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?

Both doing well. Kevin hates the sky and I think he actually misses the Scholomance qua building, but he's very happy about how Boston's infrastructure is being maintained by pros with things to teach him instead of by underpaid children and listening to him being excited by pipes is still great. Abigail has taken up baking and thinks cell phones are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

baking sounds amazing now that you mention it, one moment while I go make cupcakes

Have fun! It's great that we can just decide to do something for no reason except that it sounds pleasant and then do it!

it is! and box mix is nearly impossible to mess up!

Her next message is about twenty minutes later:

Box mix is an excellent invention. I just found that my mom has some cross-stitch kits that come with a specific pattern you're supposed to match exactly and that sounds like it could be a nice way to build mana. So now I'm debating between a few of them and whether I want to try working magic into it on my first try.

(She includes a picture of three bags with elaborate pointillist images of dragon on a mountain, a field of flowers, and a bunch of trees around a lake.)

Those are nice designs! My mom says that most years she goes around to all her mundie friends and does their taxes for them but that's a very seasonal mana generation technique.

Gonna go on a run now, I think I have the go for it now.

the sea is real, who knew

I want to learn to swim

That's so much water! :o (The :o is what my face looks like. Apparently drawing your face with punctuation is a thing in text messages.) 

Learning to swim sounds neat! Do people still wear those stripey shirt-and-pants sets they had in the British History textbooks?

Empirically, no! I am trying not to stare at all the strangers in bikinis but there are several of them here at the moment.

Having just looked up what a bikini is (Wikipedia is so great) I think you would look pretty awesome in one.

(They've all seen each other in the showers but you don't look at each other in the showers, you look at the faucet and the drain and the corners and get clean as fast as possible. Some memories may be getting recontextualized.)

Quite possibly! I think I will take my graduation present money and walk into the fanciest store with bathing suits I can find, because I have no sartorial taste that isn't about embroidering daisies as densely as possible, and need a store person hunting for a commission to put something in front of me.

Excellent plan. I wasn't sure what to do with my newfound ability to buy things but maybe I should get some pretty clothes too. That way I'll have some pictures to trade for one of you in a swimsuit.

(That last sentence gets deleted and retyped twice before sending.)

Oh, well, if you want to stand in for the hypothetical salesperson don't let me stop you.

It fits, but I was also considering a blue one.

It looks to me like you have great taste and don't need a salesperson, but I'd be happy to look at the blue one if you want a second opinion.

And your professional opinion?

Hmm, I think I like the red one better. Also you have inspired me to go out in search of a clothing store.

This is accompanied by a selfie of Marcy next to a flower planter in front of a row house. She's not in a bathing suit but is in a nicer outfit than she's had in four years, with slacks that actually fit and a button-down shirt with just enough buttons undone to be obvious she undid at least one for the picture.

Is that a before picture? Looks snazzy enough to me.

It is; thanks! I genuinely do need more clothes, my parents took a wild guess at how much growth spurt I'd have and I've got like three sets that fit, but also you have inspired me to care about looking pretty.

Shortly thereafter she sends a photo of a pair of buskers, one playing the flute while the other does a dance involving twirling long ribbons on sticks.

This is neat and I wonder if it would combine interestingly with parkour.

I think you need your hands for parkour.

I bet I could make it look cool with the ribbons attached to my wrists. It would be more difficult because there'd be more stuff to keep track of but seeing how well it works would be kind of the point.

Send me video if you try it.