Three months passed in Ravensburl, and Beatrice had settled into the stride of the living within the school grounds surrounded by other young witches and wizards. It was a calm, cool Friday morning when Beatrice’s alarm went off.

Beau, the mandrake in a pot on her bedside table, raised its head with its little tufts of bright green leaves quivering and began to scream. It only took a second for its scream to wake Beatrice, who swiftly reached out from her cocoon of fleece blankets to gently stroke the mandrake’s forehead. The mandrake, seeing that its witch was awake and very much satisfied with the patting it was receiving, wiggled and settled back down into the soil of its pot. Its head still poked out from the soil and it watched Beatrice haul herself up with an expectant expression in its beady eyes.

Beatrice yawned and stretched, swinging her legs out of bed and rubbing the sleep from her face. The mandrake squeaked once, then again a little louder.

“I haven’t forgotten! Please be patient.” Beatrice mumbled. She pulled out the drawer of her nightstand and withdrew a small vial with a silver dropper. Removing the dropper and holding it to the light, she positioned the tip just above the mandrake. The mandrake opened its mouth very wide, and let Beatrice drop no less than half a dozen drops of her specialized potion. Satisfied, the mandrake squeaked again and buried itself fully into the soil. “Thank you for your hard work every morning! Sleep well.” Beatrice said with a smile, stroking the mandrake’s leaves.

It took a few minutes for Beatrice to finish her morning routines. First, she would greet each and every plant good morning, and there were now more than twenty pots scattered about in her side of the room she shared with Nova. She would talk to them one by one, always with a calm and gentle voice, telling them how great a job they were doing or how much bigger they were growing. Then she would water them, trim any branches or pull any weeds, and only after all her plants had been tended to would she get herself ready for the day.

As Beatrice was descended from a long line of druids, the plants she tended to so carefully ranged anywhere from perfectly normal ferns to medicinal herbs and what magical plants the Headmistress and Professor Meowstaff would allow her to keep within her dormitory room. But while Beatrice had mastery over anything and everything nature-related, she knew next to nothing about her roommate, even after three long months. She wasn’t even sure Nova was her real name.

The other half of the room was covered in electronics of all kinds. Her roommate’s arrays of black boxes with blinking lights, screens that would light up or become black mirrors both confused and scared her. Her roommate had tried to explain what some of the gadgets did, but for the life of her Beatrice couldn’t understand. Nova would spend hours staring at the screens when they weren’t in class. There was a small black rectangle that she would put in her pocket and take to class with her—Nova’s cellphone and wand,— a larger rectangle that she would prop up on her bedside table to watch it make lights and sounds before falling asleep, and another one whose lid could be opened.

Nova herself was still a mystery to Beatrice. Even though they had been assigned to the same room at the dormitories at Ravensburl Academy, had spent three months co-existing in the same space, they were still complete opposites. Nova scarcely spoke, while Beatrice soothed and complimented her various plants constantly. The only time Beatrice would hear Nova speak without addressing her directly was when she would talk to the black mirror with a lid. It would always be just before curfew when Nova would talk to it as if it were a living person. She would hold conversations with it, bid it good night, and then tuck it away under her blankets or under her pillow.

After Beatrice took a shower and got dressed in a dark green sundress with brown accents, and had put her mousy brown hair into their braids with small flowers in them, did she notice that the pile of blankets on Nova’s bed was empty. Her roommate’s bed was unmade, with pillows and blankets haphazardly thrown about, and the tall Asian woman herself was nowhere to be seen. The black mirror was open, however, and was sitting on a clear space on the bed. Its screen was lit, but it was quiet.

“Nova?” Beatrice called, looking towards the door. She went to the door and peeked out of it into the dormitory’s hallway. “Nova? Are you there?” There was no one else in the hallway.

“Where did she run off to? She left her pet all alone, did she even feed it?” Beatrice wondered out loud. Her mandrake, woken by the sound of its owner’s voice, groggily looked out at her from the top layer of its soil. “Oh Beau, what should I do? I can’t head off to class knowing someone’s pet is hungry and alone!” she told her mandrake. Beatrice had put a sticker on the mandrake’s pot that read “Hello, my name is” and scribbled in the name ‘Beau’ in her copperplate-style handwriting.

Beatrice carefully picked her way over to her roommate’s bed, stepping over Nova’s collection of crisscrossing wires that snaked into more boxes on the floor. The screen of the black mirror had gone black and reflected the worried expression on Beatrice’s chubby cheeks. “Oh no! It’s gone dark! Beau, does that mean it’s asleep?” Beatrice glanced back at the mandrake, but it had settled back into its pot. A thought crossed Beatrice’s mind, and she gasped in a panic. “What if it’s dying?”

