The kind of not New Orleans (or New Jersey, or Brazil) that they've landed in appears to be a lightly fogged meadow, right on the very edge of a natural and undeveloped hot spring. There are trees off in the distance, visible through the fog, but sparsely; not a forest. In almost but not quite the opposite direction there are vague outlines of what might be a skyline. 

"There's no way you busted the gates - and besides I saw the shimmer change shape, like it was supposed to -"

Caio hugs Bella. Squints at the skyline. "They have lots of - failsafes, if they could be nibbled away by agglos or by mals that adapted to suck mana out of artifice they'd be long gone. They're probably fine even if they were tripped up for a second. We're wherever the Scholomance is anchored, probably, we'll figure out a comm spell between us, we'll get picked up and helicoptered away with bags over our heads so we don't tell anyone where it is. If we can't just hike to the city."

"The - city? - why would they have put the Scholomance near a city -"

"Mundie meatshield?"

"Or the city's new."

"Well, it's probably a better bet than camping out working on a comm spell."

Approximately orthogonal to the line between trees and skyline, an oddly-dressed girl walks out of the fog. She's wearing a pink sundress with yellow and blue flowers embroidered on the skirt, and a pink flat-topped broad-brim hat with a cream hatband, a blue fabric rose on the left side, and a pair of cream cat ears. 

"Hey, are you guys okay?"

"- we're lost," Bella says. Most people wearing weird getups are just eccentric mundies.

Speaking of weird getups, they make a weird looking set themselves. Bella's wearing much-repaired tatter-hemmed olive green cargo pants, mesh pockets full of rolled and folded letters, a pen, a knife; a T-shirt that began its life navy blue but has since been patched in many colors; and sneakers, the overengineered kind that sometimes go for jawdropping amounts of money, in black with gold and coral red piping and accents and laces, none of which are a discernible logo. The shirt and pants have been embroidered to a degree of fine detail more appropriate to a wedding dress, over and around the repairs especially, though the thread colors are pretty eccentric. Her hair's in an amateur and rather aggressive pixie cut, clearly done with more of an eye to making sure her vision would never be impaired than anything else.

"Yeah, can you tell us where we are?"

Aadhya's clothes are in much better condition - she's got on a kurta over pants, the fabric blue with white hexagons printed on it or maybe woven directly in, and while it has a few carefully mended spots of damage and looks worn a bit thin it's held up all right to whatever these kids have just gone through. Her shoes, ordinary Converses laced with braided kitchen twine, are a mess, though, the sole half off the left one and the right one looking kind of charred.

Their companion has neither well-maintained shoes nor well-maintained clothes. His buttondown (black) has clearly been through the wars; three of the buttons don't match and one of them is actually a paperclip, and it's too small in the chest. It has some embroidery like Bella's, around the hem and repair marks. His pants, unremarkable khakis, have an incredible slew of stains on them on top of the holes in the knees and the six inches that look to have been burned off on the left cuff. His shoes appear to have once velcroed but have been adapted to some other closure method since then which is hidden under the upper.

"--You're on the campus of the College at Arcadia, did you...botch a rift?"

"Botch a rift?"

"You look like you just escaped from something actively trying to eat and/or ignite you, I was assuming you were trying to get from point A, attack, to point B, not attack but also not C of A. --Or last time you were here wasn't this cycle and the springs are confusing, which would be reasonable, I'm told most of the layouts are less confusing than this one. I wouldn't know! Freshman."

"I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"If this is a masquerade breach it is objectively not my fault. Um. You...do not recognize the terms 'rift' or 'College of Arcadia,' am I correct."

"I know the words..."

"- did you say 'masquerade breach' -"

"Yes. Humans not in the know are not supposed to be on campus, so it is not my fault if I said things I wasn't supposed to." 

"- are you trying to figure out if we're magic, or something else?"

Aadhya has been trying to hold the gigantic poison-tipped pike unobtrusively, insofar as this is possible, and isn't going to stop doing that yet, but it's nice to have a conversation topic about when she can put it down on the table.

"That is absolutely what I am doing. Or, whether you knew about magic; if none of you were witches but you had cousins who were and knew that way it still wouldn't be a masquerade breach."

"We're witches - or, well, wizards, but I guess some places they say witches -"

"So you're patched into enough of a network for 'they say' but not so you've heard of the College of Arcadia--if I say Hawthorn Academia does that ring any bells--"

"No - you guys? -"

"Are those, like, enclave schools or something, I just know enclaves by city name not by internal institution."

"We can't've ended up in an enclave, can we?"

"What's an enclave?"

"Wow, I really hope we didn't just breach masquerade at you. How does anybody on the planet who speaks English and is magical not know what an enclave is?"

"I don't know what that is to even guess! I've never heard a witch called a wizard either--do you mean, like, pocket dimensions, or like, uh--Hespatian Families--gosh, I sure wouldn't want to land on one of those--"

"Pocket dimensions. What is a Hespatian Family?"

"The Hespatians are...a big agglomeration of loosely-connected groups called 'Families' which have certain techniques in common. I've, uh, heard that they're not all evil, but the ones you hear about tend to be."

"Are they... from... Pisa...? They're not going to be from Pisa, are they, this is just not how this conversation is going. Are there fucking two masquerades. Are we now going to be vulnerable to some horrible witchy problem that your masquerade was supposed to protect us from."

