"You also need it for, like, airline travel, unless your enclave makes really great fake IDs. Otherwise, security looks at it, makes a face, and you have to get the spell off, go 'no, it's fine'..."

"Why can't people just get real IDs? There has to be some procedure to tell them your birth certificate was lost in a fire if you don't have one."

"If you get a real ID then your parents get in trouble for your truancy and stuff, and like, for your weird vaccination schedule...you don't want a legal identity, you just want something that passes muster when you wave it in their guards' faces." The girl has some popcorn from the vending machine and is snacking on it and then licking cheddar dust off her fingers.

"My parents have me registered as homeschooling! It's not that hard!"

"I was at lunch the other day," another girl says, "with a kid who said Child Protective Services threatened to take her and her younger sibs away, after a couple of them died. Can you imagine."

"Man, mundies. They're so intrusive and useless at the same time."

"They don't know." She shouldn't be getting into this argument, it is not going to improve her productivity or her lifespan, there are no mundies here to mind-control except the nurse. "I guess I don't have any siblings so I can't talk though."

"Yeah if a mundie family lost two kids they probably would be doing something horribly wrong. Anyway, it looks like it's low-mana if it's a small ask, wanna practice it on each other?"

"I don't see it coming up in the next four years, seems like a waste of mana. Also, fair warning, if you do it to me I'll just counterspell you."

" - uh. Okay."

What does she say. - does she have to say anything. Not saying anything is an improvement on "my cousin died of being mind controlled at the wrong moment" which isn't even true. She moves closer to Caio.

"I'm not, like, trying to fuck with you," the girl says defensively, but lets it drop.

Oh good. She could probably get access to Suze's notes another time but it'd be inconvenient.

When she leaves the study session Annisa waves at her and Caio; the Group has secured a large carrel, this time, in view of the main reading room, and are plodding their way respectively through math, French, composition, and horrible Persian medicine.  Then Annisa notices she looks kind of mad. Well, probably she's not mad at Annisa. 

"Hi Annisa."

"How goes it."

"Oh, can't complain, just learned a spell to seize the thoughts of mere mortals and slave them to my will, you?"

I think my dad used to use that to get tourists to buy us mangos, Annisa doesn't say because one Bella looks pissed about it and two it's a weakness, and you don't just say those. 

"I didn't know there was a class on that! I am, as ever, learning French."

"It's intro incantations, I don't have it this semester so I'm in a study group to grab all the spells and maybe do some of next semester's homework early. You will presumably get it in a few weeks."

"Are you worried about people fucking with your head? There's that Chicago mundie who trails cheerfully around behind Incredibly Bad Vibes Girl, I've wondered...."

"I don't think I've seen them, actually. I'm not - especially worried about it happening here, but, like, the poor mundies - actual mundies I mean not muggleborns -"

"If you get a spell for checking we could check each other?"

"Don't have the spare mana for being paranoid."

"One of my eventual plans - which are more like dreams at present, to be clear - is for the divining knives to light up when other peoples' magic is active. You know, so you can be paranoid for a one-time cost and then on the margin for free." On the margin is a terminology from Naima's Econ class and Annisa likes it very much; it's the sort of thing there obviously should be a word for.

"Oh, that would be cool. Maybe I can get something like that in shop next semester, seems like the sort of thing I should be getting."

"It really does!!!

...do you imagine the mundies mind it, or is it just - that even if they never guess and it's not unpleasant that they weren't really alive for a bit in there -"

"I assume it varies a lot? People do that - vary a lot - and so do the use cases, right, and I can't exactly ask them, at least from here."

- nod. "I think if I were a mundie I would - mind if it meant I had to wonder later if I could trust myself to act in the expected way - like, not giving all my money to random beggars - and not mind, like, being made to not notice something is weird - better not to notice something is weird, right -"

"It's in fact safer not to know that something's weird, but that's - not always what people are focused on, right, and also that just adds another layer of things you're hiding from them to make things go how you want. I never had to use it but I had a little - speech, prepared, for if anybody at school saw something that made it look like more than me being a wildlife magnet was going on. Referenced a movie and everything. To let them pick, since some people are mundies and do know, like my dad."

" - so wait, what does the spell do?"

"Makes the target suggestible and forgetful so you can say 'this is a valid license' or 'that was a dog that got off leash but its owner took it away' or 'we've just been sitting here in silence the whole time'."

"And that's... bad?"

"Most things the spell could be used for are bad and I think the rest are arguable."

"Huh. Seems like it depends on what you're using it for."

Julian looks up from his math homework. "I thought people mostly use it for normal stuff? Like getting a job or if you need mundie prescription drugs, things like that." 

"I mean, yes, that's typical. It's also, uh, stealing. And/or fraud."

Annisa's pretty sure you can only have norms against stealing within societies, not between them, but she isn't sure saying that would contribute to the conversation.

"Well, yeah, but it seems weird to object to mind control because it enables theft. I mean, if you're going to take issue with anything in this scenario." 

"Yeah, I acknowledge I would not have the same problem with someone who stole from mundies by telekinetically picking their pockets. I think that mind control is extremely invasive and to the extent it is ever defensible it is because it takes the interests and preferences of the target into account, and 'stealing' is a pretty straightforward case of not doing that."

Annisa contemplates whether there is any way to say 'this sounds like ethics?' that doesn't come across badly. She can't think of one.

"Does that also apply to violence? Or is mind control consistently less defensible than violence?"

"I mean, both of them come in degrees, is there a particular case you have in mind -" Bella checks her watch; she can give this conversation a few more minutes.

"No, but I figure I would obviously defend myself from a mugger, and I would do it with a fireball if I had one of those and for some reason didn't have anything else, but I would do it with mind control first if I had that and thought it would work? Just doesn't seem like a different kind of thing, really. It's a way of resolving conflicts your way without resorting to violence; whether it's justified or not seems like it mostly depends on the kind of conflict."

"It mostly seems different to me in less directly hostile contexts. You aren't going to fireball an airport guy for wanting to look at your ID even if that's all you have, right? It'd be too escalatory, but wizards pretty casually use mind control for stuff like that."

They did mind control airport security when they flew to and from Paris, scanning the wide open room and eying the hundreds of luggage containers for mals that might be waiting to pounce through her mother's mobile wards, her mother gripping her hand tight as if that on its own could keep her from being snatched away, no matter how casual she'd meant to be about losing her.

"Well, how badly do I have to get on the plane, in this scenario, and is there a way to fireball him that doesn't also make getting on the plane impossible."

"...Uh, okay, maybe you would murder a gate agent to get on a plane? Learn something new every day, I guess."

"Well, it depends on the plane."

"I have not met any planes I would commit murder to board but I'm sure I could dream one up if it were an assignment. I should probably go back to my own reading room and do," econ, but if she says econ she might have to continue interacting with Naima, who apparently would murder dudes to board planes?? she needs to process that before resuming studying econ with her?? "Old French."

"All right! Good luck with it," she says, and returns to her flash cards.

Caio, who has spent this entire conversation making increasingly concerned and bewildered faces, trots after Bella.