Such as one dorm-bound student who finds it, somehow, easier to do homework in the various public buildings in the middle of the night, than in her dorm.

"...'scuse me, but am I going to get mind-wiped for seeing this or something?  Because I'd really prefer not that," says a young woman with a messenger bag slung over her shoulder, "but if I don't get any say in the matter please just do it now so you do the least damage."

As she freezes staring at the newcomer, her wand raised, the rainbows subside to a small glowing around her three circles on the sidewalk.

Then after a moment, when her mind's finally processing the newcomer's words, she answers the part that's easiest to answer.

" - well, if I wanted to mind-wipe you, of course I'd do it after asking you all sorts of questions about why you came here!  It'd be a lot harder to find that out afterwards!"

"...I'm a student.  It's easier to work when I'm not crammed into a 10-by-14 dorm room that's split down the middle and full of built-ins taking up the space that isn't occupied by beds," she deadpans.  "And quite a few of the buildings are still technically open at this hour, so I can find myself a nice little corner to work in."

"Well, of course they're still technically open to students; that's why I'm a student now.  Maybe not tonight, but sometime this week I'll be wanting to go inside here to look at the other side of these walls.

"And I didn't think dorm rooms would be that bad if you didn't have to keep most of your actual studies secret from your roommate...?"

"There is floorspace enough for exactly one person to fit down the center of my dorm room if neither of us are using the desks."

"And you could absolutely hide whatever you're doing in plain sight, as worldbuilding notes for a game or something.  People lift from real-world environments for their fiction all the time."

Aeslin tries to imagine a room that small, and it seems rather comfortable until she imagines trying to do anything in it besides sit at a desk, let alone... "How can you even store your books in there!?

"And - I didn't know games were getting as detailed as this?"  She flicks her wand and lifts one of her thick reference books (An Incomplete Guide to Properties of Fay-Made Materials) into the air.

"With effort.  And there's the cabinets and all that.  Though most of my textbooks are in digital format anyway."

And speaking of textbooks...

"Okay, yeah, you'd probably have to hide or at least digitize the reference materials, that's...  Nobody has that much vanity press budget when they're rooming with someone, I wouldn't think, unless they're an Eccentric Rich Kid.  Which...  I mean, maybe you could pull that vibe off, I don't know you?  But PDFs are cheap.  ...Though they do do single bed dormrooms here, but that's more expensive than offcampus.  Especially after you factor in the meal plan requirement..."

She wrinkles her nose.

"I prefer the feel of paper.  Besides, most of the older mages haven't bothered computerizing their books yet... entirely aside from the magical significance of books which I'm not sure would be captured in such a new thing as computers, though I admit I haven't run any experiments..."

A car backfires somewhere across campus, which interrupts Aeslin's musing and makes her suddenly remember who she's talking with.

"... But, I believe we were talking about 'mindwipes'?  That isn't the standard first-rung procedure for much of anything... Do you have reason to believe you've encountered a 'mindwipe' before?"

"...No, they're just a horribly popular Masquerade enforcement trope.  In fantasy and sci-fi, even."

Aw, darn...  She had more things she wanted to say!

"...Also, fake dustjackets would help with your book-concealing needs at minimal cost, I think.  Before we go anywhere else."

"...but... Wait a fucking minute.  Why the hell is there a Masquerade to begin with, someone should have been caught on camera, there's just too many cameras - aren't we on camera right now?  I swear I saw one right over there...  And then that's assuming that there aren't any asshole mages who'd break your statute of secrecy, or whatever it is, to fuck with mundanes for shits and giggles!  Which is kind of absurd!  There's always assholes!"

She follows Mira's glance.  "Camera - oh yes, that one.  I glamoured it first thing.  Also that other one.  Don't worry; if anyone unsavory comes by they will still see him.

"I'm honestly sure there are some mages who're still messing with muggles, even after the Great Mapmaking with most of the Fay.  But the sort of mage who wants to mess with muggles generally doesn't want to shake up the whole order of the world... or if he does, then so far he's been obvious about it.  And thank goodness the Fay are invested in our secrecy too, these days, even if it's more so than I'd prefer..."