"That, uh--don't look at Outsiders. Like, definitely don't do anything other than look, but don't even look if you can help it. That doesn't come up much, though--there are less psychologically hazardous dangers, though--but those don't come up much either. More often than outsiders, though. People tell their families and significant others all the time, it's not that big a deal, but I can't say there isn't anything. Why, what's yours protecting people from."

"...I feel like that is kind of a weird question to ask, considering!"

"Outsiders aren't on the top ten list of things I'd tell new witches!"

"I mean, our masquerade among other things is supposed to protect mundies from knowing about a thing that is more dangerous if you know about it, and I have no idea how that applies to witches but it is definitely not obvious that you should know about it."

"--Oh, I figured that if your masquerade was already broken on me it didn't matter, knowing about Outsiders in particular doesn't make you more vulnerable to them once you already know about witches." 

"I will try diligently not to encounter any Outsiders, though I haven't the foggiest how to go about that."

"They don't tend to be subtle. If you see something with too many eyes, run the other way. I can probably get you a textbook on Outsider identification if you want."

"Do they appear just kind of wherever? Among the cereal boxes, under the bed, in caves in Mozambique, what are we talking here."

"They appear where witches who have decided that 'become an Outsider cultist' sounds like a great route to power are fucking with shit. There aren't many places that are guaranteed one hundred percent Outsider free but in general anyone who hasn't lost all their self-preservation instincts who finds out about Outsider stuff is going to either kill it with fire or run off to find someone more powerful to do it." 

"Well, good to know that fire works."

"Well, you want to be real thorough, and look out for immortality methods, but yeah, fire, lightning, acid, your standard destructives work on Outsiders generally. Unless they're immune to whatever specific thing, but nobody's immune to everything." 

"Mm-hm. - so, I'm Bella, and these are my graduation allies Caio and Aadhya."

"I'm Eliza. Graduation allies?" 

"We just graduated from wizard school. It's dangerous. For masqueradey reasons. You go in with a team."

"Well. Uh, welcome to a magic school that isn't so dangerous you need teams about it?"

"Oh yay. Another magic school.

Does it have... phones. We could maybe call our parents who probably think we have all died what with our not having appeared."

"Oh, yikes, yeah--" 

She pulls a completely mundane phone out of her pocket, unlocks it, and holds it out.

Bella calls her mom's cell.

An unfamiliar voice picks up on the other end after a couple of rings. "Hello?"

"- hello? I'm calling for Renée Swan?"

"Sorry, I don't know anyone by that name." 

"Oh, I'm sorry to have bothered you." She hangs up, re-reads the number. "Okay, either I forgot the number or it changed for some reason - Aadhya, here -"

Aadhya dials her parents' house.

"Frankie's House of Pizza, how can I help you." 

"Wrong number, sorry." She hangs up. Gives the phone to Caio on autopilot.

"Uh, my folks are in Brazil, can this phone handle international all right...?"

“Yeah, we’re,” these people will have no idea what she means if she says hexvpn. “Yes.”

Then he will dial his parents in São Paulo.

The people on the other end are plausibly in São Paolo, but they are not his parents.

"...Desculpe, número errado."

"Caio I don't have Portu-

- oh."

"I... don't know why none of us would be able to connect - I can try my dad and my enclave, but -"

"We know whatever happened to Chicago hadn't escalated horribly as of a year ago...?"

"As of then, yeah."

"...yeah."

"--Something happened to Chicago?"

"To their enclave, I don't think it would've made the mundie news."

"Okay, that's good. Uh, not for the enclaves, I assume, but Chicago has a lot of normal people in it." 

"It does. Fortunately it didn't spiral out of control to the point where half of us got marching orders about it, and we don't know what kind of conditions that's turned into on the outside but it would have to be pretty bad to have affected all three of our families." She takes the phone back and tries her dad, and the enclave.

This gets random people who are not her dad or enclavers. 

"If you give me names, I can google to see if I can find any obituaries. If any of these people would have obituaries if they died."

"My dad's a mundie, he would - Charles Swan, Forks Washington?"

"Bella, I can't think of anything that would get all our families and your divorced mundie dad."

"Me either but..."

"No obituary. No other obvious hits either, I'm getting some kind of historical article about someone in Washington County, Pennsylvania."

"That's really weird."

"While we all meditate on this mystery, is there somewhere we could... sit. And food we could eat."

"Sitting down and food are trivial to accomplish; if you need longer-term accommodations then that's going to be slightly more complicated." She pulls a golden wand with a rose quartz crystal set into the tip out of thin air; a moment later and the wand is a broomstick with a much larger quartz crystal set into one end. She sets it into place in midair behind her and sits back sidesaddle on it. 

"- oh that's very cool."

"We are not carrying... currency... but are in theory ready to begin work as productive adult wizards? Though I think normally recently graduated adult wizards take, like, a gap year."

"I mean, my roommates and I can probably put you up for a while, but we would have to actually talk to them first. Things in Arcadia mostly don't run on human currency anyway."

"Is there witch currency? Wizards normally work on mundie money or mana depending."