Quickly, Beatrice crossed back into her side of the room and swiped one of her many watering cans.

The tall, Asian witch opened the door to her shared dormitory room. She was wrapped in a towel, with another one wrapping her short dark hair into a nest and sitting on her head. The sight that greeted Nova was of her roommate standing over her bed, steadily pouring water onto her laptop.

“Beatrice!” Nova screeched, darting into the room and pushing the earth witch aside. The stream of water spilling from the watering can stopped, but the damage was done. Her laptop smoked and crackled, with sparks shooting up from its damaged circuitry. Nova reached out to grab the thing and take it off her bed before the sparks could set something on fire, but a shock arced into her still damp hand forcing her to pull it back with a pained hiss.

Startled awake by the sounds of crackling and its witch’s distress, Nova’s familiar clawed its way out of its pile of blankets and hopped onto the still open laptop. The small, vaguely sheep-shaped creature, with a thick coat of wool that gave it a distinctive round shape, stretched across the sparking keyboard and absorbed the wayward electricity it was discharging.

Nova sighed. She pinched at the bridge of her nose. “Thanks, Fleece. Drain the battery while you’re there please.”

“N-Nova?” Beatrice said hesitantly, clutching the watering can close to her.

“What did you think you were doing?” Nova glared at her, her teeth clenched. It was a struggle to keep her voice even.

“I just thought that your pet was hungry! I’m so sorry, did I do something bad?” The distress and confusion were clear on the earth witch’s face. “The light went off and I thought it was going to die!”

Nova knew, in the back of her mind, that Beatrice was only trying to help. The tech witch took a long, shaky breath, and turned her back on Beatrice. She busied herself with picking out her clothes while her familiar stretched across the keyboard. “It’s not a pet, Beatrice.” She said with much restraint. “It is a very expensive piece of equipment, like my phone. I mean wand. It doesn’t behave like a plant or an animal because it isn’t alive, and now I need to get a new one because of the extensive water damage.” If it was possible to pull on underwear and a shirt angrily, Nova did so. “I had so many files on there, I don’t know if I can get them back. I don’t have the money for this…”

The way her roommate kept her back to Beatrice struck a chord. Nova was always a reserved person, and the two of them rarely spoke, but to see the tech witch so mad… All Beatrice could do was put her watering can away and stay on her side of the room. Nova finished dressing into her dark clothes that were all asymmetrical tops and form-fitting pants tucked into high boots and then set to the task of examining the damage to her laptop with a weary sigh. Fleece rolled onto the floor with a soft thump, his wool now poofed up and glowing internally with erratic sparks of electricity. He bleated happily and settled upside down where he fell, and the familiar tucked his nubby feet into his electrified wool to nap. Meanwhile, Nova scribbled notes onto a piece of paper, cross-referencing the parts she would need to repair it or searching for stores that would have services that could help on her phone.

The large bell at the top of the Academy clock tower chimed, and Beatrice knew both of them had to go to class. The first day of class was Alchemy, and the professor was not one to suffer late students. Beatrice picked up her bag, but Nova didn’t move. The tech witch had both of her other black mirrors—her phone and tablet—open to shop webpages while she had the laptop flipped over and was taking apart its back panel.

“Nova?” Beatrice asked quietly. “Are you going to—“

“No.” was the curt reply.

The earth witch scurried out of their shared room, quiet as a mouse.

Alchemy class went by without much of a problem. Professor Alexandria droned on and on as she usually did, drawing diagrams on a board in chalk while the students sit in groups. Her movements were languid and her voice monotonous and sleepy. At each table were small cauldrons, one per student, along with weighing apparatuses and jars of ingredients. Beatrice and Nova usually sat at the same table with their friends The Witches Three, but now the earth witch found herself stirring the contents of her cauldron without the subtle noise of her roommate pointing her phone at the board and taking pictures.

The other three at the table noticed Beatrice’s glum stirring. They glanced at each other as if deciding which among them would bring up the elephant in the room first. Adeline, fashionably dressed for a class with spill hazards, was watching her small winged lion familiar as it attempted to weigh itself on the table scale. She leaned forward.

“Beatrice, darling. Are you alright?” she asked softly, with a hint of her French accent. “We noticed you’re looking quite under the weather today.”

