on today, judging by the mental notes the other girls were sharing as they worked.

Restoring her mana is a pleasant, refreshing sensation, not unlike a cool drink of water on a hot, thirsty day. The Mana Font is not visibly affected.

Now that the fog has been pushed back, the sun is streaming in the upper hatch, and the view through the lower hatch is still dark but no longer swirling ominously. Where would they like to explore first?

"I wanna go upstairs."

"Downstairs might have existing artifacts we need."

Neo frowns for a moment, feeling out her abilities from her kitsune side, then conjures an illusion of Sable's wand, tilting her head curiously.

"Neo is right, the artifact we need most is a wand shaper."

"Which is made from a sapling and would probably die if left alone too long so upstairs."

"Ruby's right, unless we wanna split up. Hailey, Neo, y'all check downstairs, I'll look for a suitable sapling upstairs with Ruby and Maya, and if y'all find a wand shaper or anything else important you ping us mentally?"

Neo nods.

So does Hailey. And they head off in two groups.

The hatch at the top of the stairs is a little stiff, but the mechanism holding it closed responds to a firm tug and the whole thing creaks open in fairly short order.

The hatch at the bottom of the stairs doesn't seem inclined to open at all. There's a handle, but it's at an awkward angle for levering the thing open, and seems to instead operate a shutter that irises open and closed over the porthole in the middle.

Hailey fights the bottom hatch a little more with Neo's help, then gives up if that proves insufficient, and follows the other girls upstairs.

The first obvious thing about the world above is the wall of thick billowing fog that surrounds this hilltop on all sides, swirling unnaturally with tendrils of darkness whose movements have nothing to do with the wind. Now and then, a tendril reaches out of the wall completely and sweeps along the ground, twisting this way and that before retracting into the fog.

In a few places, the wall is low enough for someone at ground level to see over the top. Some of those views show nothing but sky; some show distant hills, shrouded in a dim and ominous haze; and one shows even more distant mountains, dark against the blue-grey sky.

The sunlight is bright compared to the shine of the Mana Font, but thin and grey by any objective scale.

Scattered across the hilltop are a few trees, a handful of bushes, and an enormous amount of rubble. What stood here once must have been a tower as grand as any cathedral; now all that's left are heaps of splintered timber and broken rock, some of it showing deep gouges like it was torn apart by some landscape-eating beast.

"Well that's fucking ominous-looking," Hailey comments to a chorus of nods. "We've definitely got a threat here. Might just be the fog, might be something bigger. Probably something bigger."

Neo points at the surrounding vegetation, and starts inspecting it for wand shaper viability and ingredient possibilities. The other girls swiftly join her.

All the trees look to be the same species, very generically deciduous without calling to mind any specific Earth species. There's one little sapling, barely two feet high, that looks like a viable candidate for the Wand Shaper creation procedure. Unfortunately it's close enough to the edge of the fog that it might be in reach of those ominous tendrils. They'd need to either transplant it under that threat, or coax one of the taller trees to produce a seed and start from there.

Apart from that, the vegetation is unfamiliar but not too diverse. There's some bushes with plump red berries, reminiscent of a blueberry if a blueberry were the colour of fresh blood and the size of a ping-pong ball. A few flowers whose ice-blue petals are cold to the touch, some of them even bearing sparkling drops of frozen dew. Some orange-red flowers with scalding-hot petals, and some tangly shrubs whose wavy leaves look tough and durable.

A yellow-eyed rat pokes its twitching nose out of its burrow. It looks just about like a normal rat, except for those gleaming golden eyes and the fact that its body is the size of a hefty watermelon.

"Yep, that's a RUS. We need wands. We need combat capability. Maya, look up the vegetation here. Hailey, conjure a spear with Pocket Dimension. Neo, shovel, get ready to go for the sapling. Sable, stay back, you're our healer reserve."

She reaches into a pocket of her skirt and pulls out a spear of her own, eyeing the rat cautiously.

The rat squeaks and twitches its nose, then nibbles one of those red berries off a nearby bush.

"I'm watching you, rat."

Maya looks through the book to see if there are any notes on the berries, or any of the other plants here. Are they edible? Are they usable for wand ingredients?

Hailey sets her spear down and pulls a trowel out of her pocket instead, and accompanies Neo in stepping closer to the sapling. They try to move quickly and get the sapling dug out safely, but before tendrils come for them. They're prepared to dart back at a moment's notice.

Index

This is a very bad index and I'm sorry about that.

Plants

Gutberry: Fat red berries. Makes a decent meal if you can't get a better one. Stew with a pinch of smokereed to improve the flavour. If you let the berries spoil, they stink like you wouldn't believe.

