Funnily enough, an unusually high proportion of the school's population is ensconced in some manner of private activity or another.

The hole in the Vault is still there. And the remaining contents are under heavy guard by the academy's security garrison. They recognize Raafi and don't object to him peeking in, but warn him sternly not to touch anything.

"Just looking," he assures them.

Anything catch his eye, in there?

There exist within the Vault a number of artifacts of historical or magical value which could possibly be interesting to Raafi for various reasons but which the author assures you are not relevant to this story and so will not be pictured here.

Neat.

He'll just sort of hang around until dinnertime, then, give Scyelen some space.

At dinnertime, Scyelen is noticeably more relaxed, though subdued.

Everyone else is gossiping madly about the incident, and it looks like Kirche has at least five new suitors vying for her attention and is far too busy to bother Raafi. Scyelen pauses briefly to take in the spectacle.

Raafi watches, too. (Maybe they'll manage to distract her permanently, wouldn't that be nice.)

(Such hopes are not immediately dashed, anyway.)

Dinner has an extra course to make up for missed lunch.

When the next round of practical magic classes roll around, Scyelen shocks her peers by suddenly being able to cast Wind spells. She knows the theory of every spell in the curriculum by heart, and usually gets them right on her first try. It causes a bit of a commotion that makes Scyelen want to hide behind Raafi, but afterward she's smiling.

Miss Vaux returns three days later.

Seeing Scyelen come into her own magically is pretty great.

He'll see if he can catch Miss Vaux for a private conversation.

She makes herself catchable, when she spots him on her way in. The headmaster can wait a bit.

"Raafi," she greets. "How're things?"

"Pretty good here, Scyelen's doing great. You?"

"I'll let you know when I find out. But, regardless, I have a lead on Fouquet. Osmond will be happy."

"That's good. Is this a good time to talk? I've had some time to think about our last conversation - there's a spell I'd like to do first, though, if you don't mind; it checks your - sort of general moral attitude, and I'm curious."

"The lead'll keep. General moral attitude?"

"Mmhmm." He heads inside. "There's actually two different parts I can check, but the one I'm sure enough about already - law and chaos, we call that one, it's about whether you feel that people should fit themselves to their societies or whether societies should be flexible to their peoples' needs; you're chaotic for the same reason Lastai is, I expect. The other one is good and evil, whether you feel inclined to try to help people or hurt them - I suspect you're good but it's possible to be neutral, too, and that wouldn't surprise me very much."

"Interesting. I have just enough of an idea how complicated a piece of magic that must be to be very impressed with whoever developed it, even if the granularity of the result is so low. Sure. I'm kinda curious how it'll read me too."

He nods, and casts Detect Good.

'Miss Vaux' does, in fact, read to his spell as Good. He's probably also right about her being Chaotic Good.

He takes the additional few seconds to confirm that she's pretty powerful - not that this is strong evidence of anything, but it's good to know.

"Yep, good. I register as neutral on both, if you're curious; I lean chaotic and good but not strongly enough to count as either."

"Neat."

She steers them into a different empty classroom than last time, and shuts the door.

"So, what has come of your time to think?"

"Well, you seemed to think that I was holding onto my taboo out of stubbornness, last time, and I wanted some time to think about it and make sure I wasn't, and I'm surer now. I care about not hurting people, especially people I'm sleeping with, and I'm not actually sure that relationships with age gaps aren't harmful - we might have that taboo for a good reason. If it's fine, I want to be convinced of that, but only if it is fine."

"I was reserving judgement, actually." Smile. "I did say it is your decision if this taboo is a part of who you are, or not."

"Usually when someone decides a taboo is no longer part of them, its because they've already lost it, and I just help them realize that. You are doing something considerably more difficult, and something I have less experience helping with. But, as one 'chaotic' person to another, I think the best place to start is: why draw any lines at all? Why ask 'will this hurt them because they're in this taboo category'? Why not simply stop at 'will this hurt them'?"

"Well, because figuring it out for each person takes longer than I usually have, for one thing. And longer than is usually practical even for people who aren't professional travelers; we'd all be paralyzed if we had to stop and figure that out for every single case. And, also, because it's easy to miss that some things hurt people, if you don't have the rule there to tell you to check. This is why I'm not actually chaotic; I do think society's rules are useful, a lot of the time, even if following them blindly is a bad idea."

"I have a lot to say on why the first of your two premises is a fallacy, but for the sake of argument let's pretend I've already convinced you that to interact as more than passing acquaintances you end up having to figure out each individual anyway and working from a place of categorical bias actually slows you down, rather than saving you time, and move on to your second point, which is more than a mere question of fact."

She goes over and perches on the edge of the instructor's desk.

"You're worried about the possibility of hurting someone in ignorance, which is entirely valid. But are your rules actually about correcting ignorance? Does the presence of such a rule merely remind you to check if a thing will cause harm, or to assume it will cause harm and resist evidence to the contrary? Or, by reciprocal implication, does the absence of such a rule merely deprive you of a reminder to check if a specific thing will cause harm, or does it lead you to assume it will NOT cause harm?"

"Of course no set of rules is going to catch everything. The cases they do catch - it's safer to assume the rule is right, most of the time, if I don't have a reason to think that the rule itself is bad. I might pass up an opportunity, but I generally have plenty of those - less now, but I'm working on that - and it's worth passing some up if it lets me sleep well at night."

He grins. "I don't think you're going to talk me around to that approach in full generality. I've seen too many things that seemed like a good idea at the time and really weren't."

She looks at him with mild disappointment.

"It seems safer. Because you're more likely to notice, when not following your rules hurts someone, than you are when following your rules hurts someone. If you care most about 'sleeping well' then moving the harm out of your sight is a fine strategy, and I mean that sincerely, no one can care about everyone; but make no mistake, moving the harm elsewhere is what you're doing."