"Ah, I see. --It's possible you could hire an indie to help you set it up and even get them to keep as mum about it as an enclaver would be, if you offered them a guaranteed spot, possibly the one previously belonging to whoever got eaten--obviously for incentive reasons this offer would need to be made only after such a casualty and not beforehand--"

"That is among the reasons they're waiting for an actual note and not just a casualty report, yeah."

Nod. "I'm curious if you have the authority to make such an offer--but, obviously, I don't expect you to answer that."

"Me and Suze jointly can offer a spot but each of us individually can only guarantee an interview, though I might be able to give up my own spot for somebody, what with never intending to have children, it's just I didn't run that plan by Aunt Evelyn first and don't know if she'd play along."

"--Interesting. It seems like agreeing on a single person to offer a guaranteed spot to would be difficult, given that only one of you could graduate with them."

"Yeah, we're not likely to use it, but if somebody, say, had a useful younger sibling and thought they'd be able to angle to pull in their younger sibling as long as the younger sibling gets an interview, I could sign Suze's guarantee for the older sibling and ally with the younger. But more likely we'll have to sign people on for interviews alone."

"Oh, the collective guarantee and the individual interviews are an and, not an or?"

"Yeah, interviews are cheap."

"True enough. From our perspective. And yet for the independents..."

"They kind of have to bullshit themselves about how valuable an interview is, yeah. Most of the value is - being demonstrated useful enough to be on the alliance at all."

"It isn't not valuable to them--the adult enclavers who evaluate independents could spend much more time than they are interviewing people, but they don't. There's an artificial scarcity from the independent perspective."

"That's true."

He presses his lips together, checks that none of the other Atlanta enclavers are listening, and mutters, "not that the scarcity of the spells to create enclaves is less artificial."

"I think people'd run into mana limits even if they were public domain, but yeah."

"Obviously individual people creating enclaves on a whim is not a possible state of affairs, but there are plenty of large groups of people desperately saving up for the spells who have plenty of mana for the purpose."

"Yeah. I wonder why they're so hard to invent independently..."

"I've never actually seen them, so I have no idea."

"I wonder if I could get one out of the void eventually. I could probably at least - accelerate natural enclave formation, that seems like metamagic..."

"It does, doesn't it. I think that's unlikely--people must have compatible affinities sometimes, but I've never even heard of someone deliberately sending a child to the Scholomance with the hope of picking up enclave-spells from the void instead of a child with a better affinity for sheer survival."

"Well, if you don't get the child out again you don't get the spell either. And the kind of people who need enclave spells are the ones who have to ration their slots at least a bit."

"If you have another child in the Scholomance, or one of your allies does, only the other child needs to survive and get the spells out."

"I guess that's true. I'm still gonna put 'enclave spells' on my list..." She flips to her void wishlist.

"I suppose asking has little cost. --And if it did happen it might be the kind of thing people would suppress rather than talk about." 

"So other people don't get the same idea and increase the competition?"

"Right. Which needn't be their own idea, even; if they had some of the spells, but not all of them, their silence might be part of the bargain with a larger enclave for the rest of the spells."