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Morty knows he shouldn't be screwing around with multidimensional shit. It's dangerous, it's impractical, it's blah blah blah. But it's a potential key to unlimited energy, how does nobody see that? He's built a dimensional siphon (it kind of looks like a cardboard box with a funnel and a TI-84 taped to it, but it damn well works), keyed in the dimensional coordinates to a random plane, and by God he's going to use it.
He flips the switch and waits for the energy bar to fill up.
It does! It fills up very rapidly. Then it explodes, along with the box. There's rather more smoke than there should be, and once the smoke clears someone is standing there.
"Oh dear," Morty says faintly.
Flicker at Whateley
point_b
"And you're sure we don't have demons because they'd make themselves known in ways unrelated to whether anybody around is magic?"
in-like-a-lion
"That and you don't have any other spirits or evidence of magic, yeah. Demons: not subtle."
point_b
"Okay. How much trouble am I going to have picking this up? Are there classes for magic-ified baselines around here that I can enter at this time of year?"
in-like-a-lion
"You're allowed tutoring at whatever pace you want, and we've got a whole department for this shit, so we could totally get you an accelerated track. Maybe we can get Circe to take you on, she's got shit else to do and she's scary good. The amount of trouble you'll have varies, but the classic indicators of magic talent sound like friggin' astrology, so I've never held with that much."
point_b
"Okay. ...Is there a way to non-disastrously dimension-hop or do I need to pick up all my tutoring and, I don't know, spellbooks and talismans, in one trip?"
in-like-a-lion
"I'm pretty sure if we can get you back home within the week we can get you back here without much trouble. You'd have to pay for the lessons, though. And for the transit, unless it turns out I can do it or something."
in-like-a-lion
"...Might want it in silver or something. Actually, silver'd be a really convenient currency for this, Sally can tun it into mithril and sell it at a fucking massive markup. Or just use it for whatever project most recently flitted into her head and sell like three ounces at a fucking massive markup. Or I can get Leo to pay for the whole thing if you'd run some courier missions for his mom or something."
point_b
"Is his mom a supervillain or something too? Because in general I have no objection to courier missions, but you seem to have a surfeit of people whose specific courier missions might be objectionable."
in-like-a-lion
"Oh, yeah, she's totally a supervillain. But not a particularly bad one. She doesn't, like, nuke stuff, just makes ominous deals with demons and accumulates dark power for her own vague purposes. Used to sacrifice people, but she hardly even does that nowadays. Her courier shit would probably be, like, 'get me this black moonsilver athame from Saudi Arabia so I don't have to wait for it to ship' or something. Or 'smuggle this magical recording crystal into the Vatican'. She's good at giving appropriate tasks to folks with objective morality."
point_b
"...And how expensive, in silver, is tutoring, because - Alli, please look up how much silver costs, ballpark, reasons - because I might just want to bounce people around at home for non-villainous purposes and pay for my lessons that way."
in-like-a-lion
"Full tuition is like 40k. You could probably knock that down to 30 since you wouldn't be living on campus. Pretty much everybody's here on full scholarships or nearly, which you don't qualify for on account of you're not a mutant and you're not homeless or fleeing from anything. This is discounting the possibility that Circe will do that thing where she takes one look at you and says 'I must tutor this girl immediately, the idea of charging for my services is insulting and absurd'. Which is possible."
point_b
"I'm not quite homeless, but the house I grew up in was recently destroyed in a massive natural disaster and I personally saved an estimated one and a half million people while helping evacuate from same, maybe that sneaks me in somewhere scholarshippy. I'm also unjustifiably optimistic that she will look at me and say that thing. Would commuting home every day - given interdimensional transit costs - be less expensive than staying on campus most of the time? Alli says silver is currently six dollars sixty-seven cents per, quote, 'OZT, whatever that means', back home. Thanks, Alli."
in-like-a-lion
"Nice work on the saving people! But most of the scholarships are pretty airtight on the mutant thing. Your optimism seems pretty justified to me, you're interesting. Circe likes people who're going to do interesting things with her tutelage. Granted, that usually means 'people who're gonna die horribly preventing the apocalypse', but in this case you might slip under on the basis of introducing magic to a new word. Daily commute would get pretty expensive, yeah. Standard dimensional summoning is a pretty big working, and there's like an ounce of powdered mithril involved. It'd be kind of like a daily commute from Australia."
point_b
"So I might wind up blowing the extra few thou on room and board here, although my family will be slightly inconvenienced by my absence and inability to do the grocery shopping in less ashy parts of the world. But I bet that via some combination of arbitrage and ferrying your fancy technology back home I can come out of this in the black and a wizard and make it home for Christmas."
in-like-a-lion
"...Now that you mention the ash, this may be a good time to ponder getting a high-ranked wizard or two into your world and having them do some stuff in the name of fixing up supervolcanic fallout. Because, like, magic. Super helpful. They probably couldn't fix it all, but they could stop the crater from smoking and they might be able to alter some weather patterns. Maybe they could truck some air elementals in or something to start herding the ash clouds into one place? But, like, that sort of thing."
point_b
"...I am tentatively interested. I think I would like to be very responsible about inviting extradimensional visitors over, because extradimensional visitors are not a typical occurrence and we do not have any systems set up to handle them, their return home, their immigration status, etcetera."
in-like-a-lion
"Reasonable. We don't really have official systems that way either, it's mostly handled independently by Whateley and the school's variously shady government contacts. Like just about everything else the school does."
point_b
"Well, if there's going to be an semi-official system on our end, I want to be working closely with it. I'll let the Junebugs help, they know what they're doing mostly."
in-like-a-lion
"Junebugs your superhero organization? I can't think of any explanations for the name, but whatever it is it's probably cute."
point_b
"It's kind of cute! Gemini is the 'twins' astrological symbol, right? And most of the dates that you can be born on to be a Gemini, astrologically, are in June. And then the 'bugs' part just got tacked on. The real name is the Gemini Guard."
point_b
"There are also Gemini Schools but those don't have a cute name. Is this the only mutant school on the planet?"
in-like-a-lion
"There's a couple of others. There's a Japanese school for super-ninjas, in particular, they're apparently our rivals, they try to steal the busts out of our cottages and we beat the crap out of their teams and take the leaders' signet rings. Because we're better than them. But yeah, we're definitely the biggest. Mutants are not a large portion of the population, and most other parts of the world tend not to, uh, retain them very well. Because they're too busy murdering them. Europe's got a couple of schools, I think there's somewhere in Australia, the Chinese may or may not have something or other."
point_b
"I don't know a lot about how other countries handle their twins. Gemini Schools are it in the United States and I think Canada has something similar. Some places might not do anything in particular. But everybody's very firmly agreed on controlling the hell out of fertility drugs."