"I don't know how common exit clauses are. Possible they are all the time happening. Reevaluating in five years not unusual, I think. Cannot personally vouch for any Lunabellans who are in the market."

".....Huh."

She sighs and rubs her temples.

"Oh god, I've reached the point of stressing about suddenly becoming magic. Got to take this seriously, think about what my best life consists of and all..."

"If you need more time for thinking about it than I can keep the shop here, I can do a house call but you would owe me."

"Maybe. I can get alllll the info and turn it over and do a spreadsheet... What kind of owe? Make a high rank potion or two owe, or what?"

"The mana back for the getting to where you are - I do not know where you live so I do not know how much - and some for my time in doing it. Could put that mana in a potion or could just mint it."

"...Riiiight, mana, mana... Does hanging out in a jewelry store tend to work for luxals? I might want, like, a loan, or at least some arrangement of 'I get to hang out here under watch'... Museum or something, one of the tacky ones that are more showing off than educational, like the room full of gemstones at the Field Museum..."

"Yes, jewelry store and museum will work fine if you are not expelled for loitering. I do not require the mana right then immediately, just, it is an amount I would be out."

"No no I get it. I want plenty for my own stuff too. Now I'm imagining an arrangement on Lunabella where I hang out in someone's treasury until I get enough dosh for my own. But slavery. I assume they chose the word deliberately, as opposed to say, contracts. I feel like I don't get it."

"Well, they actually speak Lunabellan Greek, so it is a translation. There are contracts involved."

"I don't suppose there's a way to tour these places while still a mundie?"

"Not so much. Mundies cannot even see the stuff in the Lunabella domains, that is why the moon does not look inhabited. Same problem with portals that are not designed special to include you, you walk right through like no magic was done in the place. Some factions have websites?"

"Websites are significantly better than nothing... And I'm curious enough to visit Lunabella and ask around what the process is like but definitely not curious enough to have fate about it."

"Fate is not necessary for long term opportunity to do a magic, only for buying it in points here now today."

"I'll pass entirely, then."

"It does give two points, you might want to at least consider the schools, which are website-havers."

"Have you got a Hex VPN here?"

"Sure, network is called HareNet, hare like the animal, and the password is waterwheel all one word lower case."

She will connect and try to look up the two schools, then. Hawthorne and Arcadia, wasn't it?

That's them.

Arcadia has a university website which is like all other university websites except the photography is a lot more interesting and there's less empty copy and also it advertises magic classes. She can enroll once she's awakened; apparently the website can tell that she isn't yet, but it'll still let her put together a mock courseload and browse the many clubs and look at the schedule for forthcoming campus themes (currently: Tropical Sunrise; last quarter: Haunted Woods; candidates up for students to vote on for next quarter: Underwater Shipwreck, An Homage to Saihua Museum of Fine Art, Papercraft Wonderland, and Inflorescence).

Hawthorne's website is very Web 1.0. The background is pale grey, the links are blue, the images of serious uniformed witches in labs and on brooms are static, and the whole thing is formatted in a table. It has:

- a list of wand spells taught at each rank (highlights include Counterspell, assorted painful dueling spells, Mage Hand which gives feedback just like normal hands, and, at rank 5, one to make things bigger on the inside, and ones that permanency-ify or contingency-ify other spells);
- a rubric of student behavior and according disciplinary penalties up to and including (for crimes such as "aggravated Outsider contamination") execution, with a downloadable PDF that advertises itself as being more than three hundred pages long;
- a map of the campus (it's under the Greenland ice sheet, and it is very large, with fourteen different libraries);
- a preliminary House sorting quiz (there are more than a hundred Houses and being sorted, even tentatively and nonbindingly by this form, requires information a non-awakened witch doesn't have yet like which magics she has at her highest rank);
- a course catalog, with all the expectable magic classes, and also required seminars in behavioral, physical, spiritual, and social health;
- an explanation of the strange underground illumination cycle, the way new buildings add themselves to campus on their own as-needed, and a link to the surrounding college town, for a value of "town" which has more people in it than Germany;
- an academic calendar.

"...Hawthorne does not seem like my vibe any more than the Watchers. Arcadia seems neat, but all college websites that are trying seem neat... Still. If anything, what little you've said about Hespatians and maybe the Feywilds does but also: No. I don't wanna go full edgelord. These are the only two that take public awaken-ees?"

"Arcadia takes all comers and Hawthorne all with a certain potential which you have. There are other schools in the worlds, and lots of people learn mostly from tutors, and you can seek these options, but I do not have an in with them for you."

"I got into a gifted student school once, on this scholarship doohickey. It seemed like everyone there was on drugs and it was awful in almost every possible way. There was this extra class that we had to do some kind of... Volunteer work, and it turned out to be a free labor scheme and money laundering thing. I couldn't keep up at all, but I tried, 'cause it was a boarding school. And then got kicked out at the six month mark. The security guard guy tried to get people alone with him. My English teacher there was nice, even if she seemed, like, one bad day away from finding a bridge and jumping... What am I rambling on for. Mark me lazy I guess, hard work and discipline isn't part of my best life. Arcadia, then."

"Arcadia it is. I went there for a little bit my own self. Very customizable. Their magic is digicasting, going into or taking things from arts and books and games and such."

"...Parallel world style or emulation style? I presume someone would have tried, like, writing something utopian, and then bringing it into the real..."

"The things brought out are a bit limited even if you go all the way to rank five, alas. I do not know these styles you describe?"