Her roommate arrives a few minutes later, lugging two overstuffed suitcases. She offers Angelica a tired nod on her way in, then hauls the suitcases over to whichever bed seems unclaimed and starts unpacking what looks like half a chemistry lab onto the associated desk.

Interesting. 

Angelica fiddles with a ring on her finger and goes back to composing her latest letter to Nicholas Flamel, keeping half an eye on the other girl as she does so. 

Eventually she gets everything unpacked. The desk is now covered in glassware; she had to evict the provided laptop. She flops into her desk chair, turns it to face Angelica, and smiles tiredly. "Sorry about that. I wanted to make sure first thing that I hadn't broken anything. Hi, I'm Ellen."

"Angelica. Nice to meet you, I hope."

She laughs softly. "I hope so too. —don't worry about the lab equipment, by the way, it's a side project. Synthetic spider silk."

"I wasn't acutely worried. Is spider silk particularly useful? My scientific education was eclectic and audodidactic."

"It's very useful!" She lights up a little despite her tiredness. "Amazingly strong for its weight, so you can make cords that won't snap under heavy load or cloth that's light but tough."

"Oh, cool, do you have a sample?"

She laughs. "If everything goes well, I will in a few days! Otherwise you'll have to find a spider."

"Fair enough, I should probably be able to do that. I'll probably have to go into town, though, I can't imagine this place having cobwebs anywhere."

"I see what you mean," she agrees thoughtfully. "So. What brings you to Mind Control University?"

"I didn't like the idea of someplace like this existing and my not having gone to it. Never been a fan of keeping your head down and hoping nobody targets you."

"Fair enough. For me it's mostly academic interest. Never met a novel phenomenon I didn't want to study." She gestures to the chemistry set. "Case in point, I heard you could genetically engineer microbes to produce silk and now here I am."

"That sounds like a pretty interesting project! Not something I'd put that many resources into, given my priorities, but still interesting and useful."

"Priorities? Do you have something important on your plate?" she wonders.

"You know, stabbing death in the balls, that sort of thing."

—she sporfles. "Vivid!"

"Immortality is my highest priority, but I'm also working on resurrection!"

"Interesting. I know a few people working on life extension but I suspect the methodology is very different. Resurrection, as far as I know, isn't possible in my world without preserving the dying person ahead of time."

"Oh, yeah, my world has an afterlife, I've been informed that's not standard."

She smiles wryly. "That does seem like it would make things easier. If you find a form of resurrection that works without an afterlife, now that would really be interesting."

"My research on that is in its infancy, since I had no idea it was necessary until I got invited to this place! There's no principled reason it shouldn't be doable eventually, though. For values of eventually that are related to why I want to crack immortality first."

"I might be able to put you in touch with my life extension people, depending how contact between worlds turns out to work," she says.

"Mostly I'm trying really aggressively to bribe Nicholas Flamel."

"I have no idea who that is," she admits cheerfully.

"Well the most relevant thing is that he's like 600 years old. Supposedly--I haven't personally confirmed any of this--he's approximately the greatest alchemist ever and he successfully created a Philosopher's Stone, which is a magic doodad which can turn other things permanently into gold and dispense Elixir of Life. He's definitely actually that old, I've checked, but I haven't been able to confirm that the Stone exists and does what it's supposed to do. He'd better cough up whatever secret he's got that's keeping him alive, though, if he wants what I've got to bribe him with." 

"...and what have you got to bribe him with?"

"Ancient lost magical lore!"

"Well, you'd have me sold if I were Nicolas Flamel. But I'm not six hundred years old and I can't offer you the secret of immortality." The conversation has perked her up some; she stretches slightly in her chair. "What are your thoughts on dinner? I'm thinking we should probably go together when we do, for safety's sake."

"Sounds like a plan. I'm not actively hungry yet but I could eat."

"I'm famished, I had a bit of a packing marathon to get all this," she waves vaguely at the desk as she stands, "loaded up for transport. Shall we?"

