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The only thing that sucks more than the Scholomance is not going to the Scholomance
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...what??

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"Um. Scorpius is complicated because he's got a whole enclave to sort out, and as far as I'm aware is going to be focused on getting as many people out of graduation alive as physically possible over protecting anyone in particular. So we haven't asked him or talked to him about it." Pause. "And we're still not dating."

Because for some reason everyone keeps thinking that they are!!!

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"Oh. Then... I accept. I'll... join your alliance."

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Eee!! Eeee!!!

"Okay!" she says, clearly delighted. "Then... I should get you a mana emergency fund, or at the very least some empty crystals, so you have a safety net of some kind, and when we make more we'll need to figure out if we want separate pools or if we need a connecting crystal for all three of us..."

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Yeah. Okay. She... smiles... a bit?

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Yeah. He does, too.

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She fetches several crystals for Liu's safety, and then they can all sit down and start the important tactics talk of how they are going to tackle graduation itself!

"So, my affinity's causing pain and despair, and destruction. On a large scale. Um. So I expect I'll be in front causing massive destruction no matter what."

Which is of course the most dangerous position, in the typical graduation alliance formation, but, well. She is to other incanters what a machine gun is to a bow and arrow, and she's only going to get stronger.

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"...so when you say you can't..." She really, really can't. Huh.

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"Yeah. Strict mana. I could cheat a bit when I was little, but." She shakes her head. "It became way, way, way too easy. As a child. I don't... want to know what it'd be like now." With so much more power.

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She nods. Then fidgets a bit, stands up, and goes to grab her bag from which she fetches a music player. One of those old ones without a screen that can run for like a million hours on a charge. "My grandmother... gave me a song. That I've been trying to translate to English, for Creative Writing. And... hoping I could get to use it at graduation." She offers the two of them the music player.

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"...I don't speak Mandarin."

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"This is just the melody, no lyrics."

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"That's smart, so no one can steal the whole thing if they get the player," says Yvette, approvingly. It also means that Liu won't suddenly snipe people with Mandarin, but many families assume that alliances will be in-language, at least for main ones like English and Mandarin. Rather hard to make an alliance when you can't talk to each other. Historically, eastern and western magical traditions have had some trouble mixing. That's been changing more recently, but not all families change with it.

She listens; spellsongs are tricky to explain in comparison to regular songs, but this one is particularly obvious. If an ordinary song was a solid object, and an ordinary spellsong was a cup that could hold power, this... was like a well. Or maybe an auditorium, something to reflect and magnify and send back out again...

"Is it a mana amplifier?" she asks, thoughtfully, when it's done.

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She starts. "You can't have heard it before?"

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"I haven't, it just. It. Feels like it echoes? I wouldn't know what else it could do, if it wasn't amplification." She considers why it'd be such a surprise that she could notice such a thing, and then it occurs to her that a lot of the spells she gets given involve mana amplification. So that she can level armies. "I get a lot of spells that want to... be big. It's brilliant that your family isolated that quality without the... the destruction."

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"...well. Yeah. My great-grandmother shared it with me behind my family's back, but I can't cast it, you usually need a circle of wizards for it. If I could have translated it..."

While translating spells is a horrible idea, at least if you don't fancy playing magical Russian roulette with the result, translating song spells is a lot more feasible. This is in large part because when you do that you're not really translating a spell so much as you're writing a new spell that gets at the same thing set to the same melody. Since the effect is attached to both the lyrics and the melody, the new spell will be able to borrow them to prop itself up. That's often harder than just writing a new spell from scratch and even when it does work it often tends to be a pale imitation of the original, but it usually doesn't explode horribly in your face, and when it works it really works, and you get an almost doubled effect out of it, the new spell and the old all together. And, well, spells tend to have a soft spot for the people who made them, so even if Liu can't cast the original spell, if she succeeded at the translation there's even odds that that'd work for her.

"But you can probably use it better than me."

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"That'd be excellent, if I can. Though it'd be kind of handicapping us if I'm just mana enhancing everyone else, so I wonder if there's a way I could... I don't know, start together and hand it off to you?"

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"A magical instrument can do that," says Alexei. "If you start singing and someone starts playing it can pick the song up afterwards."

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"...those are kind of very expensive."

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"And hard to make, especially while we're in our fishbowl." She looks at Alexei. "... Do you think you can?"

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"...maybe. It shouldn't be impossible. Not in-affinity, though."

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"Hmm, I suppose it isn't, is it. Damn. I'd rather play to your strengths. ... Music box, maybe? A record player? Would that be a bit more doable?"

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"Hmm."

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"We don't need to decide what to do right now. It's just... if I won't have any mana. This is something we can use, too."

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He nods. "I'll think about it."

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