" - okay." Don't wander alone, don't forget to check for mals, don't fail all your classes, don't - "When's curfew?"

"Eleven. There's big loud bells reminding you, and when they ring you've got five minutes to get back to your room. It's against the rules to stay in someone else's room for the night, the school sends mals after that room if you do, so you have to get back to your room. After curfew, mals wander the halls, and some of them'll try to get in under the door but you can place a basic ward that'll wake you if anything scary is getting in. And you never, ever open the door after curfew, even if it sounds like your friends are right outside yelling "hey, let me in, help!" It might not really be them."

"Okay! Good to know, thank you for telling me that. - um, do you already know how to place a basic ward like that, and stuff?"

Julia draws her hand around her in a sweeping motion and says something in Latin. 

"Huh. Is there, like, a mental thing to it, too, or - do you literally just say it and make the motion?"

"You have to know what the spell does or it might decide it has an opening to do something different. But that one's a simple ancient ward, the words translate to 'no monster shall pass unnoticed', that's exactly what it does, if a mal sneaks across you wake right up knowing where the ward was tripped. It's safe enough we teach it at ten, though kids that age don't have enough mana to cast it themselves."

She opens her backpack and pokes around for the notebook she's sure she has in here somewhere, she's not the sort of person who would get kidnapped by aliens - wizard school, kidnapped by wizard school - without a notebook. "Can you say it again? Slowly, so I can write it down?"

Julia recites the spell again slowly and slightly condescendingly, with enough pauses that she's not casting it (people will get on her case about the unnecessary mana use, even though it's necessary, she's acquiring a minion with it) and without the gesture.

She writes it down and repeats it back; at least it's not long. "Is that right? And to cast it I'd just need to say that and do the motion? - do you have to cast it every night, how long does it stick?"

"You want to cast it every night, yeah. And the first couple times you want to walk the perimeter of your room before you do it, thinking very clearly about where the spell perimeter is going to be, but after a couple times you don't have to do that because it learns the routine."

"Okay," she says, and makes a note of that, too. "Thanks! Are there any others I should pick up like that right now, so I don't, um, get eaten right away?"

"If something does get in in the middle of the night you want to be able to fry it, but that's a bit trickier. It's pretty unlikely anything'll get in anyway, they go for the softest targets first and if you have a nice standard ward up, that's not you."

"Okay, cool," she says, before she's thought about the implications of that and what she will do if anything does. "I guess they'll probably teach us how to do that right away in class, right, if it's important?"

"Yeah, it's covered in Maleficaria Studies, in the big auditorium - you should study the blueprints on the walls, learn your way around. New York has a VR game for practicing finding your way around, though it managed to be not quite as dreary as the real thing."

"Oh, I should do that, I'm terrible with directions. I'll talk to you later? - Julia, right?"

"Yeah! I'll find you when it's time to go through the graduated New York seniors' stuff and pick out what we're going to decorate my room with!"

'Awesone! Thanks again!"

And she goes to take notes on the maps, chanting her spell to herself under her breath.