:If you think you could get people to do that, I'd be pretty interested to know what they say!: 

So the next time there is a class there is a neatly block printed slip of paper on each chair somewhat before anyone else arrives, unobtrusive, reading "Opinion Poll: to your way of thinking, should mages be wary of seeking political office? Should others frown on this behavior? Please place in collection box when completed" and little checkboxes for yes and no, and she puts a box on the teacher's desk behind the filing tray where the teacher will not immediately notice it. Azabel arrives very slightly late.

The students are very confused and curious about this! A handful of them are glancing at Azabel, thoughtfully, but they're discreet and the teacher, who's also regularly late for this class, doesn't seem to have noticed anything. The students who come in later than the teacher make no comment about the bits of paper, though there are some Mindspeech-looks exchanged between the Mindspeakers present. 

Ma'ar, who's usually early, keeps his eyes straight ahead and doesn't smile at Azabel even though he wants to. 

Azabel checks boxes, looks around as though curious, puts the paper in the box.

The teacher gets started with class; he's not a morning person and usually comes in still bleary-eyed and nursing his tea. Today isn't one of the sessions with Urtho and they're just talking about distributions of defensive wards - a limited resource in Tantara since it takes a skillful mage to do them - across various high-priority locations, and whether this could be done better. 

Ma'ar raises his hand a few times to make innocuous points. He's gotten much better at predicting what will or will not be controversial. 

Defensive wards can be anchored on artifacts, right? Would it be valuable to have them mostly done that way so they can be moved around and any given place might be defended or not until someone checks, to make it often not worth the effort, or are they too easy to steal?

That's an interesting question! They often are done with artifacts, or at least built on a crystal focus, but moving them around on a randomized schedule hasn't been a practice in the past - it could be a clever thought! Though they'd probably take some tweaking, to be moved between buildings, and also it's trivially obvious to anyone with a sniff of mage-gift whether a building is warded or not. 

Is 'more warded' versus 'less warded' obvious? If it's not they could lightly ward lots of places and move around the heavy duty artifacts.

It's definitely noticeable but it would take more training, so it might be less obvious to the likely criminal types? Azabel definitely has good ideas sometimes! 

It's always nice to have that acknowledged. Are people filling out their polls?

People seem unsure if this is a secret from the teacher and so are doing it very sneakily and holding onto the folded papers until the teacher takes a bathroom break, but they are doing it. 

Oh good.

At the end of class Aza - does not collect the box! No one does.

The teacher has also totally failed to notice it at all. He's very absentminded; a lot of Urtho's mage-staff who do mainly theoretical research are that way. 

Ma'ar follows her out of the classroom without a glance back. :...Did you get the hertasi to do that for you?: Azabel is, after all, the one who originally informed him about their helpfulness. 

:Yep! They'll fess up if anyone asks them but I will have been seen in the library so it'd have to occur to someone first and I don't even know if anybody'll care. They're going to bring it to the library in a few minutes:

A hertasi arrives several minutes after she and Ma'ar head to the library, with the box. "Miss Azabel?" 

"Over here!"

Since this is apparently a SECRET project (well, except from all the other hertasi, who are gossiping about this delightedly in private, but they're very good at keeping secrets from the non-hertasi in the Tower), the hertasi glances around to make sure no one else is watching before conveying the box to Azabel. 

"Thank you!" Aza pulls out all the papers and hands the box back.

Once tallied up, it looks like they have seventeen answers (the total class size is twenty-one). Eleven of seventeen answered yes to 'should mages be wary of seeking political office?' Only eight thought that other people also ought to frown on this behavior. 

"Huh," Ma'ar says, thoughtful. 

"Is that what you wanted to know?"

"...Sort of? I think running for political office is - only sort of related to the thing I was worried about Urtho making people not do, but that is what we were talking about in class." Shrug. "And whether someone said yes or no doesn't say that much how they think about it. But...I guess it seems less bad, if less than half of people are going to judge other people who've got ambitions."