"Let's!" 

Angelica gets up from her desk and stretches and moves towards the door. 

Ellen, moving somewhat more stiffly, takes rearguard.

As they approach the door, her hand lands on the back of Angelica's neck, and all of a sudden everything's coming up tentacles. Red-black tendrils expand from the point of contact, rapidly enough to cover her body in mere moments.

Angelica has very good reflexes. 

Her wand is out of her sleeve and in her hand in less than a second, and less than a second after that it's pointed behind her. 

"Imperio."

Just as they were beginning to contract, the tentacles go limp.

What was previously a normal-looking human body is now an amorphous mass of writhing red-black flesh-snakes with vaguely the right silhouette for a human form. They're still moving, but much slower now, all the ones all over Angelica crawling listlessly back into the main mass while the ones composing the main mass just sort of undulate in place.

She'd been hoping she wouldn't have to do this, but it does make things simpler, in a way. 

Return to your humanoid form, she instructs her roommate through the curse. 

Slllllurp go the tentacles, and once they're all in place, they smooth themselves together and near-instantaneously wrap themselves in skin and clothing to look just like Ellen did before Surprise Tentacle Time.

Tell me what you were trying.

"I was trying to give you immortality," she says, smiling slightly.

Tell me why you felt the need to wait until my back was turned to do it.

"I assumed that you'd turn me down if I offered to consume your body with my virus tentacles and make you a part of me, because you seem like a basically reasonable person," she says. That's definitely an amused smile on her face. "And I didn't want to reveal that I was more than human before I had you, because trusting my roommate at Mind Control University on the strength of one pleasant conversation would be a terrible idea."

"You're right! I would turn you down," she agrees brightly. "And now I know that I can't trust you, although the conversation was quite pleasant. If it makes you feel better, I definitely wasn't going to strike first. Do you currently have any mind-control capabilities besides the virus tentacles?"

"Not yet," she says, still smiling. "Honestly, I think you should give the virus tentacles a chance. They're friendlier than they look."

"The problem is that I rather suspect that if I tried them and didn't like them I would be pretty well stuck. How thin can you make them?"

"I'm sure someone could figure out a way to extract you if you really wanted. Why do you ask?"

"I want to know if they could potentially penetrate a ward designed to keep out solid matter but let air exchange freely."

"I'd imagine not. I have to get up close and personal to take someone, anyway, and ideally catch them while they're not paying attention. If I snuck a few little tendrils past your wards while you were sleeping—I assume that's what you're getting at—the most I could do with them would be tickle you." She smiles again. "No, really, though, don't you want to hear my pitch for why you should let me assimilate you?"

"Sure, gimme the pitch."

"I have no interest in controlling you for its own sake; I only want to make sure of my own safety. If I take you, I'll reconstruct your body and pretty much send you about your business as normal, except that you'll have a copy of me watching your every move from the inside, making sure that you don't betray me and keeping an eye out for danger from other sources. The trick is, I've had this power for over a year, and I can make multiple copies of one individual if I have enough biomass, plus I can share around my library of copied people by having one of me split off a duplicate of herself for another one to consume. So if I get to consume you once, then I can recreate you at home even if the copy of you attending this school goes back to your world and dies there. You get to have backups of yourself, for as long as the network of Ellens persists, which will be indefinitely if I have anything to say about it."

"Surprisingly compelling," she admits, "but the answer is still no until and unless I can be absolutely certain that any me-copies you produce will still have my magic. And even then I'd have to think about it."

"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."

"Okay, that works for me. Once you've assimilated me, will you be able to give arbitrary bodies my magic?"

"At first I'm pretty sure I'll only be able to give bodies your magic by making them exact copies of you, but eventually we should be able to figure something out."

"How exact is exact? Couldn't you give them my genes without making them morphologically me?"

"Yes, but not trivially. And I don't currently know that what gives you your magic is exactly and only your genes. Consider by way of analogy the problem of constructing two people whose voices sound exactly the same even though they look very different, which I've done but which was very tricky to get just right."

