Tape recorders! And tapes! Specifically blank tapes, she was careful about that, she doesn’t want to accidentally hand a wizard a Statement and invite Questions.

Ennis takes a mirror and a camera.

"I don't much want pictures of anything in here especially if all my friends are going to live, but his affinity's cosmetics, I guess it might come up... oh, I guess I could illustrate the agglo article, come to think." Camera.

“Cameras are great for documenting stuff. The reason I’d ever held a Polaroid is because sometimes magic—back home—interferes with digital record-keeping and you want analog backups.”

"Like it fries electronics Harry Potter style?"

“Nah, just corrupts the recordings, whatever you recorded it on is still fine. Generally. I’m sure there’s an exception somewhere.”

"Huh, why's it do that?"

“That is a good question! It…might be the Eye being something approximating helpful? My dad runs a research institution for the supernatural, and in addition to the real stuff we get a lot of hoaxes and mistakes.”

"I guess if that's the way it has to separate the things that's... handy... ish..."

“The Entities are…really not human. To the extent that they can be said to want things, it’s mostly—the things that they are. The Eye isn’t really a thing that can want things like ‘helpfulness’ or ‘human flourishing.’”

"What can it want, then?"

“To…see things. To know things. Mostly vicariously through the various beings who draw on its power.”

"But it can't want to... understand the benefits of helpfulness and human flourishing to a motivating degree, or it can but it's not there yet?"

“Unfortunately understanding things is approximately outside its purview. To the extent that it has anything to do with understanding things at all, it’s that human beings connect to the Eye through their desire to know things, and the human desire to know involves the desire to understand. But the Eye itself fundamentally does not consider a well-constructed chart to be a more desirable thing than a set of uncorrelated data points.”

"Huh..."

“Yeah. Aside from the child mortality I like your magic system much better.”

"Does yours do any cool stuff?"

“Oh, absolutely! My Dad was born in 1789.”

"Nice! - what year is it where you're from, you don't seem too unmoored in time here but -"

“2034.”

"Huh, that's ahead of us, what's been invented recently by you?"

“Well, I myself had not personally invented anything of note, but recent innovations include, oh, micro-vpns, the Alpha Contact, Black42 pigment…”

Bella will be absorbed in talking about 2032 technology for the rest of dinner, and then she trades literature homework for math homework with Caio on her way out of the caf to bring Kareen to her room.

The agglos are in a four-partitioned glass and plastic terrarium; three of the compartments have hinged lids that lock and the other one's just sealed shut (with small airholes). The agglos are little decorator crab guys, though they keep their legs mostly under them instead of splayed out to the sides the way crabs tend to. They are covered in the detritus of the Scholomance. Fabric and paper scraps, pieces of hardware, chips of ceramic and wood, a scrunchie, a pencap, fingernail clippings, a human tooth, bits of colorful thread.

“Hello,” she coos, reaching into the control group tank. One of the agglos crawls up to her hand and sort of nuzzles it. Kareen is vibrating with delight.

"I try not to handle them too much, since that isn't very control group, but I do take them out and inspect them now and then."