The bell rings.
For someone with so much free time he feels like he is always late to things. The school map isn't really that useful, so he asks someone.
"Hi? I am looking for Ms. Smith's class?"
"Most people are either 'get as much living space possible' or 'donate all to charity' in my experience. But yeah, that is what I am thinking. I would at most have a nice penthouse somewhere near my workplace and be done with it. Maybe rent a yacht if I ever felt a burning need for one."
Well, the day of the exhibit comes. The place is more of an art museum that they adapted for the traveling exhibition. There is a wing for the witchlands, one for the stormlands, but the rest is mixed. The entry hall contains a massive globe with bits of flat crystal floating around it. The exhibition's name is beneath it "Around the Worlds." People dressed as Dr. Moore The Elephant and his friends are guiding a group of excited children to one of the wings.
"Ooh, I didn't even know they made layered globes, much less magical layered globes. What do you want to see first?"
There are plenty of pretty things! They have phoenix feathers in this display, next to an explanation of the history that led to its extinction.
There is a mirror that doesn't show people. There is a bar of metal that turns from lead to gold when exposed to sunlight. There is a magical floating orrery sort of thing.
She gives an introduction to skymagery. Every skymage has the gift of flight, plus any combination of the following gifts: wind, warmth, cold, humidity, lightning, darkness, light and forecasting. Sometimes these gifts come in stronger form and this is represented in their wings. The greater gifts are randomly selected.
Fenris and Felix here are a great example of this. They're genetically identical, but the random selection of greater gifts meant that each one got a different one.
Fenris levitates off the ground, simply ignoring gravity instead of doing anything that uses his wings. The woman explains that skymages with the greater gift of flight can just ignore gravity instead of actually using their wings. This is shown through wings that are differently shaped. Fenris' wings have a pair of claws in each and are slightly smaller.
Some people applaud. The woman continues the explanation. "Felix on the other hand got the greater gift of warmth. Sometimes just called the gift of fire. It does the obvious thing."
Felix snaps his fingers and pretends to have some trouble getting it. But then a ball of fire forms above his hand. People are impressed. Felix "draws" a heart with fire and people applaud.
The lesser gifts are still useful. Which is demonstrated when Fenris douses the fire heart with a localized cloud. Another skymage then complains that one shouldn't rain on someone's else day. And leaving puddles around isn't polite. The skymage makes the water float off the ground. Another skymage freezes it.
There is some talk about global warming (and how it's not caused by skymages; this causes people to laugh) and environmental importance. Most people are paying attention to the minor feats of magic in the background.
Like this one twin high-fiving people while flying upside down.
High-five?
"They're probably not that bad."
And here is the Stormlands part of the exhibit! There are a lot of pictures and miscellaneous artifacts! A sea serpent skeleton hanging from the ceiling that loops around the room! A stuffed set of lords-of-birds and how the symbiotic magic propagates between different species of birds! Various pictures of skymages using their magical powers and how these affect the colors of their wings (or their eyes if they have greater forecast). There is one about Stormland history.
"Oooh, found the first hilariously inaccurate mistake."
"Probably this isn't as meaningful if you don't have tormundic ancestry. But here they're describing the end of Stormlords and how most island-states adopted democracy or at least things sufficiently close to democracy that they eventually became democratic. So far so good."
He points at a picture, showing skymages fighting a storm elemental. This one is vaguely dragon-shaped, but still obviously made out of clouds.
"Here they are claiming that skymages stopped fighting the storms elementals after their governments turned democratic. Which isn't quite true."
"Nope," Fenris says, "because an elemental's first storm is stronger and you don't know its powers and what sort of weather patterns it defaults to. Sure, Stormlords only had to fight them two or three times a year, but the stormlords and their populations experienced a much greater mortality rate per storm. Stormlords had tons of children to compensate and they warred each other for space and power."
"While things are much stabler on the democratic side of things. Storm elementals don't change no matter how long they stay around, so you can plan around that, incentivize people to have children with the right gifts so they are useful when their obligatory military service comes around. Having people tied up in a place every other month also did some things to keep skymages busy and not warring against each other. So their numbers grew even thought the birth rate was like, a third of the Stormlords'. And they're more prosperous in general."
