People are excited about concrete progress towards colonization things and buy them up eagerly. Anitam sends a bunch out to the planet they are slowly terraforming.

It's spring in the southern hemisphere. Everyone breathlessly waits to see whether nearly all the babies are mages.

It's not quite that good; eating enough clams increases the odds, but not to the point of guarantee. It's more like eighty percent.

Still! The first babies are only a couple weeks old but being obsessively observed for signs of magic. Someone thinks their baby magically started a fire but it turns out the baby just pulled on a tablecloth and knocked a candle over.

People who ate clams should make sure they have good smoke detectors.

Everywhere already mandates really good fire protection measures, given the density fires could be disastrous. Even Calado mandates that. (Enforcement is maybe erratic, but.)

Governments could befriend Fires and Waters and Adamants to help.

Governments are varyingly well equipped to befriend their elementals.

Then they will have varying fire suppression supplementation. Maurabel churns out airtifacts and works on curriculum. Does she get the early students thing?

They can come a season early if she's paying for it.

Well, it's not nothing. Can she afford it?

If she sells more artifacts, yeah, sure!

Air artifacts for all. She gives the elementals a cut but lets them give it back if they're confused and can't think of anything to do with it.

Calado tries to make their mage come back by arresting extended family for treason for helping them escape, but then decides not to do that. The parents work overtime getting money to send back for the prison costs. The little blue collects all twelve elementals, assisted by the willingness of her parents to have their estate transformed so they all have lots of space to live. 

The southern continent's latest batch of children is in fact eighty percent mages!

"Why is Calado like that?"

Does anyone in the southern hemisphere want to invest in any way in the future of mage education?

(Everybody wants to invest in the future of mage education!)

"Historical and cultural reasons but a lot of it is their child credit allocation, it rewards - high-variance strategies."

"It's very itself." While she expects a substantial fraction of the first batch of mages - all of whom will be welcome at her school - to go on to teach, she will continue teaching herself, and will award spots in her school thoughtfully.

(So to people who have the most affinities? Or the most elemental friends?

A social worker notices a red baby leaving glowing spots on his mother's shirt and has him executed.)

"People who work there for long enough have a feel for which judgments are actually going to win out and it feels less chaotic. But it's not a good environment for anyone who lives there, not at all."

(Maurabel makes sure the southern hemisphere has dark places for reds to leave messages for Shadows, if they want.)

She'll probably come up with an entrance exam based on what she finds from the first batch - neither elemental friends nor number of affinities would be decisive on their own - but she can also admit more students from some places than others.

Based on the policies of their governments? None of the mages' families control that.

They do not. She will probably reconsider if somebody has lots of exceptional candidates. For middle of the road ones she will want to consider whether she wants their country to have more mages.

They'll have mages either way, just less trained ones. Will the classes be streamed online?

Sure, she just thinks that's not going to help very much.

Why not?

A lot of magic is felt out and can be guided along by somebody else.

It seems unfair to punish people for being born in Calado. Or similar.