Such as one dorm-bound student who finds it, somehow, easier to do homework in the various public buildings in the middle of the night, than in her dorm.

"...'scuse me, but am I going to get mind-wiped for seeing this or something?  Because I'd really prefer not that," says a young woman with a messenger bag slung over her shoulder, "but if I don't get any say in the matter please just do it now so you do the least damage."

As she freezes staring at the newcomer, her wand raised, the rainbows subside to a small glowing around her three circles on the sidewalk.

Then after a moment, when her mind's finally processing the newcomer's words, she answers the part that's easiest to answer.

" - well, if I wanted to mind-wipe you, of course I'd do it after asking you all sorts of questions about why you came here!  It'd be a lot harder to find that out afterwards!"

"...I'm a student.  It's easier to work when I'm not crammed into a 10-by-14 dorm room that's split down the middle and full of built-ins taking up the space that isn't occupied by beds," she deadpans.  "And quite a few of the buildings are still technically open at this hour, so I can find myself a nice little corner to work in."

"Well, of course they're still technically open to students; that's why I'm a student now.  Maybe not tonight, but sometime this week I'll be wanting to go inside here to look at the other side of these walls.

"And I didn't think dorm rooms would be that bad if you didn't have to keep most of your actual studies secret from your roommate...?"

"There is floorspace enough for exactly one person to fit down the center of my dorm room if neither of us are using the desks."

"And you could absolutely hide whatever you're doing in plain sight, as worldbuilding notes for a game or something.  People lift from real-world environments for their fiction all the time."

Aeslin tries to imagine a room that small, and it seems rather comfortable until she imagines trying to do anything in it besides sit at a desk, let alone... "How can you even store your books in there!?

"And - I didn't know games were getting as detailed as this?"  She flicks her wand and lifts one of her thick reference books (An Incomplete Guide to Properties of Fay-Made Materials) into the air.

"With effort.  And there's the cabinets and all that.  Though most of my textbooks are in digital format anyway."

And speaking of textbooks...

"Okay, yeah, you'd probably have to hide or at least digitize the reference materials, that's...  Nobody has that much vanity press budget when they're rooming with someone, I wouldn't think, unless they're an Eccentric Rich Kid.  Which...  I mean, maybe you could pull that vibe off, I don't know you?  But PDFs are cheap.  ...Though they do do single bed dormrooms here, but that's more expensive than offcampus.  Especially after you factor in the meal plan requirement..."

She wrinkles her nose.

"I prefer the feel of paper.  Besides, most of the older mages haven't bothered computerizing their books yet... entirely aside from the magical significance of books which I'm not sure would be captured in such a new thing as computers, though I admit I haven't run any experiments..."

A car backfires somewhere across campus, which interrupts Aeslin's musing and makes her suddenly remember who she's talking with.

"... But, I believe we were talking about 'mindwipes'?  That isn't the standard first-rung procedure for much of anything... Do you have reason to believe you've encountered a 'mindwipe' before?"

"...No, they're just a horribly popular Masquerade enforcement trope.  In fantasy and sci-fi, even."

Aw, darn...  She had more things she wanted to say!

"...Also, fake dustjackets would help with your book-concealing needs at minimal cost, I think.  Before we go anywhere else."

"...but... Wait a fucking minute.  Why the hell is there a Masquerade to begin with, someone should have been caught on camera, there's just too many cameras - aren't we on camera right now?  I swear I saw one right over there...  And then that's assuming that there aren't any asshole mages who'd break your statute of secrecy, or whatever it is, to fuck with mundanes for shits and giggles!  Which is kind of absurd!  There's always assholes!"

She follows Mira's glance.  "Camera - oh yes, that one.  I glamoured it first thing.  Also that other one.  Don't worry; if anyone unsavory comes by they will still see him.

"I'm honestly sure there are some mages who're still messing with muggles, even after the Great Mapmaking with most of the Fay.  But the sort of mage who wants to mess with muggles generally doesn't want to shake up the whole order of the world... or if he does, then so far he's been obvious about it.  And thank goodness the Fay are invested in our secrecy too, these days, even if it's more so than I'd prefer..."

"But - you didn't know about any of this magic before tonight?"

She raises her wand and traces the knot of the simplest truthspell, which will stop any direct lies from either of them for maybe the next half-minute.  (It doesn't feel like anything to Mira.)

"You didn't have a camera of your own recording this, do you?"

"...To the best of my knowledge, no, I did not, though now I'm wondering if there's anything that might actually be behind some family stories and personal experiences.

"...I doubt it, but if magic is real, then why the hell wouldn't it be possible for my mother to have occasionally had weirdly prophetic dreams for reasons instead of out of some grand cosmic coincidence.

"Anywho.  No, I do not - and did not - have a camera recording this.  The only camera I have that I could reasonably do that with is on my phone.  You'd probably be able to tell if I was taking video!"

(...But not necessarily if she was fine with just an audio recording, which...)

(Her hands are already in that pocket.  If things look like they're about to go sour...  She might try it.)

"...Is that important?"

Oh good, that makes things easier.

"Yes, I do always try to clean up my own messes."  Especially because if she doesn't, her friends and sponsors won't like it.  And if her picture is on the next leak, there's a tiny chance the Greater Fay would be angry too even if it does get covered up as a hoax, and she really doesn't want that.

"So..."  She stares at Mira.  "I could just wipe away these circles and walk away and you could have a nice story no one would believe.  At least the part about the real rainbows.  That's how it usually happens, in fact."

But there's something about Mira, and the sort of questions she's been asking, that makes Aeslin not really want to do that.  For reasons aside from how it'd make her wait for another night to get to study these stones.

"That sounds like there are other things that could happen that aren't me having to walk away from magic.

"...Even if I'm never going to be able to do any, I...

"I've always wanted magic to be real.  And having to leave all my questions forever unanswered...

"I mean, I assume your masquerade doesn't care all that much about my psychological wellbeing, but if I have to walk I will forever be haunted by this.  ...Damn, now I have to wonder if the crystal-woo people are onto something.

"But...  Please don't make me walk away.

"...Also, I've already seen you with the circles.  You don't need to wipe them now, that damage is done, no?"

She laughs.  "And I've chattered at you more than enough already, too!  So you've got more questions after your great ones so far?  I'm sure I'll be happy to answer more of them!"

(She never liked the Fay's insistence on fencing around their secrecy in all sorts of needless ways, anyway.)

"To start with, crystals -" She shrugs.  "Some people have built wands out of them.  It doesn't work as well as wood most of the time, but it works if it comes from the right places.  But just a crystal isn't anything more than just a piece of wood from the right tree."

(And after answering Mira's questions, she'll walk away... or, some other ghosts of possibilities are tickling in the back of Aeslin's mind.  Some of them, the Fay couldn't justly criticize themselves... not that they wouldn't criticize them anyway, but...)  

"...Huh...  Does petrified wood behave uniquely vis-a-vis being simultaneously chemically mineral and yet also a tree?"

"Now that's an interesting question...  I haven't heard of anyone trying!  I imagine it would depend on the fossilization process...  You see, to make a wand, you need something that's already been infused with magic - either from a magical tree, or a rock-nymph's rocks, or so on.  I'm sure some magical trees fossilized - they're common enough; half the hazels are magic for instance; they're not noticeable as magic unless you're doing magic around them - so it should be able to be tried!"

"...But would the trees of - taking my phone out to check some numbers -" tappity tappity tap "- 65 million years ago or more, be the same trees you can confirm are likely to be magic?  I mean you could do it artificial-like, actually, you just need a sufficiently anoxic environment with the right sort of mineral water..."

Aeslin does keep her eyes on the phone while Mira has it out, though she still looks like she's paying more attention to things far away.

"Artificial petrified wood?  Wow, I didn't know you could do that without magic -

"Anyway, even if you couldn't identify any trees of the right species from sixty-five million years ago, I'm sure there were some magical trees there; I could go through the petrified forests testing them like I was a wandmaker... I suppose that couldn't distinguish negative results because the trees weren't originally magical versus because the fossilization destroyed their magic, though after a while enough negative results could be telling...

"But that would take too long.  Maybe I'll throw it on the ideas list for the next time someone's volunteered to be my lab assistant.  Or the next time a journal's asking me for a letter."

"I mean I'm just guessing you can do artificial petrifaction, it doesn't actually say one way or the other, as far as the bit of Wikipedia I actually read, said, but the conditions are straightforward.  But if you can do artificial petrifaction, you can do that to test the hypothesis that petrifaction would destroy the magicalness of wood, probably?  If you repeat the same test over time with a known-magical test sample?"

"Yes, assuming the conditions of petrification are similar enough..."  She slowly twirls her wand in her hand.  "Now I'm trying to remember...  Back before the Mapmaking, there were some rock-nymphs who captured mages and altered their wands, and some of them were recaptured afterwards.  I know at least one of those wands acted more powerful, but in weirdly uneven ways... but I can't remember if anyone asked or studied exactly what the rock-nymphs did to them - whether it was petrification or something else.