"Witch currency is mana." She pulls a small copper coin out of her sleeve. "Witch Kisses, coins containing quantized amounts of mana. You can make them out of pure mana and pull mana out of them when you need it."

"- that's very cool."

"Is it lossy?"

"Nope. The main bottleneck is that if you don't have special materials or relics for it, it takes six minutes to make one Witch Kiss."

"How much mana is that - also, was there going to be food, I had a soda for breakfast and dinner last night and that's all and the adrenaline comedown is a thing -"

"There will be food when we get back to the dorms, I don't have any on me. One Witch Kiss is about a tenth of the mana needed to brew a rank-one potion, or a fortieth of what's needed inscribe a rank-one rune, or a fifth of the cost of a rank-one hex."

"Very neat and tidy sounding, your system."

"Are we meant to ride the broomstick?"

"No, sorry." The broomstick starts moving smoothly in the direction the crystal is pointed. "It's just that there are enough springs that the ground is uneven enough I'd rather ride than walk."

Well then, they'll set off on foot. "Are springs also a witch thing or does a lot of water bubble up out of the ground?"

"Well, uh...actually this is a pocket dimension that changes the terrain every cycle, and this cycle somebody picked a hot springs theme. Uh, a cycle is a three-month academic period."

"I realize we have now said this to you several times, but that's very cool."

"Yeah, our school is nowhere near that nice."

"I sort of picked that up from the graduation you need teams to survive, honestly."

"Graduation all by itself kills fully a third of the kids who die at our school, the rest of it is less of a horrorshow. Or, like, at least a much more spread-out horrorshow."

"...How...many deaths are there total."

"Usually it's like one in four make it out?"

"Our year was better though, for idiosyncratic information-hazardous reasons."

"A seventy-five percent death rate!? Why the fuck does anyone go there."

"Because it's about five times better than the death rate outside the school for the relevant age group."

"--You said families, earlier--is this hereditary--why do any of you have babies--"

"Good fucking question! I was an accident and for my own part plan to be extremely gay about it!"

"I think it's about the same reason anyone had - or, well, wanted, some people wanted them - babies back when infant mortality was awful for mundies? It's just kind of - normal - and some people have better resources than others for getting through the danger years -"

She makes a very complicatedly unhappy face. "Well--there's free birth control at Student Health, they don't exactly demand to see student IDs."

"Bella's gay, I have the implant, and Caio is far too awkward to have this problem."

"Hey."

"If I had a genetic condition with a twenty-five percent survival rate I would get a hysterectomy and then every sterility curse I could find. --But a reasonable person level of caution is also reasonable and I'm not judging you about it, just kind of freaked out." 

"Do abortions not work for witches?"

She makes a face. "They do, but I don't want to have one."

"Then if you were a wizard I would fully support you in having a hysterectomy."

"My parents sucked, I have issues, I am not judging anyone else's life choices."

"At any rate, uh, if we're - currently displaced - do you have a general sense of what our options are likely to be?"

"Honestly, I'd need to know more about your powers to get into specifics, but if you have different magic than us then that means comparative advantage, and that can be leveraged. I expect that you'll need a little while to get on your feet regardless, and I messaged my roommates and they're fine with you staying over at least for a little while but if there isn't some combination of two of you who can share a bed while the third takes the couch we're going to have to get creative."

"We all speak several languages, my affinity is metamagic, Caio's is complicated potions, Aadhya's is artificing with exotic materials. I don't think any two of us can straightforwardly share a bed but honestly the beds in the Scholomance are sufficiently awful that whoever draws the short straw will be grateful for a nice floor."

"Okay then, one of you can sleep in my bed, one of you can take the couch, and one of you can grab some floor. We might even be able to scare up a sleeping bag but I bet someone at least has a spare blanket and pillow." 

"Where will you sleep?"

"In my boyfriend's room."

"- god that's such a weird concept. Sorry. Scholomance thing. We will be on the lookout for things to do with ourselves that do not involve prevailing on the hospitality of the first person we encountered, thank you very much."

"Which thing is a weird concept, having an opposite-sex lover with whom it is theoretically possible for birth control to fail? Putting energy into relationships instead of being part of the surviving quarter?"

"Sleeping in someone else's room. It's weird in all possible cases but the case in which one ever even sort of thinks about it before realizing it is not to be risked is usually with people's significant others. People do date in the Scholomance, people do all kinds of things, but they do not have sleepovers."

"For...weird...infohazard monster reasons?"

"Right in one."

Headshake. "I would be so curious if I didn't know perfectly well not to fuck around with infohazards. Does that mean whoever takes floor is going to want to camp out in the kitchen instead of my room or the living room, so that everybody's in a different room?"

"I don't think it's quite that severe."

"Okay." She has more questions but they're either kind of personal or skirting on infohazardous. 

They emerge from the fog into an area with an array of low buildings, only two or three stories apiece, arranged mostly in a sort of grid pattern with a quad between every relevant combination of four buildings. Eliza hops off of her broom and dismisses it as soon as there's a nice paved path to walk on.

The Scholomance kids are perhaps overly enamored by features like "the sky" and "plants".

Well, the sky is fake, but it's a really good fake. 

Eliza leads them towards a dorm on the opposite side of this quad, past what appears to be a cross between a pokemon battle and a yugioh duel, in the sense that a charizard is wrestling with a red-eyes black dragon while two girls, one of whom has green skin, make gestures with cards and yell enthusiastically with each other. 

