"I think we should pause the awakening and I should sacrifice a few disk drives, then, for convenience. Do you have a Witchipedia counterpart?"

"Like, a wiki by and for denizens of the supernatural world? There's two, in a little friendly competition: our Encyclopedia Amazonica and the Romans' Natural History. Plus the monster forums, but even I haven't managed to score a password to any of those."

"That sounds right. Arcadia runs ours. And those should work."

Is it obvious how Raven drops out of awakening?

Yes.

She drops out, then! What are Imrijka's disk drives like?

"I was actually thinking that the Amazons probably had spare drives available to put archives on."

"Ah! Yes, absolutely."

Raven leads her to a room filled with workstations, and logs into one.

"Consider yourself to have functionally unlimited space. Information is our most valuable resource, and we won't pass it up."

"We want the encyclopedias you mentioned, the human Wikipedia, and anything you think is relevant to computing and military technology. And, you know, other nonfiction wouldn't hurt."

"Um. Do you guys have shadow libraries for academic papers, and what are your thoughts on the ethics of them?"

"Shadow library … is this about piracy?"

"Yes."

"So, different factions take different stances on the matter. Hawthorne doesn't see itself as having a responsibility to compensate humans for their works, but also doesn't focus on covering modern Earth concerns in great depth, so they're mostly not that opinionated. They certainly don't care if students do it. Lunabellans tend to think that if humans publish things you want, you should pay for them, and if you don't, you look poor. Some people raise concerns about hypothetical Awakened authors getting mad about piracy, or weakening cosmic principles towards order, but I'd be shocked if 'but it makes you look poor' isn't the overwhelming consideration. On the other hand, Arcadia has professors who developed a 'HexVPN' relic which allows for access to a lot of computer content, and they've never asked me to discourage warlocks from piracy when mentioning the relic. Your inferior counterparts probably don't really have a moral stance but they in fact offer somewhat similar items which just have them paying for the user's television, because they value the opportunity to monitor a witch's computer behavior fairly highly. Probably the Watchers are against it and Hespatia and Alfheimr don't care, but I don't actually know."

"Well, like your Lunabellans, we have a faction around here that's like 'what are we, poor?', and then we've got another that's like 'paying mortals for shit we could instead steal is just giving more resources to the rebel provinces to use against us', but the upshot of it all is that I can give you either the complete collection of basically every academic paper ever published or the somewhat smaller curated collection available through New Rome University institutional access."

"I have limited patience for sacrificing disks, let's do the smaller one."

"Legit. The Romans have a good selection, if you had to recreate our civilization from scratch you'd have everything you need."

"Wow, your civilization specifically? Anyway, I'm going to want to cut up the relevant disks. I realize this will just shatter the disks into pieces that don't follow the path of the scissors, but it's more ritually appropriate. You should probably pick a space for that."

"We have dedicated rooms for performing magical rituals! The provided materials and safety precautions are geared towards our kinds of magic, of course, but one has been reserved for you. It's Magic Lab 104, I can lead you or you can use the map."

"Let's try the map."

"All right! You can text me when you're done in there, then; do you have my phone number?"

"I'm not sure, I just got issued this phone. Do you specifically prefer texting over Sending?"

"Like, magic communication? I'm cool with that as long as it's reasonably user-friendly."

«Right now you can't reply, unfortunately, but it's very straightforward.»

Raven pulls out her phone and types for a minute.

<Our gold standard for magic messaging is Iris-messages. Throw a drachma in a rainbow and pray to Iris. Something along the lines of 'O goddess, accept this offering' and then 'message to Raven Christina Reynolds' or 'Amazon Seattle HQ Room 307 passphrase unfixed-villain-curry-playtime', for example. As our honored guest, you get a stipend denominated in Bitcoin; you can pull it out at any ATM marked on your map, as drachma, denarii, USD, or actual Bitcoin.>

Imrijka looks at her phone.

"It seems I can receive text messages from you. Anyway, Iris clearly has advantages in, say, delivering messages to targets besides specific people, but her protocol sounds expensive for messages between two people in the same building."