There is a Nessie! She's not a species - one-off creatures just exist sometimes. She's an animal, not a person. One-off animals tend to be magical and to have ways of preventing casual observation by humans, but to turned critters Nessie is sometimes friendly. She likes popcorn.

That makes more sense than a person doing it, except for how "one-off species" is almost a weirder concept than magic. What about angels, that sounds potentially pretty weird too. Do they in fact have six wings and enough eyes for the whole class?

Angels are pretty mysterious but do have a lot of wings, "six" being a possible number. They do not generally appear with extra eyes. They don't talk about where they came from, but they are understood not to have "free will" and to instead be bound to carry out tasks, mostly keeping demons in check. They are supposedly incapable of hurting people who don't "deserve it" so a safe way to get un-possessed is to have an angel stab you: you'll be fine and the demon won't. They are genderless, they can glow, bugbears can't sense them, they live a very very long time though they might not be outright immortal, they're eccentric and rare and asocial and sexless and imperceptible by bugbear senses.

That's definitely at least as weird as extra eyes. Margaret has a lot of questions about what exactly decides whether a victim of angelic stabbing "deserved it", but answering those questions empirically sounds 1) infeasible and 2) distinctly not fun. She brings the book on the war back home and reads it there for easier notetaking.

The dragons and sphinxes, the most magically powerful creatures ever unless unicorns (who've been extinct longer) had something cool, had a war. They had allies of other species, but no fully overwhelming dominion over any - most griffins worked for sphinxes, most wyverns worked for dragons, but there were exceptions and the alliances were on the individual or family level, nothing that left the remaining combatants feuding after the sphinxes and dragons had driven each other to extinction. They carefully guarded the secrets of their magical prowess - dragons seemed to mostly use runecasting, but did insane things with it such that it's widely believed to have been a smokescreen for some natural magic in addition to whatever the details were of their incredible defensive prowess; sphinxes relied much less heavily on runes in the moment and tended to have amazingly well-enchanted artifacts in play instead. Some of these artifacts survive and are held by private owners or on display in museums in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa (where the war spanned). Sphinxes are credited with the invention of medallions and some sort of dispute about dragon medallions is believed to have sparked the conflict, though the historian writing this book believes there must be more to it, as it was so all-encompassing.

So runecasting is kind of sort of part of her heritage, but it's a heritage that nearly wiped out dragons and may have wiped out sphinxes. That's . . . a sobering thought. She'll just have to do better than her ancestors, and not even think about having kids until she finds some way to live openly as a dragon.

Step 1 on that is making some critter friends. Kevin went badly, but that was because they had nothing in common and also she was using him for information. Does the Avalon library, or the Avalon in general, have any events where she can meet other critters her own age? Maybe a book club or something?

If she looks at fliers posted on Avalon lampposts, she can find:

- a book club planning to next read some book called "Nora Finn"
- a video game club inviting all challengers to defeat them at Madden
- a club called Barn Raisers planning on getting together to repair the nondenominational church's roof and clear out some old hippogriff's gutters and refit a house for a harpy family
- two poker nights, a bridge club, a Magic: the Gathering club, a D&D campaign looking for players, and a general board game night
- karaoke Thursdays
- a "Sunshine Day" holiday party for aquatic types and anyone who likes to swim in the Avalon pond
- an after-school club that seems to be aimed at kids who attend school within the Avalon, called "Extra Credit"
- anime club
- street hockey
- knitting circle

"DnD as played by actual magical creatures" is hilarious on a conceptual level even though it's probably very similar to the baseline human kind in practice, and she probably won't have to lie to her parents about anything except the location. She'll sign up for that, provided they don't require nontrivial prior gaming experience--she did a session or two with some robotics club people once, but their group was too large already and she didn't stick around.

It says they're playing 3.5 and the DM can make a character for you if you don't know how, which is probably promising!

She will show up to the next session and meet everyone there and ask for help rolling up a wizard!

"We've got a wizard, do you have a second choice or should I just try to make a real different wizard?" says the DM, who has lop rabbit ears and a rabbit tail on an otherwise human form at the moment but doesn't wear a medallion. Most of the people in this group are older than her, early twenties, but they don't make an issue of it.

"I can be something else, what does the group not have one of?"

"Could use a cleric," comments a person in human form.

"Or a paladin, we've got a monk but not a full on fighter," says a midformed griffin. "And we have a druid."

"Big party," remarks a lamia.

"Paladin sounds like fun. They're the ones who use both weapons and magic and have a bunch of extra rules about being heroic to follow, right?"

"That's right," says the DM. "Lemme whip up a first level paladin for you real quick. If anybody else shows up I can run this campaign for two groups but I think with six people it's not worth the schedule headache." He rolls up a first level paladin for her. "You got decent stats, lucky you."

"Thank you! Can I maybe get a quick introduction to everybody?" She introduced herself when she showed up but hasn't gotten the rundown of everyone else's names yet.

"I'm Xavier," says the DM. "Your competitor wizard over there is Cole, Sanjay," he indicates the griffin, "is playing a monk, Brenda," a medallionless woman with a snake lower half and sharp teeth, "is playing a psion, Alec," he's in a midform with a horse tail and nothing else, "is our druid, and Joseph," no medallion, looks human, "is a rogue."

"Nice to meet you all!" And now she's ready to start gaming. She will work to remember the rules she's half-forgotten, help the rest of the party in their endeavors, and scout out who in the group seems nice and friendly and like they might be fun to spend time with.

The campaign is pretty standard fare, although they meet because they are all picked up by a band of mixed human and orc slavers rather than happening across each other in a tavern. Brenda is closest to Margaret's age and is helpful, if sometimes in a munchkiny way, with the game; Joseph cracks a lot of jokes; Sanjay keeps being tempted to metagame.

This is pretty fun! If it's like what she remembers it will probably eat the whole evening, but she made sure to have her homework done first.

It does take three and a half hours before the DM calls a halt and says they can pick up same time next week.

Margaret goes home and falls asleep immediately, without even spending some time in fullform first.

The next morning she realizes that all this history-books-and-gaming has been, while useful to her long-term goals, also working as a distraction from something she hadn't fully admitted: she has a pretty good understanding of how incantations work. The next thing she needs to do in her self-study of runecasting is try creating her own diagram.

She decides to start with a spell to cool water, since testing it will be similar to her tests of heating water and there shouldn't be any new risks on top of the existing ones. If the heating-water spell starts with "heat" and "water", this one should start with "cold" and "water". She spends well over ten hours over the course of several days on constructing a first draft of a diagram, cancelling the side effects of side effects of side effects, being careful not to do anything near it that might count as "incanting".

It completely fails to indicate in any way whether or not it is plotting her doom.

If it did, that would be extremely worrying, given that it would be a departure from what she's used to. The next step, according to the textbook, is to leave it alone for a week, so she does that. During that time she goes to DnD again. She gets to the avalon early, though, to swing by the library and renew her textbook and see if there's anything new in the magic section.