"I will need to attend classes but my next one isn't too far from the junior floor, I'll be on time. If I were you I would want a native guide and then if anything exceptional came up I would be disposed favorably toward said native guide but even if that's not how you tick I approve of your project and want it to go off brilliantly."

“I appreciate your services as a native guide and am favorably inclined towards you but I am also wary of accidentally propping up the whole enclaves as nobility thing, so like, be forewarned in advance that I am also going to go out of my way to spend time with non-enclavers and if anyone reacts badly to that I am going to double down.”

"No, that's fine, lots of indies are lovely. I think the sleep affinity girl is one. It's not a good dynamic but it arises out of lots of things it's basically impossible to police and dangerous to iconoclastically reject, you know? My mother moved out of the enclave after she graduated, but when she had me - I have been reassuringly informed that I was an accident - she needed to make nice so I wouldn't, like. Die. I hesitate to object to anyone who has that option taking it, though I can and do object to wizards reproducing at all."

“I was also an accident but this was less interesting in my case. I don’t object to people being in enclaves but I do kind of object to hogging parts of the library about it.”

"I think it might in fact be worse if nobody hogged any parts of the library - the thing is you have to watch your back if nobody around you is doing it, so people travel in groups, and colonize areas to hang out in in groups, and if a place is stably occupied by a specific group there can be... I know the infrastructure looks really pathetic if you're recently from outside but it does mean something that Suze can build a rocking chair and put it in our reading room, and the alternative is that nobody has a rocking chair in any room more public than their bedroom. And the natural unit of organization is - there's enclavers, and we make friends with specific indies we trust and they hang out in the places we've dibsed. There's non-enclave groups with comparable levels of - continuity? But they're going to be enclaves as soon as their families save up enough mana to cover the spells they need to build one."

“I’m not really judging. I meant it when I yelled ‘natural justice isn’t a thing but human compassion is.’ I think the people involved could have worked towards a better equilibrium but this is also true of approximately everyone all the time everywhere. I certainly don’t intend to punish anyone for anything. But my presence flips the board and I don’t want the new status quo to preserve the preexisting social hierarchies with the original reasons gone.”

"Your presence flips - a lot of the board? I'm not yet sure about flipping all the board-features that underpin our social fabric. Most wizard kids still for some reason want children when they grow up, and they want a safe place to raise them, and that gets them wanting to make a good impression on the enclavers - even if they aren't our first or second or third or fourth choice to recommend as new clavemates, when those four people could all die graduating it pays to be fifth, and you'd think that'd mean they could pick one or a few but the enclavers talk to each other, because we can be confident we don't have ulterior motives..." Shrug. "I wish you the best of luck, you should absolutely talk to indies, I am slightly conservative in my expectations."

"The current wizard situation is unusually bad but until a century or two ago the child mortality rate was over fifty percent. Humanity has been aggressively selected for willingness to procreate even under situations of horrifying child mortality."

"Yeah, I have it maybe easier on this front 'cause I'm gay."

"Didn't save my dad. Trans people exist. Do be careful anyway."

"Yeah, I know."

"And if it does come up, use more than condoms."

"Yeah-huh."

"Better safe than sorry, if you hadn't thought of it. ...Should I be adding birth control to the table."

"People come in with stuff - some people have trouble getting long acting stuff into their fourteen year olds, we actually rely on mundie BC because wizard methods are unreliable for expectation-and-belief kindsa reasons and mundie doctors do not understand why someone would bring in their seven consecutive daughters to get IUDs when they're fourteen, but there's always," deadpan jazz hands, "miiiiind contro-ol! so probably most people have it if they weren't too gay and against mind control to get it. I think there's a... I took economics in Mandarin. Risk compensation," she says in Mandarin, "problem if you hand out condoms, and maybe also pills if people were under-educated about how they work. Everything else, how d'you administer it?" Shrug. "You can, of course."

"Okay, if anyone asks I'll say yes but I won't offer. Is there...a reason to do jazz hands about mind control?"

"Sarcasm. Wizards are generally really cavalier about it. It does protect the mundies to not know magic is real, I know why we don't just advertise we exist, but they go a bit farther than that."

"Ah. I wouldn't say mind control isn't a harm, but it's not one I've been especially prioritizing." 

"Well, there's not much of it flying around in here, it's all wizards in here, but if you were wondering who prescribes fourteen-year-olds IUDs the answer is sometimes mind controlled doctors."

"Is anyone using mind control to wipe someone's real memories of one of their loved ones and replace them?"

"...not as far as I know, but nobody'd tell me if that were a leading hobby among wizards in Sudan or something."

"There was a monster back home that'd do that. Freaked me out more than the coffin of burying people alive forever because that one you can just chain up and lock up and it won't eat anyone new."

"Well, wizards are a little hard to restrain humanely if it comes up."

"You're also not that hard to kill. Like, not that I want to go around killing anyone or anything, but some of the monsters back home are reeeeeeeaaaaaally hard to kill."

"No, yeah, that's what you do, if a wizard cannot control themselves the way somebody else controls 'em is death."