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void affinity
wrong void
Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy isn't really trying to do magic. She's just sketching out a possible way summoning things directly from the void could work, if one were doing that, instead of asking one's wall for them. Anything worth trying to retrieve from the void that her wall wouldn't give her would probably be a bad idea to bring into the school anyway, at least in terms of things she knows are in the void. Plus her wall might feel slighted, and that would be a shame. 

She hasn't put any mana in, when she finishes the circle. Nothing is supposed to happen. 

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Something happens anyway!

"- hello? Uh - did you maybe do this out of order -" He peers at the circle.

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"FUCK." She whirls to her feet, her eyes darting to the door and the vent and the weak points in the walls. She pulls a couple of knives out of her silk dress, and tosses the shorter one to him. "Be very ready to kill shit," she says grimly. 

Something starts ominously oozing under the door. She recites a short poem in Greek and it bursts into flame. 

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"What the fuck?"

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"This is the Scholomance, do you know anything about the Scholomance?" He speaks English so probably he's not from some ancient Hindi enclave that yote themselves into the Void on purpose but that leaves loads of options.

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"No!"

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"Well, we're not supposed to have multiple people in our rooms after curfew, so if that happens the school starts sending mals after you. Too many mals." She lightning-zaps something with too many legs that skitters through the vent while something larger presses against it from the other side. "Probably neither of us survives until morning but I'm not giving up that easily." 

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"I'm confused but also, importantly, indestructible, would you like me to step into the hall and revisit this bewilderment tomorrow morning?"

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"--Indestructible? Uh, that's gonna be--worse--if you're really confident I'd be grateful but--yeah."

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"I'm not as confident as I would like considering how confused I am. Maybe I can just -" He interpolates something sticking a limb out of the air vent.

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The limb dissolves; the thing screeches and yanks backwards, acidic blood pitting the wall. 

Something intangible floats through the door; Lucy hisses a killing spell in Basque and it shivers and dissipates. 

"You speak modern English, I have--hypotheses--about where you came from but I don't, uh, have any idea which if any is right."

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"Is this a good time to have this conversation." Something under the bed exposes itself and disintegrates.

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"Well, you see, some of these hypotheses suggest you might have some kind of stimulants on you and some do not." She frags another insubstantial thing, this time coming through the wall next to the door. 

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"Do you have a preferred brand."

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"You don't really have the slack for those here."

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He guesses her weight and offers her a patch. "Slap it on your arm and you should be good for a few hours."

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She slaps it on her arm. "Thanks." She kills something gooey; it shrivels up. "Sorry for whyever you're here."

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"I mean, it's at least interesting, I'm just hoping I can keep you alive till this stops happening." Does fire work on the insubstantial kind. He can do fire.

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Fire does not work on that one but Lucy gets it with a wind spell. "I appreciate that, I am very in favor of surviving the night."

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"How long can you keep doing that, because I can try the hallway, or you could send me home and re-attempt this later on."

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"--Probably not all night, if sending you home and trying again later is an option then I love it."

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"I don't know if it'll work twice, is the trouble, since it would sure be weird if you were the first person to get it to happen if it were easy."

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"I have a void affinity."

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"I don't know what that means. How about I tell you how to get rid of me, I sit in the hallway, and I will appear a flashing siren in your room to ask you to do that if anything I can't deal with seems to be eating me?"

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"Sounds good."

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"You just concentrate for a minute by the clock on getting rid of me, sending me home, whatever frame suits you."

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"I can do that." 

Something presses ominously against the door. Lucy flicks the door open and then dives to the side so indestructible guy can deal with it. 

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The indestructible guy deals with it and sees himself out. Is there anything in this hallway at the moment that he needs to kill.

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There is lots of stuff in this hallway that's enthusiastic about trying to eat him!

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Well, better him than some teenager! He floods the entire hallway with liquid nitrogen, not densely enough for anyone to have trouble breathing in their sleep.

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Liquid nitrogen does for everything that's currently trying to consume his life essence! Further things hang back a little but start charging in once the liquid nitrogen is gone. 

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He will try various liquified components of normal air mixture in the correct approximate ratios.

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These work variously well at killing things! 

The rate of things-to-be-killed slows down any over the course of the night, but they sure do refuse to stop trying to kill him altogether.