Phoenix's Kiss: Warm orange petals. Alchemists and wandcrafters use this for a basic fire element.

Ice flower: Icy flowers. Water element. I'm told you can also make glass with it, somehow.

Wyrmweed: Big green leaves. I'm told it looks like seaweed. Nature element.

Smokereed: Long yellow flowers that make smoke in the daytime. Air element.

Sporeshroom: Luminous purple mushroom. Harvest at night, avoid during the day. It has uses but I don't know what they are.

Bitterrice: A bitter grain. Grows well in a garden. Tastes bad.

Honeydrop: Hexagonal golden pods. Sweetens any meal, and good in a healing potion too.

Voidcap: Likes dark enclosed spaces aboveground. Useful but annoying. Dark element.

Mandrake: I think it's pink?

Runewood: A tree that glows green. I've never seen one. The wood is useful for crafting and construction.

Trapdoor Vine: Eats people. If you catch one, pick its teeth out, they're good for something.

Unstable Anemone: I don't know what it looks like or what's unstable about it.

Crabbage, Jumping Nut: Better crops than bitterrice, I'm told.

Fractal Mold: ???

The Underschool

I'm told the passages beneath the Mana Font were once used to hold obscure ritual equipment, but that was before the fog. Right now, I don't know what's down there but I know that it frightens me.

The fog waves its tendrils, but doesn't seem to be actively reacting to Hailey and Neo's presence. They have to jump back once to get out of the way of a sweeping tendril, but apart from that they can get the sapling dug up fairly straightforwardly.

She gets the sapling transplanted very near the hatch with Neo's help, settling it into place. 

"The plants up here are gutberry, phoenix's kiss, ice flower, and wyrmweed. The last three are fire, water, and nature elemental materials, respectively, while the first is apparently a tolerable food source," Maya explains, pointing each out." We conveniently do not have to eat, however, so we can figure that out later. Also, we may be able to conjure past foods we have handled. As for the hatch you had trouble with, Hailey, it apparently goes to the Underschool and scared Magister Aspen. We will likely want to leave it be for now."

Then she helps Sable find the page on creating a wand shaper. 

"That's definitely not the materials for even most of our preferred wands. Maybe we'll find more in the next expansion, though."

Sable nods and looks down at the wand shaper instructions. "Yeah. I'll make Hailey a fire wand once I've got this set up, and then we'll see about doing another expansion after that."

Does this wand shaper process look straightforward?

In short:

Plant the sapling in either a large sturdy pot/planter, or a flat patch of ground. Make sure you put a roof over it to protect it from the weather in the long term, but leave it a window or skylight so it gets plenty of sun. Channel Earth magic to bind a bit of stone into it, and Nature magic to split and shape it into a sort of double helix (there's a diagram), then keep channeling Nature and add a bundle of wyrmweed leaves when it starts feeling tense and reluctant to accept more magic; the Nature you're already channeling should bind the leaves in just fine, but if you have trouble, an assistant can help by positioning them here, here, and here for you. If you planted it in the ground it'll be a permanent installation and you'll need to transplant it to move it, which can get pretty involved; if you put it in a separate pot or planter, you can shrink it with Air magic to store or move it easily.

Okay, Sable has the girls start picking wyrmweed leaves and preparing a couple bundles.

Which they cheerfully do.

She has Neo appear a planter for it like one of the ones they remember from either of her parents' homes.

She conjures it in a temporary backpack using Dressing Room and Pocket Dimension, and then transfers the sapling to it.

And she starts channeling into the sapling. Earth first, then Nature, c'mon, make that pretty little double helix for her. She watches carefully for when it starts to resist her, and mentally pings the other Pirates to add a bundle when it does. Little by little, they get the sapling twisted into the form of a Wand Shaper.

The process takes around fifteen minutes, and the resulting tree is about twice as tall as Sable, but the planter they picked seems just about big enough to hold it. The tree's leaves gleam with a faint light, and there's a zone in the middle between the twin spirals of the trunk that seems to shimmer like a mirage.

According to the wandcrafting notes, to make a basic wand you cut a length of wood of about the right size, shape it into the approximate profile of a wand, then place it into the Wand Shaper's active area along with your other ingredients and channel Nature to shape the wand, finishing with just a smidge of the wand's desired element. (There are no notes on how to craft more all-element wands like Mg. Aspen's.)

The naive guess there is to try materials of every element and channel every element, but that's an experiment for another day. Sable hums. "Okay. We can source copper for Lightning easily enough," she fishes a spool of uninsulated copper wire from all of their various electronics projects out of a pocket, "and Maya can go get a stone chip from the rubble, and Hailey can harvest from the phoenix's kiss. So that's three of four first-pick wands off the bat."

