[MISC] The School Sourcebook

Dave Van Domelen dvandom at eyrie.org
Tue Jun 23 22:11:06 PDT 2020


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

Contents
     
     1. Appearance and Environs
     2. The Academic Year
     3. Demographics and Mundane Cohorts
     4. Magical Cohorts
     5. Color Attunement

	       *	      *		     *		    *

1. Appearance and Environs

     The original of The School was founded in the 1700s in the western part
of Massachussetts in what is now the Savoy Mountain State Forest, and the
internal geography of its grounds always look about the same no matter where
it is located.  So, it may be physically on top of a mesa in Arizona, but
from inside the shields it looks like a wide dale in a New England foothill
forest.  It bears little resemblance to the current location it originally
sat upon, though, as that area had since been turned into farmland,
abandoned, and then replanted as a forest in the 1930s.  And even the general
contours of The School grounds have shifted subtly over the centuries as The
School moved and was altered to meet the needs of the students.  Perhaps
coincidentally, perhaps not, its current location is not too far from where
Mark Gray went to practice his spells, although that's about to change.
     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).  The various
protective spells (see below) also tend to keep out most of the external
weather conditions in addition to temperature extremes, but cloudy days
remain cloudy and regular rain can be allowed through if desired and deemed
safe.  Magically conjured rain and snow ensure the grounds stay adequately
watered, though, even if the school is located in a desert or other dry
climate.

     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.  A significant portion of the magic is devoted to
hiding the school and protecting it from intrusion.
     From outside it is invisible to those without magical permissions, and
looks like just an empty stretch of unused land.  Subtle spells divert
attention from the area and affect direction sense so that you could walk
around it while thinking you were going in a straight line.  If wildlife is
common to the area, illusory animals can sometimes be seen in the empty spot
as is appropriate.  Spy satellites are getting to be more of a problem, but
so far The School (and its international sister institutions) is able to keep
enough of the right people misdirected or even brought in on the secret so
that nothing funny shows up in inconvenient places.  
     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), and hard shields that spring up
if anything seems undeterred by the diversions.  The diversion spells also
redirect unwanted rain or snow to the surrounding ground, and groundskeepers
sometimes need to deal with suspicious snowbanks.
     Because no static defense will work forever, The School is also moved to
new locations every year, although the moves used to be less frequent before
the information age made it so much harder to keep secrets.  The usual moving
time is during the break between the end of summer courses and the beginning
of the new school year.  Some locations are returned to after a while,
provided that they seem to have drawn no attention during the intervening
years.  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.  
     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.
While some ground can be temporarily displaced to make room for the
foundations (and it "snaps back" when The School moves on), they're pretty
sure that trying to move directly into an underground location would at best
result in a very low ceiling.  Also, being on the surface means that if
everything fails badly, people can still try to escape.  There is also talk
of making agreements with other institutions to locate The School outside of
North America, to help confuse any searching eyes.

     The campus itself is comparable to a small private academy of the
mundane variety, albeit with a bit more space given over to practice grounds.
The specifics always change with each move to reflect the changing needs of
the students and teachers, but the following buildings are generally present
and in the same basic positions: Elementary classrooms, Secondary classrooms,
Magical classrooms (heavily reinforced), Elementary dormitory (with cafeteria
on the first floor), Secondary dormitory (two wings connected by a cafeteria,
one wing is suites for Advanced study teams and the other is for grades 7-12
who haven't finished Tertia yet), Faculty and Staff apartments, Amphitheater
(with various administrative offices in the understories).  Several
underground shelters are dotted about the grounds, and the practice grounds
are usually set up so that they can be converted to sports fields with
minimal (and often purely mundane) preparations.  Currently, there is no
dedicated indoor gymnasium, as most of the physical activity takes place as
part of the magical curriculum, but sometimes one will appear attached to the
Secondary classrooms.
     Dining occurs mostly in the cafeterias that are part of the two
dormitory buildings.  Instructors have several options, including eating in
their apartments or offices, together for a working meal in one of the prep
rooms, or simply dining in the cafeteria with their students.  On days when
no rain is scheduled, students and faculty alike can take their meals outside
as well.
     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.  A
handful of both Wizards and Magical Girls (well, women) are drawn towards the
sorts of careers that The School needs in administration or groundskeeping.
The current head groundskeeper is a graduate of the school with a passion for
plant magic.  Some jobs require magical skill, such as shield maintenance,
while others are simply made easier by it.  The mundane staff has access to a
few Items of Power that are helpful, such as magical snow shovels, or
enchanted computers.  All of the cafeteria staff are currently mundanes and
jobs like dishwashing and table busing are assigned as rotating chores to the
students (with extra KP shifts being a common minor punishment).  Total
numbers vary and several of the specialist positions are part time, but from
forty to fifty non-faculty staff work for The School at any given time.