"And then they already were wands before petrification, which would be different from the experiment we were talking about, but still interesting!  And a much faster experiment, which makes me want to take one of my backup wands to a rock-nymph this weekend!"

"...What is 'The Mapmaking', I swear I can hear the capital letters?"

"Oh!  That was when we human mages and the Fay first convinced each other to talk as peers.  At least in theory.  The Fay stop kidnapping mortals; the humans stop hunting Fay; both sides honor each other's rights and come as guests if at all; nobody interferes with the muggles...  It was a long drawn-out process, because for all the different groups of Fay say they have queens and kings, they don't listen to them most of the time and they set up new kingdoms all the time.

"Or, well, they used to be like that.  But then, human mages didn't have a king or congress of their own back then either.  I think the Mapmapking was what gave us our first real governments to talk to each other, though I was never really one for history?

"And the Mapmaking's still going on if you want to be technical; I just heard last month about some naiads in the oceans who don't acknowledge any of it.  But only in the oceans and maybe a few remote mountains... otherwise there're just too many of you muggles with too good communications."

"...That one island where it is the general policy of all the governments that the native human population has made it quite clear that they don't want any - outsiders, that is - must pose quite a conundrum of a similar nature, come to think of it."

"Oh?  I haven't heard - do you get young adventurers who want to prove themselves and go in there, too?"

She almost laughs, but it's a self-depreciating almost-laugh.

"Worse - missionaries.  You have adventurers?"

"Oh yes.  Mostly they go challenge each other to a ceremonial contest of magic or wits or something."  She shakes her head at the pointlessness.  "And then some of them challenge the Greater Fay, who sometimes condescend to accept the challenge... and at least they survive when they lose.  And now with the Mapmaking, we've made sure they were warned several times in case they weren't paying attention the first time like they should've been."

"...What part of don't fuck with the fae has millennia of people making it a point of every story they tell that you should not fuck with the fae managed to not encode in your cultural consciousness where the fae actually exist?!"

"I wish I knew!"

She throws up her hands.  The rainbows around the circle arc up in two arcs of fire reaching toward her hands.

"Most of them aren't even going for anything useful, like mysteries of magic - I've sometimes dreamed of challenging Emerac for that myself - but even for something useful I wouldn't do that for another hundred years at least!"

"What sort of open mysteries of magic do you have, anyway?"

Well, she let one slip right there... though fortunately Mira doesn't seem to be following up on her secret dream of life-extension.

"There's so much we don't know about how the cycle of magic and land-memory work with each other... oh, did I mention that?  Magic is strengthened or weakened by where it's cast and what the land remembers.  That's why most of the Fay and most strong mages stay in one or two places, because their spells are stronger there once some mage has been casting the same field of spells there for a long time."

"I've got my own lab too - but there're so many questions pulling me out on field trips!  Like this semester here!

"And that reminds me - it's a totally unsettled question what form magic takes on the Moon and in the astral spheres!  Maybe someday we can find it out... though not until we can get there!"

She rather assumed life extension was already a thing given how Aeslin talked about planning for a hundred years out!

"...What, you didn't sneak anyone into the Apollo program to go find out?  Or onto the ISS?  For shame!  ...I'm joking."

"...The land has a memory, huh?  Interesting.  I wonder...

"...Would that be more of a noöspheric effect, or...

"Oh, hell, Australia must be kind of a way - the people there have already preserved stories of some truly ancient things; I can't imagine how long the land's memory might be...

"And - wait, what do you mean the astral spheres?"

"Noöspheric?  As in, founded in people's minds working together?  I don't think that can be all of it - we've got some effects out in Alaska that look seriously ancient, underlaying all the more recent things, beyond what anyone actually remembers as far as I know.  Maybe elsewhere too, but there're few enough more recent impacts in Alaska that I can check.  Can't prove it, but my theory is that it dates back to the first migrations into America!

"And the astral spheres - uh, space.  Beyond the moon.  We don't know anything about it you don't, unless Pamela's theory of magic ultimately coming from the Sun proves true after all."

"...Get you a historical anthropology degree or something...  And - huh, when are the earliest archaeological finds in that area, I don't actually know...  ...Has that ever impacted things?  Like, somebody turns up evidence of something that had been lost to time, and suddenly there's new field effects?"

"...And I had been a bit worried that there was - something up with the magical version of space, but I think you're implying it's just vaguely ossified jargon and not, uh, an actual celestial sphere that you could run into with a spaceship?  I mean Voyager worked fine, probably, but it wasn't manned..."

"No, just jargon; no literal spheres out there far as I know, except the planets and stars and such everyone knows about.  And if Voyager's got any problems, I really don't think they're magical.  Unless all computers do somehow silently depend on magic from the sun; I guess Voyager and such would be the first test of that wild guess I just thought up with zero evidence...

"... and hmm, no idea about new discoveries impacting things.  I know a few people who might know.  There's clearly some influence from people's present beliefs; national border changes can be reflected in magic pretty quickly if the people living there actually start thinking of themselves as belonging to the new country  - and that's not the only thing just the clearest -"

"I think in literary references too much, so it's a story where Neil Armstrong bonked the Apollo mission into the skybox that had me questioning the astral sphere thing - and the Voyager probes have passed the heliopause, or, at least one of them has for sure.  I wonder if you could do, like, a sympathetic magic thing, bounce off the Golden Records, to see if the solar system is relevantly a domain?  ...but how would you differentiate..."

"Well, I wouldn't think there's a different domain outside the Solar System at least until you get near another star, so it'd keep whatever it started with.  If it did start with any magic on it; a normal book or picture is inert except as a symbol, and I don't see why anyone would've enchanted the Golden Record.  It's not like you could put yourself in it and see what magic is like up there...

"...Unless they wanted to send a message to hypothetical alien mages, I suppose, which's actually an interesting idea..."

"I mostly meant that if you could target it because of any of its uniqueness, cultural impact, or design intent, it would be a way to get a spell out there?  Unless spells also have to obey the speed of light in which case you may as well just point and shoot up into the sky..."

"The Fermi paradox sure is a question, though!"

"Enough people have tried casting spells on the sun, and most of them fail, and a lot of the ones that seem to work give wild enough outcomes that I'm pretty sure they don't actually do anything to the sun.  If you could get something that reliably does contact the sun, maybe we could settle that question... how long does light take to the sun...

"... and the what paradox?  Is that a thing about space travel?"

"Eight minutes or so?  And the Fermi 'paradox' is the open question of why nonmagical observation can't find any aliens.  Well.  Any people aliens.  We've found life-bearing planets.  Just very simple ones."

"I wish I could help there.  But we don't even know whether magic exists outside the Earth.  So if we can answer that and the Sun question..."

She glances up at the full moon in the sky.  "Our spells probably have contacted the Moon, at least.  Probably.  Not that we can fly there - flight spells exist but they're slow and unreliable enough we fly in airplanes just like muggles."

"...bloody hell, magic had better be universal or else I'm going to implode of paranoia that magic isn't.

"...Why not just launch an enchanted Cubesat or something?  Human flight might be finicky but surely you have vectored thrust enough to accelerate a small object out of Earth orbit?"

"Why?  When this morning you didn't think magic existed at all?"  She chuckles.

"And yes, we've launched things up.  Tricked some muggle pilots into thinking they were alien spaceships, I hear.  Magic keeps working as far as I hear they've gone - but no surprise; like I said I'm pretty sure it works all the way out to the Moon.  And I've never heard of anyone going beyond there.

"Which doesn't mean they haven't.  I could give a big rant about how mages don't tell anyone about half the things they figure out!" 

She throws up her hands again at the end of that exclamation, again punctuated by leaping flames from the circle around her.

(Her own hypocrisy on that point doesn't even cross her mind.  If it did, she'd excuse herself by saying nobody asks about half the things she figures out.)

"...When knowledge is power, and power shared is power halved, I can see why everyone hoards it.

"...And I still think you could run that.  The reason I picked a Cubesat as your delivery vehicle is because they're often enough someone's hobby project that they can pass beneath notice.  Hm...  But how do you cover for the unsustainable delta-v...

"Experimental reactionless drive ala - that thing that never panned out?  It would become a mystery, but it would be a mystery.

"Or maybe a malfunction on deployment that sends some smaller part rocketing off.  But they would probably try to track it...

"Or just.  Veil it?

"You'd probably be able to get away with optical camouflage...

"...What do your solutions for comms look like?  Assuming as I am that you must have something that isn't piggybacking off of mundane infrastructure?"

"Power shared is... halved?" Aeslin trails off, confused as she tries to take it literally, fails, and then boggles at the failure of metaphor.  "But power shared means no one else can build on it to make even more power!"

"And... veil?  How?  Is that a muggle thing?"

"Having the details of everything you can do, be laid out for everyone to see, is a threat to pretty much any mage's wellbeing, because if you are known you can be predicted.  Your spells can be taken apart and countered and used to hurt you with.  Am I wrong?