"I'm not sure that's a very useful analogy because I can't see why that would be difficult either but I'll take you at your word that it is. Alright. Anything left to do before you tentacle me up?"

"The pitch and sound of your voice is controlled by the physical shape of your vocal apparatus and very small changes can have very detectable effects! —anyway, no, I don't think there is. Shall I?" She reaches an unraveling hand toward Angelica but waits politely for confirmation.

"Hang on a second." 

She takes off all her jewelry and places it on the desk. 

"Okay, now."

Once again, everything is coming up tentacles.

It's—not quite exactly painful but definitely very intense—and it's over very quickly, and then there's a sort of dreamy timeless moment of nonexperience, and then she's being reconstructed much more gently, flowing together into the shape she's familiar with. She can straightforwardly perceive everything that the Ellen in here with her is thinking, but most of it is in structures and sensory modalities that she's never experienced before, so it's pretty disorienting; which gives Ellen time to construct a second Ellen, after which Angelica can still perceive everything they're both thinking but now her own Ellen is mostly passively receiving the other Ellen's thoughts and senses.

"Okay," says other-Ellen, "so you're the master copy whose job is to stay home all day, and I'm the roaming Ellen, and it's probably a good idea to give you a minute to settle in before we make the roaming Angelica."

"Cool," she says after a moment to orient. "This is going to be interesting...oh, man, having this at home is going to be fun. And make it much easier to preserve my secret identity." 

"A secret identity! Exciting," says Roaming Ellen. (The Ellen sharing Angelica's body sends Roaming Ellen a contentless ping of communication to check that she gets it. They don't let this interrupt the flow of conversation.) "Those can be fun but the way I do it is mostly exhausting, having to set up legal identities for dozens of different researchers so I can work on a team with myself. The forged doctorates alone... so much paperwork!" Fortunately the people she's working for are more interested in results than in credentials, so she didn't have to try very hard. It was just sort of understood after a while that if she could wave the right pieces of paper around, no one would check if they were real. She never actually went in with a diploma scribbled on cardstock in crayon but she thought about it.

"Oh, I don't have to do anything like that, Eurydice Peverell sends people letters bribing them flagrantly with lost arcane lore and occasionally shows up at parties in a spooky cloak, she doesn't work for anyone she'd have to justify herself to with credentials or a legal identity or anything."

"The people working on studying the Blacklight virus want to hire people who will make them money, and I'm pretty good at recommending people who will make them money." Because those people are also Ellen. Though honestly the methodology of every non-Ellen researcher in the entire project is crap and sometimes she feels like she'd be better off ditching the whole organization and starting over from scratch herself. Unfortunately they have military backing, but hey, maybe Mind Control University will teach her how to deal with that obstacle.

Anyway, "Want to make yourself a Roaming Angelica now? Your Ellen can set you up—" and indeed, the Ellen in Angelica's head is already doing incomprehensible things with their presumably Blacklight-derived incomprehensible mental interfaces, weaving together a construct which can be completed if Angelica just holds out her hand a little and wills it so.

She holds out her hand and wills the construct. 

And lo, there is a second Angelica!

Getting the feed from her is a little weirder, because there is, as promised, an underlying Ellen. Roaming Angelica's experience is of being alone in her body, but behind her like a faint echo there is an Ellen, who is largely just scanning her senses for points of interest and not really paying close attention to her thoughts.

All together, with the feed from the two roaming bodies and the extra Ellen layer in Roaming Angelica, plus Home Base Angelica's own mind and senses, it's getting to be kind of a lot. Home Base Angelica's Ellen helpfully sorts through the input streams for her; reading them at one remove through her Ellen layer is easier and more straightforward than trying to track it all in raw form.

"This is interesting," Home Base Angelica observes. "I guess we'll be able to get more potion-making done while we're here than I thought."