This gets raised eyebrows but no comment, since the people seem to be... having... fun?

"Digicasting," Eliza says brightly, "is the practice of using magic to manifest fiction into reality. --It's less overpowered than it sounds, there's a reason those two lizards are wrestling and not throwing exotic ranged effects at each other."

"It still sounds useful, depending on how long the lizards last and how tractable they are?"

"It's definitely useful! My boyfriend uses it for prosthetics on demand whenever it's useful for him to get out of his wheelchair and walk."

"...I realize we keep saying this, but that's very cool."

"That one I don't feel horrified about the implied comparisons for, it is in fact very cool."

"I kind of hope anything we can do is also very cool."

"I'm sort of curious what your potions can do and whether your exotic materials and our exotic materials have any practical overlap."

"An inconvenient number of my exotic materials are infohazardous."

"Potion ingredients usually aren't, though. Uh, potions can do a ton of things, and my affinity's about how they're made, not what they do when you make them, so it's sort of hard to sum up..."

"Innnnnteresting. Well, I wasn't going to ask to make a potion with any of your exotic ingredients anytime soon, because I assume that any you have on you are in highly limited supply, but I'd be happy to spot a few kisses for some inexpensive magic ingredients to see if you can do anything cool with them that we can't." 

"We don't have any raw ingredients on us, just finished stuff."

"I could repurpose a lot of it especially if Bella helps since she's got the good metamagic spells but yeah."

"Also, why are they called 'kisses'."

"I have no idea."

"I suppose I will just have to wonder, then. So this is a school? How's it - operate, as distinct from, say, a mundie college or something."

"There aren't any entrance exams or tuition; Arcadia will admit any newish witch who wants to come, and provides free room and board. The dorms are nicer than I'm led to believe human colleges have. A lot of things are more flexible; you don't generally have to fight with other students over the best timeslots for the best classes. The grounds change drastically four times a year. The teachers are here because teaching sounded like a good way to spend however big a chunk of their lives they wanted to, not because they needed a day job and college professor was what they qualified for. If you visit the chapel there is a non-zero chance you will meet someone who fought in the literal actual Crusades."

"- how's that last?"

"The chapel--it looks more like a cathedral, but it doesn't have a bishop, and apparently that matters--it's run by the Watchers, who are a group of Abrahamically-aligned religious witches. The Watchers are pretty old as an organization and apparently recruited from both sides."

"I suspect she was asking about the being hundreds of years old business."

"--Oh! Witches do that. Do you not?"

"Not routinely. We live longer than mundies on the high end but most research into making us die less focuses on. Teenagers. Considering."

"That...makes sense. Every race of witch except neutrals--humans--has their own innate way of not dying of old age, like, I'm an oread, I'm nineteen, if I stayed out of the ground completely for ten years I would age to twenty-four and then when I went to sleep buried I'd regress to twenty. And even for neutrals, there are magics that can prevent or reverse aging; they're expensive, but not so expensive that dying of old age is common."

"Wow. Do they only work on witches?"

"They do not." 

"That's very cool."

"I'm a fan! Ways to prevent or reverse death are sort of a special interest."

"You can reverse it too? Man, I'm starting to be concerned that in fact we cannot do anything cool!"

"It takes rank five magic, generally, and most people can't manage to get over rank three. Rank five alchemists make bank with their Arch-curatives."

"Rank is what it sounds like?"

"I think it sounds like what it is!"

"Wizards have nothing so tidy, unfortunately."

"I wouldn't have predicted it, before I learned magic was real." 

"You didn't know?"

"Nope. I was a 'natural' awakening."

"Wizards don't - awaken - just improve in mana generation over time."

"Witches awaken. It can be done manually, by another witch who knows how, or it can happen by itself, usually in response to trauma and adrenaline."

"Estimated time on food?"

"We're almost there." 

The dorm building has an elevator inside; she doesn't suggest using the stairs instead. They get out on the second floor, and after unlocking the door the first thing Eliza does is stride into the kitchen and fling open the snack cupboard. 

The suite has either five or six rooms depending on how you want to count them: four small bedrooms off the main common area, which contains a partially sectioned-off kitchenette. 

They all know what an elevator is, though none of them have seen one in the last four years. Flinging the cabinet open gets them all flinching but they chill out a moment later. And descend on the snacks.

The snacks have been selected with the gleeful abandon of college students able to brew curative potions if they ever encounter any kind of nutritional problem. Also, not all of them are recognizable brands. One jar of gummy worms warns that they invert your color perception. Eliza opens the fridge to pull out sandwich fixings, because in her experience when you're hungry sometimes snack foods just aren't enough and you want something more substantial.  

FOOD. REAL FOOD.

The door, not closed all the way, swings the rest of the way open as a man in a wheelchair knocks it aside. He pauses for a moment in bemusement at the sheer gustatory enthusiasm the three arrivals are displaying for perfectly ordinary sandwiches, before wheeling over. 

Eliza leans down to peck him on the cheek. "Hello, love. Sweetheart, these are Bella, Aadhya, and Caio; Bella, Aadhya, and Caio, this is my boyfriend, Johann Morgan." She pronounces his first name the German way, with a y sound.

