"Sounds good. We have magic we can use for privacy." She's under no illusions that their magic will definitely beat local eavesdropping magic, but they're not likely to discuss anything it would be a disaster for someone to overhear.

"In that case, open the door when you'd like to speak to me again or think of anything else you need." And she stands to depart.

Once she's out, they'll put up a privacy spell and a tripwire (they haven't seen any mals or demons or anything in here but you can't have a serious conversation without a tripwire).

"Even if we figure out a way to contact Earth, any significant back and forth is going to lead to mals finding a way across. Either we'll be able to go home and that's it, or we won't, and that's it. So, we need to decide what to do in either case. And what we'll be to each other if we stay here."

"I think, if we stay here, even if we decide to avoid taking any oaths or joining any armies, it's still going to be more like being outside than being in school. So we can be--allies who have graduated." Closer than friends, closer than brothers, but with their promise to each other fulfilled, free to pursue separate goals and care about things other than their collective survival.

"I agree. We can still look out for each other; we don't need a promise for that."

Abigail puts her hand on the table between them, and everyone else puts a hand on top of hers. They didn't have any kind of plan for a formal acknowledgement--their oath was supposed to expire when they returned to Boston--but it feels right.

"We all graduated from the Scholomance."

Something in Marcy's chest relaxes, just a bit. They all graduated. Four out of four. The thing that mattered more than anything else for as long as she can remember. 

If she was back in the enclave, would she feel lost? If they had graduated normally in a normal year, with no Orion and no El and no grand plan, would she know how to make new plans and want new things?

"If there's a way to tell everyone we survived we need to do that," says Franklin after a long moment. "But once we've done that--if the options are spend years figuring out how to go home or not that--" it feels like an insane thing to be thinking.

"You want to learn the second kind of wizardry that's all math and make amazing things with two kinds of magic."

"Yeah."

"And I want--to see what's possible. To see if two kinds of magic lets us do something like the plan here too."

"You want to be the game-changer. Like Orion and El."

"Yeah. I know it probably won't work that well, almost nothing ever works as well as the plan did, but--if I don't I'll always wonder what would have happened if I'd tried."

"We're adults now. We're allowed to want crazy things."

"What do you want, Kevin?"

 (It's obvious what Abigail wants. She wants to let herself care about more things and more people.)

"I'm not sure yet. To find somewhere I fit, I guess. And 'fighting demons with you three' is more likely to be that than anything else is." 

"We'll always be glad to have you watching our backs."

(Firm nods from Marcy and Franklin.)

"So we'll learn this world's magic and deal with this world's problems--if those are what they seem to be. I think they are--the demons and the forts are real enough--but we should make sure." Which means using the stupid terrible interrogation spell, but lots of things are stupid and terrible and need doing. "Let's figure out a set of questions to ask . . ."

They open the door not too long afterwards.

There's a guard at the door who can send for the inquisitor.  She's just a few rooms over, having finished making a report-via-being-scried-by-her-superiors.

"Hello, Inquisitor. We're agreed that we want to help with the problems here, either as part of your organization or independently, as soon as we've verified that the situation is basically as you've represented it. You mentioned being willing to be questioned under truth magic, but while I don't know what sort of truth magic your planet has, ours is--complicated. The best spell I know for the purpose works by making the target temporarily trusting, impulsive, and confused, so it doesn't occur to them to lie and they have trouble coming up with additional details for a lie on the spot. We'll be careful to confine our questions to things we need to know, but people subject to this spell do sometimes blurt out unrelated secrets. We can promise not to spread anything irrelevant we learn and to try to avoid acting on it, but none of us are perfect at pretending not to know something. Given that, are you still okay with it?"

"I'd rather you cast a spell like that on someone who isn't the head of security for this installation, but I don't know if that'd be sufficient for your purposes."

"Switching out for someone who knows fewer secrets is fine. It would be ideal if that person was Marit, the wizard who brought us here and can be asked things like 'have you lied to us at all', but we can also do it with a new person if Marit is busy or also knows too many secrets."

"You can do it on him. I'll have him come up here now." And she can pass that instruction along. 

And Marcy can explain again the ways in which their truth spell is awful.

"Wow, yeah, that's way worse than the kind Iomedae hands out to her priests. You can do it, though."