“Do you need anything? I can make tea, and I think I have some chocolates in my bag.” The second witch chimed in. Hanan dug through her rucksack and pulled out a partially melted bar of chocolate and slid it across the table to Beatrice. Sonny, her softly glowing St. Elmo’s Fire familiar seemed to dim sheepishly as it fluttered out of the bag: the cause of the melting.

“Yeah, we noticed once you came in.” the third spoke. Sascha waved away the pixie fluttering about their dirty blonde hair. “And where’s Nova?”

“Oh, you Witches Three!” Beatrice said with a sniff, fighting back tears. Gratefully, she took the mostly melted chocolate and broke off a square. “I’ve made Nova so upset! I thought her pet was dying, you know that one that opens and closes like this—“ she made a motion with her hands to copy the laptop’s lid closing “—and its light went off and I got so worried! So I poured water on it because my plants always look better after being watered so I thought…Oh, I just wanted to help!” Beatrice broke off, spluttering.

“Shh!” Professor Alexandria said without turning around. Her rhythmic scratching on the board didn’t stop.

Beatrice, sheepish and chastised, dropped her voice to a whisper. The Witches Three all leaned closer to hear her. “And Nova came back from the showers and she was so mad! I’ve never seen her so mad and upset. I don’t know what to do! Her pet, she called it a laptop, I think it’s damaged so badly and it’s all my fault!”

“Oh no, darling!” Adeline cooed, reaching over the table to take Beatrice’s hand and offer some comfort.

Sascha, like Beatrice, had not come from a background that was familiar with modern technology. They turned to Hanan and whispered, “What’s a laptop?”

“It’s a computer, but one that you can carry around with you! Well, Nova has a lot of things that can be counted as portable computers but, um…” Hanan’s brows furrowed as she tried to explain. She took a chunk of chocolate and popped it in her mouth. “You remember that Nova’s wand is a small rectangle with a black mirror, right? And sometimes it lights up and there are words and pictures on it?”

Both Sascha and Beatrice nodded. “She takes pictures of the notes on the board in class instead of writing notes.”

“That’s her smartphone! Del and I have phones too, but I don't use it as much in the Academy.”

“My dumb brother keeps stealing mine to play games on it. And he keeps getting higher scores than me! How is that fair?” Adeline whispered. She balanced the scales on the weighing equipment until her familiar was properly weighed. The little winged lion stayed as still as it could till the scales stopped moving, then looked so proud of itself once it did.

“Anyway, that’s a small computer, and a laptop is bigger than that. You can do more things on it.” Hanan continued.

“Yes.” Sascha readily nodded. “But what’s a computer?”

While Hanan tried to explain the intricacies of modern technology to someone who simply hasn’t lived it, Adeline leaned closer to Beatrice. “So, what are you going to do now?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nova looked so mad, and I just wanted to help. I don’t know anything about computers, or phones, or laptops—“

“Hey now, slow down darling,” Adeline said softly. “Did Nova say anything about how to fix it or something similar? Did she say if you can help pay for repairs?”

“Well no, she didn’t tell me anything. She just looked so upset and ignored the first bell.” Beatrice replied, shrinking in her seat. “She was scribbling some notes on a paper, I think.”

“You really should talk to Nova, darling. But after class, give her some time to settle.” Adeline smiled. She pulled out her bag from under the table and took out a small bucket. It was filled to the brim with cookies. “Want some?”

Professor Alexandria yawned briefly then tapped her chalk against the board. “Shhh!”

Nova wasn’t in the dorm room when Beatrice got back from class several hours later. Her familiar was cuddled up in the witch’s bedding, his wool having deflated and the electricity stored within it safely discharged. The tech witch had left her laptop on her bed, along with the paper she had been scribbling on earlier. Beatrice, struck with a sudden thought, peeked back out into the hallway. She looked up and down the hall with its many doors and saw no one. Especially not Nova.

With a gulp and frayed nerves, Beatrice scooped up her roommate’s broken laptop, the note left behind and went to root through the trunk she kept at the foot of her own bed. Digging through her modest collection of personal belongings she brought from home, the earth witch pulled out a small leather bag tied with a cord. The gold coins inside jiggled and clinked against each other as Beatrice emptied her school bag of all its books, parchment, pens, and ink, and stuffed Nova’s laptop and the little bag inside. She sighed to steady her nerves before reading Nova’s notes. There were addresses on it, written in Nova’s cramped handwriting, with the name of shops beside them. The addresses sounded familiar and weren’t too far away from Ravensburl. If she could make it out of campus, probably take the bus back to the station, get down to the city, and back before curfew with Nova’s laptop fixed, her roommate wouldn’t be upset anymore. The plan sounded perfect enough, and Beatrice was out of the room and down the hall before she could lose her nerve.