"I have to imagine you keep just as much back, too.

"...It's like.  The converse of nuclear deterrence?

"The biggest threat a mage can pose is the one you know absolutely nothing about.  Because everyome knows that there will be one, because that's how things work, but the more that is known about your trump card, the less it trumps.

"Yes, if everyone pooled their...

"...Oh, I've just had a wonderfully terrible idea, though I don't know if a human mind could actually execute it because I'm lifting it from a piece of fiction about, effectively, naturally-occurring transcendent beings.

"Suffice to say, a knowledge-sharing equivalent of a Ponzi scheme.

"...As for your other question - Veils?  Illusions?  What's the technical term for the class of spells that hide things from people, then?"

"Well yes, I keep things back, but that's because people aren't interested, and it's so much of a bother to write them up in a way that they'd understand - why'd you think I started talking to a random muggle like you!"  Aeslin throws up her hands.

"Maybe everyone else is keeping things back for antinuclearesque deterrence like you're saying, but if so - so much the worse for them!"

"... of course, if they understood things as easily with analogies like you do, it might be another matter..."

A sudden thought crosses her mind.

"... Speaking of hiding things from people, are you sure you heard anyone talk about magic before?  It's not exactly usual, but then it'd also be unusual for you to... well, I guess I haven't tried explaining magic to a random sample of muggles...?"

She hasn't thought about why on earth Aeslin's talking to her, yet.  The question clearly makes her start thinking about it and then realize something that seems dreadfully obvious once it's been considered, but there's a different question to answer that takes priority.

"...I'm pretty confident that the only remotely magical-seeming things I've ever heard of that weren't - coming from inside the house, as was - were just superstition dressed up fancy.  There's a bunch of people who love to sell shiny rocks like they do something, but that seems...  Well if someone was actually doing that to muggles with real magic rocks everybody would come down on their head like a ton of bricks.  Then again, if I was a wizard having to hide - not the existence, but certainly the nature, of an enterprise from the IRS, I'd probably hide it in the sector of things claiming to be fake magic...

"The only time I've known myself to have heard of even magical terminology is when - She Who Must Not Be Named, derogatory - clearly stole some from y'all for a frankly substandard work of children's fiction, and that's only retrospective."

"Yeah, I've been at a couple magical shops that do that.  It always felt like too much bother to me, though, unless you really like spinning stories for muggles.

"And that author -"  Aeslin shrugs.  "I think she just overheard a few terms?  She doesn't have any real magic herself, and - I've never read the books, but I'm told she didn't get much right."

"But!"  She holds up her wand at salute, with a few sparkles circling its tip.  "Now that I'm thinking of the possibility, do you mind if I test you for any spells on your mind?  We don't have a full general-purpose memory altering spell, but there're still some things... It's been short enough that if I wanted to, I could still make you forget our conversation tonight..."

She trails off, her mind full of magic and completely ignoring how that last line would sound to Mira.

"...I would prefer that you did not wipe my memory but did test me for other mind-altering spells, if you would be so kind."

"Oh - why would I do that; then we'd need to start talking all over again next time - anything you love about this particular school, by the way?"

She raises her wand, and then remembers something and starts patting down the pockets hidden in her skirt.  It should hopefully be somewhere... "maybe I left it in the bag," she mumbles...

"Agreed."

"...It was one of the better options for my degree program to be had in a state that doesn't want to criminalize my existence, and honestly the non-dorm parts of campus are neat - but aside from the reasons anyone might pick this university, I'm not particularly tied to it?"

"Criminalize - oh."  She shakes her head, suddenly realizing.  And then she realizes another possibility, shakes her head again, and decides not to ask.

Instead, she dives into her bag, and comes out with what looks like a floppy lightweight ski cap and another piece of chalk, but nothing else.

"Well, I don't have everything I was looking for, but between this and my wand I can show whether you have active geases or reverse sleep or dreamweaving spells... not that I'd seriously expect dreamweaving; if anyone but me and a few of my friends even knows how to put that on you I'd be astonished..."

She falls into thought for a moment and then starts drawing a chalk circle around Mira.  "Just stand somewhere in this circle; it won't hurt you if you step out but it'll break the spell... well, it won't hurt you for the first several spells at least."

...Sound any more like a mad scientist, why don't you, she doesn't say as she makes an agreeing noise.  "Go on, then, I'm as ready as I'll ever be.  ...Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if something was odd with my dreams, because they're unusually vivid compared to my waking ability to visualize anything novel - but I doubt that that's magic at play.  Probably just some sort of brain weirdness."

She finishes the circle and taps it with her wand; it starts glowing, though not sparkling yet like her own circle had been. 

"Well, hey, if you want me to have a look, I can always do with another willing test subject next time I do get up to dream magic."

At the end of the sentence, she taps the back of Mira's head with her wand once, lightly.  It doesn't feel like anything aside from a normal tap.

"That sounds cool, honestly, as long as I can be reasonably sure it's not going to make my brain implode or something?  So yeah put my name down."

"Well, I probably could do that - figuratively speaking; literal wouldn't involve dream magic at all - but there're so many more fun things to look into..."

She weaves her wand lazily in the air around Mira, and sparkles dart back and forth between the wand and her head.  Some of them feel ticklish like light sparks of electricity; others feel something like tiny scratches.

"...Well, yes, obviously you could if you tried, the question was never whether you could but what amount of risk I'd be taking on of that happening entirely by accident.

"...Huh, I can feel whatever these are doing, kind of?"

"Oh good.  I think that means you're more self-aware than people who don't?  On average, I mean.  Maybe someday someone will finish proving that theory."

She taps Mira in the forehead once, and a momentary wave of sleepiness goes through her before vanishing a moment later.

"Well, that does it!  No dream magic active on you.  Nor the quasi-dream type of memory magic, which is the only version I can test here - but that usually doesn't stay around more than a few months, so it doesn't say that much."

"Well, that's good to know.  ...What's this hypothesis about self-awareness?"

"Oh, that you're more likely to feel probing-spells related to dream magic when you're in the habit of noticing your own thought patterns and considering how you think on a meta-level!  Haven't seen any decent evidence against it, and a decent amount of case studies pointing towards it.  But, dream magic as a whole is scandalously under-studied."

She holds out the hat to Mira.  "You want to put it on your head, or should I?  Doesn't matter which way goes where; just stretch it out and don't bunch it up."

"Huh.  I wouldn't have thought I was above-average on that metric, but then it's not like I actually collect that sort of data..."

Anyway.  Hat! 

It feels like a hat!  With something like small pebbles and grains of sand sewn into its lining, with what might be wires connecting them!

Aeslin smiles slightly when Mira puts it on.

And then Aeslin draws a ring about it with her wand, and sparks arc up from the circle to the hat, and it tightens around Mira's head.

"Searching out geases," Aeslin says.  "You'd probably know about them if you had them on you - probably - but you might not be able to tell me.  So I wanted to check..."

She nods.  "Very possibly, though I can say that I don't know of any geasa on me.  Huh, the design of this feels like one of those electrode skullcaps for measuring brain activity...  Was it inspired by that, or just, convergent evolution, do you know?"

"Sure, you can say that -" She smiles faintly.

"I'd guess convergent changes?  This dates back to the 1700's, and I don't think any mages were involved in muggle psychiatry, at least till the last few --"

The front of the cap swells and bubbles over Mira's head.

Aeslin abruptly falls silent and swoops down to tap the circle between them; it brightens.

And then Aeslin freezes in place for a moment, staring.

"...Well that doesn't seem like a particularly good outcome...does it?"

"I'm legitimately confused now - that's not what should've happened if it did find something - and even if a geas was preemptively defending itself, how could it -"

...

Oh, she realizes after a moment, there's one possibility she was forgetting.

She raises her wand, but then realizes the hat is going to interfere with magic-detection spells here.  She could ignore her own circle, but not a device like that.

"It's probably not safe for me to cross the circle right now," (half because of the circle itself, but half because of the chance that some dangerous magic might be on Mira - and she's not going to mention that because she's learned caution dealing with unknown magic) "but can you carefully take the hat off and set it down somewhere inside the circle?"

She can do that.  Very, very carefully do that.  Like the hat might be about to explode, do that.  Eep.

And Aeslin weaves her wand in a simple magic detection spell, looking for the delay-triggered magical gems or devices some unknown mage had hidden in Mira's hair, which would explain everything.

(She hopes Mira didn't consciously know about them herself?  That'd be less painful at least.)

Except they aren't there.

There's no magic on Mira.  Except the spells Aeslin herself put there a minute ago.

"Well, that just became more confusing.  I don't detect any magic on you at all.  But something happened!  And I'm pretty sure it was magical!"

"Well, that's strange...  Can you, like...  Widen the filter to - not just structured, but any, magic?  Because my next guess is 'maybe there's not a spell on me'."

