On 6/24/20 1:11 AM, Dave Van Domelen wrote:

Sourcebook: The School
copyright 2020 by Dave Van Domelen
A Sources of Magic Information File

Yaaaaaaay! <3

The climate is kept moderate via magical means, with most of the winter months meaning only that a sweater is preferred when outside, and summer is merely pleasantly warm even if the weather outside the grounds is sweltering. An exception to this is that there is usually snow during the weeks before and after the winter holiday break (and during, for the benefit of the handful of students who don't return home for whatever reason).

Awwwww, lovely. <3

The School grounds constitute one of the most powerful magical artifacts
in existence, having been added to and improved upon by Wizards and Magical Girls over the centuries.

Hmmmmm, yes. Such an interesting binary. X3

Even if someone can overcome the mental diversion spells, there are also
physical diversion spells (a drone flying straight at the school would turn aside while its compass and GPS told it was going straight, and eventually would get back on course on the other side),

Ohhhh, nicenicenice.

The diversion spells also
redirect unwanted rain or snow to the surrounding ground, and groundskeepers sometimes need to deal with suspicious snowbanks.

Oh, makes sense. X3

The location being used in "Welcome To The School" was one such
reused site, and the breach may have been caused in part by insufficient care in recycling.

Also makes sense! :>

There is serious consideration being given to change the ritual so that The School's location is underground, but preparing a large enough cavity in advance is still not something they can hide well enough for their liking.

Hmmmmm yeah. X3;

The staff who keep things running are a mix of mundanes and magicals. Sometimes, when a mundane stumbles onto the secret of magic, they're offered a job at The School instead of having their memories altered. Sometimes mundanes with useful skills are recruited, as happens with faculty.

Ooooooh. Very nice, very neat. :>

During normal relocations, students and most
mundane employees are off-campus, but the total number of people on campus barely drops due to the temporary presence of a great number of Wizards who manage the move.

Oh that'd be an interesting job to be brought in on.

Students and their parents are
enspelled to not give away the existence or location of the school, as part of the protective warding. Instead, they talk about a mundane academy that is just starting and doesn't have much publicity, which is why no one has heard of it. Once a student can maintain their own wards, it is up to them whether to trust their loved ones with that information, but sometimes it is necessary to fix their errors in judgement.

That sure is a creepy way to put it. o3o;;;

In the rare case that this is not feasible, they start
taking regular classes at The School immediately, but don't get sorted into a Prima color until September. This doesn't happen often enough that there's an established nickname for pre-Prima students, and faculty prefer to not create a label for these students, as they suspect it might become an
insult.

That's a good idea. X3

The School primarily deals with students from English-speaking countries. Originally it was just North America and England, with Latin American students expected to learn English. But with the ease of teleportal transit, the split has become more cultural. The School is 90% or more students from the U.S. and Canada (and some U.S. territories), but some English students still prefer it over the European equivalent, and an increasing number of students who speak English as a second language come to The School due to its prestige.

Oooo, I was wondering about that.

There are several other schools, including a European one that assumes multilingual students, a Chinese school very steeped in Taoist traditions, and a growing Spanish-language school. There are much smaller academies catering to smaller demographics or philosophies, and some talk of merging some of the smaller ones into a "real" school with sufficient resources for something comparable to The School's campus. (These schools remain unnamed for now, to allow any other writers to flesh out the setting.)

Very nice! :>

But in recent decades there's been a
lot of controversy about whether this should be kept platonic (oddly, the battle lines are not strictly young vs. old faculty). It can be difficult enough convincing parents to send their girls to a school for magic, without purely NON-magical concerns about parental views on sexuality. All boarding schools have this issue, of course, but the strong emphasis on love makes it a bit more faught for The School. Especially when the girls come home for holidays sporting magically dyed hair and a significantly changed personality thanks to the lessons they've learned.

An excellent point. X3

The Advanced squads are a more recent invention (late 20th Century), prior to that those who graduated from Tertia would leave The School and either switch to a mundane school or simply not finish their education. But with increating gender parity in higher education, there was a push to give magically advanced students a reason to finish out their high school degrees at The School and also provide them with more specialized magical training. There was discussion of calling them Quartas, but the individual team name idea won out.

Oooooo, very good detail.

The uniforms are crafted by specialists who come to
campus at the start of the year, but are bonded to the student's aura and cannot be permanently taken away without permission...they will always reappear when summoned.

oooooooh. Fascinating. But does the magic power reshape them to the owner's liking over time?

=One popular area of study in Advanced squads is greater flexibility
in the appearance and even function of their uniforms. Miss Vermillion specialized in this skill, and can modify her uniform for hostile environments, to look like formal clothing, or even to manifest underneath rather than instead of mundane clothing.

Ooooo, nicenice.

There's currently no consensus what label to give women who have inherited magical powers but are adults, which is a bit awkward given that most of the magical faculty fall into this category aside from a handful of Wizards. For a long time, women with inherited magic were called Witches, but that term has fallen out of favor. "Magical Girl" itself rose to popularity in the 1940s, although it took decades to percolate out to mundane pop culture. A few of the faculty seek to reclaim the Witch title, others are fine being called Magical Girls even into their senior citizen years.

A very relevant tie-in to how gendered things work.

