"Why?  When this morning you didn't think magic existed at all?"  She chuckles.

"And yes, we've launched things up.  Tricked some muggle pilots into thinking they were alien spaceships, I hear.  Magic keeps working as far as I hear they've gone - but no surprise; like I said I'm pretty sure it works all the way out to the Moon.  And I've never heard of anyone going beyond there.

"Which doesn't mean they haven't.  I could give a big rant about how mages don't tell anyone about half the things they figure out!" 

She throws up her hands again at the end of that exclamation, again punctuated by leaping flames from the circle around her.

(Her own hypocrisy on that point doesn't even cross her mind.  If it did, she'd excuse herself by saying nobody asks about half the things she figures out.)

"...When knowledge is power, and power shared is power halved, I can see why everyone hoards it.

"...And I still think you could run that.  The reason I picked a Cubesat as your delivery vehicle is because they're often enough someone's hobby project that they can pass beneath notice.  Hm...  But how do you cover for the unsustainable delta-v...

"Experimental reactionless drive ala - that thing that never panned out?  It would become a mystery, but it would be a mystery.

"Or maybe a malfunction on deployment that sends some smaller part rocketing off.  But they would probably try to track it...

"Or just.  Veil it?

"You'd probably be able to get away with optical camouflage...

"...What do your solutions for comms look like?  Assuming as I am that you must have something that isn't piggybacking off of mundane infrastructure?"

"Power shared is... halved?" Aeslin trails off, confused as she tries to take it literally, fails, and then boggles at the failure of metaphor.  "But power shared means no one else can build on it to make even more power!"

"And... veil?  How?  Is that a muggle thing?"

"Having the details of everything you can do, be laid out for everyone to see, is a threat to pretty much any mage's wellbeing, because if you are known you can be predicted.  Your spells can be taken apart and countered and used to hurt you with.  Am I wrong?

"I have to imagine you keep just as much back, too.

"...It's like.  The converse of nuclear deterrence?

"The biggest threat a mage can pose is the one you know absolutely nothing about.  Because everyome knows that there will be one, because that's how things work, but the more that is known about your trump card, the less it trumps.

"Yes, if everyone pooled their...

"...Oh, I've just had a wonderfully terrible idea, though I don't know if a human mind could actually execute it because I'm lifting it from a piece of fiction about, effectively, naturally-occurring transcendent beings.

"Suffice to say, a knowledge-sharing equivalent of a Ponzi scheme.

"...As for your other question - Veils?  Illusions?  What's the technical term for the class of spells that hide things from people, then?"

"Well yes, I keep things back, but that's because people aren't interested, and it's so much of a bother to write them up in a way that they'd understand - why'd you think I started talking to a random muggle like you!"  Aeslin throws up her hands.

"Maybe everyone else is keeping things back for antinuclearesque deterrence like you're saying, but if so - so much the worse for them!"

"... of course, if they understood things as easily with analogies like you do, it might be another matter..."

A sudden thought crosses her mind.

"... Speaking of hiding things from people, are you sure you heard anyone talk about magic before?  It's not exactly usual, but then it'd also be unusual for you to... well, I guess I haven't tried explaining magic to a random sample of muggles...?"

She hasn't thought about why on earth Aeslin's talking to her, yet.  The question clearly makes her start thinking about it and then realize something that seems dreadfully obvious once it's been considered, but there's a different question to answer that takes priority.

"...I'm pretty confident that the only remotely magical-seeming things I've ever heard of that weren't - coming from inside the house, as was - were just superstition dressed up fancy.  There's a bunch of people who love to sell shiny rocks like they do something, but that seems...  Well if someone was actually doing that to muggles with real magic rocks everybody would come down on their head like a ton of bricks.  Then again, if I was a wizard having to hide - not the existence, but certainly the nature, of an enterprise from the IRS, I'd probably hide it in the sector of things claiming to be fake magic...

"The only time I've known myself to have heard of even magical terminology is when - She Who Must Not Be Named, derogatory - clearly stole some from y'all for a frankly substandard work of children's fiction, and that's only retrospective."

"Yeah, I've been at a couple magical shops that do that.  It always felt like too much bother to me, though, unless you really like spinning stories for muggles.

"And that author -"  Aeslin shrugs.  "I think she just overheard a few terms?  She doesn't have any real magic herself, and - I've never read the books, but I'm told she didn't get much right."

"But!"  She holds up her wand at salute, with a few sparkles circling its tip.  "Now that I'm thinking of the possibility, do you mind if I test you for any spells on your mind?  We don't have a full general-purpose memory altering spell, but there're still some things... It's been short enough that if I wanted to, I could still make you forget our conversation tonight..."