"You think you might be... part rock-fay?  Or were-beast?  But you would've noticed before now... unless you got bitten in the last moon, but then you would've presumably noticed that -"

She reaches in her pocket, picks out a coin, and tosses it across the circle.  "Truesilver, if you want to test that."

She'll test it!  "I don't know what could be happening, except as that there Is Magic, and there Should Not Be Anything Setting Off The Magic-Detector without a source of magic, you know?  But as far as I know the only thing that could've bitten me without notice is a were-mosquito and it isn't even the right season for those."

No, no blistering or other unusual reaction!

"Were-mosquitoes aren't a thing.  Fortunately.  Only were-mammals and were-rodents, outside Australia where you get were-marsupials.  No idea whether it's a biological reason or land-magic reason - though if it's land-magic you'd think you'd get were-birds somewhere."

She grins.  "So I could do several things like that, and I really want to do them - but I can't do them here.  I was planning to study a building, not to study you!

"So... want to come see my apartment?"

She yawns.  "I really should get some sleep...  Buuuuuut I don't want to go back to the dorms, I want to find out what's going on with the weird magic readings!  So yes, I would love to see your apartment, so long as you don't mind if I accidentally fall asleep on your couch or something."

The thoughts of morning classes and possible roommates don't even cross Aeslin's mind. 

"Sure, I can move the books off the couch.  I think I put away everything that'd be dangerous... long as you don't touch that cursed sword, of course..."

Aeslin weaves her wand up and down around the circle around Mira to untie it; the sparkling vanishes.  "Circle's broken now.  Just need to clean up here and we can head out."

She, for one, has deftly evaded having morning classes this semester.

(...The thought of roommates hasn't crossed her mind, either.  And she doesn't think her dormmate will even notice.  They barely talk.)

"Don't...touch...swords.  Got it.  Anything I can help with for the cleanup?"

"Uh..." She glances around, trying to judge what would be safe for Mira to handle.  "... Books go in that pack over there; don't move any existing bookmarks.  Chalk can go in that bag there."

And then she turns to de-power the circles and smudge enough diagrams to leave them indistinguishable from sidewalk art.

Sure, she can do that.

Aeslin carefully puts away her spare wands and other magical devices, hoists her staves over her shoulder, and leads the way past the building with mysterious stones and off-campus.

"It isn't too far," she says.  "Not sure how much that was luck and how much just that I was asking early, but it's going to come in handy for late nights like this."

(A few other college students pass the two girls as they go, including one guy who does a double-take at Aeslin's staves but doesn't say anything about it.)

"Yeah.  Can't say much is good about the dorms, but they are at least convenient."

"I do wish I had my own backyard - there're some spells that work better outside - but at least I've got a window in the right spot to get sunlight and moonlight sometimes."

"...I'm either going to sound like an idiot or a genius, but couldn't you stick the spell out the window?  I guess it depends on how it opens, and whether you need to be outside to benefit from the outside-ness..."

"Awkward, but yeah, it works sometimes.  Not for spells that need something like a circle, or anything more than my wand and maybe head."

"Well, if you could get a really tiny circle...  ...Does size usually matter to these things?"

"It matters if I'm inside or outside it.  Or whatever it is I'm casting on - like when you were in the second circle.  But sure, I suppose if some Fay shrank me down, I could be in a super-small circle." 

"Ahh.  Okay.  ...Spatial distortion would probably first require a circle, and then can you even move them, so that's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem...  Anyway.  What sort of things are there left to test for?"

They're walking down a street of apartments and rowhouses now.  Loud music is pouring out of a few windows, in blithe disregard for anyone who might be trying to sleep.

"To test on you?  Well, first to redo the test for geases, and then several more general-purpose magic tests... I'd ideally like to head down to Mexico and do them there - America and Canada both make it hard to look too closely at living people - but that'd take too long and I shouldn't have to look all that closely.  And you're enthusiastically joining in, which should help.  And if that doesn't show anything... I could try a few more things to check your memories, but seriously, by that point it'd be simpler and more fun to look into your dreams."

"Yeah I don't think I want to go out of the country, CBP are presumed assholes until proven otherwise even though I'm a citizen.  And yeah of course I'm enthusiastic?  Or at least very intent on finding out what the fuck is going on in my head, you know?"

Oh, Mira is a United States citizen?  So she must've been talking about the other thing... but Aeslin's not about to change the subject now!

"That's fine; I like comparing magic in different countries, but most of the Fay don't move around much.  The Commission - our government - is actually on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but there's no real reason pulling you there."

She turns aside to one of the apartment blocks, taps her wand on a perfectly undecorated door with the light out, and then fishes a key out of her pocket and unlocks it.

"Here, come on in."

"Oh, huh.  I suppose that makes as much sense as anything, though I'm still kind of surprised it's not a one-to-one mapping on this side of the planet.  Although I would have expected tribal governments to have greater magical continuity, presupposing that as a premise...  What is magical government like?"

And she follows Aeslin inside.

The door opens into Aeslin's living room, with walls lined with bookcases and debris of projects scattered over the table and half the floor.  A floor mat was moved in to draw a chalk circle on, which represents a significant fraction of the clear floor space.

There's a couch to the side, a chair to the other side piled with a dozen books, and one chair left at the table with barely any clear space (if you don't count the plate with some fragments of toast left on it.)

(There's an open doorway to a tiny kitchen, and two other closed doors on the other side.  At back is what looks like a floor-to-ceiling window with curtains drawn.)

"Er, find a seat -" Aeslin says while shrugging off her pack of staves and backpack.  "I'll double-check the circle first; this might need my spare..."

She sits!  Although in truth there is a significant impetus to take care of that toast plate because leaving food out like that is asking for trouble...  But that would be kind of rude?  So it's mostly just her looking at it.

Aeslin erases a few symbols on the circle, draws several more (with chalk on the mat), and then dives into a box to pull out something that looks like a rasp and a lightweight bow, and then dives into another box for two thick tomes.

She places the bow and tomes in a triangle around the circle, and then waves to Mira.  "Okay!  We're redoing the test for geases now.  Step on in the circle!  Oh, and take off your shoes please - it shouldn't matter, but then the last test should've worked so let's be cautious."

Sure, she'll toe off her shoes before she steps in the circle.

...String instrument bow, or archery bow, by the way?

Oh, an archery bow!  A small one, but if Mira asks, Aeslin will happily mention it's symbolic.

"All right!" she says.  She holds her wand up in one hand and the rasp in another... and then glances at the staves... and shakes her head.  "Light work this time.  I don't want enough power to do anything to you and your mind.  So, tie the weave in... I could hold a normal wand as a rasp, by the way, but actually having a real wood wand that's also the handle of a rasp is even better symbolism.  Anyway."

She starts tying knots in the air all around the circle, and an even stronger rainbow of sparkles comes up from the circle into a dome around Mira.  It wafts outward around the bow and books, and inward to dance just around Mira's head.  For the first minute, it doesn't feel like anything at all; then it starts tingling.

After several more minutes of tingling, Aeslin waves a circle in the air and lets her arms drop.  The sparkles subside.

"Good news:  No geases!  And with this setup, I'll believe it.  Now that we've settled that, the question is what was doing that earlier.  Whatever it was, it wasn't doing anything now, so..."

"It's not doing anything that your spells were calibrated to notice.  Is it possible to disguise a spell as another sort of spell?  I've seen that be a thing in some systems..."

"Oh, you could disguise one sort of geas as another, or in theory you could disguise one of them as an active memory-modifying spell probably.  But you can't hide it completely; the human mind is strong enough that any active spells on it are going to show up.  And - really, neither a geas nor memory magic would explain the active magic that we saw back there!"

"No yes I mean like - disguising a memory block as some sort of kinesis, you know?  But what sort of spell did that seem like?"

"A simple movement charm?  Or a bubble charm?  It's easy -"

She circles her wand around her own forehead, and her hair bubbles up something like the cap did on Mira.

"- but I wasn't doing the magic, so who was?  Or what was?  I could set it in a trigger-launched device to do it when someone cast a spell on you, but if so, how'd that device end up on you?  I checked for any magic right afterwards..."

"...I swear, if there's a separate masquerade for some sort of only semitransparent psionic force I will riot.  Metaphorically speaking."

"It's not impossible - I'd blame the Greater Fay - but why you and why now?

"Okay, I'll check for magic again with this circle; it's not impossible I missed something before --"

Suddenly an obvious possibility strikes her.

"One moment - magic devices don't last -"

She quickly ducks into the bathroom and comes out brandishing a comb.

"Here; why don't you look for no-longer-magical devices.  Probably around your head."

...Sure, she can see if something falls out of her hair that way.  "...I still have no idea how it would've gotten there, assuming that there is something...  But that would make some amount of sense..."

"Yeah, I don't know how either... I haven't heard of any other mage around here, but it's possible..."

"... and really, at this point I don't think any more tests for magic on you are useful.  Even if someone did modify your memories last year, that still wouldn't explain how anything got on you..."

