Kiss.

Getting everyone to agree to the meeting isn't painless - but they get the essential people well enough, and the ones they didn't catch after dinner they can track down after breakfast Saturday.

Right then.

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss ways to make the world safe enough to graduate the younger years with the seniors. Since leaving them in the Scholomance with mawmouths wandering in through the wards apparently at will would be tantamount to murder.

"That'll be tough in the long term; main way most mals are created is when people use malia," she says, in the tone of someone who made valedictorian partially through a rather insanely detailed and long report in Advanced Readings in the Creation of Maleficaria. "Even the tiny amounts nearly everyone tries to excuse as normal - from my research, that's probably a much bigger contributer than outright maleficers, even. Maleficers are rare. There's... A lot of people who aren't strict mana."

"Things being safer in the short term would give us a massive advantage, though - if the Scholomance is empty, and kids are more or less safe outside it, even for five, ten years... The major enclaves could work together to overhaul the school's wards, for instance."

"If we can organize a wide-scale culling... Once it's been done once, it'll be easier to do again."

"I don't think even we can fight that many at once. And that kind of combat - it'll just create more mals, unless we somehow do it and stay strict mana the entire time."

"So what other ways to get rid of them are there? Can't really just bundle a mal up in a sack and toss it off the back of your room..."

" - If we can toss them properly into the void, they shouldn't be able to come back, though. And then whatever malia they have - like, malia's energy, no way it just vanishes when mals die - will get tossed away with them."

"How would we get them to sit still for that?"

" - A bait trap. We could use a bait trap, get them to an entire area we're cutting off."

"It would need to be a big space. And more compelling bait than a thousand undertrained wizards."

"They're already trying to get into the Scholomance, aren't they? Especially during graduation, since there's a lot of portals opening. If we time it right - we could piggyback off that, use amplification spells..."

"Use the entire school?"

" - Probably can't undo that, though, or do it more than once. We'd need a solution for when mal populations start increasing again, and building a new school is a massive undertaking."

"It would still buy us a lot of time."

"Hasn't Shanghai been threatening to break away and build their own school, anyways?"

"...We've been saving up mana, yes. But that's also how we know it isn't trivial."

"Think this argument would be a lot easier to have if we know how long we'll even have. Like, if this'll buy us two years is a really different story than if this'll buy us fifty or more."

"Not sure how we'd go about estimating that... Unlikely the population statistics are there in a meaningful way."

"The library might be able to give us some..."

"Won't know unless we ask!" says Dani, in the tone of voice of someone who almost always finds what she's looking for after only a brief time spent searching.

" - We can put people with better luck on the searching."

"We need time to work on the other parts, anyway."

"Yeah - and see if there's other options while we're at it..."