However, sometimes despite all the love and support and guidance, a Magical Girl cannot overcome the darkness in her own heart and embrace the magical virtues needed to master her powers. It takes more than dedication and smarts to master inherited magic, it's a matter of inner strength. These failures aren't limited to just "evil Magical Girls," they also include the broken-hearted, the cynical, and so forth. The older a student is when enrolling, the more likely it is that they will be unable to overcome their own emotional baggage, and this is definitely a concern in Mark Gray's situation.

Ahhhhhh, yes. And I'm sure this ties into various axes of oppression.

The remedy to such expulsion cases depends on the specific reasons. In the mildest cases, where the student just can't cope with their powers and honestly wants to be normal again, it is possible with their consent to enact a ritual that seals their powers away entirely. (It was suggested that this be done to Mark Gray without his consent, rather than revealing The School to him.) In principal this can be reversed later, but rarely without exacting a significant spiritual toll.

Ooooooh, interesting. That makes sense, and a character who experienced this would be interesting...

If a Magical Girl turns
evil after graduation or managed to hide it until after graduation, a priority is placed on capturing them and performing this procedure with any modifications needed to account for their post-graduation life. However, it's getting harder to fake this sort of altered past, even with the help of some mundane academies and local government officials that are partially in on the secret, and there's talk of reviving the long abandoned magical prison colony that was shut down in 1927.

Hmmmmm, I see >:/

For as long as anyone can remember, inherited magic has been linked to colors. It's one of the few points of agreement among those who claim direct knowledge of pre-calamity days, in fact. However, currently the only solid point of agreement among magical researchers is that color helps focus inherited magic.

Makes sense - emotional associations and all.

Two American or Chinese or African "Blue"
Magical Girls may be working from significantly different assumptions from each other, and if you compare an American to a Chinese Magical Girl there may not be any points of similarity.

Excellent. <3

At most, you get a sort of
self-fulfilling prophecy, where a girl feels they need to conform to the lore about their color. For instance, once of the traditional associations of blue in the lore accepted at The School is "the brainy one," and Karen not only feels she has to live up to that, she's frustrated that Yoriko doesn't.

Awwwwww.

Interestingly, this viewpoint has strengthened the long-held student lore that switching colors is bad luck. Modernists insist it's not a matter of bad luck in the mystical sense (which does exist), but rather that having to change her focus can throw a student off her game and lead to impeded progress.

Oooooh, yeah.

One of the responsibilities of the art teacher, whether they're mundane or magical, is to help students interpret their colors.

Oooooh! Love it, very fun. :>

For reasons no one can agree on, five colors tend to correlate with the best links to the magical wellspring: red, yellow, blue, green, and pink.

Heeheeheehee. I mean, other than the obvious meta-reference, those are famously the ones cultures tend to start out with, other than pink, which has those powerful femininty vibes.

When attempted on a single person, the
results are wildly unpredictable, but shades of gray do sometimes happen when it is attempted on singletons...the art teacher wasn't just making a joke in Mark Gray's case.

Heeheeheehee

While technically no one ever gets a "pure" color, they try to avoid giving hard to remember or pronounce colors to the Primas. If only one of them is particularly reddish, they get to be PrimaRed even if they're technically Scarlet or Geranium.

Heeheehee. :> Yeah, you'd wanna give them that stuff.

When ranking up, colors often change at least slightly. For instance, if Karen graduates to Secunda while Yoriko is still at that level, the next year's Attunement won't leave them both as "Blue". One or both will at least get to be a more subtle shade of blue, like Navy or Sapphire, and Karen will be quite put out if she doesn't get to be Blue. Sometimes, however, there's a more radical change, such as a PrimaGreen becoming SecundaSunshine. Traditionalists claim that this reflects personal growth, modernists see it as evidence that the ritual is at least somewhat random, even if it usually keeps everyone fairly consistent.

Hmhmhmhm!

To establish
an esprit de corps, they are allowed to pick their own team name, with some limited veto power from the faculty (which was codified after a team in the 1980s wanted a name that was pretty obscene). Usually they play into the popular media view of magical girls, with names like Smile or Shimmer or Heavenly. Every so often you get a more rebellious team, such as 2014's Team Gun. They got a very close eye on their progress.

X3

Post-graduation teams often pick their own colors based on what feels right, but some request "official" Attunement from The School once they form their team. While the written and unwritten rules of the magic community require that they work in secret in their fight against evil, enough of the teams have been spotted that not all memories could be altered and the concept of Magical Girl teams percolated into popular culture.

Ah yes, the Masquerade tie-in.

As noted above, he couldn't
be Attuned solo, either. Some on the faculty were also uncertain how well the ritual will even work with an adult...there's not many examples of Primas over age 14, but at least a few of them are suspected to have glitched the ritual in some fashion. To avoid all of these problems, the modernists were given their way for now, just arbitrarily picking the never-assigned "Gray" for now. They have most of the year to study his connection to the wellspring and determine if he should be part of the Secunda Attunement next year.

Hmmmm, yes, very interesting.

Yeah, I can't help but build worlds, and it did bother me as a professional educator that I left so much unsaid in "Welcome To The School."

Hell yeah. :3

For the more mundane aspects of The School, I drew upon my year of teaching at a small women's college (Cottey College) to inform things like campus size, faculty size, living arrangements, etc.

Noice! :>

Drew "getting schooled" Nilium

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