I was starting to wonder if you'd lost my new number. I'm surprisingly okay! Haven't tried leaving the enclave yet though (except in the entryway to hug my dad of course), we'll see if I collapse if I try to visit a McDonald's. Did you know there are, like, hundreds of kinds of ice cream?

I needed to learn how to keep normal waking hours without a schedule. I haven't tried leaving yet either but I think I'll be okay. That's a really amazing number of kinds of ice cream! Are they all normal ice cream flavors or are there meat ice cream and brussels sprouts ice cream and ketchup ice cream and stuff?

There is a range of ice cream normalcies! I have not seen meat/sprouts/ketchup but I have heard tell of garlic. Didn't try it though, thought it'd taste too much like the milk carton incident. My ice creams tried list is up to like 20 kinds though! Raspberry chocolate chip is maybe my favorite so far and the weirdest kind I have actually eaten is probably this lemon basil kind Renée suggested.

Raspberry chocolate chip sounds good. I don't think I would like garlic ice cream either but garlic *bread* is pretty great. My parents made us all a chocolate cake the size of one of the school beds, I think fifty different people must've had some.

Have you gotten all set up with a power sharer and a bank account and everything?

Bank account yes, power sharer is kind of pending? Suze dumped some mana on me for incidentals but I might not live here long term and even if I just go crash with each of my parents for a few months and then move back it wouldn't work at that distance anyway.

Yeah, makes sense. I've been deriving an unreasonable amount of enjoyment from not building mana but I'll probably start again in a week or two. With some totally different set of activities.

Huh, I'm planning to keep up running. I think it's in a sweet spot for me. Embroidery could go either way, maybe with more materials availability I'll want to do something else like, I don't know, mosaics or stained glass.

I like parkour but just straight running is boring; if I stick with it it'll be because I'm used to being fast. Embroidery is pretty appealing because you can do wearable artifice and because I never did it much in school. Mosaics and stained glass sound awesome though; I bet you'll make some great stuff either way.

I'm excited about being able to go running in, you know, places. I guess I could go for walks but that's not as efficient in terms of seeing stuff OR mana. But we'll see if I hate fresh air or panic if a bug lands on me.

I don't actually know what kinds of places are good for running in but I seem to recall that there are locations that aren't in the void even a little bit and that some of them were nice to look at. Is there anywhere you went as a kid that you'd like to see again?

Grew up near some woods, not that far a drive from the beach. I'll check them out and see what I think of them as an adult, when I can bear to be on a plane to Port Angeles.

Trippy to say 'as an adult'.

Yeah, I keep trying to refer to the people in the enclave who didn't just graduate as "the adults" and then realizing that means us too. Being on a plane does not sound great to me either right now but I hear a lot of that kind of thing gets easier. 

You thinking of restarting your agglo research out here?

I sent an email to everybody who has an agglo farm, we'll see if anyone gets back to me. I might do it independently but they're harder to come by out here, I think they have such limited needs they can pick up things mundies leave without going hungry and they spread out.

I'm planning to join Boston's research program eventually but I'd like to try mundie college first.

Feels weird admitting that in writing.

I've thought about it too but I think reading books while I work on things will 80/20 it for me. What do you want to study? For that matter, what does Boston research?

I want to major in linguistics and then take every class that seems interesting with no regard for what part of the building they're in or what anyone else is taking or whether the projects could kill me if they attacked me. 

We study a lot of different things! Lower-mana versions of defensive spells, better wards, ways of detecting mals from farther away, there's a project trying to expand the enclave more efficiently by borrowing space from miles up in the air but I don't know if they'll ever get anywhere with it. There might be someone doing mal ecology but I don't know them. I'm interested in the project that's trying to get a better mana-to-weight-limit tradeoff for induction.

I didn't think anyone actually used the mana-to-weight trade! Except Wilbur and Lucy but that was their mom being weird. I guess they might if it was more efficient. New Orleans doesn't have a lot of research going on, there's some people who develop things but mostly on an individual basis and mostly not innovative, more like the power sink brought in my junior year, so even if I were desperate to live in an enclave I'd probably jump ship.

Oh, I meant making the regular weight limit bigger without increasing the school's total mana budget. Or keeping the weight limit the same while freeing up more mana for everything else--there might be a political fight over which one to do if they succeed but that'd be a nice problem to have.

Got any thoughts about where you might jump ship to?

London has the best agglo farm but I'm sort of hoping someone will be like 'oh yeah, we have tame chayaenas and quattrias to experiment on', none of these are a really ideal use case for the general category of mals but apparently the agglo farm is a century old and I'm not quite cocky enough to think I've already revolutionized their field.

Makes sense. I won't be surprised if you do revolutionize your field once you've had some time with good resources.

I wonder if anywhere is working on some kind of low-power long-term honeypot spell to get some less-tame mals to stay in a box or if that's one of those things that sounds great and kills everyone who tries it.

I think honeypots get mals into a more active hunting mode than would be ideal for containment but maybe something in that general vein could work....

Maybe something with a vibe of safety instead of food. "This is a cozy den you can hide in and wait for food to come to you" sort of thing. Given how much mals love cupboards and toolchests it really seems like it should be possible to get them to stay in a box.

Huh. Sounds like it'd be up Franklin's alley, how's he doing?

He's doing pretty well. Still kinda jumpy and checking rooms thoroughly when he goes in but it's not like there's much reason not to. He's planning to settle down and make a bunch of artifacts and accumulate wealth until he thinks of something to do with it. How are Caio and Aadhya doing?

Haven't seen them in person obviously, but they both made it home in one piece. Kevin and Abigail?