She tosses the spool to Ruby. "Cut off an appropriate length of that? Neo, help me cut some wand-length branches from one of the other trees?"

Maya nods and starts inspecting the rubble for a likely-looking stone chip.

Ruby conjures a familiar wire-cutter from their old tool set in her pocket and cuts out a good several inches of wire and coils it up, then helps with branches.

Hailey carefully starts picking some phoenix's kiss.

And Neo and Sable lead the branch-cutting, picking out good-sized pieces of wood, poking into everyone's memories and carefully sizing them to preference. Neo tucks her wand-blank into her belt.

While Sable gets started making the first wand. She goes with Ruby's first, since the wire is already cut. In go the wood and the wire, and she starts feeding Nature mana into it, waiting for the right moment to finish it off with a dose of Lightning.

The original rat has returned to its burrow while Sable was growing the Wand Shaper, but another one pokes its nose out of a different burrow to munch Gutberries while everyone is preparing to make wands.

The wandcrafting process goes pretty straightforwardly. Nature tension builds up in the wand, a little bit like it did with the Wand Shaper, as the wood incorporates the metal and its shape gradually changes to become smoother and more wandlike; and then after a few minutes it fairly abruptly undergoes some kind of phase change and starts feeling distinctly like it needs a little Lightning mana.

Then she'll give it some Lightning mana. Just a touch at first, feeling how much it wants to be happy as a wand.

A touch is all it takes. There's a loud crackling sound, the wand's shape violently rearranges itself into a jagged zigzag like a stylized lightning bolt, and for a moment it's haloed in a searing golden light before the glow settles down into a mere gentle glimmer peeking through the grain of the wood. It feels perfectly complete, smoothly rejecting any further magic.

She plucks it from the work area and tosses it to Ruby, then holds out her hand for Maya's chip of rock.

Ruby catches her new wand! Does it like her?

Maya passes Sable her small bit of rubble.

And the process begins again!

Ruby's new wand doesn't bond instantly like Sable's; there's a moment of tentative, questing connection, and a sense that she could either lean into the bond or refuse it.

When she accepts it, she gets the same mental clicking-into-place feeling that Sable did, and the same sevenfold sensation of open elemental channels—but unlike Sable's harshly limited equality of options, Ruby can very definitively tell which of her new elements is Lightning; it seems to spark eagerly, inviting her to cast it. Air is pretty easy to pick out too, though not as insistent as Lightning, and Fire and Dark are also separating themselves from the pack just a little bit.

The process for crafting the Earth wand goes much the same, except that the sound effect at the end is more of a low, solid boom, the glow is a much softer grey-brown and fades more slowly, and the wand's final shape has the blocky profile of a stack of rough stones instead of the sharp back-and-forth of the Lightning wand.

Okay this is going great. That gets tossed to Maya. Does Hailey have fire flowers for her?

Totes. Have some phoenix's kiss.

In goes another wand blank with them.

Like Ruby, Maya finds that her wand's most easily distinguished elements are the ones whose mindsets she best vibes with, besides Earth which comes out firmly ahead regardless. Fire and Dark are pretty dim for her, though she can dig them out if she focuses; Nature and Water are prominent.

The Fire wand ends up with a sort of swirling, flamelike profile, the red-orange of the Phoenix's Kiss petals visible in decorative patches along its surface as well as glowing from the depths of the woodgrain. The sound when Sable finishes it is like a roar of flame, and the bright glow comes with a wash of heat like someone just opened an oven, though it passes quickly.

Awesome. She'll toss that to Hailey, and then back to the book room they'll go. Can she find some practice exercises in there for the three newly-wanded girls to work on while she recharges herself and then does another round of filling the Mana Font?

Hailey finds Earth and Lightning trailing only a short distance behind Fire in sensory immediacy, and Air and Nature in last place, overshadowed by the rest.

The best way for a new student to practice their elemental casting is using a Learning Stone, which absorbs all elements equally. To build it, you will need a good amount of stone, Earth magic to anchor and shape it, and unformed magic to give it purpose. First, mark out a circle three paces wide...

That's... very useful but not immediately so. She doesn't have somewhere to put one, what with the lack of unoccupied rooms. Any advice on building things, especially buildings?

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.