"But - you didn't know about any of this magic before tonight?"

She raises her wand and traces the knot of the simplest truthspell, which will stop any direct lies from either of them for maybe the next half-minute.  (It doesn't feel like anything to Mira.)

"You didn't have a camera of your own recording this, do you?"

"...To the best of my knowledge, no, I did not, though now I'm wondering if there's anything that might actually be behind some family stories and personal experiences.

"...I doubt it, but if magic is real, then why the hell wouldn't it be possible for my mother to have occasionally had weirdly prophetic dreams for reasons instead of out of some grand cosmic coincidence.

"Anywho.  No, I do not - and did not - have a camera recording this.  The only camera I have that I could reasonably do that with is on my phone.  You'd probably be able to tell if I was taking video!"

(...But not necessarily if she was fine with just an audio recording, which...)

(Her hands are already in that pocket.  If things look like they're about to go sour...  She might try it.)

"...Is that important?"

Oh good, that makes things easier.

"Yes, I do always try to clean up my own messes."  Especially because if she doesn't, her friends and sponsors won't like it.  And if her picture is on the next leak, there's a tiny chance the Greater Fay would be angry too even if it does get covered up as a hoax, and she really doesn't want that.

"So..."  She stares at Mira.  "I could just wipe away these circles and walk away and you could have a nice story no one would believe.  At least the part about the real rainbows.  That's how it usually happens, in fact."

But there's something about Mira, and the sort of questions she's been asking, that makes Aeslin not really want to do that.  For reasons aside from how it'd make her wait for another night to get to study these stones.

"That sounds like there are other things that could happen that aren't me having to walk away from magic.

"...Even if I'm never going to be able to do any, I...

"I've always wanted magic to be real.  And having to leave all my questions forever unanswered...

"I mean, I assume your masquerade doesn't care all that much about my psychological wellbeing, but if I have to walk I will forever be haunted by this.  ...Damn, now I have to wonder if the crystal-woo people are onto something.

"But...  Please don't make me walk away.

"...Also, I've already seen you with the circles.  You don't need to wipe them now, that damage is done, no?"

She laughs.  "And I've chattered at you more than enough already, too!  So you've got more questions after your great ones so far?  I'm sure I'll be happy to answer more of them!"

(She never liked the Fay's insistence on fencing around their secrecy in all sorts of needless ways, anyway.)

"To start with, crystals -" She shrugs.  "Some people have built wands out of them.  It doesn't work as well as wood most of the time, but it works if it comes from the right places.  But just a crystal isn't anything more than just a piece of wood from the right tree."

(And after answering Mira's questions, she'll walk away... or, some other ghosts of possibilities are tickling in the back of Aeslin's mind.  Some of them, the Fay couldn't justly criticize themselves... not that they wouldn't criticize them anyway, but...)  

"...Huh...  Does petrified wood behave uniquely vis-a-vis being simultaneously chemically mineral and yet also a tree?"

"Now that's an interesting question...  I haven't heard of anyone trying!  I imagine it would depend on the fossilization process...  You see, to make a wand, you need something that's already been infused with magic - either from a magical tree, or a rock-nymph's rocks, or so on.  I'm sure some magical trees fossilized - they're common enough; half the hazels are magic for instance; they're not noticeable as magic unless you're doing magic around them - so it should be able to be tried!"

"...But would the trees of - taking my phone out to check some numbers -" tappity tappity tap "- 65 million years ago or more, be the same trees you can confirm are likely to be magic?  I mean you could do it artificial-like, actually, you just need a sufficiently anoxic environment with the right sort of mineral water..."

Aeslin does keep her eyes on the phone while Mira has it out, though she still looks like she's paying more attention to things far away.

"Artificial petrified wood?  Wow, I didn't know you could do that without magic -

"Anyway, even if you couldn't identify any trees of the right species from sixty-five million years ago, I'm sure there were some magical trees there; I could go through the petrified forests testing them like I was a wandmaker... I suppose that couldn't distinguish negative results because the trees weren't originally magical versus because the fossilization destroyed their magic, though after a while enough negative results could be telling...