She trails off, her mind full of magic and completely ignoring how that last line would sound to Mira.

"...I would prefer that you did not wipe my memory but did test me for other mind-altering spells, if you would be so kind."

"Oh - why would I do that; then we'd need to start talking all over again next time - anything you love about this particular school, by the way?"

She raises her wand, and then remembers something and starts patting down the pockets hidden in her skirt.  It should hopefully be somewhere... "maybe I left it in the bag," she mumbles...

"Agreed."

"...It was one of the better options for my degree program to be had in a state that doesn't want to criminalize my existence, and honestly the non-dorm parts of campus are neat - but aside from the reasons anyone might pick this university, I'm not particularly tied to it?"

"Criminalize - oh."  She shakes her head, suddenly realizing.  And then she realizes another possibility, shakes her head again, and decides not to ask.

Instead, she dives into her bag, and comes out with what looks like a floppy lightweight ski cap and another piece of chalk, but nothing else.

"Well, I don't have everything I was looking for, but between this and my wand I can show whether you have active geases or reverse sleep or dreamweaving spells... not that I'd seriously expect dreamweaving; if anyone but me and a few of my friends even knows how to put that on you I'd be astonished..."

She falls into thought for a moment and then starts drawing a chalk circle around Mira.  "Just stand somewhere in this circle; it won't hurt you if you step out but it'll break the spell... well, it won't hurt you for the first several spells at least."

...Sound any more like a mad scientist, why don't you, she doesn't say as she makes an agreeing noise.  "Go on, then, I'm as ready as I'll ever be.  ...Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if something was odd with my dreams, because they're unusually vivid compared to my waking ability to visualize anything novel - but I doubt that that's magic at play.  Probably just some sort of brain weirdness."

She finishes the circle and taps it with her wand; it starts glowing, though not sparkling yet like her own circle had been. 

"Well, hey, if you want me to have a look, I can always do with another willing test subject next time I do get up to dream magic."

At the end of the sentence, she taps the back of Mira's head with her wand once, lightly.  It doesn't feel like anything aside from a normal tap.

"That sounds cool, honestly, as long as I can be reasonably sure it's not going to make my brain implode or something?  So yeah put my name down."

"Well, I probably could do that - figuratively speaking; literal wouldn't involve dream magic at all - but there're so many more fun things to look into..."

She weaves her wand lazily in the air around Mira, and sparkles dart back and forth between the wand and her head.  Some of them feel ticklish like light sparks of electricity; others feel something like tiny scratches.

"...Well, yes, obviously you could if you tried, the question was never whether you could but what amount of risk I'd be taking on of that happening entirely by accident.

"...Huh, I can feel whatever these are doing, kind of?"

"Oh good.  I think that means you're more self-aware than people who don't?  On average, I mean.  Maybe someday someone will finish proving that theory."

She taps Mira in the forehead once, and a momentary wave of sleepiness goes through her before vanishing a moment later.

"Well, that does it!  No dream magic active on you.  Nor the quasi-dream type of memory magic, which is the only version I can test here - but that usually doesn't stay around more than a few months, so it doesn't say that much."

"Well, that's good to know.  ...What's this hypothesis about self-awareness?"

"Oh, that you're more likely to feel probing-spells related to dream magic when you're in the habit of noticing your own thought patterns and considering how you think on a meta-level!  Haven't seen any decent evidence against it, and a decent amount of case studies pointing towards it.  But, dream magic as a whole is scandalously under-studied."

She holds out the hat to Mira.  "You want to put it on your head, or should I?  Doesn't matter which way goes where; just stretch it out and don't bunch it up."

"Huh.  I wouldn't have thought I was above-average on that metric, but then it's not like I actually collect that sort of data..."

Anyway.  Hat! 

It feels like a hat!  With something like small pebbles and grains of sand sewn into its lining, with what might be wires connecting them!

Aeslin smiles slightly when Mira puts it on.

And then Aeslin draws a ring about it with her wand, and sparks arc up from the circle to the hat, and it tightens around Mira's head.

"Searching out geases," Aeslin says.  "You'd probably know about them if you had them on you - probably - but you might not be able to tell me.  So I wanted to check..."

She nods.  "Very possibly, though I can say that I don't know of any geasa on me.  Huh, the design of this feels like one of those electrode skullcaps for measuring brain activity...  Was it inspired by that, or just, convergent evolution, do you know?"