     Wherever it is, access is primarily via teleportation magic, both in and
out.  Some permanently enchanted portals connect to common locations on the
outside, but they can also be retuned to send or collect people anywhere on
Earth.  The portals have the advantage of being less obvious than regular
teleportation spells, and can be used by those who don't actually know that
branch of magic themselves.  
     As noted in the next section, those who leave the grounds are magically
prevented from revealing its location or the fact it's more than a mundane
private academy.  These spells do not apply while on campus, however, and
students with an interest in astronomy can usually figure out roughly where
The School is located at any given time, and some years there's a competition
among students to see who can figure it out first and to the greatest
precision.  There's also some points of pride in having The School located in
one's home state or province.

	       *	      *		     *		    *

2. The Academic Year

     There are Fall and Spring semesters, with a two week Winter Break in
between them.  Courses continue over the summer, mostly magical training and
a smattering of catch-up courses for students who are struggling academically
and get-ahead independent study courses for the go-getters.  The students in
the middle of the curve treat it as a partial vacation, with only magic
classes to worry about, and there are often group outings organized by the
faculty to locations of potential interest, such as sister schools or
magically important locations.  There is a one week break at the end of
summer for relocation of the school and dealing with any consequences of the
move (reconnecting to the internet, adjusting to any alterations to the
buildings or grounds, etc).  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.  During an emergency relocation, students and mundanes
simply spend the move in shelters.
     Students live on campus except for Winter Break, the relocation week,
and visits with family over the summer.  Summer courses of study, both
magical and mundane, are kept flexible to accomodate both family vacations
and class outings.  Younger students often spend weekends with their
families, protected by wards cast by their magical teachers, and some of the
older students are granted permission to take college or college-prep courses
at mundane schools for part of the day.  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.
     Magical faculty generally live on campus, as they are also part of the
school's defenses.  Mundane faculty have the option of commuting, especially
if they continue to have ties to their outside life, but are subject to
similar "no talking about The School" spells as the students.  Most end up
living on campus if they stay in the job long enough, setting up cover
stories about moving to take a job in another state.  It's simply less hassle
to live on campus, and The School tends to select for teachers who won't be
missed if they withdraw from society.  (It's a delicate balance, because they
need to be able to model the virtues important to a Magical Girl, so they
can't just be misanthropic hermits.)
     Graduation and promotions happen in May, although there's a second
ceremony in August just before relocation week, for the handful of students
who needed a few more months over the summer to manage the requirements.  The
Attunement ritual is performed at the start of the school year in September
every year.  Students rarely start at any other time (Gray was a special
case, because he broke so many precedents that they didn't want to take any
chances).  If their powers emerge at an inconvenient time they are visited
frequently to keep them warded and allowed to finish out their current year
of regular school.  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. 

	       *	      *		     *		    *

3. Demographics and Mundane Cohorts

     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.  
     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.)

     The School has support for the full range of grades 1-12 (British
students considering college often transfer to a mundane school for 13th
form, but independent study is also available for them).  However, since
magical powers tend to emerge closer to puberty, he elementary side of things
is less well populated.  The sections of a cohort tend to spend most of the
day in their homeroom with teachers moving between rooms as necessary, but
some classes require going to another room (such as music).
     Typical cohort sizes are as follows:
     Grades 1-3 - 15 students, taught as a single cohort, using "one room
schoolhouse" style curriculum.
     Grades 4-6 - 35 students, split into two or three sections, but not
always strictly by age.
     Grade 7: 25 students, a single section.
     Grade 8: 25 students, a single section.  
     Grade 9: 25 students, a single section.
     Grade 10: 20 students, tends to be broken into smaller study groups.
     Grade 11: 15 students, similarly split up.
     Grade 12: Highly variable, but usually around 10 students who are
determined to graduate with their friends.  Some classes are taken as a
group, but by this point there might be 10 students split among 6 or more
programs of study (e.g. two STEM-prep, one who wants to go on to be a
musician, two looking at education majors, one who isn't going to go on to a
mundane college at all, etc.).
     Grade 13: Usually zero, but the occasional British-system student or
lagging Tertia will spend one more year here.  Almost exclusively independent
study. 
     Most years, the entire student body is around 150 students, but the
facilities don't start to strain (and reconfigure) until 200.

