"I received the student handbook, and read some things online."

"I didn't realize there were websites about the school, was there anything especially interesting there?"

"A surprising amount of it was about snack tokens, but it also explained the room numbering system, gave advice on course selection, and had some tips for maintenance students about checking broom closets and so on."

"I suppose it's a bit late to ask for advice on course selection. I wonder why people were so focused on snack tokens."

"I imagine it becomes steadily more important to have some better food. Though I did not find any accounts of the machine dispensing fresh vegetables, and those are what I will miss, I think."

"Yeah, variety is nice. I wonder if we could grow vegetables or if that's impossible for some reason. I guess we'd need seeds and people probably didn't bring those."

"Maybe someone with the right spells could convince a plant from the salad bar here that it was real and able to grow."

"That would be neat. I don't think I could do it though, my affinity is for wire not vegetables."

"Mine is weather. I could perhaps help, but not do all of it."

"That's an interesting affinity, I wonder if you'll be able to do mini-tornados when you're older. Those sound like they'd be fun to play with and useful for clearing a path."

"I could probably do that, given enough time to study and the right spell. At home I used to make it rain."

"That sounds useful too. I wonder if it would work in here to replace the showers in the bathroom. Probably takes too much mana to do it often."

"It depends on how much water there is to work with, so I cannot replace trips to the bathroom."

"Oh well, I expected it to be infeasible but it would have been cool."

"It would. If I had mana to spare, I think I could block air vents and keep the air circulating, but I don't at this time."

"I think a lot of us could do a lot more if we didn't have to worry about mana costs."

Nod nod. "If the induction spell didn't take it I wonder if things would be different."

"I hadn't really thought about that. I think it would probably be helpful but I'm not sure how long an amount of storage you can carry would last. At a minimum it would probably make your first year safer."

"Perhaps if the rule were something like, a student may bring any amount of stored mana provided an equal amount is donated to the school, there would be more total resources available to the students."

"That's a cool idea. I think that's why you get extra weight allowance but I think most people don't think it's worthwhile at the exchange rate the school uses."

"Precisely. So, taking weight in is very costly, but if the mana were donated directly, it would likely seem worthwhile. But perhaps it is too late to alter this school in that way and it will have to wait for a second to be built."

"Is that likely to happen? It seems like there's a lot of problems with this one but it was really hard to make."

"There is talk of it in China. Currently just a threat, but I cannot expect it will remain only a threat for long."

"Especially with what happened to Chicago."

"I hope a new school is the most that comes of that."