"But that would take too long.  Maybe I'll throw it on the ideas list for the next time someone's volunteered to be my lab assistant.  Or the next time a journal's asking me for a letter."

"I mean I'm just guessing you can do artificial petrifaction, it doesn't actually say one way or the other, as far as the bit of Wikipedia I actually read, said, but the conditions are straightforward.  But if you can do artificial petrifaction, you can do that to test the hypothesis that petrifaction would destroy the magicalness of wood, probably?  If you repeat the same test over time with a known-magical test sample?"

"Yes, assuming the conditions of petrification are similar enough..."  She slowly twirls her wand in her hand.  "Now I'm trying to remember...  Back before the Mapmaking, there were some rock-nymphs who captured mages and altered their wands, and some of them were recaptured afterwards.  I know at least one of those wands acted more powerful, but in weirdly uneven ways... but I can't remember if anyone asked or studied exactly what the rock-nymphs did to them - whether it was petrification or something else.

"And then they already were wands before petrification, which would be different from the experiment we were talking about, but still interesting!  And a much faster experiment, which makes me want to take one of my backup wands to a rock-nymph this weekend!"

"...What is 'The Mapmaking', I swear I can hear the capital letters?"

"Oh!  That was when we human mages and the Fay first convinced each other to talk as peers.  At least in theory.  The Fay stop kidnapping mortals; the humans stop hunting Fay; both sides honor each other's rights and come as guests if at all; nobody interferes with the muggles...  It was a long drawn-out process, because for all the different groups of Fay say they have queens and kings, they don't listen to them most of the time and they set up new kingdoms all the time.

"Or, well, they used to be like that.  But then, human mages didn't have a king or congress of their own back then either.  I think the Mapmapking was what gave us our first real governments to talk to each other, though I was never really one for history?

"And the Mapmaking's still going on if you want to be technical; I just heard last month about some naiads in the oceans who don't acknowledge any of it.  But only in the oceans and maybe a few remote mountains... otherwise there're just too many of you muggles with too good communications."

"...That one island where it is the general policy of all the governments that the native human population has made it quite clear that they don't want any - outsiders, that is - must pose quite a conundrum of a similar nature, come to think of it."

"Oh?  I haven't heard - do you get young adventurers who want to prove themselves and go in there, too?"

She almost laughs, but it's a self-depreciating almost-laugh.

"Worse - missionaries.  You have adventurers?"

"Oh yes.  Mostly they go challenge each other to a ceremonial contest of magic or wits or something."  She shakes her head at the pointlessness.  "And then some of them challenge the Greater Fay, who sometimes condescend to accept the challenge... and at least they survive when they lose.  And now with the Mapmaking, we've made sure they were warned several times in case they weren't paying attention the first time like they should've been."

"...What part of don't fuck with the fae has millennia of people making it a point of every story they tell that you should not fuck with the fae managed to not encode in your cultural consciousness where the fae actually exist?!"

"I wish I knew!"

She throws up her hands.  The rainbows around the circle arc up in two arcs of fire reaching toward her hands.

"Most of them aren't even going for anything useful, like mysteries of magic - I've sometimes dreamed of challenging Emerac for that myself - but even for something useful I wouldn't do that for another hundred years at least!"

"What sort of open mysteries of magic do you have, anyway?"

Well, she let one slip right there... though fortunately Mira doesn't seem to be following up on her secret dream of life-extension.

"There's so much we don't know about how the cycle of magic and land-memory work with each other... oh, did I mention that?  Magic is strengthened or weakened by where it's cast and what the land remembers.  That's why most of the Fay and most strong mages stay in one or two places, because their spells are stronger there once some mage has been casting the same field of spells there for a long time."

"I've got my own lab too - but there're so many questions pulling me out on field trips!  Like this semester here!

"And that reminds me - it's a totally unsettled question what form magic takes on the Moon and in the astral spheres!  Maybe someday we can find it out... though not until we can get there!"

She rather assumed life extension was already a thing given how Aeslin talked about planning for a hundred years out!

"...What, you didn't sneak anyone into the Apollo program to go find out?  Or onto the ISS?  For shame!  ...I'm joking."

