"You're welcome. I don't want to hurt anything, I just also don't want to let go of my children so easily after four years of being uncertain if I would ever see them again."

"That is totally reasonable of you."

So, so reasonable. The portal to Devonshire and Notting Hill both snap closed. Chu Wanning discreetly squeezes her daughter's hand. 

Squeeze. 

"Should we contact Boston with a 'hey we might have a fix for Annisa' before or after we actually fetch said fix."

For insane unbelievable reasons you can choose to postpone learning about if you wish, there might be a fix for Annisa in the works - possibly expensive but probably not specifically expensive in mana. Can I drop by your enclave sooner-than-seems-likely to talk about it or are you in full decompression mode

I want to know everything you know about possible ways to get Annisa back. Feel free to come over if you want, but we don't have her here so if you need someone to take a look at her we'll have to set something up with her parents.

Text me a pic of the enclave entrance?

That's weird, but it's not like it's a secret. Picture.

She glances at the picture and opens the rift. 

Marcy is there, holding her phone, except she immediately drops it and throws up a shield with a yelp of French. "What the fuck?!"

"- hey, sorry, it's just me and some of my friends and the implausible witches from another universes I picked up."

"Okay. Okay." Down comes the shield. "Sorry, still twitchy. And the implausible witches from another universe have really good healing?"

"Yes, up to and including resurrection but currently it only works with remains. They are actually better at almost everything than us except for specifically mana storage, which they normally do in an inefficient and silly way."

"That's amazing," she pronounces decisively. To the implausible witches: "What forms of payment are you interested in? Mana storage? Mana? One of this planet's mundane currencies?"

"We want support for our plan to use our massive amounts of mana to eradicate this planet's monster population." 

"The reason we don't run honeypots until they finally work once and for all is resource limitations, right? One of the things some of 'em're better at is generating mana fast, so if we give some of those power sharers..."

"Being a witch is, uh, not...fraught...like being a wizard apparently is, I'm the oldest of eight and have never once in my life entertained a serious expectation that any of us would fail to live to adulthood. Finding out that this was different for wizards was concerning! We would like to fix it. I'm playing mana battery, I have three different ways of accumulating mana charge and one of them is 'zero to full in a couple of minutes of getting petted.'" 

This sounds increasingly way too good to be true but Bella would not jerk her around pointlessly and they did just casually do a long-distance portal.

"That would be amazing if you could pull it off, and if it's the best way to help Annisa we're on board. I can get information on how many mals there are in various parts of the world and what locations would be good for a honeypot based on what rate you think you can handle at once--did you get Orion Lake on board yet, he'd love this--and I can set you up for a meeting with the enclave council, they'll be able to get you good mana storage if they think the overall plan is viable." She says like she definitely did not just remember the availability of adults midway through that sentence.

"I have not yet contacted Orion directly, I didn't really have New York friends to go through."

"I'm on speaking terms with Julia Sanderson but not, uh, springing massive worldview changes terms."

"If you have her number you could ask for the enclave number and we could see if they'll put Orion on."

"I am mildly concerned that she'll ask why and I don't think 'you literally will not believe me' is going to help our case. Especially since New York is lowkey paranoid about another enclave poaching Orion."

"'There is a honeypot operation in the works and we would like to float the idea of hiring Orion to him'."

"--Okay, fair enough."

She pulls out her phone and dials Julia.