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Well, if they slow down enough, he can maybe conjure the complete works of that guy listed on the blueprint poster over there and see if any of it says WHAT THE FUUUUUCK.

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Lucy opens the door at precisely 6:00 the next morning. 

"You're still alive! Come in, I don't want to have to try to explain you to my neighbors before I have any idea what's going on myself."

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Cam goes in. "Thank you, don't mind if I do, can I get you breakfast or anything?"

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"--If you can produce a breakfast that is definitely zero percent poisoned then yes."

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"Why would I poison you?" he asks, handing her a plate of pancakes and bacon.

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"--I mean, I'm not suggesting you would do it on purpose," she says, accepting the plate. "Where...did this come from, exactly? Do you have a spell that just summons food?"

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"I can make arbitrary material objects? It didn't come from anywhere. It just exists now." He makes himself a plate of the same and digs in.

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"You can what." She checks the plate for nasties just to be safe, then starts eating. "I admit that my affinity is bullshit, but that's insane."

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"It's a thing my species can do, there's billions of us. I agree it's very cool."

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"--And your species--exists in the Void?"

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"That's one of the things people call it, yes."

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"What else do people call it?" she asks, fascinated despite herself. 

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"In English 'Hell' is most common."

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"--Sorry, you're saying the Void is Hell???"

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"Its reputation is greatly exaggerated."

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"Can't be worse than a maw-mouth, I guess."

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"I again don't know what that is. I tried to get some reading done overnight when the monsters slowed down but they didn't slow down much."

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"They wouldn't have, no. A maw-mouth is a fleshy sack of mouths, eyes, and pseudopods. The best advice for dealing with them is to be somewhere else. The second-best advice is to die before it can get you. Unlike most mals, a maw-mouth won't kill you, and you do not want to become one of the sets of mouths and eyes. --You won't encounter any up here, though, they stay down in the graduation hall. Uh, that's the place where the Scholomance joins up with reality, and where mals can wiggle their way in, but there's more warding between the graduation hall and the rest of the school so only relatively little stuff gets up here."

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"How... charming?"

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"I mean, it's the Scholomance, it's better than the alternative but it's not fun. --The Scholomance's survival rate is one in four and the survival rate spending your whole adolescence in the outside world is one in twenty, approximately."

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"I have never heard of any of this before in my life."

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"Presumably you wouldn't have if you're an indestructible void-dweller!"

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"We normally get lots of news from Earth! Since we can conjure arbitrary material objects! And are sometimes summoned!"

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"--Summoned? By who?"

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"...humans! Like you! You summoned me."

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"Yeah but I've never heard of anything like you before! Which, like, makes sense probably if it's some kind of enclave secret, except there's no enclave in the world who would sacrifice that resource to get their kids out on graduation day, when you have to go through the giant horde of mals!"

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"It hasn't been a secret since 2006. Billions of people know how, even if most of them don't do it personally."

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"--I've only been in here since 2019, and anyway the freshmen would have mentioned that."

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"Probably this is an entirely different universe from the set I'm accustomed to, with similarities, such as English, and dissimilarities, such as the Monster Manual."

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"...I...don't know what to make of that. Okay. So, uh, thank you very much for breakfast, and even more for leaving my room last night, do you have like--plans, priorities, things you want in trade--you told me how to send you home and did not suggest I immediately do that and leave you alone forevermore, which suggests you would like to be here for a while, we sure could use some material objects."

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"I don't really need stuff, since I can make stuff. Home is well sorted, I don't think anyone there needs me, but here, uh, yikes, looks like you could use me, virtue is its own reward and all."

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"Being that generous isn't safe for us students here but, uh, you survived last night, so thanks I appreciate it. Anyway, just because you can make anything doesn't mean you know everything to make, even if you can do all the artifices and potions you want that doesn't mean we couldn't trade you--okay probably you can't use spells as spells but some of them are good poetry."

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"I could use some native-guide-ing. But also making things is like... free, except in attention? I don't have to ration it."

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"Yes, but anything you give away is something you didn't trade for something that could keep you alive. I'm not arguing with you, it's just the mindset most of us have in order to try to claw our way into the surviving twenty-five percent. Not that as many of us in our year have died as most years, we have Orion Lake, his affinity is mal-hunting or something bullshit like that. There's a surprising amount of bullshit going on this generation!"

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"...okay, well, maybe I will throw a party and disabuse people of the notion that I need to be plied with gifts in exchange for pancakes."