"Hi, Johann. We had a graduation accident from our magical school from a different masquerade it is infohazardous to speak too much about certain aspects of, and are both traumatized and unable to contact our families, that's our deal."

"Eliza told me. I'm sorry about the trauma. And being unable to contact your families. But mostly the trauma, honestly." 

"Most people have less complicated relationships with their families than we do." 

"True." 

"I think all three of us were looking forward to seeing ours again."

"I'm glad to hear it. It may be possible for us to help you get home, but the risk of infecting our world with infohazard monsters is, I admit, concerning."

"Well, I haven't seen any yet? I don't know how encouraging to find that, I've never heard of this happening before."

"I don't think any of us know how to evaluate that. We should probably talk to, like, adults, who are experts on planar theory."

"If you have those then yes by all means."

"We definitely have those! Portals and Aethernautics are both fields of magic that should be relevant."

"You think it's another plane, not another masquerade?"

"It'd explain the phone."

"Well, other planes exist, and the phone thing seems pretty hard to explain just by separate masquerades, and the idea of separate masquerades requires that nobody managed to conjoin them before now."

"Or that previous occasions have been covered up."

"That's why I said conjoined and not punctured."

"I don't think it's that much more confusing than mundies not knowing in the first place? I guess it's probably easier to convince witches and wizards of each other existing."

"Once you've already passed through one veil of ignorance, the next one becomes more plausible, in my experience."

"But we don't have that. - usually, anyway."

"So it's only relevant one way, but it's still relevant the one way, some of the time. Anyway, regardless of how plausible it is for two ancient magical conspiracies to coexist in mutual ignorance, there's still the phone thing. We could probably get a Diviner to confirm."

"That sounds good, do you have one handy?"

"I'm taking a course on divination this cycle, I'll email my professor asking for a favor."

"Must be neat having teachers. Our school doesn't have teachers."

"...How...?"

"The school magically sets and grades assignments and stocks the library and suchlike."

"Why?"

"It doesn't really support a commute."

"In what sense?"

"The only time anyone goes in or out is when we're inducted, when we're fourteen, and when we graduate, four years later."

"And graduation is dangerous, even in teams. Brr."

"A while ago they modified the school to kidnap a mundie school nurse every year but they had no exit plan for those. They usually last about a month."

"I sent a stern letter out about that with a graduating team but I don't know if they lived to deliver."

"It sure would be nice if nobody ever committed a nonconsensual human sacrifice."

"Amen." Having demolished two sandwiches she sets in on a pack of snack cakes.

"If there's anything in particular you want, Melody has decided to go grocery shopping."

"- ice cream?"

"A pomegranate."

"Cheese."

"Got it," he says, definitely not getting out a phone or anything to legibly send this message. 

"You guys have some kind of comm spell running?"

"Sending is rank zero, which means it's pretty much trivial."

"Do you guys even have affinities?"

"--Yes but given the givens I suspect we mean different things by that." 

"Affinities for wizards are an area of spell that comes more easily and intuitively and cheaply. Everybody learns to cast out of affinity, too, but most actually useful things aren't trivial for most wizards. Or, well, wizards younger than us, we can probably relax about mana costs considerably more now."

"For us, affinities are a set of mostly-racial quasi-elemental categories that make it easier for us to learn certain kinds of magic. For example, I'm 'neutral'--fully human aside from the magic--which means that my affinities are soul and body. Other affinities include mind, death, beast, nature, life, blood, water, fire, metal, earth, and wind."

"...huh. At least most of those are plausible wizard affinities but ours're much more varied than that."

"There are also three basic categories of witch, according to how we learn magic--I'm a sorceress, which means I mostly learn magic through instinct and practice; the other kinds are academics, who learn magic out of books, and warlocks, who make compacts with greater beings for power."

"I suppose we're all academics by that scheme."

"Or at least, your magic is more similar to academic magic in that way. Some kinds of magic are also easier or harder to learn for one or another category. Like, elementalism is a lot easier for me because I'm a sorceress." 

"Manchester enclave had a water and a fire affinity in our year."

"Come to think of it, you mentioned yours earlier--metamagic, exotic materials, aaand potions?"

"Potions specifically created with stuff arranged around and not just in the container."

"That is...I am sure much less remarkably specific in your familiar context than it seems to me."

"It's 'arrays' and 'arrangements', depending on the stuff around the beaker or vat or what have you, and, yeah, there's lots of them."

"We have potions, and there are different ways of making them, and someone might have more talent for one method or another, but it wouldn't be--it would just be, like, having more of a knack for doing things one way than another, it wouldn't be more magically effective for them to do things the way they're more comfortable with."

"I mean, I'm not necessarily more effective at it? Somebody else's arrayed potion could be just as good as mine, especially if they had some other alchemy-related affinity but even if they didn't and were just good in the lab. It means I - remember how to do them more easily, and can push mana through them a bit more efficiently, and am less likely to make a mistake. It means I'm better at writing new recipes that way instead of a different way. But if me and Bella or Aadhya do the same recipe and none of us fuck it up the potion will be about the same."

"It also wouldn't cost less mana!"

"Do your affinities have nothing to do with mana efficiency or do they just not include stuff like Caio's?"