     The mundane faculty is similarly somewhat variable, and many teachers
are cross-trained to cover more than one topic or grade level, including some
who split time between mundane and magical teaching.  (Grant Simpson is
almost exclusively mundane elementary, but teaches occasional high school
level independent study courses in either mundane math or hermetic magic, for
instance.)
     Two teachers are purely grades 1-3, and have degrees in child
development and teaching.  Three are exclusive to grades 4-6.  Another two,
including Grant Simpson, cover the whole elementary range of grades 1-6.
     Four teachers are exclusive to the "middle school" range of grades 7-9,
two more only teach high school subjects to grade 10-12 (they have some of
the worst prep loads because so many of their "classes" are a single student
at a time), and four more cover the whole secondary range.  Additionally,
there's usually two or three "guest" teachers at the secondary level, mostly
managing independent study programs, or splitting time between mundane and
magical topics.  (For instance, one of the magical instructors also teaches
the Hidden History course at the secondary level.)  Everyone pitches in
during test prep season so that students can take the ACT, SAT, or other
tests required for their plans or their official state of residence.  It's
easier to magically fake a paper trail with real paper).
     Additionally, one art teacher and two music teachers (usually one vocal
and one instrumental) cover the entire range of El-Hi.  Sometimes there is a
mundane dance or physical education teacher, but those subjects are usually
worked into magical instruction.
     The total mundane faculty runs in the low 20s, with a student to teacher
ratio of around 6:1.  (This doesn't mean every class has 6 students, but
rather you might have a section of 18 students that is the responsibility of
three teachers over the course of the day.)
     Promotion in grade generally follows how it works in mundane schools,
and students from non-American countries get extra help in adjusting to the
expectations.  Graduation ceremonies at the end of the year honor each age
group in turn, so a student could conceiveably go through 12 graduations if
they started as a 6 year old and hung out to the very end.

     It's important to note that Magical Girl magic emphasizes virtues like
love and friendship, and can be made more powerful by strong bonds between
members of a squad.  This is why Ms. Cerulean told Gray that he'd have to
abandon some of his defense mechanisms.  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.
     The official position is currently guarded.  Let love blossom where it
may, but beware of misunderstandings, pressure, or even illicit use of
magical persuasion.  There's always rumors that one or more of the Advanced
squads is a lesbian polycule, and there's even some truth to those rumors on
occasion.  However, the training doesn't "turn girls gay," so much as it
teaches them to be more aware of their feelings.  It it significantly more
likely that a questioning student will explore their feelings than at a
mundane school.  Issues of trans identity are still about as closeted as in
mundane society, however, if not moreso given the until-now 100% link between
inherited magic and being genetically XY.  As yet, no student has come out as
a transman while at The School, but a handful have done so later in life.
Some faculty think that the arrival of Mark Gray will break down some of the
barriers keeping students from considering their gender, however.
     Speaking of Professor Gray, he has had it made clear in no uncertain
terms that he is to keep his love purely platonic.  And he's been college
faculty long enough to have the whole "no relationships between teachers and
students" thing drilled into him, so he's likely in for a pretty dry love
life unless he hits it off with one of the mundane teachers (and even then,
he may not consider workplace romance to be a good idea, haven't figured out
that part of his personality yet).  At least he doesn't currently have to
worry about fending off any classmates, they find the idea as icky as he
does.

