"That's very exciting, honestly--hm. I'm going to have to think about implications for a while, honestly there's a lot of stuff that might be interesting to try given my Void affinity."

"What does a Void affinity mean?"

"--So every wizard has an affinity, and magic done about their affinity is extra cheap and extra effective. Wilbur's affinity is thread, so he's an artificer. Bella's is metamagic, which is insanely difficult if you don't have the affinity. And I have Void, which is mostly useful for now for getting exactly the spells I want from my wall, but that's no small thing."

"The spells you want from your wall."

"Everyone has a section of Void in their room and they ask it for spells."

"How aesthetic."

"It's practical! Means there's a direction monsters can't sneak in through."

"Why can spells get in and not monsters?"

"I mean, the spells aren't self-directed. The school could in theory chuck a mal at you through the Void in your room but it is designed to not do that."

"But it's designed to enforce curfew?"

"It didn't used to but before that Seniors were shoving freshmen out of their dorms because the freshman dorms are safer. So--no swaps, no two to a room, be in your own by curfew."

"Ah. At least it was motivated by something more important than Puritanism."

"To be fair magic is shit at birth control and accidental pregnancies are a much bigger catastrophe in here."

"I guess they would be! Would anyone like an IUD or something, I can do that."

"I have a mundane implant, lots of girls have either that or an IUD already and most of the ones who don't are concerned about them getting ideas, but there's probably someone who'd take you up on it."

"Okay. I did go to medical school."

“I appreciate that but I think your med school probably didn’t cover ‘sometimes formerly non-magical objects pick some up from their environment and decide to make your life difficult.’ IUDs are less likely to go bad than, say, scissors, but it’s still…a risk. Probably you’ll get more than zero takers, but.” Shrug.

"They decide this, or is that just a fanciful way to say it."

"I guess depending on how you feel about various theories of cognition you might choose to consider the word inappropriate, but yeah, magic stuff tends to acquire opinions. I don't actually know how conscious they are but they do display distinct preferences."

"And they acquire hostile opinions."

"Not always! But you cannot really establish a positive working relationship with something that is embedded inside your flesh."

"That's not really how IUDs are supposed to be placed."

"I don't think you can really interact with the inside of your own uterus either."

"That is my understanding. Does this trait of magic have implications beyond that people will have slightly different IUD risk assessments?"

"It makes haircuts harder to come by--and you want to keep your hair well short, because otherwise mals can grab you by it. Also you need to double-check miscellaneous objects to make sure they work the way they're supposed to instead of some other way, like, even if something doesn't decide to be hostile, most random changes are not going to be positive ones."