"There are ways to improve mana efficiency but none of them have to do particularly with affinity, so far as I'm aware."

"What does affinity do for witches then?"

"'Easier to learn' isn't just a matter of a knack like what I was talking about with potions. It takes me half as much practice to develop a kind of magic that's in-affinity for me as one that's not--and for an academic it takes half as much study and for a warlock, half as much favor from their patron. The practices we use to develop our magic give us a sort of--intangible resource, which can be invested to develop what we're actually capable of. An academic could spend weeks studying complex rank-five runic rituals, and at the end have moved from being capable of rank-one rituals to rank-two rituals. Most people can never move beyond rank three in any particular discipline."

"This intangible resource is a separate thing from mana?"

"Right. Mana is about using abilities you already have; this thing is about gaining new abilities."

"...huh. I think for us there's just - learning to do it, and then having enough mana to do it."

"That's definitely an advantage. --I wonder if your mana and our mana are similar enough that you can use Kisses."

"I'd be happy to try it, my power sharer hasn't worked since we graduated and I miss it already."

What a power sharer is is a question she can ask later. She pulls out a small copper coin and hands it to her. 

Bella takes and inspects it. "This is mana? What do you do to get it out, bite it or something?"

"--No, you just--draw on it."

She will attempt to draw on it like it is its own tiny power sink.

There is a little bit of mana in there! 

The coin vanishes when she pulls it out. 

"Ee! That's nifty. Barely a sneeze of mana, is it more for you than that -?"

"Nah, I gave you the smallest denomination of coin in case you couldn't use it but it still got messed up somehow."

"Sensible. It takes six minutes to make this? I think I could build that much mana in a minute and a half, maybe, if I went with a fast method."

"Generally it does! There are ways to cheat. But the fact that they're so inconvenient to mint is why they're so valuable relative to the amount of mana involved; I could regenerate from empty to full in, like, an hour, but there's a limit to how much I can store."

"And this is the only way you have to store mana?"

"No, just the one that scales best."

"Maybe the thing we can do that is very cool is build you a real power sink. Mine was put together outside the Scholomance, but I helped set it up, so I wouldn't be starting from scratch."

"--Ooh."

"Maybe not scratch scratch, but we don't have access to wizard books here."

"There is that."

"It is such a shame you guys didn't have textbooks on you, they would have been fascinating. Oh well. I wonder if you can use anything from any of ours."

"Could give it a whirl, do you have a book of simple stuff handy?"

"Hmm. We should..." 

"Zero Hour by Belladona Quincey."

"Oh, right!" 

She vanishes briefly into one of the rooms, and comes back holding the book in question. 

"This is a book about rank-zero magic, the basic stuff that almost any witch can learn without investing a lot of resources into it. Notably, minting kisses is rank-zero Hex magic."

"Cool." She scoots next to Caio and they peer at the book together.

The book notes in a foreward that new magic disciplines are invented sometimes, perhaps more often, privately, than anyone knows, and newly-invented disciplines often involve the discovery of new rank-zero magic, so this book should not be taken as comprehensive. The book has chapters on the rank zero effects of Hexes, Witchery, Familiarity, Divination, Necromancy, and Dominion. Each chapter not only describes the effects of the rank zero effect in general, but also different approaches often taken to them by Arcanists, Sorcerers, and Warlocks, and detailed minutiae of what the magic is actually doing. 

It seems highly unlikely that wizards get "mothergifts". Instead they will try doing a Sending to each other.

Actually getting the magic to line up right to go through is harder than the book implies that it ought to be, but it does go through. 

"Neat, we have achieved Sending! I'm pretty sure there are wizard spells kinda like that but they're not common within the Scholomance, everybody's cooped up together and can usually just talk in person and also context-insensitive interruptions are fairly hostile."

"I wouldn't Send somebody out of nowhere if I had another way to contact them and it wasn't urgent and I didn't have an ongoing relationship with them where we were all on the same page about when Sending is appropriate, yeah."

"Quite. Handy to have, though, and not very expensive."

"That describes a lot of rank zero stuff! And rank one stuff, you only need rank one Witchery to turn your rod into a broomstick. For example."

"I think some wizards used to enchant broomsticks but they're no longer in vogue. Are they cooler than they sound?"

"Depends on your rank at Witchery and whether you've got any spare abilities to boost 'em, but like, flying? Is awesome."

"If we have mana to burn we can just fly straight up. It's useful for getting high-up library books occasionally."

"Well, riding a broomstick doesn't cost mana, so there's that."

"I think these days carpets are more popular for that with us."

"Some broomsticks can turn into carpets! Carpets can carry more people but are slower."

"Why are they slower?"

"Dunno, mine can't so I haven't had a lot of reason to look into it."

"...hey, question. How do you build your mana?"

"Me personally, or witches in general? Every race has their own way of building charge. Oreads do it through physical proximity to people we're emotionally close to. Neutrals use sleep."

"Buuuuuuullshit."

"I think you are officially cooler than us across the board."

"Sor...ry? I'm not actually sorry, it's nice being cool. How do you generate mana? Probably there is a race that has it worse and it's just that you didn't happen to meet a Lamia right off."

"Effort and suffering."

"Not ideal but definitely better than a Lamia or a Lilin."

"Or a Hannya." 

