Illusions huh... that might mean he's tricking people into giving him money... she'll just not ask about that. She hasn't known him long enough to have any chance of talking him out of that. "What other things do you occupy your time with them since you said you didn't do anything full time?"

"Oh, whole bunch of things. Whatever I feel like doing, really. Trying to learn magic, gardening, my boyfriends, reading, exploring. Columbia has a bunch of tunnels connecting the buildings, and lately I've been looking for a way into the ones they've sealed off."

"That sounds fun, do you know why they sealed some of them off?"

"There was a student strike in 1968, the strikers occupied a lot of the buildings on campus and used the tunnels to move between them. And what I've heard is that they sealed off a lot of the tunnels after the strike to stop that from happening again."

"That's unfortunate. What have you tried so far?"

"So far I'm just mapping out the system and locating the access points. A lot of it is bricked up, but I'm hopeful some of the connections to the buildings might just be behind a locked door."

"Huh, that makes sense." Ring can you make a map of the tunnels for me without giving any visible sign?

"Scanning will cause ring to glow, although this is unlikely to be visible beyond gloves."

"I'm kind of surprised you took me seriously about the magic thing. A lot of people don't think it's real, or don't think I know anything about it."

"People don't believe in magic when Atlantis is real? And you did randomly show up in one of my classes. You seemed to be expecting something too and it definitely wasn't the lecture considering how bored you looked."

"It's not like anyone knows much about Atlantis, I don't really think it's existence is compelling evidence of anything. I did show up in one of your classes, but that could just as easily have been coincidence."

"...Unless whatever is interesting about you is so interesting that it couldn't have possibly been coincidence."

"I've visited Atlantis so I guess it's not as abstract for me as it is for most people."

"Oh, that is interesting. It's magical, I take it?"

How did she do that? Sid would give... at least two of his toes to visit Atlantis.

"They openly sell enchanted items and one of the people I met was going to school for sorcery. I don't quite know if the whole city is enchanted somehow but it is on the ocean floor and I don't think the pressure was as high as that would imply. It's possible that everyone there is just able to survive pressures that would kill a normal person."

"Are you able to survive pressures that would kill a normal person?"

"I expect so, I can survive a lot of things normal people can't. I've also been to the moon without a spacesuit."

"Sounds like a pretty useful superpower to have."

Something occurs to him. "You didn't see any wizards on the moon, did you? There are some rather persistent rumors."

"I didn't explore throughly but no."

"Hmm. Good to know."

He writes something down in his notebook.

"Don't suppose I could hire you to buy some of those Atlantean enchanted items for me?"

"Maybe, what kind of thing are you looking for?"

"A variety of relatively cheap stuff I can reverse-engineer. Literally anything would be useful, they've got to have a completely different style than anyone up here."

"I should probably check with some people but tentatively at least that seems like something I'd be open to."

"Oooh. It has been very interesting to meet you, Sapphire."

"It's been interesting meeting you too. Do you have some way we can stay in touch or should I just expect you to show up in my experimental methods class from time to time?"

"I'm still planning on auditing the rest of the class, and I'll probably be there for most of the semester. But I'll also give you my phone number."

He tears a page out of his notebook, writes it down, and passes it to her.