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"--I have no idea how the vast majority of the population of the school is going to take you but, like, be forewarned that people here are paranoid as fuck and not necessarily going to trust you no matter how many pancakes you ply them with. My instinct is to introduce you to my friends first because they're somewhat selected for being decent, that or I'm prejudiced in their favor, but if you wanna do something else I will one hundred percent follow your lead."

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"...kids are presumably dying on a fairly routine basis here? Can you like, test my indestructibility against magic a little bit, I can replace my wing if something happens to it, and if I'm good I don't want to hesitate just because it would look slightly more locally normal to be tentative."

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"Ironically that is also a reason to introduce you to my friends first because I don't have much in the way of non-physical killing-stuff spells but El does."

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"...okay, sure."

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Lucy leads him along an arced hallway, down a spiral staircase, down a straight hallway, and down some more arc. 

She knocks on El's door. 

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"It is EARLY," El yells through the door.

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"It's IMPORTANT," Lucy yells back. 

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"It had BETTER be," snaps El, but she opens the door.

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"I was doing a prototype for something void-related and this guy showed up in my room," she gestures at him, "after curfew, and we killed a bunch of mals and then he went into the hall and I stopped being bothered by them and he still survived the night. And he isn't Orion Lake. He says he can make material objects and he can back it up. He wants to stress-test his indestructibility on one of his wings before he starts messing with stuff, and, sorry, but you're better for that than I am."

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"What the dickens are you supposed to be?" El asks him.

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"It seems so far that I am a demon from an alternate universe."

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"How's being indestructible work?"

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"Part of the species package deal, sorry. I can replace my wing if you want to blast it off me."

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"I should throw mana at this why?"

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"Arbitrary material objects. Admittedly I didn't quiz him on how arbitrary and how he targets things so I don't actually know whether it just means 'abitrary artificing slash alchemy ingredients, non-poisoned food, clothing, and killing mals by making stuff where they are, or if he can also pull the Golden Sutras out of thin air, but it didn't seem necessary to establish this before dragging him down here."

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"Would you like breakfast or something for your trouble."

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"Is it any good?"

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"Yeah! --Okay now I'm curious can you pull arbitrary spellbooks out of thin air--"

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"If the spellbooks are not themselves magical or intelligent or something," Cam says. He hands El pancakes and bacon.

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"Fucking hell," says El of pancakes and bacon.

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"Quite."

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"I know, right? Real food. --Wait, you can't make magical things?"

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"Not that I have tried. Would you like to name a magical thing and see if I can do it with examples to copy?"

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She pulls out her knife again. "This'll do. Or, like, my dress, if you're more comfy with defensive magic than offensive."

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He attempts the dress.

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He gets a black silk dress in a slightly-orientally-influenced style that looks mostly like the one Lucy is wearing except duller in a couple of places where she used dyes made of mal parts. 

She pokes it. "Yeah, not magic."

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"So, yeah, the objects have to be material. And will turn out stupid even if there is no physical reason for this. But should cover books unless those are usually written on magical paper or something."

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"No, they tend to acquire magic but the books themselves shouldn't fall apart without it."

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El is still stuffing her face with pancakes very cheerily.

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El is VALID. 

"--Oh man, imagine if we dumped a copy of the whole New York library in the middle of the open where everyone could see, the New Yorkers would be pissed and everyone else would be thrilled. I mean if we were going to do it we should probably do it with all the big enclaves or at least Shanghai but that's not super a downside from my point of view."

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"I mean, it certainly looks like you guys are not eating well and are generally resource-poor in a way that doesn't strictly reduce to too much intellectual property."

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"--I mean, too much intellectual property does a lot more damage when it's magic than when it's Disney bribing Congress to say their copyrights haven't run out."

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"Yes, just, priorities seem to me like they might start with scaling up the pancakes and leave some time to negotiate about the spells and for me to learn what you want the spells for."

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"Enclaves. Technically the Golden Sutras could do that, and if you did, in fact, hand out the Golden Sutras like candy that would admittedly eighty-twenty it pretty well, but the modern enclaves have better enclave-building spells and enclaves are a hell of a lot safer than not enclaves."

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"A deep and flexible spell arsenal is important for doing classwork, which is not optional, and for fighting mals, which is also usually not optional. We aren't going to go build enclaves till we're out of here so I don't think we need the sutras literally right now, though I'd give a few toes for them."

