:I think a lot of humans don't really think elementals are people:

:They have thoughts and feelings! ...I guess I know that because I read some of their minds. Not right away, though, I just tried Mindspeaking the way I am with you first. I didn't read thoughts until after I murdered someone by accident, maybe I should've: 

:I think you should've talked to someone for somewhat longer, maybe several people, not read minds about it, but freeing the first elemental you saw was a noble impulse:

:Er, thank you: She feels very sheepish all of a sudden. And very young. She doesn't know how old Maurabel is but definitely older than her. :...Um, what's going to school here like?: 

:What do you want to know about it?:

Jisa has to think about that for a moment. :I guess what classes you take, and how long you go to school for, and - is there an entrance exam to get in...?: 

:We take classes for our elements, so I'm in ten of them, two a day, and I help teach the lower levels in a few elements. There's not a set amount of time - I could leave whenever if I felt like I'd learned enough, lots of people leave after just a year or two to go make a living doing something somewhere - there's not a fixed curriculum, magic hasn't been common long enough for us to have learned all the things you can do with it, so there keeps being more to learn, some of it even student-developed. To get in you have to get along okay with the teachers who'd be having you in class, some people aren't taking all the classes they could because they didn't impress those teachers, and also you have to be a mage and pay the school in chores:

:Huh, interesting. How did people end up figuring out the trick for making more people be born as mages, anyway?: She wishes it were that easy for Valdemar. 

:Someone in a coastal village thought seaweed was really good for pregnant women and kept convincing them to eat it and eventually it was pretty obvious they were having a lot of mage babies in that village. They started selling seaweed and it's not hard for mages to farm and harvest it if they've got Water and Earth or Wood:

:Ooh. That was clever of them. Must've changed a lot of things, that's–: She's about to say 'really good' and stops. :Er, is that when all the elemental slavery started, though?: 

:Not when it started to begin with, no. That was a couple decades earlier, when we invented writing. The new ones coalesced able to read - the old ones noticed that was new - some of them came to check it out - and someone who was already a mage, there were always some, figured out how to capture them:

:Do you know why elementals work like that? Popping up knowing all the languages that way?: 

:Not a clue:

:Ooh, hmm: She looks thoughtful. :Wonder how you could study that. Maybe if I watched an elemental coalesce with mage-sight, I could see something... Where do they tend to show up?: 

:Depends on the kind, but I don't think you're likely to catch one even if you just go stare at a pond all your waking hours the entire rest of your life:

:That's inconvenient: Jisa is pouting just a tiny bit. 

:Sorry. They're not all that common, there's just a lot of people who have them around here because of the school:

:Do none of them know how they're made either? I don't know if you've asked or anything: 

:They don't know. They just exist all of a sudden:

:- Wait, and they're immortal, right? Do there just keep being more and more and more of them?: 

:Yes. They don't appear all that frequently though, there are far fewer of them than humans. Hunters usually scry first to get an idea of where one they want to catch hangs out:

:Right. I think I have just been getting thrown off on their population size by how many are in this city. Also I stumbled on a Water right when I arrived, so that might've made them seem more common than they are. I tried to talk to it and it attacked me, which...I guess makes sense knowing what I do now: 

:Used to be wild ones might be shy but wouldn't be hostile. These days they tell each other humans are dangerous and they mustn't be caught:

:Good for them!: 

:People die that way. Often hunters, but sometimes people who are just traveling or looking for food: