"That was the first question I asked Mesmerra—whether arbitrary classmates could be successfully copied with all their powers and abilities intact. She said yes." Slight pause. "I can also, once the school year is over, send my primary copy of you home without my personality active underneath yours. I'd want to give you some way to wake me up just in case you felt like it, but I don't mean for being assimilated to put you in the position of never having a private thought again. I could even teach you to use the virus tentacles."

"Hm," she says. "I'll think about it. I will genuinely think about it. But I'm not going to agree to something like that without even going to a single tech class--I mean, for all I know, I could turn myself into something like you on my own."

"I doubt it. The Blacklight "virus" is, as far as I can tell, actually just magic. But sure, suit yourself."

"Assuming I agree, is there any downside to delaying?"

"If I eat you and remake you and we go out there like that, you have an entire extra mind in your body with you who can pay attention to your senses and notice things you're missing, which seems useful; more situational awareness is generally better in dangerous situations. And—I took my shot, I missed, you were reasonable about it; I trust you enough now that I wouldn't be focusing much effort on trying to make sure you didn't mess with me. Which means I would be paying all my attention to checking for threats you might otherwise miss."

She considers this. 

"I'm going to put you in a chair, and tie you to it, and put a curse on you so you can't move anything but your head, and feed you a drop of truth potion, and lift the Imperius, and ask you to confirm that everything you've said is true, and if you clear that check I'll let you go altogether, how does that sound."

"Suits me," she says cheerfully.

Angelica conjures a chair and sits Ellen down in it and paralyzes her and conjures ropes, and then she has Ellen close her eyes while she rummages in one of her hidden nooks for her little bottle of Veritaserum. She conjures a little glass, adds a single droplet of Veritaserum, examines it to make sure it's precisely the amount she wants, and then fills the glass the rest of the way with water. 

"Drink," she says, pressing the glass into Ellen's hands. 

She downs it. As she does, she's saying thoughtfully, "I can also read my duplicates' minds under some circumstances, and we can theoretically use that for two-way communication if I set it up right. It's also theoretically possible to leave you in charge of both of us instead of me, but I have more practice at this sort of thing than you do so I'll be better at running you without interference than you'll be at the reverse. And I've never set it up that way before because I've never met someone I wanted to offer that to, so I'm not completely sure I can do it. The Blacklight virus can be obnoxiously difficult about doing things that should be logically possible given its other known capabilities, sometimes."

"Hm. Between my freeing you now and not taking you up on that, versus my keeping you under the Imperius while taking you up on the assimilation offer so I can make sure it goes in a way I'm alright with, which one would you prefer."

"Oh, if you want to be mind-controlling me while I take you, I don't mind at all as long as whatever you're doing doesn't interfere in a way that would make the process unsafe."

"What I would like to do is set it up so that neither one of us is wholesale in control of the other but we're both basically aware of what the other is up to and either of us can do some sort of override in case of an emergency where the one who isn't physically present has more context or expertise. Do you think that's possible? If the process is reversible we could practice on a townie first to make sure we get it right."

"Once I assimilate someone I can't make them not assimilated anymore, although I can get them to a state that's functionally very similar assuming nobody nearby has a well-tuned Blacklight detector. I theorize that someone here is going to be able to turn people from the assimilated Blacklight form back into standard human biology, just because that seems like the sort of thing that's likely to happen in a place like this, but I have no way to do it myself. Yet. Making neither of us wholesale in control of the other... I'm not sure what you mean by that? If I had you assimilated and remade I wouldn't go around altering your thoughts or behaviour without a very good reason, ideally one you agreed with. You've been very polite with your mind control so far, I don't see any reason to do otherwise. You evidently have the ability to mind-control me anytime we're in the same room; I almost think having you assimilated would in a sense put us on more even footing in that regard?"

"I suppose that's true, but the thing I don't want is not being able to have any private thoughts even as long as the school year."

"Hmm, that's fair... remind me when you're done interrogating me to get my notebook and draw up some designs, I think I can make it work but I want to double-check that it's as easy as it sounds."

"Alright." 

She removes the Imperius curse. 

"And you can confirm verbally that to the best of your knowledge everything you've said to me is true and you have no reason to think your memory might have been modified to forget a falsehood?"

"To the best of my knowledge, everything I've said to you is true, and everything I've said to you since you started mind-controlling me is honest; I was being a little manipulative beforehand to try to set you up to walk out the door just ahead of me so I could consume you. If someone is modifying my memory without my knowledge, that person is almost certainly also me, so given the same information as me she'd come to the same conclusions, so she's not trying to subtly work against you because she has the same read on you as I do and I see no point at all in subtly working against you. If someone other than me is modifying my memory without my knowledge, I will cheerfully accept your help in finding out who and making them stop."

"Alright." 

She Vanishes the ropes. 

"The Veritaserum will take a few minutes to wear off, I can't terminate it early." 

"Well, I probably shouldn't leave the room like this, so what do you want to do in the meantime? Play Truth or Dare?" she jokes. "No, wait, right, I was going to try to design something." She gets up and fetches a notebook. "The interesting part is trying to design things so you get mental privacy but can still communicate, I've never had to bother with that when it was just me... For the best possible version we might need to leave one of ourselves in the room permanently with input streams from both of us as we walk around, but I don't have the biomass to make a third fully functional body, I was told it wouldn't be fair if I showed up with a whole clown car of Ellens ready to go. If I eat triple rations for a while I can probably get there, or if we can find some wildlife to consume. Or townspeople, I'm not picky, except that I have a policy about making sure if at all possible that anyone consumed by any of my duplicates gets backups distributed as widely as we can manage so they don't get lost. That's trickier here then it would be at home with full access to my network. Anyway, where was I? Right, design. Feel free to ask questions if you have any."

"Biomass I can do you." She rummages in the less-hidden areas of her storage space, pulls out a bottle, sets it on the floor, and uncorks it. 

It immediately begins pouring a thick purple smoke. Angelica watches it for a little while, and then, when the smoke fills up a large enough area, raises her wand. 

The smoke turns into a pig carcass which falls to the floor with a thud. She re-corks the bottle and puts it away.

"Ooh!" She grabs it immediately and goes full tentacle on it. The consumption takes barely a second before she's back in human form with the last tendrils rippling back into place; if Angelica's reflexes were sliiiightly slower, they'd be having a very different conversation. Though perhaps not all that different, all things considered. "Nice, this will cover the extra body and then some. Okay, that simplifies things. How okay are you with having a lot of duplicates of yourself active? It's easy to merge back together if you don't like it, you just consume yourself. But if you wanted to have only one consciousness thread and have it private from me, that would make this hard. Only two and both of them private from me I think I can do."

"I'm fine with having more than one of me! I might have qualms if it was a permanent separation but as long as we can periodically update each other it's fine. --Oh, is this going to affect my ability to have kids? I want biological kids someday."

"I haven't tried but worst case you might need to do in vitro fertilization and get my help stabilizing the eggs to be extracted. Oh, hmm, but that just gets you as far as an embryo; there's also the possibility that your kids might come out Blacklight prodigies which would be neat, or Blacklight disasters, which would very much not be... How would you feel about analyzing and re-synthesizing your DNA from scratch and getting a surrogate to carry the kids so they don't have any Blacklight in them? That I think I can confidently say is possible using just things I personally know or could learn how to do, without relying on other worlds to have magic or technology that will make things easier. And I'm sure other worlds have all kinds of magic and technology."

"That's fine, they just need to have my genes, I don't care much about eggs or pregnancy. I have a couple magical bloodline goodies and I don't want them to be lost is all."

"Then yes, you should be fine." She scribbles in her notebook. "Okay. So my proposal here is: three bodies. One is me. One is you, with me underlying you. One is a combination with you underlying me. The third one stays in the room at all times and gets full feeds from the others; I don't mind the private thoughts thing one bit. Then out in the field where it matters I have the base access level on you that lets me do things like keep watch with your senses and coordinate perfectly with your reactions, which I know are much harder without all the practice I've had, and in here where we don't need to be on high alert all the time you get to have the base level which means I can't hear what you're thinking unless you show me. We'll be able to use the home body as a communication relay, too, although passing messages out to a copy is much slower and clumsier than getting the feed from them."