"You are absolutely right," Roaming Angelica says, picking her wand up and putting the jewelry back on that she had removed. "--Actually there isn't much point in not having at least one me on potion-making duty at all times--this could increase our bargaining power exponentially, if we have not only nebulous lore but also, say, as much Felix Felicis as we could brew with half a dozen bodies--"

"Well, potion-making is still only so interesting, I don't want most of our experience of the world at any given time to be potion-brewing."

"That's true, but the potions that take a long time don't generally need to be attended to the whole time--and we could get so much done, if the only limit to how many of us there is is biomass--"

"Grandpa Cadmus is going to freak," Home Base Angelica observes gleefully. 

Roaming Ellen grins at their enthusiasm. "Okay, are we ready to go to dinner? We can bring more food back for you," she nods to Home Base Angelica. "And, hmm, we should figure out a designations scheme at some point; Ellens tend to name ourselves after our legal identities, but that's not how things work around here. For now we've got roaming instances and home base instances and Ellens acting as auxiliaries to Angelicas, but if we ever get into anything more complicated, we might need to start renaming ourselves. 'Home Base Angelica's Ellen' is already a bit of a mouthful."

"For right now, I'll be Eurydice," Home Base Angelica says. "Once there are more than two of us we'll need something more complicated than just giving one of us the alias we already have." 

"We should consult the others," Roaming Angelica muses. "--Ellen, I don't know how much of this you've inferred, but the reason we know there's an afterlife is the same reason we have all this lost lore to bribe people with; we have this magical artifact called the Resurrection Stone that our ancestor Cadmus Peverell invented and it can summon shades of the dead from our afterlife. We've been collaborating with him and his brothers who likewise developed things," she waves a hand, "I'll explain the Deathly Hallows later. The Stone is the only one we have, anyway. Likewise we know that the Nicholas Flamel who's around today is the original Nicholas Flamel and not the latest in a series of copycats using the same name because we can't summon the original Nicholas Flamel's spirit."

"Fascinating!" she says. "And I suppose you haven't had time to check if it still works here?"

"I mean, technically that's true," Eurydice says, going to the cabinet and pulling from one of the crannies a ring identical to the one Angelica is currently wearing, a gold band with a plain black stone, "but I asked Mesmerra if it would work here and she said yes." 

She turns the ring over, and an unattractive woman in badly-taken-care-of clothes appears, see-through and greyscale; again, and a man wearing extremely antiquated clothing joins her, again and again and two more men join the first. 

"Mother," she says, "Grandpa Cadmus, Uncle Antioch, Uncle Ignotus, this is my roommate Ellen, at the university I told you about."

"And who is that," "Uncle Antioch" asks, gesturing at the extra Angelica, "in the Polyjuice?"

"No, that's also me," Eurydice says, "Ellen can duplicate people. I'm going to use this ability to force-multiply aggressively, but once there's more than two of us we're going to need a more comprehensive identification schema than just calling one of us Angelica and one of us Eurydice." 

"Only you," the woman says, shaking her head fondly. Eurydice can't actually touch her but she can mime a hug, at least. 

"Ellen, this is my mother Merope Gaunt, my ancestor Cadmus Peverell, his older brother Antioch Peverell, and his younger brother Ignotus Peverell."

"Lovely to meet you all!" she says. "I wonder if we can figure out a way to make Blacklight interface with this thing for resurrection purposes? I'd guess it would be tricky if it's possible at all; Blacklight really loves biology and you, ah," she gestures broadly at the ghosts, "don't appear to have any. But it's a thought."

"It is a thought, but there's only one of these--the ring Angelica's wearing at the moment is a decoy--and I really don't want to risk breaking it." 

"There's not much point trying to make plans now, I'm sure we'll learn all kinds of relevant things once classes start," Angelica opines, "imagine if we'd tried to make plans about immortality before we first went to Hogwarts!" 

"Don't start," Eurydice warns Antioch, as he opens his mouth, "you may not have gone to Hogwarts, but I didn't have any other source of magic training at that point, don't be difficult, we've been over this."