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"I'd give all my toes and several fingers for them and I don't even speak Sanskrit, but you're right, they're not urgent," she admits. "Food is more urgent, not dying of mals is more urgent although I admit I'm not sure how you solve that one single-handed, unless being several places at once is also a demon power."

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"It is not. Is there an unlimited supply?"

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"Not in the sense that there are an infinite number, but they breed. Plus most of them are in the Graduation Hall and if you wiped out all the ones up here then the bigger ones would get hungry and start forcing their way up."

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"Okay, how do I get to the graduation hall?"

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"Give everyone Christmas dinner and a stack of clothes first."

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"And the Golden Sutras, they're not urgent but they are important and even if El can't kill your wing I wouldn't bet the Sutras that that means you're safe from Patience and Fortitude."

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"Very well. How do you plan to try to kill my wing?" he asks El.

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"Pick your poison, I can do fire, lightning, acid, small hailstorm..."

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"Let's go with fire." He sticks a wing out. "Ready."

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El collects her crystal and chants in Spanish.

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Cam's wing is slightly discolored and then fine again. "Cool," he says, folding it up again a little clumsily.

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"You probably want to distribute stuff in the cafeteria, everyone goes there and if you just leave stuff in a big pile people won't respect a sign that says 'take only one' or 'distribute equitably' or whatever."

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"I can just leave more than enough. How many students are there?"

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"Uh...there are sixteen hundred students a class, we've lost a surprisingly low number of the freshmen and sophomores so far but the juniors and seniors have normal levels of attrition, so sixty-four hundred is well over the number of living students but not, like, by twice as much."

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"Cool, at least sixty-four hundred student-loads of things till folks get the idea and there'll be lots to go around."

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"I suspect, human nature being what it is, that even once people believe you about who and what you are, not everyone is going to stop playing stupid zero-sum games. Although if you do manage to clean out the graduation hall that will make everyone take you seriously, nobody wants to deal with that shit."

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"Liquid nitrogen seemed to largely do the trick last night!"

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"Oh, is that why it was chillier than usual."

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"Yes, sorry. Maybe in the future I will alternate supercooled and superheated stuff."

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"It wasn't that big a deal or I'd've mentioned it sooner. That's an excellent strategy against lots of mals, but I don't recommend it against maw-mouths. Even mortal flame takes a while to eat through them."

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"I can also just fully interpolate stuff." He makes a little block of wood and it disintegrates into sawdust in his hand.

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"That's bloody brilliant."

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Lucy whistles softly. "That's a bloody hell of a finishing move."

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"Thank you!" Wag wag. "Would one of you be so kind as to show me to the cafeteria?"

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"Do you want to take him to the cafeteria or do you want to spread the suffering of the hour to Bella and Wilbur?"

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"They like you better, I'll take him to breakfast and see you there."

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"Fair enough!"

She collects Wilbur and explains things quietly, then they make their way to Bella's room. 

Knock knock. 

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"That will be one spiral bound notebook for the lost sleep!" calls Bella as she goes doorward. "Hi Lucy."

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"Hi! My affinity is bullshit, we need to get to the cafeteria, no that is not my idea of a satisfying explanation I'll explain on the way there."

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"Ugh. Fine. I guess I'm up." Bella grabs her stuff for the day so she won't have to head back to her room too much.

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"So last night I accidentally summoned a demon from another universe named Cam who wants to give everybody food and clothing and then solve the problem where people keep dying, because he can conjure arbitrary material objects, including 'enough non-poisoned food for everyone and then some' and 'air in between the bits of solid objects such as mals,' and 'the Golden Sutras.'"

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"If you woke me up to play a prank I will sneak into your room and disenchant all your possessions."

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"That would be valid! It is not the case. Either I speak the truth or I got hit with an atypically detailed hallucinogen."

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"Summoning demons from other universes is not a thing!"

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"I am aware, and yet it seems to have managed to happen anyway. He did this," she adds, fishing the completely non-magical copy of her dress out of her bag. 

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Bella double-takes. "Arbitrary material objects and you asked for a dress?"

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"No, the dress was a test to see if he could copy artifices, I asked for the Golden Sutras."

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"Did you get them?"

