"Yeah. I suppose Orion could throw them at anything that was running away from him."

"There is that. --Actually throwing the agglos might not be a bad idea if you were confident they'd eat the agglos, same logic as some students'll push their classmates."

"Yeah, but the action of grabbing one would slow me down. I guess I'll have to see what the attack patterns here are if I get to the point of having poisoned agglos to toss."

"We'll see what happens! Throw agglos if and only if it seems like a good idea. --I wonder if malia is poison for mals, it'd be a little odd but mana is the thing they're eating us for, right, our flesh is a bonus if anything, and malia's bad mana, and you hear that maleficers almost always survive--"

"Huh. If you find any to sell spiders to - I'm guessing on that one - who seem minimally murdery maybe I will get them to put a bit in some scraps for my agglos. Or I could hit up the Pisa kids, I guess."

"Do you know what the Pisa kids look like? Probably they have plenty of their own bugs but it couldn't hurt to offer. Darwin's Bark Spiders are useful for more than just malia anyway, their silk is the strongest mundane organic material in the world and making them familiars doesn't hurt their use in artificing one bit."

"I don't know them personally. If I don't encounter them organically I might ask Suze, she's a sophomore from New Orleans."

"Are you New Orleans?"

"Yeah - it's like at all complicated but rounds to yeah."

"Enclaves are useful enough for complicated to be worth it," she shrugs. 

"They've been very nice to me. Though it's small enough I don't have any yearmates, and I'm not authorized to hand out a slot, so."

"So you won't get any minions who think they can cozy up to a bigger enclave, that still leaves plenty."

"I mean, if I desperately needed someone specific I could offer to insist to my aunt that they should have my slot. I don't want kids and I won't be an hors d'ouevre any more on the outside. But it wouldn't be a guarantee. I can recommend people for interviews, Evelyn promised she'd interview anyone I promoted to her attention, but that's a very flimsy offer. We'll see how it shakes out, I guess."

"Lots of kids won't get any better offers than that," she predicts grimly. "I don't know that the other thing would work, it--doesn't sound like the kind of thing people follow through on."

"I really really don't want kids! I don't know why any wizards have them and yet here we are! My mother tells me I was a surprise, but still."

"Mum decided she was willing to risk it once--having twins was a surprise--but she spent several years before that and then the next fourteen years working her ass off to give us every advantage she could, like, we had enough mana on us for another kilo of weight allowance working her ass off."

"You seem very nice and I am glad to make your acquaintance but did she consider visiting an orphanage!"

"You know, I suspect she literally did not. ...Everyone's got blind spots."

"I guess. I will take out an ad in the journal of maleficaria studies or something. Public service announcement, orphanages exist and the children in them have normal life expectancies."

"Well, even if I die tomorrow I don't regret existing, but yeah, that is an excellent idea."

"Thank you."

"Perhaps if we get out we can point it out to her and then acquire the little siblings we never expected to have. Somehow I feel kinda pessimistic about it catching on in general though."

"Yeah, probably. But if there were even just slightly less competition for slots..."

"It wouldn't be nothing. It probably wouldn't be a good thing if everybody decided to stop having kids, anyway, you know how magic is, I bet we'd get a boom of doomed muggleborns in response."

"Yeah, I don't think we should coordinate to drive ourselves extinct even if that were realistic, but on the margin."