(Mira doesn't find anything noteworthy in her hair.)

She'll...  Check her pockets?

"...Could there have been some sort of spontaneously arising magic circle in my brain?"

"Well... only if you were a mage."

"...Well...  That's a hypothesis we could pretty easily try to falsify, I'd say.  Give me some sort of basic spell and see if I can cast it?"

"... you would've known by now, surely?  Well, I mean, it's not impossible -"

Aeslin's running through probabilities in her mind.

"- your parents.  Blood parents.  Not mages, right?  I mean, it's not impossible either way, but muggle-sprung mages are rare, and most of them realize it young -- though I suppose I can't prove there aren't some who don't ever realize it - how could I prove that -"

As she's thinking, she's tapping the circle with her wand and unraveling it.  Finally, all the sparks and colors vanish, and it's just a circle drawn on a floor mat.

"To the best of my knowledge, they're not mages, no.  ...I'm kind of surprised I didn't accidentally do anything with that Wizardology book I had when I was a kid, but then, I had already been disbelieving...  And the 'wand' it came with probably wasn't actually magic."

"That's not unlike some stories I've heard about muggle-spring mages.  Hard to make a wand if you don't know what you're doing... but you can do some simple things without one sometimes... and now that I think about it, reacting against something that might subconsciously feel like a threat to your mind isn't unlike it either..."

"Well, a test."

She pulls another wand out of her pocket and hands it to Mira.  "Here, this wand should be the least customized.  Best to step out of the circle to minimize interference for a test - not that it should matter, but - anyway, here's a simple light spell:  Hold your wand up like a candle, trace an overhand knot in the air, then jab up, and that'll give you a light."

She demonstrates, and on top of her wand there appears a small yellowish-blue light looking rather like a candle.

Trace a whatnow?  Nevermind, get out of the circle, she's pretty sure it goes like this and this and this and this and jab -

...Why does she have to hold it like a candle, that feels so wrong to her finely-tuned holding pencil-like objects instincts...

Mira feels something moving inside her fingers, something like drops of water running down them.

And on top of the wand, there's a light!

"...Huh.  That felt interesting."

"Yeah, I've heard other people's first wanded magic does too!

"And - congratulations!"  She throws up her hands.

"This answers all our questions and raises new ones!"

"Like what?  And how does magic work, anyway?"

"Like, how did you not realize you had magic till now!?  How many other muggle-sprung mages - or, hey, their mage children who technically aren't muggle-sprung - are walking around not knowing it either!? 

"And - what're you going to do with yourself now that you do know you're a mage!?"

"Lack of opportunity, probably?  It's not like I was usually waving sticks around in real life.  And my guess is, a lot?  It seems like something you could miss just because you're not really...  Looking?

"And, uh, I don't know?  I'm doing a programming sort of degree, I have no idea if that skillset is transferable..."

"You could just miss magic --"

Aeslin's horrified.

"I haven't really watched kids, but - I'm pretty sure it's easy enough they get it - but I guess I'm not seeing many of the kids who don't know about magic -"

"And I know some mages who could use some good programmers!  It's so much easier to find things in the university library here!"

"...Why is magic hidden, anyway?  And - well - I'm not that good at programming and you'd probably want someone with a library sciences degree actually?  If you're thinking of the library as the important thing here?  Which is is, to be honest, but."

"...The 'you' in that prior statement was 'organized magical society', I should clarify.  At least, I think that's what I was thinking.  Not that it's not impossible that kids are missing on discovering magic.  I have no idea about the base rate of people self-discovering magic...  And now I've got a lot of open questions about people I know who definitely believe themselves capable thereof...  But you would think that people would pick up on that more often, and if there's a Masquerade on...  Ugh, I don't like this.  I don't...

"Truth is the highest virtue, but people's lives are too much of a cost.  And now I might have to lie to everyone I've ever known, because I don't know what the cost will be.  And it won't just be me paying it, will it.  Damn it all."

"... I'm sure there're other things to do too, but yes, libraries are the really important thing!" says Aeslin, who has never in her life heard a word about statistical analysis software or modeling software.

"And... I suppose I don't know that rate either... I might like to talk with your friends too?  But you'd know better how to..."

"... but, ugh.  How do other muggle-sprung mages do it without spinning a huge lie all their lives?"  She shakes her head.  "Never asked them yet.

"I'm sure there's some reason behind the Masquerade?  But I never bothered looking into it beyond the kids' pastel-picturebook version of nasty Muggles hating magic and mages finding it easier not to tell them the truth anymore if they bothered interacting at all."  She waves her hands.  "Now of course there're tons of things that'd come crashing down if it did come down too."

Libraries contain lots of information about statistics and computer modelling!

"...The trick is, they probably don't.  It's easier to fade away from the rest of the world than to fight against the structural pressures of magical society.  It's kind of funny, how She Who Must Not Be Named got that one thing right about her horrible ripoff.  It's.

"...aw, fuck.  It's cultlike.  Magic is special and you are magic so you are special, do not talk to The Outsider, they will never understand you (not like we do)...  Cults.  Gods damning fuckit.  This is going to be utterly horrible.  And the more horrible it is, the more I find myself insisting on pushing through."

"...As far as things that depend upon the Masquerade existing: Things like what?"

Well yes, but Aeslin hasn't been looking at those topics yet this year.

"Horrible?  A... cult?  But - we don't have a cult leader; we've got different countries and factions; it's just that they all agree on the Masquerade and probably depend on it... and we can talk with muggles all the time if we want; I know some people who live next door to them...  And why'd it be horrible?"

"...You still can't talk about anything to do with magic.  And that creates a structural divide in - gah, my thoughts are outpacing my words here but - that there is an agreement upon the Masquerade's necessity that I dare suspect none would be allowed to truly speak against - that's cultlike.  It isolates.  And perhaps for cause, but - oh, hell, I just realized that the militaries of the world today would absolutely try to weaponize magic like it's MKULTRA 2.0, and start fucking with things that are best left unfuckened.  That sort of play could be worse than nukes.  Well.  Now I'm convinced the Masquerade is most definitely necessary, because I cannot countenance that.  Fucking hell.  And I've never been so glad that Christianity as practiced tends to want nothing to do with anything that looks magicky, because ten bucks says that some asshole would start trying to do so-called 'conversion' so-called 'therapy' with it.  And I hope y'all'd come down on that shit like a ton of bricks, but...  Gods.  I don't want to be thinking about just how bad mindfuckery can get but I'm not going to escape the question because right now I know that I know nothing and the absence of perceivable limits upon such things terrifies me."

Aeslin shivers.

"I don't know what the Greater Fay could do if they set their minds to it, and the better-attested stories are already more than I'm comfortable with...  I'm really glad about the Mapmaking.  And also glad I live in Canada - or, well, the United States now - I think some of their worst spells are too close to slavery to work here.  Not that I want to do a comparative study.

"The good news... well, less-bad news... is that I'm pretty sure they would take down any muggle government that was trying to weaponize magic.  If they knew about it."

"At least there probably isn't -- I'm not even going to say that out loud.  It was already risky enough to think about because if I was right then I'd've been utterly fucked by the premise.  But thankfully I think I have not had my brain eaten by a grue.

"I mean I guess I wouldn't know, if I had, assuming that the thing was benign enough that I'm still alive, but I don't feel like I'm missing time or anything, there's not anything where I'm - metaphorically running my tongue over my short-term memory only to find a loose or missing tooth where there shouldn't be --

"...Moving away from that line of thought because it's fucking terrifying, uh...

"...so how does - hm, that might be too broad -

"...I still have very little idea of either how or why magic works in practice?  Like.  How do you spells?  ...Although, it's late...  Even if I've probably terrified myself into another hour or so awake until the chemicals calm the fuck down again.  ...And into wanting to sleep with a nightlight."  She takes a shuddery breath, trying to calm herself down by sheer force of will (and also biology).

"I could check you again for memory magic if you really wanted?  But I didn't notice any missing time..."

Aeslin, now that she's thinking about it, yawns.

"Short version, it's your will nudging the... earth-memory, earth-force... and the wand acting as a conduit between them.  We say earth-memory, but it might be broader - like I was saying, we don't know if it's only on the Earth or in space too..."

She yawns again.

"Want to sleep here?  It's sort of cramped, but I've got a spare bedroll.  And a sleep spell and dream magic if you want that!"

"...Not worth the trouble of checking; if there was a problem it would have already been had.

"And...  Yeah, I think I would prefer to sleep over.  And see the dream magic, that's for sure."

"Sure!"  She brightly grins.  

"No spare clothes in your size, though - yeah, there're some laundry spells but I've never learned them.  Got a spare nightgown though that's probably loose enough to fit?"

She waves her wand, and the door to her bedroom flies open.  There's a lot more clear space on the floor there.  "Anything else before I lay out the bedroll?  Water's in the kitchen as usual... Don't bother the pitchers in the fridge, they're for experiments."