	       *	      *		     *		    *

4. Magical Cohorts

     All students start in Prima, no matter what their mundane cohort.  No
one is able to leave for good until they have mastered the Tertia level and
graduated from it.  This does mean that sometimes a magical late bloomer has
to stay past mundane high school graduation to finish their magical studies,
as noted above.  It is very rare that anyone manifests past age 14, however.
No adult woman has attended The School since before the 20th Century (and she
was fairly uneducated in the mundane sense, so she stuck it out for the full
program and got a high school diploma at age 28).
     Typically there are 20 Primas, 40 Secundas, and 60 Tertias, plus 20 or
more Advanced students.  The reason for the imbalance is that Primas tend to
get socially promoted due to the basic level of skill required, but each
higher level is more difficult to graduate.  Tertia in particular is quite
stringent, especially on the warding spells, since a student cannot be
allowed to go back into the world on their own until they have mastered at
least the ability to hide their power from unfriendly eyes.  
     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.  They're still less numerous than Tertias, usually for one of
three reasons: it took them too long to finish Tertia and they're ready to
graduate high school by that point, they really want to return to a normal
life and they finish out high school at a mundane institution, or they decide
to stick it out at The School for social reasons but don't want to take any
more magical training.

     Primas usually start at ages 6-11 and spend one or two years before
promotion to Secunda.  The older they are when they start, the more likely
they will only need one year as Primas.  As seen in "Welcome To The School,"
Primas learn to summon their uniforms, which help focus their powers and
offer some protection.  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.  Learning to reliably summon the uniform and maintain
it for several minutes is a requirement for graduation to Secunda.
     Secundas rarely take less than two years to finish their magical
studies, but usually get "socially promoted" after three years unless they're
really struggling.  Secundas can remain in uniform with only minor effort,
and need to demonstrate that they can hold it despite distractions in order
to advance.  After all, a protection that goes away when shocked by an attack
is not much protection.
     Tertias are highly variable.  An exceptional student might manage to
graduate with her "Magical Girl Diploma" in a single year, others take as
many as six.  But since there's no getting around the safety precautions,
there's no social promotion.  Any given year there are one or two Tertias who
have completed their high school education and are either taking a skip year
to focus on magic, or are commuting to a mundane college.  Tertias are able
to alter their uniforms via concentration, as well as change aspects of their
uniformed appearance such as hair color or even eye color.  The "mechanical"
aspects of the uniform generally remain unchanged.
     Advanced squads technically don't have any higher ranks within the
school's magical program, and most break up after mundane graduation.  Most
years, a "superhero squad" forms from some of the graduates, and once in a
great while an entire squad stays together after graduation and goes out to
fight evil.  Each Advanced squad shares a suite with shared common room and
bathroom, regardless of their ages.  It's not unheard of for someone to skip
right from the elementary dormitory to a suite, it happens once or twice a
decade.  Usually, though, the youngest in any Advanced squad will be in 9th
grade.  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.  The "stealth" uniform mode is
harder to maintain, though, which is why she isn't powered up all the time.

     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.
"Former Magical Girl" is reserved for those who have had their powers sealed
away, however, and "Retired Magical Girl" refers to one who has left the
magical life without surrendering her powers.  It is thus possible to be a
Retired Magical Girl as a teenager if one graduates Tertia and leaves The
School.  Regardless of their preference for classification, all teachers are
referred to as Miss, Ms., or Mrs. followed by the color they teach under (see
Color Attunement).  Informally with other instructors, their birth names
might be used, as well as their given names.  But students are not to use
personal names for their teachers prior to graduation.
     Most years, a single teacher handles all the Primas, split into two or
three sections.  Some have their magical instruction in the morning, some at
midday, and some in the afternoon, and their mundane courses are arranged
around this.  Miss Vermillion is the current Prima teacher.
     Secundas are usually split between two instructors, who each have two to
three sections as with Primas.  These teachers (as well as any others not
named in a story) are being left undefined in case someone wants to write
them into a story, this file will be updated in that event.
     Tertia has at least three and sometimes four "homeroom" teachers, and
rarely have more than two 5-7 student sections each.  Lessons at this level
are more intense and require more out of the instructor as well as the
students.
     Secunda and Tertia share two "specialist" teachers who don't have
"homeroom" responsibility, and generally the regular teacher will be present
while the specialist teaches.  These tend to vary based on the needs of the
students and the talents of the regular instructors, but include things like
flight training and healing magic.  Tertia also shares three or four
specialists with the advanced courses, focusing on self defense and more
refined or technical uses of magic.  Often one of these specialists is a
Wizard, as some Magical Girls are able to grasp Words of Power, and others at
least benefit from a more Wizardly approach to their inherited magic.
     Each year, the graduating Tertias who choose to stay for Advanced
training break into squads of 4-7, picking their own theme name.  Each squad
gets a dedicated advisor (usually a former Magical Girl, but sometimes a
Wizard or a magical creature) and trains with the specialists that are shared
with Tertia.  See the next section for more about these teams.
     Overall, there's at least a dozen magical instructors, and with squad
mentors and guest teachers the number can reach two dozen.

