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bella pays suze back
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"I think I have it all," Bella sighs to Suze, holding out her hand.

"Pleasure doing business with you. Maybe don't buy sketchy potions from freshmen you just met," says Suze, collecting her repayment.

"Yeah. I got that. I am lucky to be alive. Thank you Suze."

"Y'welcome."

"I want to do some situps so I have some slush mana, can you sit on my feet -"

"Yeah, sure." Suze sits on her feet. Bella starts doing situps.

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Kanimir is not going to approach the New Orleans freshman while she's actively doing situps. 

After she's disengaged from the sophomore, though, he says, "You too?"

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Bella is now embroidering a sock. "Alexei's potions? Yeah. Too good to be true. Some people had much worse reactions."

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"No one in Atlanta had gotten as far as drinking them when word came that they were bad, which was good for them and bad for me in terms of who got embarrassed." 

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"Well, at least nobody died, which is more than you can say for typical Scholomance mishaps as I understand it. And I got my cool potion-effect-interrupting spell from it."

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"Is it a good spell? Hopefully it shouldn't come up, much." 

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"It's a pretty good spell and hopefully it will never be relevant again but better to have it and not need it. Which makes it the sort of thing I'll probably be able to trade, at least."

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"It's certainly more than I got out of the affair. Although I would have been in more trouble with the upperclassmen if the vendor had proven less capable of making full refunds."

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"It did take him a while, he had a lot of them to scramble for, but yeah, I have not totally written him off in part because he worked so hard on that."

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"If he had gotten killed in the meanwhile I would have been on the hook for the deficit and, more importantly, my own credibility would have taken more of a hit--making reckless deals with someone who holds up their end is at least slightly less bad than making reckless deals with someone who immediately dies."

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"Yeah, I'm construing myself to have used up my stupid mistake budget for the next four years."

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"I'm overbudget. I have younger siblings."

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"Oh dear. - sorry."

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"No, you're fine. There's fucking five of us and we are not New York."

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"Sometimes I think evolution has been at work on wizards a bit too hard and all they want is grandchildren at any cost."

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"It would explain my father. But I don't think it's actually accurate; there's too much genetic cross-contamination with the mundanes."

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"I don't know that I like the word 'contamination' there. And for that matter 'cross', it's not like we throw squibs."

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"I don't endorse the implications but I couldn't think of a better term off the top of my head. --And you're right, I was thinking surely not every victim of the kind of wizard who likes seeding a lot of 'muggleborns' comes out a wizard, but," he makes a face. "Anyway, what I mean is if the difference was genetic, the influx of mundane genes would combat the trend. And historically people had a lot of children in other situations with very poor survival rates--none of which have been as stable as this one seems, so far as I could tell, but--" 

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"Well, my dad's a mundie and I plan to never have children so maybe it does combat the trend. - I don't know that it's all that stable? Only a few hundred years ago you could leave milk out for fairies and that would work. St. George killed a dragon and he wasn't even a wizard."

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"I don't know if stable is the right word but there isn't a clear end condition, it isn't being ongoingly reinforced; most of the situations as bad as this one survival-wise were wars or diseases, and those happen and they end, there isn't a time period in history that we know about far enough back that they didn't have the ability to go, 'well, we know from the past that eventually this is going to stop'."

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"Yeah. I'm going to do some horrible things to agglos and see if I get anywhere but I have no strong reason to believe I will."

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"What things?" 

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"I'm commissioning a four-compartment agglo terrarium and then I'm going to have a control, a starvation condition, a bunch I try to poison, and a bunch I stick assorted birth control to in case the intent carries through, and see if anything works."

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"If the birth control does anything to the agglos do you have any ideas for how to generalize that to non-agglos, given how agglos are."

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"Feed the agglos to stuff? This is all extremely preliminary."

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"Fair enough. I would offer to help but, uh, every spare resource I can scrape together is going to making sure my siblings are in the surviving fraction of our enclave."

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"Best of luck. What're their names? - you're Kanimir, right, Suze's friend told me who-all the Atlantans are but I'm not sure I have them all perfect."

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"I'm Kanimir; my twin sister is Jaromira. Our sister Didyme will be a freshman when we're seniors, then Sarah the year after her, and Robin two years after that."

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"Did your folks take... turns picking names...?"

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"Jaromira is my only full sibling; our stepmother likes more American names than our mother did."

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"Oh, I see. Is Didyme an American name?"

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"Didyme is trans and chose her name herself. Her deadname is more Anglotypical."

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"Huh - is she going to be able to come to school if she's medically complicated -"

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"She's not going to have any surgery until after graduation and hormone therapy isn't dangerous to interrupt."

