"Or a scam to get the void to cough up chocolate."

"That's fair, it did cough up chocolate at least once that I heard."

"I don't have nearly enough context but the concept of pretending to do group therapy in order to trick the universe into giving you chocolate is great."

"To trick the school, mostly, the Void surfaces around the Scholomance dispense what it wants to give out. They had the school nurse on board before she died and she was able to get medical supplies and convinced it that chocolate was a psychiatric medical supply."

"Bonus sorry about the nurse, nurses are great."

"They should really have planned an exit strategy for the nurse."

"Ooh, people in charge the nonconsensual human sacrifice types?" she winces. 

"Not usually as far as I know!"

"So is the nurse an exception or do they find volunteers?"

"Nurse is - not spun as a human sacrifice, the idea is that the nurse will be able to help keep some kids alive who'd otherwise die of the flu or whatever, but. No exit plan. Nurses aren't equipped to survive in there, let alone graduate. So in practice a new one dies in there every year and a new one gets inducted the next time."

"I see."

"Anyway, they think they might be able to put together mana storage more time-efficient than Kisses."

"--Ooh, really?"

"It's not something any of us already know how to do - or, well, the really high end kind, we can all make a crystal that leaks a little but at least doesn't take extra minting time as long as you focus on it while you build the mana - but I've at least set up a proper power sink you can access with a sharer remotely, deposit and withdrawal."

"Innnnteresting, I know some people who might be very interested--there are some races of witch that have very low power storage but high power generation."

"...fascinating. Caio, do you have your -"

"Oh, yeah -" He rolls up his pant cuff, the relatively more intact one, and unclips a braided leather thong securing a chunk of white beryl to his leg. He holds it out to the witches. "There's not much in this, but can you draw on it?"

She pokes at it carefully. 

"Yeah. It's...like a kiss, but liquid instead of solid? It's not in discrete units."

"Yeah, we don't really have units that everyone can agree on, though sometimes you pick one for a given project just to have a benchmark. Can you put mana in it?"

"Let me try." 

It takes her a couple of tries to get it right, and then--it just slides in, like pouring a fluid instead of crystalizing it. 

"Beautiful. So we do not have much to sell but we have this, if my guess is right that that thing there is already less annoying than minting kisses? We can make those pretty easy and I can, if we are here long enough without interworld contact that you don't want to just hire an actual wizard expert, work on figuring out how to do a quality sink."

"I don't think Kisses are going to become obsolete, they're easy to use as money and there are relics to make minting them more convenient, but yeah, this is a game-changer."

"Maybe with a sink established the lucky folks who recharge with, of all things, sleep, can keep everybody with worse ways in mana."

"Hah, you think sleep is a good way of recharging mana? I mean, yeah, it's not bad, but a Mimi recharges to full just from having their head patted for twenty seconds."

"It takes longer to get to full for those of us who're hybrids with species with more capacity."