"Would you have actually watched the movie, if it hadn't been Legally Blonde?"

"I mean, obviously not, I think I had about ten free minutes last year. But I could have studied while existing in the same room as a movie that wasn't Legally Blonde!" 

"Are you going to want, uh, some time off?"

"I'm not sure. Everyone keeps telling me I should. But it's been so long since I wasn't working like that, I think it might be better for me to taper off instead of going cold turkey. Besides –" he can't imagine sleeping for a year no matter how much he'd like to because Naima is basically a slave in Paris and the idea of letting her work off the indenture alone makes him sick to stomach. "There are some things I need to take care of that'll be easier if I have a job." 

"You can work, like, normal hours. Like sixty, seventy a week. Everyone'll be very impressed with your diligence and that still leaves like eighty hours you aren't working in."

"Maybe there's a way for me to start out working part-time. There's still so much I have to learn about enclave construction before I really get going." Julian does not, in his heart of hearts, believe this. But there are adults who've been working on this stuff for twice as long as he's been alive and probably they have a thing or two to teach him. 

"Well, it's up to you," Julia's mother says, "but I promise they won't run off and do it without you if you take some time off. Or part-time. Shall we eat?"

"Yes, let's!" 

For an appetizer, La Grenoille has sent chilled terrine of fois gras with pear chutney, lobster medallions with avocado, grapefruit, and vegetable vermicelli, artichoke heart carpaccio and smoked salmon blini with caviar. Julia eats without making a face for the first time Julian has ever seen her.

It's all very good, except for the combination of lobster and grapefruit (kinda weird) and the foie gras (great). 

"This is incredible – how does delivery to the enclave work? Do they think it's a residential address?" 

"They think it's a business. There's a service entrance for deliveries and then enclave staff do the last-block delivery, or you can go pick it up yourself if you order something at an odd hour."

"Wow. Just how many staff does this place have?" 

"There are about a hundred researchers, about a hundred people on education, and about - four hundred support staff. Not all of them members of the enclave; many of the researchers are here part-time for collaborations, and about half of the support staff are independent. The pay's good."

"We have nearly full-sized replicas of the shop and library, and full-size of the lab, and run weekend workshops for independent kids; staff gets their pick of them. And a lot of them are on long contract to be enclavers eventually."

They want so badly to be good people. 

And Julian can't say he blames them. It's not like he turned down his chance at a New York slot.  He can tell himself it's because of the kids (which is true), and because the best thing he can do with his affinity is work on the Scholomance expansion team (which is at least highly probable) – but it's certainly convenient how it requires him to live in a nice cushy enclave and do cutting-edge magical research with the greatest sorcerers in the world. 

"My dad used to work for Hong Kong enclave. Mundane wealth management. The really strange thing is that I think he actually likes it, he cares about things like spreadsheets and exchange-traded funds." 

"Huh! You know, mundane wealth management is what funds the enclave. They pay tens of millions of dollars a year for the fastest cable connection under the Atlantic so they can get news from London a little faster than the competitors."

"That's – really? It's a shame you can't put one through to Tokyo or Shanghai." Hong Kong might actually go for it, on the mundane end it's the third biggest stock exchange in Asia and the enclave leadership is always looking for ways to assert their independence from the Shanghaiers. And he could go home on weekends. 

"There've been conversations. It takes a lot of trust, of course, on both sides, but when you can pull it off.... what we have with London is that one of the exits to the London enclave is anchored on New York, not anywhere on Earth at all. The ultimate protection against getting destroyed in the Blitz."

Wow. He'd always assumed the trans-Atlantic portal had physical anchors at both ends. Maybe there really is something for him to learn here. 

"I'd love to know how they did that." 

"If you're getting any diagrams out of the library you have to wait until after dinner," says Julia, who is feeding lobster to Trisket. "Household rule. No enclave diagrams at the dinner table."

"No diagrams. Cross my heart. It'll be easier now that I'm not having them foisted upon me with absolutely no provocation." 

Over sautéed frog legs provencale and grilled hanger steak and sole dijon hollandaise, Julia's dad will explain how the trans-Atlantic portal works!

This time last week Julian was eating reconstituted nutrient paste while going over the plan for the 700th time. It doesn't feel totally real. 

Julia has four glasses of wine, after which it starts to feel very real, because if she'd ever felt like this in the Scholomance she'd have been dying. 

Julian has one glass after which he cuts himself off in a slight panic because if he ever felt like this in the Scholomance he'd have been dying. 

Drunk Julia is even bubblier than normal Julia. She entertains her parents with very scrubbed anecdotes about school and at the end of the evening when Julia is leaving she gives him a very long hug and a kiss on the cheek. "We should invite Naima too next time!" she says after she does this, so her mom won't get confused.