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"Cool. I don't know much about it, I hope it wasn't rude to ask."

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"No, it's fine. Honestly if she couldn't do anything to medically transition at all until graduation it would annoy her but it still wouldn't make the top ten list of worst things of wizard puberty."

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"A very competitive list." She pricks her finger, sticks it in her mouth and looks around a little anxiously to see if anything noticed.

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Nothing appears to have noticed but Kanimir is now holding a dagger about it. 

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When she doesn't taste blood any more she goes back to embroidering a little more carefully.

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"That seems like a slightly risky hobby for that reason." 

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"Pinpricks heal almost right away, it's portable, it doesn't take a lot of energy - I know crochet is classic but I enjoy doing it more and like having crocheted things less. But I do hope to eventually enchant the needle to not stick me."

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"That makes sense. I finger-knit; it's much worse than anything that actually uses a tool, in my experience."

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"Huh. Do you know about horrible wall-sitting?"

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"What's horrible wall-sitting?"

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"You put your back against the wall and pretend like there is a chair under you and sit on the chair that is not there."

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"Is it worse than doing the same thing but without the wall? I've heard good, and by good I mean horrible, things about maintaining a sitting position with no support."

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"I don't know it to actually be worse but it's less likely you will fall in a potentially injurious way; you can just slide down the wall."

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"That's fair, a lower risk of injury for the same horribleness is a valuable thing. I will try it and possibly--well, not recommend it to the rest of the freshmen, tell Jaromira to recommend it to the rest of the freshmen, her credibility isn't currently damaged."

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"They won't notice it's your idea?"

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"It doesn't really matter if it's my idea; what matters is that Jaromira can decide not to pass it along if it turns out to be stupid."

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"Oh, that makes sense. I wasn't really drilled on larger enclave dynamics at all since it's just me and Suze and they weren't even positive Suze would still be here."

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"They vary. Boston does some amazingly effective team-building things and New York, uh...contains Julia and the boy who adopted Rebecca, the girl in pajamas, which seems to be turning out well for them considering Sacramento but he couldn't possibly have known that at the time, plus Orion Lake."

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"Marcy from Boston is good to know, and her squadmate's making my agglo terrarium for me, he has an affinity for 'containers' - mine's metamagic, what's yours?"

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"Metamagic? That's amazing. --Mine is biochemistry."

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"Ooh, how's that manifest?"

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"I'm doing alchemy track, I've had a lot of recipes so far that duplicate the effects of mundane drugs--caffeine, aspirin, things like that. Also a few poisons but those are less interesting. I talked with a junior who thinks I'll be able to do some really interesting things to the endocrine system later on."

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"I might be in the market for poisons once I've filled up my agglo terrarium."

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"I might be willing to give you a discount if the horrible wall sitting turns out to be valuable."

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"It's not very exclusive information, I got it for free from Annie who's in my history of artificing section."

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"Ah. Well, I'll likely still have no idea what to do with the vial of strychnine the lab wanted me to make when your terrarium is done with, so it's unlikely to be too expensive anyway." 

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"Gosh, strychnine." She will write this down in the section of her notebook devoted to planned agglo interventions.

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"It's chemically complicated, it turns out, and so are the horrible things it does to people."

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"Well, hopefully it will also do horrible things to agglos. Or do nothing to them but then if I set one out that's picked up a vial and stake it out in the hall it will be replaced by a dead horka or something."

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"I can think of worse outcomes. Is that your ultimate plan, see how far up the food chain you can launch it?"

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"Yeah, pretty much. The province of Alberta has no rats, and it's not because rats prefer Saskatchewan."

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"The province of Alberta has no rats?"

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"Yeah! They just... got rid of all the rats in there. You aren't allowed to have them as pets in Alberta, they spent a ton of money on rat poison and making sure rats had nowhere to live, and now they don't have rats. And modern pest control relies on contraception as much as poison. I feel that we are not taking enough leaves out of the standard pest control handbook. If a mundie has roaches they do not personally step on each one they catch and expect to stop having roaches."

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He physically sits on his hands. 

"I very badly want to help with this and I can't because I don't expect it to pay off soon enough to help keep all four of my siblings alive." 

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"Well, I'm hoping to have a writeup to send out by the end of the year, and you can help me convince your seniors to carry copies to submit for publication? - I'd wait and concentrate on getting myself through except, you know, can't be sure that I can do that."

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"No, I understand. I will suggest someone talk to you--I can't, I won't make any tradeoffs that might give my siblings fewer resources. But within that constraint, this could be the most important thing any of us ever do. If this war, this epidemic, could end--" He shakes his head. "--If you give me writeups of your progress every now and then, if anything happens to you I can make sure it doesn't vanish." 