While Sable practices walls, Neo sketches out a design for the tower and what goes where. A bit of math about dorms and common rooms and the minimum wall thickness for the magical reinforcement spell (half a meter) gets her a tower diameter of twenty and a half meters, including a central spiral staircase. The ground floor gets to be entirely taken up by the infirmary. An animal processing shed goes in a wooden outbuilding against the outer wall. Next floor up is seven training rooms, one per element, with a study area in the center full of desks and tables. Then seven apprenticing rooms, again one per element. These two are the closest rooms to the infirmary because they're the most likely in-tower buildings to produce injuries, so they should have the shortest trip. That's also why the infirmary is on the ground floor, to allow injured hunters or defenders from outside the tower to be brought in quickly. The next floor above the training floors is the kitchen and dining room, with lots of round wooden tables and comfy chairs. 

Then above that go five floors of dorms, just to future-proof. Every dorm floor has twelve dorm rooms and two bathrooms, evenly divided radially, each room four meters long. Each dorm gets a bed, a window, curtains, a wardrobe, a desk, a chair, and some bookshelves over the desk. The central area of each dorm floor has a common lounge, full of comfy couches and chairs, tables, and more bookshelves. All the bookshelves get filled with blank notebooks to start, and stacks of looseleaf, binders, and pens and pencils. They've handled enough of all of those to conjure them freely. Above that goes a crafting floor, then a research office and lab rooms. The crafting floor only has the wand shaper for now, the research office gets the research desk the previous Magisters talked about, and the labs have tables and open spaces and bookshelves of notebooks and such.

Finally, the top two floors are special. The second-highest floor is the Headmistress's suite, reserved just for the five of them, and optionally anyone else who joins their little polycule. There's a very small landing area where the stairs reach the floor, but otherwise it's completely walled off. It features a cozy lounge, a private office and workshop, a deeply luxurious bathroom with an enormous bathtub, two smaller bedrooms in case someone needs their own space, and a fucking huge master bedroom. The bed there is wider than an Alaskan King, wide enough to make this bedroom the largest room on the floor, because the five of them refuse to ever sleep alone again. They have each other to cuddle now.

The highest floor is the auditorium, because there doesn't need to be a staircase obstructing the center of the room. The center is then reserved for the central stage (with just a little hatch to enter through), and gradually raised seating radiates outward from that.

Sable gets the practice walls the way she wants them, a mix of swoopy and spooky, dark grey stone with lighter accents. She knocks all of that down, readies Neo's design in her view in mindspace, and starts shaping it into place. Most rooms get cherry or mahogany for their furniture, though for the dorms she does a variety, alternating through a series of cherry, mahogany, cedar, redwood, purpleheart, and ebony for each dorm. She lays plumbing through the walls to the kitchen and bathrooms, connecting the waste flow to a tank below the processing shed for the midden jellies. 

It takes time. There are a lot of rooms and beds and furniture to fill the rooms with. But they've handled a lot of furniture and materials in their lives, so between the other Pirates conjuring materials and books, and her slowly shaping everything into place higher and higher, they can get the tower built.

Learning stones go into the training rooms. Potted plants go into Nature rooms. Arcing electric widgets go in the Lightning rooms. And so on.

Anything that requires an unavailable magical material gets a placeholder sign instead.

But eventually it's finished. Eventually they have a tower that they can run an academy out of, that they can teach themselves magic in, that they can call home in this strange, apocalyptic world.

She collapses into an armchair in their suite, sighing tiredly.

The smokeless torches from page 98 turn out to just take a few Phoenix's Kiss petals each to make, plus wood or stone or metal to shape into the sconce, and provide adequate if dim lighting to any room not reached by a window; they come out looking just like the ones downstairs in the book room and so on.

All in all, constructing the tower takes the rest of the day and well into the night. An unfamiliar moon shines brightly through the windows, making the Ice Flowers growing outside sparkle brilliantly against the damp, dim grass. A flightless bird the size of an entire human toddler waddles out of the fog and starts pecking at a gutberry bush, its dark purple feathers sticking out every which way to form a spiky silhouette.

Maya steps close and scoops Sable into a princess carry "My lovely Captain, our lovely Headmistress, you tired yourself out building us this lovely home. Let us go to bed, beloved."

She leads the way to the bedroom, Sable in her arms, and everyone switches to sleepwear along the way with a bit of coordinated looking away from each other. Maya switches to a lacy bra and panties set in silvery silk.

Ruby switches into a cute little black spaghetti-strap camisole and soft red shorts, blushing slightly.

Hailey winds up in just a black bra and panties, fairly simple, no lace.

Neo goes for something pink and lacy

And Sable, with a bit of a blush at being scooped like that, winds up shifting down to a petite, white-haired form, with red eyes and lacy violet lingerie.

The girls all pile into bed cozily atop each other, intertwined and snuggled close, with Sable firmly in the middle.

And they drift off to sleep.