"Or a Hannya, eugh." 

"Lamia gain mana by digesting creatures they swallowed alive. Lilin gain mana by doing things they consider to be morally wrong. Hannya gain mana by being drunk."

"...okay, those are unfortunate. Though I imagine some people would like the drunk one? I don't personally see the appeal but people do drink on purpose."

"People do drink on purpose but people don't usually become alcoholics on purpose, which is pretty much inevitable for pure Hannya. At least some actual Hannya like it, but, like...they're not the most stable people to be around. Also the Lamia situation is actually worse than Johann implied, they gain mana from the souls of the creatures they digest and most animals don't have souls that are strong enough to count."

"Oh dear. I guess the Kisses are in practice how the more... neighborly... ones get mana? They buy them with whatever else?"

"I don't personally know a lot of Lamias but I imagine so. I suppose if one had a friend with a convenient form of immortality and some kinks something consensual could be worked out..."

"Is... that a real kink?"

"What, vore? It's popular enough that there's, like, a word for it."

"That's just Latin - or, like, an abbreviation of 'omnivore', probably, lots of things are - anyway it doesn't matter as we are not lamias and get mana by doing pushups or embroidery or whatever."

"Is there a gym on campus? - that we could use?"

"Prob...ab...ly? I know there are multiple gyms but I am not much of a gym person personally so I don't know which if any of them need student ID to get in. Lemme check." Pause. "Okay Lisao says there's a gym not that far from here that should be convenient."

"Cool. We wound up doing bodyweight exercises in our rooms half the time for reasons."

"That wouldn't work so well for me, I think I would wind up leaning more on the embroidery part."

"It's good to have a mix of exhausting and annoying so you can switch between them if you run out of materials for your annoying or stamina for your exhausting. I think most adult wizards settle on having a kind of hardcore workout routine and optionally an irritating hobby."

"Makes sense, even if it never occurred to me to seek out a hobby for being irritating before."

"My plan for if I ran out of surfaces on my clothes to embroider was to take up lacemaking, which I expect I would find incredibly loathsome."

"My mom goes for an hourlong run every morning and her job is magic weaving so that does for an irritating hobby for her, she just gets incredibly persnickety about it all, and my dad has a rowing machine and weights and crosswords."

"I embroider, it's good for doing runes. It doesn't irritate me, though."

"Yeah, if I loved it it would work less well. It did actually start working less well, after a while, just not to the point where I switched to lace."

"Runes in lace would look really cool, I bet, maybe I should look into it. Or mention it offhand to Melody and see if she goes on a research binge about it."

"Melody's a friend of yours?"

"That room is hers," she says, pointing to the one on the right hand side farther from the door into the suite. "And that one's Lisao's," the closer right-hand one, "and that one's mine, so one of you will be using it," farther left-hand, "and that one's Johann's." Closer left-hand. 

"Luxurious. We've been living in roughly a shipping container apiece. With a lethal curfew."

"That sounds...better than a, what was it, five percent chance of survival? If you don't go to school?"

"I think the ones who make it without having to go to the Scholomance might be better adjusted, but there are certainly fewer of them."

"It wasn't as bad a few generations ago, or we'd probably've died out at some point."

"That makes sense. I wonder what changed. ...I wonder if there's a non-infohazard answer to that question."

"Is 'it's a research interest of mine' an answer?"

"It's more of an answer than I was expecting, honestly."

"Well, it is. I don't think we'd better go into much more detail till we know more about the relationship between our worlds whenever your... planar expert... gets back to us."

"I won't argue." 

The door opens again. 

"I have cheese, ice cream, and pomegranates!" Melody chirps. "Also some other stuff we were running low on."

"Thanks so much! There's no decent perishables in the Scholomance at all." She falls upon the cheese.

Melody got a variety of cheeses, including cheddar, swiss, pepper jack, asiago, and the really nice fresh mozzarella where you can practically drink the whey out of the packaging. 

"How come?"

"The food there consists of what people bring in on a pretty sharp weight limit, a transmuted nutrient slurry that is just barely convincing enough as a facsimile of bad cafeteria food that one can choke it down, and a weird vending machine that dispenses a variety of dubious vending machine type foods but only the kind you can store at room temperature for kind of a while." Ice cream?

Ice cream! There's Vanilla Bean, Death by Chocolate, Strawberry Cheesecake, Red Bean, Pomegranate, Panda Paws, and Maple Walnut. 

"Sorry about your horrible nutrient slurry."

"Some decades back they didn't even transmute it and kids were dying of malnutrition! It gets better! Sorta! So are you blue on account of being one of the panoply of witch species?" She is going to spoon some of - that and some of th- yeah she's going to put a scoop of everything in the bowl she graduated she deserves it.

"I'm a Vana! Some people use the plural Vanir as the singular form but those people are wrong."

"I don't recognize the word.. I mostly stuck to Chinese and the Romance languages."

"It's a bad idea in the Scholomance to pick up bits of languages you don't plan to get spell-competent in. Confuses the school."

"And to be clear basically anything we say is a bad idea is so because it can kill you, though that one is typically indirect."

"I don't think it's especially a foreign language at this point? People talk about Norse Mythology in English all the time."

"We were all brought up on the understanding we'd be going to the Scholomance and needed to focus on what we'd need there."