(Ellen giggles. Angelica interacting with her ghost family has a similar air of familiarity and collaboration to Ellens interacting with themselves; it's pretty endearing.)

"After dinner I want to go to the library, we'll have to stop back here first to deliver Eurydice's food but after that. And if we bring the ghosts at that point that's more sets of eyes-on-books."

"True, but do we want to reveal that you can summon ghosts? What if someone mind-controls the ghosts?"

"Point. We don't know there'll be anyone at the library, but we don't know there won't...this would be more helpful if we had managed to recreate the Cloak already," she grumbles. 

"I don't think any of us would be able to wear it," Ignotus says, amused. 

"Yeah, but I could, and then nobody would know you were with me! And anyone who tried to mindcontrol you wouldn't know I had your back."

"The Cloak?" wonders Ellen.

"Right, I said I would explain the Deathly Hallows--let's start with the bedtime story version," she says. "Once upon a time, three brothers were traveling through a forest. They came across a great and fierce river, that no man could hope to swim across and survive. But the brothers were powerful wizards, and together they conjured a strong bridge, over which they passed the river safely."

Death was annoyed that they had evaded him, since the river had taken the lives of many travelers. But Death is cunning and subtle, so he congratulated the Brothers on escaping him, and offered each of them a boon."

The oldest brother asked for the most powerful wand on earth, so Death took a branch from a nearby Elder tree, and fashioned a wand, and gave it to him. And the first brother, pleased with his prize, went to find another wizard with whom he had a quarrel, and slew him, and boasted in the tavern that night that he had the most powerful wand on Earth. So another wizard crept into his room that night and cut his throat as he slept, taking the Elder Wand for his own. Thus did Death claim the first brother for his own."

The second brother asked for something that would allow him to pluck people from Death's own grasp. So Death picked up a pebble from the riverside and gave it to him, saying that if he turned the stone over the one in his thoughts would be returned to him. So the second brother returned home, and summoned the shade of a woman he had once loved, and lived with her for a time. But he was dissatisfied with being unable to be with her completely, so he ultimately killed himself to be with her in truth. Thus did Death claim the second brother as his own."

The third brother asked for something that would hide him from Death himself. And so, reluctantly, Death removed his own Cloak of Invisibility, and gave it to the third brother. And Death could not find the third brother for years and years and years, until the third brother was very old. The third brother gave the cloak to his son, and finally departed with Death as equals." 

"It's nonsense," Antioch harrumphs. "It took me way more than one night to get myself killed." 

Ignotus elbows him. "More importantly, Death didn't give us anything. We created the Deathly Hallows ourselves."

"Interesting!" she says thoughtfully. It's not quite like any specific legend she's heard but it sort of rhymes with a few - something something Hades's helmet, that sort of thing. "I wonder how that managed to be the way your accomplishments were remembered?"

"Good question," Ignotus says. "The story didn't become popular until long after I died, so none of us have a direct perspective on it." 

Eurydice shows Ellen the Stone. "This is the sigil of the Deathly Hallows, see? The triangle is the cloak, and the circle is the stone, and the line is the wand." 

"What was their original purpose as a set—and why are they themed around death?"

"The purpose of all of them was to fix Death," Cadmus says. "They were the first phase of what was originally planned to be a project to deal with it entirely." He gives Antioch a judgmental look. "When Antioch got himself killed as a braggart, and the Wand was lost, it was--a setback. A very large setback. The Elder Wand is powerful. It's not meant for dueling, it's meant for bootstrapping creating more artifacts."

"The thing we objected to wasn't the afterlife," Antioch clarifies, looking embarrassed at being called out like that. "It was Death as a process, the way it currently exists, where everyone starts out on Earth and then ends up in the afterlife and then can't go back or even communicate with anyone back on Earth." 

"We kept going, after Antioch died, but...it wasn't just the loss of the Elder Wand," Ignotus says. "We had access to fewer ideas back then--the thing that amazes me the most about the modern world, especially modern muggles, is the information technology they have. The printing press! The radio! Angelica has been very patient about explaining these sorts of things." 

