But for the time being she's still enrolled, though she tends to neglect her homework in favor of working on spell designs to do useful things - to cover gaps in the peal of Bells's capabilities, to sell, to prove interesting theoretical points - and working on her fairy princess magic.
She's blocked on getting her fairy princess magic to produce any non-physical results, like verifiable luck or a ward. She's currently manning the store, rolling dice to see if she's gotten luck to behave this time. (Her luck charm, which would confound the results, is out of her hair and on the counter beside her so as not to interfere with the experiment.)
Darren's out at class, when they arrive in the storefront.
"That's me. And I have enough stuff with me to get started on fetching your daughter right away, and all I need from you is her full name. I should warn you that the spell does not behave completely predictably with respect to non-humans, at least non-humans who aren't witches like me. The first time I cast it on a mage, he came back without his magic and left a separate ghost, since mage ghosts more or less are their magic. His sister had to kill him so I could do it over again with a revised version. I don't have any good way to figure out in advance how the spell will work on Medallion critters unless a Medallion critter wants to visit my world and let my alethiometer look at them - and in my world, if you go there, your soul emerges from wherever it usually lives and turns into an animal." She gestures at Path on her shoulder. "Which has its own side effects, and the consensus seems to be that it's not worth it unless you're going to move there. So there could be some unanticipated side effect - or the possibility that it won't work at all - with your daughter."
"Unless you separate - which can be done with teleporting and then it doesn't hurt much, and which thirteen-year-olds of my species routinely manage the long way around within a few tries - your daemon will have to stay close to you at all times, within a few yards. You don't control what kind of animal you get; most of them are mammals or birds, but it is not impossible that you will get something like an insect, or - more immediately dangerous - a fish. If the daemon is hurt you are too, if he or she dies so do you and vice versa. If anyone besides you, other daemons, or in some cases extremely intimate partners touches your daemon it is incapacitatingly painful. And of course if you don't outright move to Chamomile, no one will know why you have whatever kind of creature following you around and your daemon will not be able to do his or her parallel socializing job." Ice pauses, then says, "You might not actually get one. In my world there are talking bears, and they don't have daemons, although they say that their armor is their souls. So you might be not-human-enough that Chamomile will let you not have a daemon."
"Physically moving away," says Path. "Zeviana and Lecasryn did it on ordinary ground, but witches usually do it in a wasteland up in the North where daemons can't go. The daemon's usually the one to change their mind, if one of them does. So that makes it easier to get it done on the first try."
"Okay, if that's the order you want to do things in," says Ice dubiously, and she goes back to thingamagjig twiddling. "Ah, here we go. Spell bugbear spell human same - it should work on her with no special complications, Phix will be thrilled - and we should go do this in Pantheon or Medallion, not here, unless you think she ought to have a daemon too."
It occurs to them both that they could ask each other's life stories - but that would mean they'd have to tell their own. Neither of them particularly want to, and neither care enough about the other's to ask. They can make conjectures.
Either way, they get along quite nicely. Babysitting will actually be viable now, though she'll take some time before heading home. She likes talking to her alt, and her alt's husband.