"Luxal saliva renders metal soft and pliant! Which is actually very useful for artistic purposes, I can just lick one edge of a penny and smoosh it together with all the other licked-coin-edges to get some neat copper scaling."

"Oh, fun, does it retain this property outside of your mouth? It could be an art supply."

"It doesn't retain this property after it dries up and I wouldn't be surprised if some people were weird about handling someone else's spit but, also, I wouldn't be surprised to see bottles of the stuff on the shelves of whatever craft stores there are around here. Or maybe people who want to use the stuff tend to make arrangements directly with a source! Finding out will be an adventure, I'm sure."

"Speaking of what's around here, do you three wanna join me in casing the campus? I'm not planning to venture to the town today unless campus is smaller than I expect, that I'm intending to save for the weekend, but still."

"Fuck yeah!" Ava exclaims, leaping up. 

"I'm in. Maybe you and I can do aerial reconnaissance while the groundpounders take the footpaths." 

"I can take a passenger on my broom." She produces her wand and broomifies it. "- as long as they're not much more than twice as heavy as me, and I'm surprisingly light now."

"I will have to pass on account of my bones being iron. Well, steel, which is mostly iron and doesn't weigh a ton less."

"I'd be happy to accept a broom ride but I kind of don't want to leave Emily as the only one on the ground."

"Alrighty." May re-wands her broom and sleeves it and sets about checking if she can open her window to fly out of it.

The window swings open easily! There is a latch to one side of it and once that's undone it is triviality itself to get it pushed open. 

"See you guys at the exit!" And out she hops. Without a passenger or the need to go real fast, flying sans broom is plenty good enough.

Edie cackles and dives out after her, her wings snapping out to catch her and redirect her momentum after she's fallen about a meter. 

Emily snorts and heads for the stairs. 

"Is it nice having wings? I am mostly indifferent to my antlers," May says to Edie, pulling off her hat and letting it disappear to display them, "but I turn out to really like having a tail."

"I love having wings! Flying without them would be, like, fine, but--man, I haven't had them long and I'd already rather lose my legs, if I had to give up a set of limbs. The tail's nice, I like the tail, it's expressive, but the wings are awesome."

And if May goes up high, what is there to see around here?

There is SO MUCH to see. 

For one thing, calling the campus "sprawling" would be an understatement. Most of the buildings are taller than you would expect to find on a cozy liberal arts campus of the sort Arcadia so fervently emulates, and they're still spread out over an absolutely massive area. 

There are literally dozens of gardens, at least three different styles of outdoor swimming pool, open quads in several different styles of terrain and, surrounding the campus, the town. 

Oh what fun. She loosely plots a walkable route among all the everything and then dives to join the non-flying party members.

Edie swooped down to land next to her sister pretty much as soon as Emily and Ava had walked through the front door. She is currently cheerfully describing some of the flower gardens she saw from the air. 

"Oooooh. I'm going to have to use some of those flowers as models sometime. I like big blooms and I cannot lie."

"Ooh, silver and gold flowers with patina copper foliage?" suggests May.

Emily faux-swoons. "You're speaking my language!"

Giggle. "There's a pool this way - I'm assuming the pools are not all strictly swimming pools, probably one of them is an aquatic student dormitory and one of them is intended for water magic practice but probably at least one of them is just for swimming in, we should check them all."

"Hm, I'd more expect a visible pool area to be, like, the lawn of an aquatic student dormitory? I assume mermaids and whatever also like privacy."