"Oh, other Stormlords would totally invade each other's territories. The problem is that those Stormlords wouldn't adapt and kept killing the storm elementals. Or some tried the new way, but didn't have the numbers to pull it off while fighting other Stormlords and the democratic coalition."
"I don't think that is the exact percentage, but I do think that a good chunk of the problem is that the two major sides of the international magical community are at odds with each other so they can't reach a consensus on how to help magic people elsewhere. If that was out of the way, I think the Stormlands and Witchlands would be strong enough to seriously improve things everywhere else."
"I mean, historical reasons is in fact most of it. Without going into a history lesson, the Witch-queens tried to invade and conquer the Stormlands a lot in the past. Failed each time and then simply stopped. Generations later, both sides still hold a grudge over it."
There is a layered map showing the Stormlands. The twins point out where Dalkas is. It overlaps with the east third of Greenland, while the west third belongs to Sumralkas, the dusklight island. The middle third is ocean and the display mentions how the middle of greenland has no land, but is frozen over. And goes on talking about how geography often repeats across dimensions, but with minor differences. It gives the example of the seven-sisters peaks, a mountain repeated over and over across the overlapping dimensions, but with minor differences. One is a volcano.
Very pretty. Other Witch-queen artifacts are similarly extravagant and elaborate. There is a video screen showing a Witch-queen fight in a loop. Currently the scene shows a flower themed Witch-queen making an army sprout of seeds from the ground, while the other is charging up a single target attack. Kids huddle around the screen and occasionally have to be told to contain their cheering to a minimum.
"That magic is also why it might not stick to our feathers. Our wings do a self-maintenance and healing thing that interferes with keeping them dyed. Granted, I'm not sure how it would interact with witchcraft. I'm sure it was tested in the past, but not in friendly terms."
Well, you can't really separate things in discrete parts. There is the fact that when their parents died the thaumatophobic doctor decided to call a poorly trained thaumatophobic security guard who decided it was a good idea to point a gun at Felix's head in case he reacted badly to the news "your parents are dead". That is by far the most absurd part of the entire situation and even made the news. The United States government even made a point of looking very apologetic about it. Then their grandparents took their younger sister to the Stormlands and decided not to send her back and kept insisting that the twins go against their parents' wishes and go to the Stormlands too. The government was suddenly less apologetic and just absent. The twins' parents had named their surviving uncle and (a fiancée at the time of the writing of their will) the uncle's ex-girlfriend to become their legal guardians upon death. The uncle moved back to the Stormlands after the break-up and the twins had to convince the ex to let them crash at her place while the twins got emancipated. They suspect, but have no concrete proof, that their grandparents have been sabotaging the twins' attempt to work using their skymagery.
In order from the most to least important:
1. They want their sister safe.
2. They want their sister to not be forced in an arranged marriage for the purpose of skymage-gift eugenics.
3. They want their sister to not be under constant pressure to be a skymage dedicated to serving the community.
(Oh, they just remembered that this correspondence should be confidential. So they're free to reveal that their uncle (the gradparents' eldest) killed himself because of emotional pressure from the maternal grandparents. They wanted him to be a skymage dedicated to serving the community.)
4. They want their sister living with them.
5. They want their grandparents to not influence the twins' job prospects negatively, if they are doing that.
(As a side note, they explain that they have family from their father's side, but they are more or less estranged and that set of grandparents is likely to do what the other tells them to. So putting their sisters with them is not an option. Their surviving maternal uncle is not available for the same reason.)
Not physically abusive, no. The grandparents had high standards and their children would need to earn being allowed to have fun, seeing friends outside of school hours or even having time with their own parents (on the grounds that their time was too valuable and helped many lives). Their mom remarked that their dead uncle used to get a lot of praise and the other was largely ignored like he wasn't there. She was somewhere in the middle. Allegedly the grandparents have tried to improve over the years, but they took their sister and didn't let her go back.
Okay, this she can definitely work with, even if it wasn't exactly what she was hired for. The biggest problem is that they're still minors, but if they can prove that their sister is more suited to being raised by them they can get custody that way. It's going to be extremely hard, though, the system is rigged against them.
They are grateful! They didn't even have better options before. They even considered going to the Stormlands and then share the burden of being around their grandparents (they didn't went for that because it would be so much harder to actually rescue Maira from the situation.)