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"Not yet but he's under the impression the mal problem is tractable and I had to admit the Sutras were less urgent, but he did say that if he went down to the graduation hall he'd cough them up first."

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"All right. Where's Wilbur? - oh, there you are. I still think lurking like that is a bad habit, somebody's startle reflex will get you one of these days."

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"I'm not doing it on purpose! I don't know why people don't notice me so often." 

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"You could stand to say hi more often."

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"Hmph."

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"Anyway. Early breakfast it is, I suppose."

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"Yep."

They reach the cafeteria, where presumably Cam has been long enough to truly perplex some seniors. 

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Cam is here to perplex the shit out of seniors! He adds an entire additional buffet to the cafeteria and fills it with food. Easily grabbed and taken food, little pies and sandwiches and bentos. The bentos are in nice boxes with glass lids so you can see what's in them.

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"Behold: Cam, who should not exist. Hi Cam! This is my brother Wilbur and my friend Bella."

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"Hello," says Wilbur, so as not to accidentally lurk.

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"You have wings."

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"Yes I do. Breakfast burrito?"

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"I ate his pancakes and I seem to be alive."

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Bella accepts the breakfast burrito.

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"Possibly I should have mentioned the wings but they were kind of overshadowed by everything else."

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"This is very tasty, I can see why you'd forget."

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"There was real bacon! I haven't had bacon since induction."

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"May I also have absurdly delicious breakfast," Wilbur asks Cam.

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"Breakfast is very motivating to undernourished teenagers." He offers Wilbur a bagel.

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This is the most delicious bagel Wilbur has had in his life and now he is having emotions about it. 

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"I hope El's inexplicable aura of doom wasn't too offputting," Lucy adds belatedly. 

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"Oh, is that not on purpose? I was assuming it was, like, monster bugspray or something."

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"I bloody wish."

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"As far as we can tell it doesn't do anything to monsters! It's just annoying."

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"Well, it's not that much more unpleasant than standing next to somebody wearing half a can of Off! so don't worry about it. Though if you might be keeping the other kids off the food perhaps you could give the buffet some space?"

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El stomps off to a table, checks it, sits down with the donut she was halfway through.

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"I got over it because of who I am as a person, and Wilbur got over it because of who I am as a person, and Bella got over it because of who she is as a person, but El is not the most popular person and I don't blame her a bit for being as bitchy as she is." 

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"Seems perfectly fair to me. Do you guys want to go spread the good news of three-minute eggs?"

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"Sure, I'll go tell people it's as good as it looks." Off trots Bella.

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"I assume you're gonna be here a while and I don't need to go roust all the underclassman so they get a shot at the nice food while you're here."

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"It seems like the place to be set up. See and be seen."

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"Cool. Can you--can you conjure, like, 'all the mals and poison that have made it into the food,' so we can swap out anything that gets contaminated, 'cause things are gonna get contaminated."

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"I don't know, let me see." He makes a model buffet and then attempts to fill it with only the mal-affected food.

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Nothing happens. 

"Well, that's inconvenient." 

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"I'll check manually, you talk to people." 

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"Okay. Be careful."

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"Always," he promises her, and goes to poke the food with a stick. 

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Cam taps his foot anxiously and straightens a stack of pastries.

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Wilbur gets one thing jumping at him out of the scrambled eggs, which he quickly dispatches and then pronounces non-poisonous. 

"I mean, it is venomous, but it shouldn't have bitten any of the eggs, so that's fine."

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"Are you sure it wasn't previously consorting with anything poisonous?"

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"Well, not sure sure, but you're never completely sure."

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"I can replace the eggs if there's somewhere to dump the old ones. Although I suppose anyone who'd eat those would come get something actually good."

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He shrugs and pulls the bin out. "We can start a pile, chuck 'em into the Void later."

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"Oh, is that what that is. It's not going to land on anything important in there?"

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"As far as we can tell things in the Void don't really have locations."

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"Fascinating. I will catch up on that when no one is imminently dying, perhaps." Are Bella and Lucy having any luck herding people over?

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Some people are being herded over! Most of them are confused and/or suspicous; several of them poke the food with variously magical objects before taking any. One of them finds some kind of horrible carapaced thing that Wilbur missed. 

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"Oh, thank you," says Cam, encasing it in plastic before interpolating it. He puts the deceased carapaced thing in its capsule in a paper bag.