"I'll just sleep in what I've already got on, I figure.  It won't kill me.  If that doesn't work, there's always a sleep spell."

Aeslin nods and vanishes into the bedroom.  If Mira's watching, she'll see a mass of blankets fly out from a closet shelf and shake themselves out in the middle of the air before Aeslin unrolls them.

"Dream magic was my first specialty back when I was a really little girl," she says.  "Found an old book on it written by a Fay... still don't know who; they didn't give their real name.  Though I'd love to meet them.  Anyway, nobody else had studied it really, but I practiced until I was walking into other people's dreams every night.  I few mistakes of course -" (there's a brief frown) "- and then got into other magic, but there's so much potential in dream magic nobody's looked into!"

"I wouldm't be surprised; dreams can have some very interesting things in them.  ...Shall we?"

She gets herself settled in for the oncoming sleep, assuming that she can just yet.

"Sure."

She reaches into her dresser drawer and holds up a pen.

"You want the normal fast sleep spell with just my wand, or the extra-safe version that involves drawing circles on your forehead, but makes clear that I'm not going to do anything other than just put you to sleep?  Or, well, would make clear if you knew how to interpret it...  I guess I could develop circles for the memory-altering and semi-hypnotic versions too, if I wanted."

"I lose nothing I haven't already risked by trusting that you're just going to cast the sleep spell."

Aeslin stares at the closed curtains of her window for a moment, and then flicks her wand in a circle, and then a figure-eight, and then jabs it straight in the direction of Mira's head.

Tiredness breaks over Mira, in a huge wave.

If she tries, she might be able to keep her eyes open long enough to see Aeslin repeating several more figure-eights and another jab... but after that, she's going to be asleep.

Aeslin herself slips into her nightgown and then takes out her experiment journal.

After some notes about the building she'd started investigating, she adds,

Experiments interrupted by Mira, with cogent questions.  Look into hiring lab assistant?

 Also, consider how to check how many Muggle-sprung never realize about magic.

Also, investigate natural unconscious magical circles as reaction to mind-affecting magic?  Might help explain spell failure rate. 

... And then she casts the dreamwalking-trigger spell on herself, turns off the light, and lies awake for a few minutes before she decides her mind is racing all too much and casts the sleep spell on herself.

She's looking for someone.  They're - that way this way that way - through the door of a 'bank' that looks like the Matrix, out of the airship's dumbwaiter that is the other half of the door, turn a corner into a house that has more corners than it should, corners that turn into eachother (glass and grey and red, well put together - "outside", it's raining, but there isn't an outside -)

Oh, hello.  That's a person, there, amongst the crowd of no import.  Could it possibly be?  Has she found something she's been looking for, after so long?  Why does she feel like she's thinking more than she usually does, when the dream's not busy repeating itself?

She's floating in the sea of cloudlike mist that's at the core of her dreamrealms.  But she's lucid tonight.

She concentrates, and an image of her wand appears in her hand.  She waves it - not in any spell, just as a gesture; it's not a real material wand anyway - and the mist clears a bit, enough for her to see a metal gate off in one direction.

Smiling, she walks through the mist (faint images of trees and library shelves and a waterfall in the distance), and gestures for the gate to open.

It doesn't open, but it fades somewhat.  She walks through.

The gate vanishes behind her (as she expected), and she's suddenly in a crowd, wearing different clothes.  Everything feels different now, less homely, more alien... as expected; she's in Mira's dream now!

And there's Mira herself, or at least an image of her!

Aeslin gestures, and her wand is again in her hand, and she's wearing the same skirt-and-T-shirt she was when they met this evening.  "Hello, Mira!" she says aloud.

Lucidity washes over her like the shock of walking outside into the cold, as she hears Aeslin's voice.

Her dreams sometimes include communication, but they never seem to include sounds.  Not sounds that feel real.

"Hello, Aeslin," she tries to reply.  (Part of her isn't sure she'll manage to actually speak, instead of vaguely impress communicative intent upon the dreamscape.  She's not quite all there, to be speaking with - there's only half an impression of her body, really, for all that that definitely means she stands out from the crowd.)  "...So, uh, what happens now?"

The 'crowd' - really, more of a sparsely scattered set of humanlike objects that aren't at all interactive - seems to fall away from the, 'open-concept floorplan' of the 'house', without actually falling at all, as Mira somewhat-fumblingly makes her way to a side feature - something that's not actually a bar, on account of not having anything to eat nor drink, let alone alcohol, but is perhaps best described as either that or an island.  (The seating arrangements there are definitely bar stools, facing 'outside' towards the glass walls and the rain.)

...Hopefully she doesn't accidentally frustrum-cull Aeslin's manifestation.  That would be rude.

Aeslin doesn't fall away; the magic holding her image in the dream is steadier than that.  Mira could probably dismiss her if she wanted to, but hardly by accident.

"Hello!" she answers, waving her hand.  She gestures around the room as she catches up with Mira.  "A real place?  Or something from your imagination?"

(Aeslin points at the "bar," and an empty plate appears in front of them.)

"I've never imagined this place before in my life, but definitely more the latter than the --"

Ker-plate?  But why ker-plate?

"What's the plate for?"

"It's a bar?  A plate's something that should go there - want to fill it yourself?  Or got other ideas now that you can consciously decide what should go here?"

"...It's not really...

"Like sure this is 'a bar' but it's not, a bar...  It doesn't.  Hm.  Serve the purpose?  Of a bar.  If I was going to appearify food it would be from an actual restaurant-shaped environment feature or something.  This is a house.  It's not even a kitchen.

"But...  Why do this anyway?  Is it just...  Because we can, sort of thing?  I don't know what I should be expecting of this magic other than the evident lucidity."

"Then what is it?  A workbench?  Decoration of wonder?

"And yeah, that's most of the fun part!"

"Could also go digging into each other's subconscious and monkeying around with our heads - hmm, it'd actually be an interesting experiment to see if you could do anything to me that'd stay around after I woke up since you didn't get the trigger-spell cast on you... but that's not as fun, right?"

"...Oh it could be quite fun indeed, for certain kinds of people - but I don't think either of us trust eachother quite that far yet, and I doubt you're one of the people who would have inherent interest in such things.  Even if I'd give myself reasonably good odds of succeeding at doing something to your subconscious mind if I tried."

That voice... sounded different.

"...Though, speaking of workbenches, I have a sudden burning curiosity as to the question of whether you could make something in here and reify it out there later."

And now it's back to ~normal again!

"Yeah, I don't care to now that I know it can be done."

(And that's a good thing for the world, her friend once said.)

"Uh, make something?  Like what -" She's suddenly holding a piece of paper with what looks like a spell diagram drawn on it.

"Like make any thing, not limited to but including whatever it is you have there, and - evert it out of the dream into reality?"

"I've technically done that, but only through my real-world wand.  So I can conjure illusions in the real world, but not create arbitrary things - I need to know how to do it by magic."

"Mmmm.  What makes a magic spell work?"  She has some thoughts.

"The short version is, your will, the earth-force, and something to bring them in contact.  Which abstracts a lot, but it tells you something about what it's abstracting.  You can only do something you can imagine - in broad terms, of course; you absolutely don't need to know every detail and you can certainly abstract it to 'do this list of things'.

"And you can only do something the earth-force knows how to do and is willing to do where you are; that's a whole broad category I don't totally know myself but includes everything about land-memory down to 'enslavement spells categorically don't work in the United States.'

"And you need something to bring them into contact, like a wand.  I can only be dreamwalking now because of the trigger spell I cast on myself before I went to sleep.  Your circle in your mind... could've been through my wand, or could've been some of the poorly-understood things that look like exceptions.  My own favored theory on them is that sometimes people eat bits of magical trees, but I can't prove that."

"Carbon's carbon wherever it is, and there's not not microscopic tree bits in food.  Wouldn't be surprised."

But her focus is quite elsewhere, because she may well have λ-things to make λ-real.  The question is, what?

"I have some wild ideas," she says, staring at the freshly manifested floating λ that radiates a somewhat purplish shadow.  "Do you think not knowing what nominally can't be done might help me do them?  Or will things just...  Fizzle?  Or explode.  Exploding would be worse than fizzling."

"Here in the dream?  No worries.  You almost certainly won't mess up your own head by accident, or mine.  In the real world?  It usually won't help, but no particular risk of accidental explosions."

"So go ahead!"

She raises her hands, to an accompaniment of trumpet-blasts from somewhere overhead.

She laughs, and starts making up rules.

...Nothing feels real enough, however, to feel like she could feel out whether she could make her favorite flavor of paradoxically extant non-existence.  And she doesn't actually want to fall flat on her face, here.  She'll...  Hold on to that λ-'λ', and what it could λ-represent, for later - for waking.

"...I don't think I want to be quite so dramatic as this," she waves a hand at the slowly-rotating sigil floating over the countertop, "and then fail equally dramatically to stick the landing in the waking world because I didn't have a feeling for what I was actually trying to do - but believe you me, I have things to try."

