"Came in with a lot of deadweight and made some deeply questionable calls, geopolitically speaking, to try to carry them through. Nobody had to be executed by a student tribunal but it was a near thing."

“…Wow. Uh, is that a thing that happens, uh, often? Tribunals executing someone? I can see the danger level really encouraging it or really discouraging it, either way.”

"It's very rare, actually! Mostly people are too focused on their own survival to even attempt to call a tribunal and somebody has to be really dangerous to get such a call taken seriously."

"Yeah, that's one of the scenarios I had in mind, the other was one where it was really easy for one person to make things worse for everyone so things were really authoritarian." 

"It's not very authoritarian at all, really, there's no single central power. There's enclaves but they only have so many tools with which to govern their own."

"Could be worse."

"...could it?"

"You could have all the problems you currently have and also an authoritarian regime. I'm damning with faint praise, here."

"I guess an authoritarian regime could make nuisances of themselves in between crises in which such a thing would be useful. But the big Anglo enclaves wound up pulling together over Shanghai's thing, anyway, went around questioning people, cornered everyone who looked iffy in shop class..."

"When we have solved all the problems this thing ameliorates I am going to set it on fire." 

"I don't think fire'll work, but I'm sure you can come up with some way to wreck it and we'll all be behind you cheering."

"I bet Eliza and Lanhua working together could make fire work once they've gotten better at elemental fire magic, sorceresses are neat like that." 

"I'll set up recording equipment ahead of time so I can send video to Mephistopheles to warn him to keep his hands off my man." 

"Is Mephistopholes likely to find destroying a large unpleasant building very threatening?"

"Might depend on how I destroy it and how magic it is." 

"Well, the building is very magic."

"So we'll see. It's not really the priority, anyway, compared to, uh," she makes a gesture of encompassing lots of things. 

"The school would have some remaining advantages if the death rate were solved and it would also make it possible to dramatically improve the school, albeit while reducing the incentive to do so. I do like being able to get spellbooks out of the Void, I think that's a Scholomance-only thing."

"I think Manchester's got that."

"Really? That was big of them, then, duplicating it for the school."

"I think it wasn't as obvious a jump over the state of the art till thousands of kids got access to it? It's probably not as impressive if you already have an enclave library and haven't thought about indies much."

"What's the void and how does extracting spellbooks from it work because depending on how it works, the implications I can see are...interesting."

"The void is - nothing? Not like, vacuum in space nothing, not-a-place nothing. The Scholomance and enclaves in general are built out into it. It's safer, for reasons. The library ceiling's void, the drains lead to the void, every dorm room has a void wall or floor or ceiling, etcetera. The school is able to maintain its own library, but in addition to that, it will respond to spellbook requests - and academic journal requests, though it doesn't manage to extend to dictionaries or novels or anything - by spitting out whatever you asked for from the void. It's opinionated, too, the way a lot of kids figure out their affinities is by looking at patterns in what kinds of things it seems to give them when offered degrees of freedom."

"How can things be built into it if it's not a thing at all?"

"Magic."