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The senior looks at him in startled bemusement before serving herself from the tray the carapaced thing was hiding in. "You're welcome. Useful for parts?"

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"What, the beetle thing? No, do you want it for something? I just didn't want it to get on the tablecloth."

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"No, I just couldn't think of why else you'd be thanking me, you weren't about to go for that tray."

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"For pointing it out. I like to be thorough."

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"Okay," they say, not sounding particularly enlightened, and walk off to make way for the next person. 

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"I'll take custom orders," Cam says when someone seems hesitant.

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"Uh," the boy says hesitantly, "uh, french toast?"

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"You got it." French toast. Maple syrup and peaches and cinnamon and whipped cream.

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He boggles at this, then says, "Thank you," and hurries off to sit down and check to make sure it isn't poisoned.

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Lucy reports in. 

"Everyone is extremely confused, but we have a fairly even mix of pleased and convinced they're hallucinating."

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"Eventually I will have been around too long to be a hallucination. Do you think there is any amount of air at various temperatures I could add to this school that would become a pressurization problem?"

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"Nah, don't worry about it. Actually, avoid thinking too hard about the air in here at all."

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"Ah, one of those, okay."

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"--One of which, sorry?"

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"Oh, I've read a lot of fantasy novels over the years and 'magic responds to how people think about it' is a recurring theme. I will do my best to go on expecting the air to behave in a convenient fashion."

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"Oh! Yes. This is why the blueprints are posted on the walls at regular intervals, is to make sure everyone expects all parts of the place to continue existing and in the correct orientation and such."

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"That's surprisingly adorable."

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"There are some adorable things. It's not quite an unrelenting horror show. Agglos are cute. And everyone's so excited when the new freshmen come in with news from the outside world at Induction."

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"I am glad that agglos are cute. The other thing sounds like it's mostly just the horror relenting rather than being a pleasant thing that does not depend on horror."

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"Admittedly this is true. The Scholomance is still better than the alternative." 

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"Maybe you guys should move to the moon or something. Are there monsters on the moon?"

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"Doubt it. There probably would be if we moved there, though."

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"Really? Why?"

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"--They get in here," she points out. "This place isn't spatially connected to Earth at all. If we sealed off every possible connection between Earth and the Moon, killed all the mals that had gotten to the moon with us like rats riding the conquistadores' ships, and managed not to make any more, then the Moon wouldn't have mals on it. But it's a tall order."

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"People are making these things?"

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"Mostly not on purpose."

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"Mostly, she says!"

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"Quattria are created by alchemists because if you starve them and then feed them certain alchemical reagents they shit more useful alchemical reagents. And then they decide this is bullshit and go feral and breed. Chayenas are possibly the worst origin story, some European wizards went to Africa, went, 'hm, we want bigger more dangerous game,' and paid an African wizard to create this bullshit cheetah-hyena-rhinocerous-some other stuff I'm forgetting hybrid, and the African wizard was like 'wow fuck you guys' and did as they asked except he gave them a paralytic bite too, which did for the would-be big game hunters. Chayenas are actually maybe technically not mals, they domesticate nicely if you treat 'em well, but, uh, generally people do not do that. Generally people are smart enough not to go 'I'm going to create a horrible monster for the hell of it' and then unleash them on their enemies, there are ways to strike at your enemies less likely to fuck over your own descendants."

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"Ah-huh. Okay, so maybe the moon isn't better than this thing here."

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"This thing here will be a hell of a lot better if you manage to clean out the graduation hall!"

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"Which I am happy to do!"

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"I appreciate it and genuinely hope you don't die or worse!"

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"I am indestructible. I would be fine if I fell into a black hole. If you fail to hear back from me after some troubling amount of time, you can try dismissing and resummoning me."

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"Whoah, you could make a black hole, couldn't you."

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"I mean, yes, but I'm not going to, it'd be rather friendly fire."

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"No, no, yeah, I wasn't accusing you of anything, it's just, wow, that's--a perspective. To have. On your powers."

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"I could make a planet, too. Take me a few weeks though."

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"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."

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"What does a Void affinity mean?"

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"--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."

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"The spells you want from your wall."

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

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"How aesthetic."

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

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"Why can spells get in and not monsters?"

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"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."

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"But it's designed to enforce curfew?"

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"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."

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

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

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

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"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."

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"Okay. I did go to medical school."