"I'm not sure of that but at any rate hopefully we can do better."

"Yeah. Well. Maybe between the witches and Orion Lake and the Shanghai dominus we can take out Patience and Fortitude and it won't matter."

"Patience and Fortitude?"

"Nicknames for the two big maw-mouths that hang out next to the graduation gates."

"Ah."

"Where do maw-mouths come from?"

"I don't think their reproductive habits have been widely studied but most mals are magic gone wrong - or intended wrong to begin with - if you trace them back far enough."

"Eugh."

"Are there books about them? Have they been studied at all? Or is everyone afraid to get close enough to look, because that would be reasonable."

"There's a Journal of Maleficaria Studies. But maw-mouths in particular are not much studied for safety reasons."

"I can think of ways to try to get around that...but it's better if the honey plan makes it irrelevant."

"Here's hoping."

Melody: Professor Agrippa, I've got a draft of an advertisement to participate in the honey trap, how does it look?

Belladonna Agrippa, Professor of Divinations: Hm, not the most polished it could possibly be, and we could use more detail before widespread recruitment starts. 

Melody: Yeah, you're right.

"Do you have any thoughts on, like, what would be a good place per-continent to set the trap? It seems like not only should it not be inhabited it would also be nice if the mals weren't trampling over anything tasty on the way there."

"A honeypot done sufficiently emphatically should prevent them from taking potshots en route, and they'd be coming from all directions, but probably you want something a ways off from the nearest major cities so you can pull from those."

"Fair enough, I don't know much about honeypots. Maybe...somewhere in Arizona? Arizona has lots of uninhabited desert, right? I'd look it up but my phone doesn't work here." 

"And there might be political as well as practical considerations, if any enclaves we talk to decide to have opinions."

"Yeah, I don't know how Phoenix would feel about honeypotting nearer them than anyone else. Also mals don't have infinite travel speeds, we might need to do this more than twice a continent. And might want to start somewhere relatively smaller scale like an island which will have a limited mal population so we can gauge our operational effectiveness."

"Inconveniently the concentration of mals is likely to correlate with the concentration of wizards, geographically." 

"Maybe we can set up a test run in Antarctica once we've been using it as a jumping-off point long enough for mals to plausibly notice."

"Maybe. Or if the mals don't notice Antarctica in a reasonable time frame we could go somewhere remote in Alaska."

"Mals are more likely to come through the portals than across the ocean, right? --You know, we wouldn't necessarily need to do this loads of times if we had a bunch of portals set up between the honeypot and all the places."

"...ooh, good point. You could just summon them all to Antarctica, number of portals open depending on what clip they come through at..."

"At that point we'd want to build a permanent structure with some kind of protection from the elements, that'd be more cost-effective than covering every individual person every individual time...it would be good to have portal-makers involved other than Mom, especially if she wants to fight, those we would probably want to bring to all the sites we wanted to open portals from, that's more reliable than the mental image method if you're not using it immediately..."

"We will want to get a big map and a heatmap of mal prevalence from the latest Journal."

"Ooh. How hard is this Journal to get ahold of?"