"Ooh, what things?"

She squints at the 'λ', trying to figure out what it might symbolize.  "I've never been to Greece... is this something about physics?"

"Ha, no.  Nothing to do with...  I mean, I suppose it could eventually extremely tangentially touch on the subject of wavelengths, but that's so many degrees of association before you get there that it just doesn't count.  It's a reference to something that I dearly hope is still only a work of fiction.  ...I wish I could explain it properly, but I absolutely cannot do that even though I know exactly what I'm looking for, sort of."

"If it works, though..."

"...Well.  I suppose you've already said that you can make magic just up and fill in the blanks of a spell.  I intend to see if that is extensible."

"Oh - inventing new spells?  It's... not impossible, but it usually fails to do much of anything, or sometimes only does half of what you want it to.  And doing it in here doesn't tell you anything about whether it'll work in the waking world."

"Though if you want to try... there's a lot of tradition about what knots are related to which parts of the spell.  But if you want to try doing it without knowing any of that tradition, go ahead!  It'll at least be an interesting experiment!"

"...Extensible to the products of spells.  Not...  I mean, yes, this would be a new spell, for it to work, but the spell-invention isn't the point, really."

"Products of spells, as in... what?  If you mean creating material out of nothing, you can't do that?  Or something else?"

"No, no, creating -"

"Creating a thing that isn't, creating a not-thing, but a not-thing that - fails to exist so hard that it wraps around to effectively existing when appropriately perceived?"

"That... sounds a little like what that one Fay said..." (- what was the Fay's unique pronoun again -) "zxe was doing... but I've never heard it from anyone else, and I thought zxe was spinning lies.  But if not... it sounds dangerous; zxe also said it could destroy the world."

"...Well, yes, of course it could if you made the wrong sort of λ-thing.  The whole thing is that they're concepts.  They're - the platonic ideal of things, existing only within their roles, and it's all too easy to think of a thing that could destroy the world, though one hopes the world would successfully reject being asked to create such a thing, and one therefore wouldn't risk accidentallying existence...

"...Of course, you could also get out in front of hypothetical XK events if you make the right pState...  Uh, rules for how a λ-thing exists, I mean.

"...I have a sudden, burning desire to send - um, how do you conjugate that pronoun, do you conjugate that pronoun? - a copy of Glitch, and also simultaneously desire to keep - insert pronoun here - very far away from the collected works of the inimitable Dr. Jenna Katerin Moran."

Shiver.

"Yeah, I wouldn't send... zxo? If I remember correctly?... any ideas about interesting dangerous things either.  Even though I'm not sure they'd work; I'd think that the collected magic of the Earth would defend itself, and maybe defend humanity too."

Shiver again.

"... But I'm very curious to see if it'd work!  And if it does, then I'll shove out at least half my other projects to try to figure out how to defend against it."

"I think, if it works remotely like I think it might, that it would be relatively simple to frame a spoiler against world-destroying λ-creations.  Maybe it'd be hard, but - simple.

"...Would it, in fact, be as Utterly Stupid of an idea as I think it might be, to bribe zxo with the books that gave me this idea, to help out with safety precautions?"

Aeslin cringes.

"Please don't.  Zxe would help a bit if zxe promised... you can trust the Fey's promises to the letter of their word... but nothing more.  Don't give zxo any books with nasty ideas.  If this is real; we haven't proved it yet."

"...I'm not just going to give them the books on spec, Aeslin.  I know enough faerie lore to want to run away screaming at the thought of even meeting one.  But if zxe's already researching this sort of thing, and we find out that this works.  It would be better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in, if you'll forgive the crudity of the idiom."

"I've never trusted Fay in my tent, but... maybe if it's big and urgent enough."

She breaths deeply.  "So what're you thinking now?  Any other things before" (gulp) "testing this in the waking world?"

"I.  Am very much a bit consumed by dread.  But, um, hm.  Knots.  You mentioned knots in a casting context.  There's math about knots.  Did you know that."

"Oh yes!  Muggle knot-invariant proofs have explained several longstanding questions.  I haven't figured out yet how to use four-dimensional untying, but I'm sure there's something there."

"Okay good because I know almost nothing about it."

"It's not that hard to learn, if you can visualize things well.  And learning magic helps you practice that."

Aeslin twists the upright-stroke of the λ into an overhand knot, and then stares outside.  The rain starts focusing itself into something more like a shower-spray, or maybe a waterfall.

...She tries to twist the λ, but it has been grabbed and relocated by Mira before she gets very far.  "Don't...Mess with that.  We don't know what it does.  But...  Where was I.  ...I'm honestly a horrible visualizer, when I'm awake, but I'm not bad at patterns?  Like.  I can at least do some basic conducting and stuff so hopefully that scales well."

What it does here in Mira's dream?...

... well, it's Mira's dream, so it could at least turn things into a nightmare and eject Aeslin with a real-world headache.  Or maybe just possibly something more.

"Hopefully... Hmm, conducting.  I haven't though about that, but there're some similarities..."

A staglamite juts up from somewhere beneath the window, turning the shower-spray of rain into a fountain.  Aeslin starts sculpting it a bit.

It's symbolic.

"...I suppose I could...

"...I have no idea if practicing wand stuff in here would have any effect on my ability to do it waking."

"It helps!  Builds the mental habits, though not the muscle-memory.  I could show you -- wait, no, can't show you a book; the text won't stay reliable if I'm not looking.  I can demo you some beginner exercises?"

"Just put up some patterns directly?  ...How is one supposed to hold a wand, anyway..."

"Just this fist grip is fine for rough work... for really rough work you should really be using a staff anyway... but here, try this for fine knots.  It's best to learn with the fine one to start."

(She demonstrates something rather like a pencil hold.)

She plucks - well, it ends up looking rather like a conductor's baton, for murkily subconscious reasons - out of thin air, and prepares to memorize.

Aeslin is very rusty at teaching beginners, and her last memories of trying (from her brief time in a magical primary school, she mentions) aren't pleasant.  But she's very good at repeating and pointing out what Mira needs to fix.

It's waving something around in a particular pattern; this is the kind of thing one can self-teach from sufficient diagrams or just fucking around, which she knows because she's done that.  It's the rest that's probably going to be trouble.

"...I have such an idea for a training tool for this sort of thing."  She doesn't know if the malleability of dream-memory will fuck things up, but that generally never happens until something's out of sight out of mind, so when she tags the tip of her wand to leave a trail of light behind it, she's cautiously hopeful it'll work.

"Oh?  Would it work outside dreams?  Or even if not, that'd be a reason to try to get people to learn dreamwalking..."

"Well, you tell me, yes?"  She gestures to the tracery her most recent attempt left.

"Oh yeah, I've seen instructors doing that sometimes -"

"... oops.  Uh, sorry?  I guess I didn't think of it."

She repeats her most recent examples with tracing.

"Aheh.  It's fine, you're, like, the magic equivalent of a tenured professor teaching 400-level classes, you haven't needed to think about the Intro To Magic basics for...  A while.  So like.  Yeah.  I can't blame you for not thinking of it."

She continues practicing!

"Heh... I more work on researching than teach...  okay, yeah, that's a fair comparison.  Though we really don't have colleges in the modern Muggle sense...  and we really don't have any classes introducing magic to adults like you."

"...Well, that seems awful."

"Because... what is the point of muggle colleges after all?  Just more school for people who won't read the books and do the experiments for themselves?  But somehow need chemistry and foreign languages and literature papers and all the other distribution requirements I avoided because I'm not planning to stay here more than a semester or two whatever I told them?"

"The point is to foster an environment of learning.

"Well, no, the point is capitalism.  But the ideal is to foster an environment of learning.

"And there's reasons to branch outside your discipline at least a little bit.

"One only has to look at the techbro-to-fascism pipeline to see why you can't neglect the humanities, especially as regards civics.  ...My mother was, albeit that this was decades ago, hired as a computer programmer because she plays music.

"And - not everyone can do the experiments, but that doesn't mean that only the people who do the experiments should get to benefit from the knowledge of what was done.

"Plus, project managers exist and that skillset benefits greatly from being conversant in the field they're managing but cannot devote their time to doing it because their job is makimg sure everyone else does it, you know?"

Aeslin has no idea what that pipeline to fascism is, and only a vague sense of what a "project manager" is (maybe the same thing she calls a team-chamberlain?), but that's not the response that's boiling over inside her.

"Well yeah, of course people need to know all sorts of things, but if they aren't studying for themselves by twenty-two then something's gone really wrong with your culture!  Now I'm not saying mage education is that great either, but our general group-classroom schools let out around age sixteen... and I'm not saying everyone gets a great education after then, but a lot of people do keep on studying - apprenticeships and tutorials and such - and they've got more drive and curiosity because they're needing to study for themselves!"

She throws up her hands.

"Of course, maybe it's just because most of us aren't studying chemistry and physics and computers and everything like that.  Maybe you've just got a lot more to learn.

