Can you tap into two at once? Do you have to be touching them? If you're tapping a hybrid, do you need to be focusing on one half in particular? Will it go faster now that they know how to do it?

You can. Yes, or they can be touching each other in a chain. No. Yes.

How many can you tap into at once? Does it take extra practice to do that?

No known upper limit. Yes.

Ooooooh.

What things do they most want to learn to do?

Shadow-walking! So they can go to planets! Flying! Artifacts!

"It's actually a bad idea to try to steer a shadow walk if you don't absolutely have to. Shadows are miles better at it and can bring passengers. We will definitely cover flying - I don't have enough Air to do it without help myself but I have books and we can figure out the rest. And we're going to cover artifacts for sure, what artifacts do you want to make?"

Artifacts they can sell for lots of money! Artifacts they can use for terraforming! And for self-defense! And for killing uppity reds!

That last kid can leave the classroom now. They can try again tomorrow.

That is a useful thing to have artifacts for, though.

Anybody who remarks on the usefulness or desirability of extrajudicial death of any person can leave. They can come back tomorrow. This time.

"Everyone knows they should die." Some of his classmates are nodding.

She will continue expelling students and teach just the reds if she has to.

She might have to.

Nah, like half of the kids are willing to volunteer no opinion about the reds. One of the greys looks like he couldn't care less but once he notices all the other greys have gotten kicked out he says 'they should die' and quickly leaves.

She resumes the lesson! She would like them all to come to their individual appointments with guesses about their affinity strengths if they can. Magic you're better at is easier, feels more available - there's not a lot of strength difference when you don't know what you're doing yet but there's some - and if they manage to make a magic sense work and then try with others (their elementals are encouraged to student-hop) the ones they are better at will be sharper and easier to sustain and interpret and steer.

That makes sense. They try it.

They will need a while and should practice out of class. She makes little diagrams of what elements might be useful in all the non-murder artifact ideas presented.

They will practice out of class!

Great. She answers more questions and sets up a way for them to organize meets to share elementals and explains how the assessment system is tentatively going to work and reminds them to wear their nametags to the next class.

And off they go, some already planning elemental swapping.

And she has already found amenable elementals that cover the dozen for the reds. Sigh.

"I should concretize the thing where if they, for example, advocate murder, they will be asked to leave; 'for example' isn't good enough," says Maurabel to her orange TAs, "is there some standard I could copy?"

"The school I worked at had a policy against disrupting the classroom environment - saying the reds should be dead wouldn't count but saying one of your classmates should would -"

"It is the policy of their governments to kill red mages, are you planning to enforce a ban on discussing laws currently in place -"

"We would have someone take a student to a separate room to talk if they were making inappropriate comments."

"Yes, I recommend that over sending them home, especially if their parents are at work and there's no one to make sure they get home safely - that's less of a concern here, obviously -"

"In my country elementals are legally forces of nature and enslaving them is encouraged. If someone discussed that currently-in-place law in an approving or even a potentially threatening neutral way I would certainly send them away."

"They should really be getting a non-magical education too - save that kind of discussion for civics class -"

"Oh, I agree there, it's very off-topic -"

"I think having someone take disruptive students aside for a talk should work fine -"

"- depending whether the point is to correct misbehavior or show off to the reds that it's taken seriously -"

"Ewwww. They're here, that's enough of a point made."