Welp. They'll try stuff, very patiently and carefully, and let their bereaved know that final results are still pending on the matter of resurrecting locals.

Nothing seems to straightforwardly 'fix' the odd mentality. They can be physically healed and can be knocked out and kept knocked out. Which might be necessary, since they'll all turn on the guy with the broken leg the moment they think they're unobserved.

Meanwhile, Samara Glory has acquired an orc acquaintance and a class schedule and attends her first lesson on magic rock prep.

Instructor Raunat appears in front of the class! She explains that she didn't teleport, most magic rocks can't, but she turned invisible, which most magic rocks can do. She introduces the syllabus: they're going to go over the capabilities of magic rocks both general and specific-to-your-wish, detour a bit into Magic Rock History, talk wish wordings, review Mîr protocols for magic rocks on and off duty, review safety stuff, and, throughout this entire shebang, they will be given various screening tests. Taking this class constitutes consent to be tested including in ways that may be misleading or deceptive; the tests are not expected to harm them or anyone else, and if something does go wrong, Mîr will cover fixing it, but being startled or feeling lied to does not count as harm for this purpose, they need to know that magic rocks aren't going to go home and abuse their spouses or gallivant off to uncontacted planets in Cube and fuck with the natives or something like that. The tests do not include mindreading unless you specifically opt into that for a slightly more streamlined experience.

Samara is fine being mindread. It's the correct aesthetic for this sort of thing anyway, if she is going to be tested body and soul. She thinks of herself as a reasonable, kind person, but most people do. Is she truly? (She doesn't interrupt the class or anything, instead waiting to find a place or time to indicate this.) 

They now have an icebreaker exercise; you are supposed to give your name and a little about yourself, such as what you hope to do with magic or what you're thinking of wishing for.

"I am Samara Glory, from the newly dubbed world called Spirit. My city paid to bring me back- But it was not enough, I have no emotional attachment to my past life with the standard resurrection, I lack my original soul. I know I loved my friends and my city, so I aim to fix it, and perhaps raise as many others as I can with my wish as well. This magic is beautiful, and I would bring it to my city as the first bearer."

Hers is arguably the most interesting blurb in the class.

When they're done with that Raunat goes over some classic magical girl powers - healing specialists, teleporters like Empress Lúthien, terraformers, the ones who wake up basement dwellers, and the one-off time dilation power of Empress Isabella "Gem" Swan. Some things - telekinesis, minor transmutation effects, basic healing, temporary hard-light objects and projectiles, the transformation itself, changing one's rock-self from ring to bauble to costume accessory, operating a body while in fact actually a rock - all magic rocks can do, and if you come up with another thing on a similar scale to those, you can probably do that too. Most magic rocks can also summon a thematically appropriate tool of some kind - historically this was almost always a weapon or at least something that could be used that way, but these days you see the occasional magic rock with a broomstick or a garden hose or a handbag or a mirror or a wand that isn't even big enough to use as a quarterstaff. Weapons are still common; while they'll be on-theme on some level having a sword or a gun doesn't strongly indicate that you're "supposed" to be a martial-oriented magic rock, and still less does a pair of scissors. Additional, heavier-duty powers are based around your wish: you can directly wish for a power you want, like Samara might want to be a resurrection-rock specced to the Spirit resurrection situation, and that will tend to give you an oomphier power than wishing for something unrelated and seeing what the power you get is. (Though that's not a guarantee - it's also very important how strongly and urgently you feel about something, both positively and negatively, and some people just seem to have higher native capacity than others. Gem's wish was not a direct wish for a power but she made it while literally watching the world be devoured by a monster and her power's very good.) Your special powers will be efficient for you to the point you can "fit" them into your maximum magic capacity; somebody else's won't be.

Questions?

Many, such as 'should she go out of her way to find a dead friend to regret', but none she wishes to interrupt the class for.

-Actually, she does ask if one can pick a specific implement somehow, or if it's random, or goes off aesthetics, or else how it it chosen?

Usually you will get something you find appropriate but it's not something you can directly wish for the way you can directly wish for a power.

Some other students have questions and Instructor Raunat answers them and then moves on. Magic rock history! The wish granting device appears to have been a technology of inherently magical aliens; they left some ruins but are not themselves resurrectable so far, and nobody knows what killed them. Most sapient species native to Mîr, except the wishbuilders and humans, do not have emotions, and emotions are, in the Mîr magic system, a kind of magical fuel; the wish-granter taps into, and confers powers that tap into, those emotions. After the wishbuilders were dead, another civilization, this one emotionless, found their ruins and their wish-granter. They found humans, prehistoric, and decided to turn Earth into a power plant: they'd use human emotions to fuel their own interests, granting human wishes and using the swing between the euphoria of a granted wish and the despair caused by running out of magic. Early magic rocks (they specifically tended to stick to teenaged girls) fought their despair-ridden "witch" sisters, generally never finding out about the connection, and at every step of the process Kyubeys (the created avatars of the emotionless civilization, designed to be appealing to human teenage girls) siphoned some off the top. As such, modern magic rocks can be more powerful at the high end than "classic" magical girls, though also the Kyubeys did a lot of selection for oomph and so many modern magic rocks are less so instead.

The multiverse continues to be a very strange place. The history feels deeply tragic, a machine using humans as tools. Like the Star Lords, who expected them to serve like slaves.

She started out taking notes but gets sort of distracted in parts of the history and doodles sketches of kyuubeys with slightly too wide grins and girls with grim determination in their eyes on the computer with a stylus. Never entirely stops paying attention, though.