"Or maybe it's primary school all over again and I've landed in a classroom that works fine for the people who don't go studying for themselves, and... who knows, maybe there's something else I haven't heard about for the people who do?"

"...I think that if you would like a hug, I would like to give you a hug, because dear gods now that I think about it I know what that pain feels like.  I still fondly remember my first grade English teacher because she was the only teacher I can recall giving me a spelling list of words I wasn't practically guaranteed to already know.  To say nothing of the 'fourth-grade math class claiming squares aren't rectangles' debacle.  ...There kind of are schools that try to do things that don't...  I don't want to say 'drag everyone along at the pace of the lowest common denominator and not actually teach anyone who isn't learning how to learn to learn how to learn', but...  Okay, I do want to say that, actually!  But they're not universally available, nor even distributed sensibly!"

"...Fuck, now I want to go on a rant about the - Muggle, I suppose - education system.  Because it's fucking failed me, and by the time I achieved enough metacognition to notice it was too fucking late.  And - as much as I'm still hanging on by the skin of my teeth because I'm technically still here right now, I know I'm reaching the peak of a parabolic trajectory of attainment because I was never taught - how to manage myself?  How to build a support structure for the things I just can't do?  Except that that's not really...

"It's the assumed-neurotypicality of it all that's left me floundering - both me, and you, I dare suspect, because - you remind me of me, and I know my brain's not stock.  I was taught the wrong things for the wrong reasons, and skills I need and still don't fucking have aren't even taught in schools, especially to a gifted child," she all but literally spits.

"I just.  There's so much that even my ability to string words together meaningfully is just utterly imploding at the task!"

Hugs... oh yes, hugs are a thing.

A good thing, for all she keeps forgetting they exist.

She opens her arms for the hug, and to offer one to Mira too.

"I... it sounds like you had it even worse than I did.  I got out after primary school and basically taught myself.  There was, well, some pressure from a friendly Fay involved... even though she wouldn't call herself friendly, she was...  Still too much floundering, but I landed somewhere at the end, where I'd want to..."

Sigh.  She hasn't admitted it before, but after everything Mira said...

"... Most of where I'd want to be."

Hugs are very appreciated.

"...Sounds like there's a story there."

Sigh.

"I don't know, really.  I haven't thought about it consciously much, let alone laid out a proper hypothesis and experiment.

"I like being myself.  That much I know.  But... right now I'm feeling like I'd like it more if I wasn't the only one who even mostly understands myself... or something like that?"

Sigh again.

"...Oh how I understand that.  But I think...  You already aren't alone in being able to understand you.  I think you just might not know all the people who would, yet.  Albeit it might be harder for me to introduce you to people if -"

"Well the people I know who I think would get you are on the non-magical side of the Masquerade, y'know?  And - your whole thing is magic.  So the common ground of having this big interest in something-in-particular is harder to establish if you can't actually share it with others."

Also, the hugging will continue until morale improves.

What would she even be like without magic?  The idea's never even crossed her mind before!

"... Now I'm really thinking about how many muggles might actually be mages without knowing it..."

Then the table and room both vanish, and they're inside what might be a cave or might be a house, lined with alternating wood and rock.  A window looks out on a mountainside with a line of scraggly trees rustling in the wind.  But inside, floor-to-ceiling bookcases line one wall, and a large desk just as messy as Aeslin's living-room the other. 

If Mira looks, every title of every book is crystal-clear.

Aeslin looks up, without breaking the hug.

"Oh.  I didn't mean to do that...  This was my study-room with the Fay.  It was the first time I had the library and lab I really wanted..."

"I don't think that's precisely what I --"

And then they are somewhere else, and not somewhere of hers.  She shuts her eyes.

"Oh...  ...Do you want me to see it?"

"Oh, yes!  Of course!"  She frees one arm to gesture around.

Well, then, she will look.

"Oh, wow, you must have a very good memory to get all those titles right."

"Thank you!"

She gazes at the windowframe, and then releases the hug and slowly walks over to the bookcases and runs her fingers over the spines.

She's just going to let Aeslin do that.

"...So, question, are we in my dreams, or in your dreams, right now?"

Aeslin looks over her shoulder, and then turns from the bookcases.  "Your dream.  If we truly fought over what would happen, just on the level of dreamshaping, you'd win; if you woke up, it'd dissolve around me.

"Of course, there's other dream magic that could prevent that, but I'd still be doing it on you.  And it's risky; there is some safe mind-magic, but dreamwalking hasn't been explored enough to be sure, and I don't like testing those risky parts..."

(She briefly frowns, remembering the first time one of her tests did go wrong.  They were able to heal Trixa afterwards, but it was much more worrisome than Aeslin had imagined before.)

"...Yeah, but I wasn't fighting.  And if this is my dream how did it get information I don't have, like those book titles...?  Am I going to get, like, leakage of your magic knowledge somehow?"

"That's from my dreamwalking magic!  It's putting the images in your mind's mindscape, just the same as how it's putting me in your dream.  It might make you better at dreamwalking if you learned it yourself?  On the subconscious level.  But not enough people have been interested in learning to know for sure.  But it's too limited the way I'm doing it to really give you more of my magic knowledge..."

She purses her lips.  "I could try; it'd work in theory - but that's another risky part."  And it'd take much too long to get her to a good healer when it goes wrong.

"...Yeah, thinking about the potential neirological consequences, I can see why it would not be a good idea."

Aeslin nods.

After a moment, she walks over to the desk, pushes some of the mess over a bit, and hops up to sit on the bit of now-clear space.

"So... What're you thinking about tomorrow?  Or, well, next month?  Still want to keep going with your muggle education here?  Or go study magic?"

"...I am really torn between those two options, because ot seems to me that the magical side of the Masquerade is missing out if you're an exemplar thereof, but also, magic is cool.  I could probably motivate myself to self-study magic somewhat!"

"Missing out - oh, you mean the λ-magic idea?  I do want that to be tested..."  She shakes her head.  "So many projects.

"I can give you a wand tomorrow morning, of course, but I should at least put you in touch with some other mage or Fay... hmm, Edgar wouldn't do anything bad, but who would be the best for someone who thought herself a muggle yesterday..."

"Also, computers.  The general concept thereof.  And it's not just λ-stuff that I think would be interesting to see if I could reimplement magically."

"Oh!  Yeah...  How well do you know programming now?  Or... maybe you should take a look around our mapped-lands to see where computers could be really useful..."

"Enough to write toy programs, play games that are pretty programming-adjacent, understand control flow generally, and little else, if I'm honest."

"Well, that's about how good I was at dreamwalking when I was a little girl... and that impressed people... so maybe?  Except someone getting in your dreams does feel more impressive than playing games on a computer screen."

"Yeah, if nothing else the interpretive layer is such utter bullshit.  And you kind of sort of answer the problem of qualia by doing this!  Do I see the same red as you do?  Hop into my sleeping brain and find out!"

"Yeah!  Fay dreams are really really..." She searches for a word and then settles on, "weird!  In different ways for different sorts of Fay!  And they find my dreams weird too!"

"'course they think humans are weird; they're not even built on the same neural architecture, no?"

"Different ways of seeing the world... both literally and figuratively.  Not fundamentally different ways of thinking, at the core - despite what humans say - but different values sprinkled throughout.  And different origins and views of what society could be.  And then Fay are almost as different from each other as they are from us.

"... I said Cilaria - the Fay who got my parents to get me out of school - was friendly.  And she was.  But is it much less wrong to say she thought of me as her friend, than to say she thought of me as her pet?  Or her project?  I've been in her dreams, and... I really can't say either way."

"...Homestly, I've seen humans who think that way.  Boy did that turn out horribly but that's honestly just as much because that person was a bad pet owner."

"... I'm sure.  If Cilaria hadn't let me -- well, okay technically she bespell me and make me break them before I could leave, but that was explicitly a challenge.  And a fair challenge, and fun."

"Yeah that doesn't seem like a huge thing even though it seems like it ought to seem like it would be.  I could see that pattern recurring elsewhere."

"Yeah, with other Fay it would be.  Well, if they want to do anything like that at all."

"No, I mean, hmm...  D'you know about, like, special forces training programs?  'Break out of these curses before you can graduate' seems like something they would do if they did have magic.  And while I have little to really base this impression on, you strike me as very badass.  I want to be clear, that's a compliment, in case you don't know the slang."

"Th-thanks -" She's heard the word, but never thought of it applied to herself.

"And... yeah, I guess some people would do it?  Maybe some of the Patrolmen would want it... and it might be fun to set it up for other people too?"  She starts to faintly smile.

"Might be!"

She swings her legs on the table.  Outside, the clouds start churning back and forth.

"So... if you're staying at college here, I'll try to put you in touch with a few more mages?  And I'll sound out the local Fay - it's good for you to at least know about them if you're doing magic around here.  I might be staying - depends on all these new projects - but I'll be sure to let you know if I'm not.  Sounds good?"

"That does sound pretty good."