"Does anyone wanna help me build agglo terraria at some point? I have most of the stuff from my supply run but need brackets and hinges, and someone with more building-stuff practice to make sure my agglos will not all escape."

"Uh, maybe? Can I ask... why?"

"I want to see if I can poison them, starve them, or give them birth control, and if I can do any of those things it might replicate in other mal populations."

" ...huh. The idea is that something changed in the mal ecosystem and maybe it's time we tried changing it on purpose?" It's a very enclaver project but as enclaver projects go it's a very good one.

"I mean, I wasn't specifically inspired by the mal ecosystem having changed - if it had somehow always been like this and we still managed to be here today it would still be worth changing - but yeah. It probably won't work, but agglos are easy to find and harmless, so I want to give it a try. People handle infestations of rodents or bugs or deer or bears or whatever very differently from 'run away, kill them in single combat as you encounter them, or maybe feed them things you can afford to lose'."

"Mal birth control is a great idea if they reproduce sexually. I'd worry about analogizing too much from, uh, biology, though."  

"An agglo terrarium sounds tricky, you'd have to design it so that there's no way they can just take it apart. Maybe if it was mostly one big piece??"

"Well, we'll see if we can find anything, I guess."

"Oh, I don't think hardly any of them reproduce sexually, but magic runs on expectation and symbolism as much as anything else. I wouldn't bet very much on handing an agglo a condom or a blister pack of pills, but I'd bet a trip to the nurse to see if she can get me some. Sort of the opposite of putting out a dish of milk so they can feed on the intent, you know?"

"It'd be really cool if there turns out to be an angle on it. I will help out on the terrariums if you have a plan for people not thinking they're incredibly sketchy."

"Mostly telling everyone that I'm planning to keep agglos. Anyone who wants to see my agglos may to make sure I'm not hiding mice in with them and I will trade small things for agglos to populate them with."

"There's probably a version of mend-and-make that can turn a terrarium into one big piece of glass, but I don't happen to know it. ...You know, speaking of milk, I wonder what would happen if you found a way to breed more small mals. Give the big ones something to eat that isn't us." 

"Whether I want to do that depends a lot on whether mals can starve. If they can starve I absolutely don't want to feed them!"

"I haven't given this a ton of thought but it has always seemed to me like there must've been an extinction of some - critical ecosystem element - that led to the weird present situation where there are lots of mals around who mostly only eat wizards. We're not soft targets and that's not how you would expect an ecosystem to work and I think something must've happened."

"Does anyone know what it was? When the deaths picked up so much? I know in the history of artificing homework it was talking like wizards mostly prepared for fighting other wizards, so it must have been different at some point."

"The diversity of possibilities both for the past and the future is why I need four compartments, control group and birth control and poison and starvation. If a kid dies on my hall I may try to claim the room for more arms of the experiment but that's getting ahead of myself."

"I've always sort of assumed it started when mundanes really stopped believing in magic, or started believing in science, or mostly being literate, or something like that. Which would also fit with when the Scholomance was constructed, I think.  If you assume this is all happening around 1800, and then things get worse, and the school is built a few decades later – the thing to do would be to look up mundane literacy rates or education levels and compare it with mal deaths in a given area but I have no idea if those statistics even exist." 

"Huh. Sounds like a senior project if they do."

"It's gotten worse since then, too. Indonesia had - naturally occurring enclave religious orders, until the 1990s, and their death rates just got steadily worse and worse until they were overrun entirely..."

"Seems like a post-graduation project, since it probably won't help that much with surviving - except of course you won't have the library once you're out..."

"Lots of things happened in 1800, but I guess that's probably a major contender. You think they - what actually is the mechanism, there, did a lot of the smaller ones just stop existing when people stopped believing in them? And the bigger ones could hold on without belief? And people believe in magic less and less over time?"

"...if that it's then it would've happened later, in Indonesia..."

"Maybe the food chain used to rely a lot on disease deaths and stuff?"

"Do we know that it happened the same time in Indonesia as everywhere else? Or at the same rate?"

"I think 1800 is a good candidate for when it started but any theory also has to explain why things are getting worse and why they're getting worse uniformly, not just in places that are less literate, or more superstitious, or still believe in demons or something."