"Fair enough. Vanir the actual witch species are not gods but the word's the same as a kind of god from Norse Mythology and so I occasionally insert first-person pronouns into invectives that would usually reference divinity because I find it funny."

"Why do you have the same word?"

"My best guess is that we had it first and then some people mistook us for gods but I don't actually know all the historical details."

Icecreamicecreamicecreamicecream.

Aww.

"It's also possible that when the fey folk decided to start calling themselves the Alfheimr Alliance some other stuff got Norse words slapped on."

"That is also possible, yes."

"Fey folk?" Caio is picking apart his pomegranate reverently.

"Uh...well, in practice, the Alfheimr Alliance is a set of loosely-associated polities in a particular plane mostly grouped into two factions, summer and winter, with the summer ones being more authoritarian and the winter ones being more libertarian. Everyone there is, if not a witch, at least a non-human."

"Are most witches not human? Are many non-humans non-witches? Wizards are just a kind of human, sometimes we even pop up with two mundie parents."

"Okay, so...for most cases, a species acts like a species, except when witchness gets involved. If I have kids with another Vana, our kids will come out Vanir, and may or may not ever awaken as witches. But if I have kids with, say, a Jotunn, our kids will come out Vana/Jotunn hybrids, and if they ever awaken as witches they might awaken as hybrids, or they might awaken as full Vanir or Jotunns. And if I have kids with a human, and they have kids with a human, and so on and so on, then eventually you get what are basically humans with bits and pieces of heritage from whatever else lying around. And when a human awakens, they might awaken as a human, or they might awaken as some random thing they've got ancestry from. So, like, assuming Eliza and Johann have kids someday, any one of those kids might awaken as Neutral, or an Oread, or a Neutral/Oread hybrid, or some other thing that one of them has lurking in their gene pool, or some hybrid of that and Oread or Neutral, or even a Neutral/Oread/third thing chimera. --Eliza and I were both born human."

"Lisao is the only one who lives here who wasn't born human, she's a Daeva/Mimi hybrid and her parents are a Daeva witch and a Mimi witch." 

"What are those?"

"Oreads and Mimis are both species with animal traits--any land animal, actually, Lisao and I are both catgirls but that's just a coincidence, if I had Oread children they might come out with fox traits or deer traits or even lizard traits--but Oreads have a deep connection to the earth, whereas Mimis are more connected to other people. If I die, I can come back if you bury my body; if Lisao dies, she can come back if someone builds a shrine to her and weeps for her there. Daeva are--basically if someone took a human being and was like, 'okay, what if this, but without all the parts that suck.' Daeva are taller and stronger and don't get periods or headaches or acne or cancer or allergies or...you get the picture." 

"Also, on average, they have bigger breasts." 

"Which I suppose is evidence for the idea that whoever decided to redesign humanity had never had to deal with them." 

"We have a very easy potion that makes periods shoo. If there's a market for that among species that do not enjoy this feature naturally."

"Most species don't get them, which ironically makes finding potion recipes to do that harder for Neutrals. I know some exist but you can certainly make money selling them."

"You can do it on basically anything you'd reasonably call a 'tea' and a few things you cannot reasonably call a 'tea' in a pinch."

"You can...put the potion into the tea, or use the tea as an ingredient in the potion...?"

"...our potions are not just mixtures, you have to incant over them."

"Same with artifice."

"...Huh, we ever have incantations as part of potion-making but it's generally secondary to mixing things together, I don't think I've ever heard of a potion that was just--an ordinary liquid with an incantation."

"Most of them are not very ordinary liquids but that one is - as I understand it, never having had to make one. If it's just mixing things together does it call for magic at all or could a mundie make your potions?"

"No, it's definitely magic, if you try to follow a potion recipe without using magic you usually just get a bunch of useless glop."

"I know a recipe for a restorative potion that makes a perfectly nice soup if you do it without magic."

"If we needed soup ingredients for potions then the alchemy cupboards would presumably have sourced them somehow but they'd've been raided by people who wanted soup."

"Yeah, we do not have this problem."

"I guess in your school it must be an advantage not to be able to taste things."

"My understanding is that that's actually risky - there's occasions where you need taste to make sure you stop eating something you shouldn't - and that besides if you have fewer senses to work with the illusions on the food won't have as much to convince you with."

"Stop eating? And wouldn't the nutrient slurry be less horrible if you couldn't taste it?"

"One of the many ways you can die in the Scholomance is by eating things you should not eat. And if you can't taste, you can still smell - unless you can't even do that, and you're solely feeling the food - and those senses still need to be convinced that you are consuming something that is okay to eat, you want more sensory surface area for that, not less."

"Eesh."

"I hope these infohazards aren't so infohazardous that we can't do anything to help with them."

"Honestly my bet at this point would be that it's fine but we should have enough patience to talk to professors and stuff."

"Oh, absolutely, the last thing I want is to get my soul eaten because I was a dumbass."

"Is that a reference to something?"

"Not anything specific, why?"

"It sounded specific but maybe that's just because I haven't actually seen a movie in four years."

"It's just that I'm one of the more robust kinds of immortal so having my soul eaten--or otherwise destroyed, or corrupted--is kinda necessary for it to be worse than an inconvenience."