"Wait'll you hear about the Internet," Ellen murmurs with a smile, glancing over at the laptop for which there is no longer any room on her desk because her desk is instead covered in lab equipment.

"What's the Internet? And what's that thing, too, for that matter, I assume it ties into this Internet thing in some way."

She holds up the thoughts for Eurydice to examine—blurry memories of sitting at a desk with a glowing screen in front of her, scrolling through Wikipedia, opening new tabs to follow interesting references—as she goes to open up said laptop for a practical demonstration.

"In short, information technology that improves on the printing press more than the printing press improved on clay tablets. In slightly less short—you have radios in your world, do you have telegrams? The basic concept of sending information over a wire, so that text signaled at the origin arrives very quickly at the destination? That, but faster. So much faster that you can send entire books across a continent in seconds or minutes. And the technology developed in tandem with devices like this," she opens the laptop and demonstrates typing into a text editor, "which can access and display and manipulate the information, also in novel and powerful ways."

"Whoah. When does this happen? --Ooh I bet you anything tech class involves even better versions."

Ellen grins. "Yes, I very much expect it will!"

"You had better figure out a safe way to get me into the library," Ignotus mutters. 

"Can ghosts interact with physical objects at all? I wonder if I could make a tracking interface of some kind... I wish we'd brought more hardware expertise, I only have a partial set of our skills for security reasons." She nevertheless rifles through her collection for brains she has absorbed that might be able to help with the task, which is a deeply disorienting mental motion to experience at one remove. Like watching a highly compressed montage of someone paging through book after book after book, except that each book is a whole person with a lifetime of experiences, all going by in a flash as Ellen picks them up and then puts them down again when they don't contain the thing she wants. Absently, out loud, she explains, "If you can't move things around but you can be detected by cameras, I could probably rig up something that would let you use a computer yourself despite being insubstantial. Best to keep that in the room, though, hidden from prying eyes so they won't know we have a team of ghost researchers backing us up."

"We can't exert force," he says. "We can be detected by cameras."

"I have to turn the pages for them when they're reading books," Angelica says, "but that's still faster than reading everything myself."

"It might take a bit of trickery to actually implement, but in theory, if you can be detected by cameras then you can use computers and if we come up with enough computers you can all be reading different books simultaneously with no one having to turn pages for you," says Ellen. "Now that's what I'd call a force multiplier."

"--I wonder what happens if there's six of me and one gets addicted to a magical substance," Eurydice speculates. 

"Please do not get addicted to Felix Felicis," Merope says. 

"But Moooom, it's so useful." 

"Oh, I have lots of advice for separating out duplicates to try getting addicted to things," Ellen says cheerfully. "Not magical things, admittedly."

"You should try Felix Felicis. --Mom will you chill out if she tries getting addicted to it first and it works out okay?"

Merope makes a long-suffering face. 

"Felix basically tells you what to do next to get the best results, I wouldn't want all of me to be on it all the time but it's so fucking useful."

"I'll think about it. How easily can you repeat that pig trick? And how does Felix decide what the best results are and how you should get them? —And we really should go get dinner at some point, we're feeding three people now and shouldn't get in the habit of skipping or delaying meals because we're distracted by interesting ideas." (Ellen has a lot of experience getting in that habit and then needing to get herself back out again.)

"Excellent point. Eventually I'll have to brew more Fuming Philtre but that's pretty much the bottleneck on the pig thing," Angelica chimes in. "We don't know exactly how Felix works yet." 

"Is 'how does Fuming Philtre work to produce pigs' the sort of interesting but largely strategically irrelevant question we could discuss on the way to dinner?" she wonders.

"Fuming Philtre doesn't directly produce pigs--yes, it very much is, let's go." Giggle. "I'll even go first, if you still care."

"Not in the slightest, but it's amusing," she says cheerfully. "After you."