"It's very interesting that you are able to... hold a conversation."

"The artifact is lending me some assistance. I am not thinking very much, but what thoughts I begin to have complete themselves."

"Aadhya is amazing, I'm really impressed," Kareen murmurs to Bella.

"And she has lots of spare time and mana now!" Bella murmurs back. Louder, "They improved the food from your day, too. They've got the slurry illusioned as actual food items. But it's still not very good and we've been switching to Kareen's magic food."

"The math on the pipeline for the slurry was dreadful."

"Dreadful in what way?"

"It has to appear at intervals and not continuously... to quarantine each ingress, so that some of it can be discarded if it is contaminated... and there are multiple redundant inputs, as any substantial risk of starving the whole student body would be worse than allowing more points of contact for maleficaria... but each one is as small as can serve, given that... they may have had to replace the pipes to cope with added pressure... if they doubled the student body and also made the food more palatable..."

"Huh. New York is handling that stuff now, I don't know whether that was before or after."

"New York?"

"Yes, they took over after London which itself ran the place for a while after Manchester. - The Manchester enclave is, like, fine, it's just no longer the obvious most project-capable institution."

"Only in this place would 'trying to make tea out of dried apple slices' be considered 'fine.'"

"They're presumably not doing that in the actual enclave," Bella murmurs back.

"I suppose that so long as the school survives... then it matters less who holds it," Sir Alfred says grudgingly.

"The Chinese are thinking of making their own. There'd be two schools competing for indies, they'd have to sweeten the deal a bit, advertise better survival rates - and they'd have more modern facilities, gaslamps are obsolete outside the Scholomance these days -"

"They - what - no -"

“No? Why not?”

.......

"I think they should go for it, but it'd be staggeringly expensive so they're playing politics about access to the existing one instead..."

................................................

…Kareen peers thoughtfully at the mirror. “Would it be better if it was someone else who made a new one, instead of China?”

"Nnnnnnnnn," he groans.

Hey Backchannel, a little help?

The mirror is not helping him on this topic for some reason so all they're getting is vague noises of distress. It's probably because of the magical nondisclosure agreement.

“Backchannel thinks there’s a magical NDA.”

"...those exist but I don't know wh - oh, the enclave-building spells are generally shared under those? So the people who sell are only selling to whoever's paying."