"So you should be aware of that. Anyway, there are advice forums online about setting up a business to distribute rare magical services on a more-than-local scale that are more thorough than I'm going to be able to be in ten minutes." 

"Can you email me a link or something?"

"That I can definitely do." 

"Thanks!"

On to Hexes!

The hexes classroom is laid out in more of a lecture hall style than the enlarged music room of her vocals class or the lab setup of alchemy, although the desks do have large sturdy drawers attached, with a number of kinds of material inside. 

May will pick a seat on the aisle in the second row and plunk herself into it.

If she cares to check, the drawer in her desk contains a big tub of wood chips, some rocks, two jars of tiny white crystals, and a handful of empty bowls in a mixture of clay and glass, all shaped exactly the same but made out of different kinds of their materials

Huh. Makes sense that there'd be materials for this one.

The teacher comes in a short while later, while other students are still settling into their seats, calls for everyone's attention, and starts passing out syllabi (magically) and explaining what the coursework is going to be like. 

Is it mostly practical or what?

It is mostly practical; there's a fair amount of theory, but less of the kind Academics need to gain power and more of the kind used to determine whether an unfamiliar transformation would be one rank or another. There is also an optional additional textbook, with accompanying optional worksheets and quizzes, for Academics and also nerds who just think this stuff is fun (where they don't overlap). 

She will take some for playing with in her copious spare time. What are they hexing today?

Today they're hexing three of the traditional rank one transformations; stone to mud, clay to glass, and sugar to salt (and vice versa). The wood chips are the "medium" for a rank one hex. The teacher encourages them to work on details--try turning a stone into mud, and then the mud into a completely different stone, for example; the more specific, the better. 

Ooh. Stone into mud into.... jade? Stone into mud into... salt?

Stone into mud into jade works, stone into mud into salt does not; she can get a rock that contains mineral salt, but not just salt.

Huh! Stone into mud into... ice? Stone into mud into... opal?

Ice no. Opal is tricky, the spell would rather produce a matrix stone which contains opal, but she can get it if she concentrates. 

Oooh this is the fun kind of tricky. Opal thaaaat switches through various opal colors?

Actually slightly easier than one-color opal on the relevant axis of trickiness, but she separately has to keep the color gradient fixed firmly in her mind. 

She will check to see if it helps to take notes and loosely sketch the design of rock she wants.

It helps in the sense that it is easier to keep something fixed in your mind while staring at a representation of it; the magic does not seem to naively consult the paper for information on the end product. 

Fair enough.

Sugar to salty-rock to mud to rock?

Sugar to salt really really really does not want to produce anything other than pure salt! She can get different kinds of salt mixed together if she tries hard and believes in herself. 

Bummer. The pink-and-white-salt thing is pretty though. What about mud to salty-rock to sugar?

She can turn all the salt in a salty rock into sugar, but the rest of the rock won't go.