     While it is acceptable, if regrettable, for a student to flunk out of
mundane coursework and never obtain a high school diploma, the same cannot be
said of magical studies.  An insufficiently trained Magical Girl is a danger
to herself, her loved ones, and quite likely to the world at large if she is
captured by dark forces.
     If it's a matter of talent or effort, Tertias may continue to work until
they get it right.  The School is willing to make accomodations to let a
student attend a mundane college while working on their Tertia studies, but
it must be either an online course of study, or study at one of the handful
of colleges where The School has an insider.
     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.  In some rare cases, the student may not even make it into the
Tertia classes before it's clear that they're not going to be able to
succeed, although The School is much more likely to keep trying these days
than they once were.  A century ago, washouts were routinely subjected to the
ritual below and sent home.
     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.
     If all sides agree that what is needed is time off, the warding amulets
given to students on extended vacation have an implantable variant.  However,
these lose their potency after a few years, at which time the former student
needs to decide whether to return to their studies or not.  A second
implantation is possible, but is almost never needed...a few years of
normalcy is almost always enough to let her make a decision between returning
to her studies and the power-blocking ritual.
     Very infrequently, The School gets someone who just turned out evil, and
who was unable to hide it long enough to graduate.  A combination of the
power-blocking ritual and a memory charm (which lasts much longer on a
mundane than on a Magical Girl) is used to remove them from the magical
community.  Their memories are altered to those of attending and washing out
of a mundane private academy, and they are returned to their families (who
may or may not be subjected to memory alteration).  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.
     Finally, once in a while a problem student is allowed to transfer to a
different magical school, or even to private study with one of a handful of
magical instructors who do not currently work at an institution.  This is
only done if the faculty believe that there is some chance of redemption, but
that The School is part of the student's problem.  For instance, in 2016 a
romantic relationship between students ended badly, and one of them just
could not stand to see the other one, to the point of it cratering her
magical performance.  She transferred to the European school and was able to
graduate the next year.

	       *	      *		     *		    *

5. Color Attunement

     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.  By tradition, only single word unhyphenated colors are
used.  So you won't find a Red-Orange, instead that will be Geranium or Flame
or something along those lines.
     The traditional view is that each color has specific meanings, and that
your true color is tied to a magic user's spirit and/or your magical
aptitudes.  However, even within a relatively tight cultural cluster there
are significant differences of interpretation, especially when it comes to the
finer divisions of hue.  Once you look at completely different cultural
contexts, all bets are off.  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.
     Increasing awareness of other cultures and a generally more scientific
approach to magic has led to the increasing popularity of the opinion that
colors have no intrinsic meaning, that it's all mundane cultural bias.
Rather, having a color and sticking to it helps with focus, but the
particular color doesn't matter.  You could assign colors by picking crayons
out of a box and get equally good results.  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.
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.  

     As with many things at The School, the policy as enacted is a
compromise.  The traditional meanings that dominated the creation of the
Attunement ritual are retained, but the positive aspects of each color are
emphasized in order to reduce the chances of a destructive self-fulfilling
prophecy.  In fact, many of the more negative connotations are kept from
students until they are in Tertia, to the extent it's possible.  The student
rumor mill makes sure that even Primas know some of the bad associations of
their color, although much of this lore is made up out of whole cloth just to
be mean.  Magical Girls need to embrace the virtues eventually, but they're
still just as nasty as any other bunch of children when they start out.
     One of the responsibilities of the art teacher, whether they're mundane
or magical, is to help students interpret their colors.  This can be as
simple as "what do I call that particular shade," and as complex as walking
through the sometimes fraught associations of some of the more ill-omened
colors.  The current art teacher is on the modernist side of there not being
intrinsic meanings, but he treats the traditional views respectfully.  
     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.
There's a lot of competition to be worthy of one of these "Big Five" colors,
and disappointment if "demoted" to a related color.  Sometimes when there are
equally good claimants on one of the Big Five, the entire faculty meets to
consider the issue.  Otherwise, the interpretations are generally left to a
small committee including the Art instructor and two or three magical
instructors.  The student always knows what their color looks like once the
ritual is completed, but naming it may require a broader vocabulary than they
possess. 
     Many students use magical or mundane means to dye their hair to match
their Color, or wear their color prominently in their regular clothing.
Others only play up their color while in uniform.