"...The land has a memory, huh?  Interesting.  I wonder...

"...Would that be more of a noöspheric effect, or...

"Oh, hell, Australia must be kind of a way - the people there have already preserved stories of some truly ancient things; I can't imagine how long the land's memory might be...

"And - wait, what do you mean the astral spheres?"

"Noöspheric?  As in, founded in people's minds working together?  I don't think that can be all of it - we've got some effects out in Alaska that look seriously ancient, underlaying all the more recent things, beyond what anyone actually remembers as far as I know.  Maybe elsewhere too, but there're few enough more recent impacts in Alaska that I can check.  Can't prove it, but my theory is that it dates back to the first migrations into America!

"And the astral spheres - uh, space.  Beyond the moon.  We don't know anything about it you don't, unless Pamela's theory of magic ultimately coming from the Sun proves true after all."

"...Get you a historical anthropology degree or something...  And - huh, when are the earliest archaeological finds in that area, I don't actually know...  ...Has that ever impacted things?  Like, somebody turns up evidence of something that had been lost to time, and suddenly there's new field effects?"

"...And I had been a bit worried that there was - something up with the magical version of space, but I think you're implying it's just vaguely ossified jargon and not, uh, an actual celestial sphere that you could run into with a spaceship?  I mean Voyager worked fine, probably, but it wasn't manned..."

"No, just jargon; no literal spheres out there far as I know, except the planets and stars and such everyone knows about.  And if Voyager's got any problems, I really don't think they're magical.  Unless all computers do somehow silently depend on magic from the sun; I guess Voyager and such would be the first test of that wild guess I just thought up with zero evidence...

"... and hmm, no idea about new discoveries impacting things.  I know a few people who might know.  There's clearly some influence from people's present beliefs; national border changes can be reflected in magic pretty quickly if the people living there actually start thinking of themselves as belonging to the new country  - and that's not the only thing just the clearest -"

"I think in literary references too much, so it's a story where Neil Armstrong bonked the Apollo mission into the skybox that had me questioning the astral sphere thing - and the Voyager probes have passed the heliopause, or, at least one of them has for sure.  I wonder if you could do, like, a sympathetic magic thing, bounce off the Golden Records, to see if the solar system is relevantly a domain?  ...but how would you differentiate..."

"Well, I wouldn't think there's a different domain outside the Solar System at least until you get near another star, so it'd keep whatever it started with.  If it did start with any magic on it; a normal book or picture is inert except as a symbol, and I don't see why anyone would've enchanted the Golden Record.  It's not like you could put yourself in it and see what magic is like up there...

"...Unless they wanted to send a message to hypothetical alien mages, I suppose, which's actually an interesting idea..."

"I mostly meant that if you could target it because of any of its uniqueness, cultural impact, or design intent, it would be a way to get a spell out there?  Unless spells also have to obey the speed of light in which case you may as well just point and shoot up into the sky..."

"The Fermi paradox sure is a question, though!"

"Enough people have tried casting spells on the sun, and most of them fail, and a lot of the ones that seem to work give wild enough outcomes that I'm pretty sure they don't actually do anything to the sun.  If you could get something that reliably does contact the sun, maybe we could settle that question... how long does light take to the sun...

"... and the what paradox?  Is that a thing about space travel?"

"Eight minutes or so?  And the Fermi 'paradox' is the open question of why nonmagical observation can't find any aliens.  Well.  Any people aliens.  We've found life-bearing planets.  Just very simple ones."

"I wish I could help there.  But we don't even know whether magic exists outside the Earth.  So if we can answer that and the Sun question..."

She glances up at the full moon in the sky.  "Our spells probably have contacted the Moon, at least.  Probably.  Not that we can fly there - flight spells exist but they're slow and unreliable enough we fly in airplanes just like muggles."

"...bloody hell, magic had better be universal or else I'm going to implode of paranoia that magic isn't.

"...Why not just launch an enchanted Cubesat or something?  Human flight might be finicky but surely you have vectored thrust enough to accelerate a small object out of Earth orbit?"

"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 s 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?"