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"Thank you, I really appreciate that. And, y'know, not everything funges against your younger siblings, they're not here yet and if you toss me a snack token to buy agglo poison with or buy homework off me preferentially I don't think that'll hurt your position there."

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"I could also save up my snack tokens for three years to give to them but that's absurd and at that point the cost of storing them outweighs the value, you're right. Preferentially buying homework from you I can certainly do, what classes are you selling homework in?"

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"Literature! I'm one of those weird people who actually likes the kind of literature they have us on in here. I haven't seen you in my lit classes but you're quiet, I could've missed you - Victor Hugo and Cervantes, this semester."

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"I'm not taking either of those this semester but if you keep your assignments I can use 'Bella is selling the homework' as a tie-breaker if I'm offered them next term. And I think Madison is in Cervantes, I can point her at you." 

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"I keep copies, yep."

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"Then I may have an excuse to read the unabridged Les Miserables at some point in the future!"

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"Comes with decent plumbing maintenance spells, I don't know if Atlanta has a minion or if you'll use those."

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"We have a minion but it might still be useful for acute bathroom situations, depending."

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"Victor Hugo really liked the Parisian sewers."

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"Did he like them in ways that might be relevant to situations where the showerheads are full of amphisbaena."

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"Well, he wasn't a wizard, but the assignments come with spells that are relevant to situations like that."

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"Good. --Incidentally, Jaromira's affinity is potions that aerosolize, so if you run across anything like that, we're in the market."

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"Gosh, that's so specific. I haven't gotten much in the way of alchemical recipes let alone any that aerosolize, though I did get a recipe that potionified my cancel-potion-effects spell and it might work in an aerosol."

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"You can aerosolize a surprising number of things! One of her first lab assignments was pepper spray and that's a fairly solid concept to build off of, I think." 

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"Does it work on mals?"

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"Fortunately, we haven't had an opportunity to find out."

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"Early days."

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"She gave it to a junior, standing orders are for freshmen to run and not try anything unless you absolutely positively have to, and to not have any clever ideas so appealing that it might be tempting to absolutely positively have to." 

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"Reasonable of your seniors."

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"I suppose they would carve out an exception if someone managed to have the clever idea 'be Orion Lake' but that one seems to be taken."

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"I still don't know why New York lets him act like that, even if it won't kill him it's got to eat half their mana."

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"Maybe, in addition to killing mals like they were candy, he is also Vanya Lipovsky."

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"I do not have a thorough understanding of Vanya Lipovsky besides that he was mixed up in the nastiness last year and is friends with pajama girl."

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"He is an enormous resource drain on Sacramento and they put up with it because he produces mana like an avalanche."

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"Gosh. ...if they get by by paying everyone in mana then the loose maleficer must have been especially bad news for them."

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"I think Sacramento does most of the work themselves."

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"I guess there are enough of them, big enclave... Do you know all the other kids in your enclave pretty well?"

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Nod nod. "I have flashcards."

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"I hope everything goes well with New Orleans bumping up a weight class. If we send the go-ahead message out end of next year then induction day the year after we'll get our power sink in here."

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"Oh, is that not set in stone? I sort of had the impression that that was definitely going to happen."

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"If something happens to me or Suze we might not be able to set it up properly and it'd have to wait."

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"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--"

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

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

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"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."

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"--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."

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"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."

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

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"Yeah, interviews are cheap."

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

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"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."

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"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."

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"That's true."

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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."

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

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"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."

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

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

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"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..."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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

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"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." 

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

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"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."

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"Oh, that makes sense, I sort of forgot that it wasn't just one big spell..."

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"--Maybe, if you find someone else with an enclave-relevant affinity, the two of you could ask together, and that would have better luck than just one of you alone."

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Nod nod.

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"I think I heard something about Shanghai snagging a freshman with a good affinity for infrastructure and then the freshman bailing when they adopted a maleficer, but I don't have any details and it could have been something someone made up."

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"I have nothing further for the rumor mill there, alas."

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"I'll let you know if I run into someone who seems promising. There's someone in Manchester with a water affinity, which is useful for an enclave but not I think in the right way."

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"Also they're already in an enclave, so."

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"So are you and I, but I take your point." 

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"I can imagine more possible motives for an indie, but yeah, maybe I'm just being unfair, maybe Manchester water kid would love to get in on bootleg enclaving."

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“I absolutely agree that an indie is more likely to want in on this, it’s just that an enclave has more slack to do it with.”

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Nod nod.

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“I admire your ambition.”

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"Aw, thank you."

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“You’re welcome. I’ll let you know if I find out anything about the ecosystem.”

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"I appreciate that."