They break for lunch and in the afternoon are all supposed to read mini-biographies of different magic rocks (there are more biographies than students, she can pick the one with the most appealing cover) and then have a discussion about their magic uses and wishes and what they would do differently and what's inspiring in their examples.

She picks one with a cover of the subject staring moodily up at the night sky.

Nastya Ivanova made her wish in 1795, rescuing her village from a year of bad harvest that threatened everyone's lives and health and ability to make it through to the next year. She had a falling out with her parents in the months following, as she kept disappearing to track witches down in more populous areas of Russia; eventually she stopped coming home, settled in St. Petersburg, and took up a day job as a baker, using her food-oriented magic specialty to make the work go quickly and leave her time to hunt. She was ultimately killed in a territory dispute between her and a pair of other St. Petersburg-based magical girls, and was resurrected by her younger brother after his great great great great great great grand nephew's chain of resurrections got that far back. Today Nastya doesn't do much magic rock stuff and operates a new bakery in Wish-Chicago. Her weapon was a sovnya, her gem was pink, her costume looked like a pink-and-green palette swap of a Snow Maiden outfit with apple blossom add-ons, with the gem mounted in the middle of one such flower in her hat.

She cries several times reading it. She's really lived a charmed life, hasn't she? Held up as architect and artist, admired and supported by a culture that likes what she did with her life.

For the discussion: Saving a village from starvation is a touching and worthy use of a wish. Starvation is a looming specter even for a mercantile city; Her grandmother died of it. Perhaps Nastya did not realize it was an option to wish for a better harvest for all of Russia, but it is easy to only care about those you know, it is easy to not understand just how big the world is - she lives in a bustling port city by such standards and she's only seen a tiny fraction of the world. It's understandable. She launches into a rant about how the whole thing is incredibly perverse and the Empress's victory is a great triumph and she thinks it lucky that Nastya never became a witch and how, were she in Nastya's place and learned the truth, thinks she would have launched herself at rivals without fighting very hard until one took her down.

Nastya probably did not have the option to wish for a better harvest for all of Russia; Russia is big and her feelings about the matter probably didn't stretch to that scope of wish.

Most of the other students (who are mostly orcs) chose zhop subjects ('zhop' being a term of art for specifically an orc magic rock), and those all wished more recently, usually helping set up orc colony planets or resurrection setups. Their backstories before that are mostly incredibly horrifying. One of the other humans in the class picks the Empress herself, and one picks Raine, who in an alternate timeline was instrumental to the salvation of the world though she is not even actually a magic rock in this timeline at all.

What?? Okay, she'll have to read more about this alternate timeline business later. She agrees that the backstories are incredibly horrifying, and she doesn't want to pick at the Empress's actions without giving that one a good read herself.

They have some time to read each other's booklets or the ones nobody picked if they like.

What is this alternate timeline thing about, does the relevant booklet say?

Yup, both Raine's booklet (cover: her with her wife and their kids outside their home in Reno) and Gem's (cover: holding court on her throne in her palace) explain that. Gem can turn back time to a save point, at will or if she dies; originally she was trapped in a loop of a maximum length of a month, trying to figure out how to save the world. In some instances of the loop she got Raine to make particular wishes that she thought might help; ultimately Raine wished Lúthien into the loop after Lúthien's portalsnake incident.

Hmm. Being a side-character to saving the world is not a terrible fate, if somehow disappointing.

Moving on.

Knowing what they know now with the examples of all these magic rocks what will they do differently and what the same when choosing their own wishes and subsequent trajectories?

She has to choose her wish carefully for maximum effect; Maximum that she can still emote strongly about. She'll ask for the mindless bodies of as many Spirit humans as possible, and remember her own suffering and the jarring disconnect between her past and current life, and fix them.

She won't deny that there is a certain appeal to the high drama of the past crisis, but it was real and severe and brutal. Definitely not something to actually hope for. The conditions are different now that there aren't any monsters killing people regularly, and no threat of turning into one. Fighting other magic rocks will not be necessary unless they commit more ordinary sorts of crimes; Even then, she's not a soldier and doesn't want to be one.

The examples of the post-monster zhops all seem fair and reasonable for the most part- Using the magic for good, but also maintaining time for oneself. She is not and could not become a do-good automaton that spends most of her time helping others. She is introspective enough to know she hasn't enough pride to stick to principles like that, or to take joy in selflessness without it eventually fading and becoming resentment. She'd probably be happy to help people, but knows she can't commit to doing so forever.

Mostly she wants to go do art and exist in her city, and help people in her city, and help people in her local culture group, and in her world, in descending order of how strongly she feels about those. Or, well, she expects those to be her feelings; She doesn't feel much for the city right now and that is wrong. The empress is inspiring; She does not have the same strength of will and pride to go to such lengths for worthy causes. But she can certainly heal people, or bring them back, perhaps.

Instructor Raunat asks if that means she's going to need a queue of people to ensoul ready by the time she's prepped to make her wish?

"I had intended to wish for the ensouling of a great many people; Not for the power to ensoul people. I do not think being the only one who can do that would necessarily be good for me. If I put myself into the position of doing things for others being something I must do, I will eventually break down over it. I nearly did in my last life, until I secluded and then set myself limits and stuck to them. Perhaps a power to ensoul would be different, since it's not - demanding of creativity in the same way."

"I can let the Imperials know you need a pile of people ready - might set them scrambling a bit. But you don't have to use your power even if you've got it. Or you could wish the power onto some volunteers."