     The Attunement Ritual has been refined over the generations, and is
based on fairly standard European views of color symbolism, although with a
few differences here and there based on prominent Magical Girls through
history.  It works best with groups of 6 or more, and has never worked
reliably on fewer than 4 at a time.  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.
     In September, each group is subjected to the Attunement Ritual as a
cohort: Prima, Secunda, Tertia, and any Advanced squads who wish to do so.
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.
     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.
     The Advanced squads are basically seen as combat squads in training,
even if not all of them intend to fight evil with their magic.  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.  
     The Advanced teams decide as a group whether they want to be re-Attuned,
as it's all of them or none of them.  The main motivation to do so is the
hope of getting reset to a Big Five color, since the smaller the group the
easier it is to just settle into "blue" rather than "cerulean" or "navy."
There can only be one TertiaBlue, but there can be ShimmerBlue, SmileBlue,
and GunBlue.  On the other hand, many students get used to their more complex
colors, and the squad chooses to stick with their Tertia Attunements.

     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.

     Teachers and other magical staff tend to use their last-Attuned color as
a working name.  Miss Vermillion's driver's license does not have the word
"Vermillion" on it, but she briefly operated as Shimmer Vermillion and so
uses that as her teacher name.  Ms. Cerulean never did the superhero deal,
but her color upon graduation was Cerulean.  In cases where the teacher only
ever had an Attunement that's very common, they generally pick something
related.  If Vermillion's teammate Shimmer Green (who stayed just "Green" all
the way through) joined the faculty, she'd probably teach as Ms. Malachite or
Ms. Verdure.  No one has ever seriously suggested getting the faculty
together for their own Attunement.  A student Attuning to the color of one of
their teachers is seen as a matter for mild concern, along the lines of
having a crush on her.  Sometimes students are steered away to similar
colors, but most times it is allowed to happen on the grounds that
"SecundaScarlet" is clearly Vermillion and no one is being fooled, least of
all the student.

     Mark Gray was not Attuned for several reasons, not just the ones he or
his classmates were given.  For one thing, Attuning him would have required
redoing all the Primas a month or so into the school year, which would have
been a lot of dislocation for them to put up with.  If he "stole" a color
from anyone, it would have led to bad feelings.  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. 

============================================================================

Author's Notes:

     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."
So here's a pile of worldbuilding.  When I wrote The Academy to kick off
Academy of Super-Heroes, I didn't worry too much about being consistent about
this sort of thing.  That was partly because I hadn't started doing education
research yet (that happened a year after I started ASH), but mostly because I
figured the Academy was still new enough that if I changed my mind about
stuff later I could chalk it up to them changing policies as a result of the
relatively new school's growing pains.

     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.  I have no direct
experience with El-Hi academies, but some of the "small school, girls only"
stuff does transfer.  And I took the "choose your own team names" thing in
part from one of Cottey's traditions.  (Some of those could get weird enough
that I wouldn't have been too surprised if there was a team of Magical Girls
under cover at Cottey.)

     "Cohort" is an educational term, referring to how we tend to group
students by age more than any other factor.  Technically, that means Prima is
not a cohort, since it's an ability-based grouping.  But it gets called a
cohort anyway.  And yes, the Attunement ritual is a sorting hat riff, not
something really from the Magical Girl source materials, but I did want my
Magical Girls to diverge from Sailor Scouts/Precure tropes on occasion.  The
Sources of Magic setting has the same pop culture as the real world for the
most part, but in their case some of the magical stuff is based on the
truth. 




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