It was well past curfew when Nova knocked on the door of the Witches Three. The trio now shared a dormitory, and the room contained the chaos of three people. The tech witch didn’t talk to the trio much — Nova didn’t talk to many people in the Academy, but Beatrice did. The Witches Three were good friends with the earth witch and so were the first people Nova thought of.

“Yes?” Adeline stifled a yawn as she opened the door. “Oh! Nova! It’s nice to see you, come in, come in!” she opened the door wider and stepped aside, gesturing for the taller witch to come in. If Nova and Beatrice’s room was of complete opposites with the divide clear and cut down the middle, the Witches Three’s room was just a mess.

Hanan’s third of the room mirrored Beatrice’s, with hanging pots and plants and small potted succulents put on the windowsills. She took up all the window space and the wall by her bed was covered in papers that bore sigils and runes. Sascha’s corner was all bookcases and books, with notebooks filled with spidery writing and pens lying beside stained inkwells. Sascha themself was face down in their bed, half-covered in blankets with one hand on an open notebook and a pen in the crook of their thumb. Spindly ink creatures pulled themselves out of the pages while Sascha slept, and was trying to hop and catch the pixie that normally lived in their hair, chasing it all around the room. Adeline’s corner had her bed and a large wardrobe crammed into the remaining space. Shawls and accessories were thrown haphazardly over the wardrobe’s knobs. As Nova surveyed the room, Adeline’s winged lion found itself stuck inside the witch’s bucket of cookies.

The tech witch’s brows went up. In comparison, her perpetually unmade bed was probably easier to deal with. She turned her attention back to Adeline. “Have you seen Beatrice?”

“Beatrice? We haven’t seen her since Alchemy.” Adeline replied, her brow furrowed.

“It’s already passed curfew! Did something happen?” Hanan chimed in, looking up from where she was reading.

Nova shook her head. “I don’t know where she is, and I haven’t seen her since this morning. And my laptop is missing. I have a feeling she spoke to you three.”

“Well yes she did, and she was so upset over what she did.” Adeline stooped to pick up her bucket of cookies. The winged lion fluttered out of it, a chocolate cookie clamped in its little jaws. “I was hoping she would go talk to you to make amends!”

“I didn’t see her the whole day after. Did she say anything else?”

Adeline paused. “She mentioned seeing you write notes or something of the sort as you were checking your laptop.”

“My notes?” Nova asked. Then she felt like smacking herself in the face. “Oh my god, don’t tell me.”

“What is it?”

“Is the bus station still open this late?”

“I think it is, for another hour at least.”

“Thanks, Adeline.” Nova said with a resigned sigh. Before she left, she took a couple of cookies from the offered bucket. “I gave you my number last time right? If Beatrice comes back before I do, call me.”

The tech witch was out the door before Adeline could say ‘sure’.

It was near midnight when Beatrice stopped, sobbing, at a bench by a streetlight. The city that lay at the foot of Ravensburl was on was a small one, bordered by rolling green hills. The Academy of Witchcraft was hidden from the non-magical populace with spells of protection and cloaking, and its many rules were in place to keep its students safe. But Beatrice, weary, upset, and tired from walking all around the city on a fruitless hunt, could do nothing but sit on the bench and cry. It was a stupid idea from the start, and she should have known. She had come from a family of druids, she had no idea what cities were like, or what most modern technologies were. Her money was completely the wrong kind; no one in the city would take actual gold coins as legal tender. Beatrice was laughed out of nearly every store she went into, clutching Nova’s broken laptop like her life depended on it. And now she was lost, out past dark, and far away from the safe, familiar walls of Ravensburl.

As Beatrice wiped away her tears with the sleeve of her shirt, she heard the steady footsteps of someone approaching. She sniffed; it was probably someone crossing the street. There were quite a lot of people who walked past someone in need of help in the city. The earth witch kept her head down, staring into the pavement, even as a pair of black high boots stopped in front of her. She looked up.

“Hey, Beatrice,” Nova said softly.

“Nova! I-I, uh, what are you doing here?” Beatrice stammered, startled. “It’s past curfew!”

“Yeah, it is. What are you doing out here?” Nova sat beside her roommate, her expression as unreadable as always.

“Well, I was…” Beatrice trailed off. She was clutching the broken laptop to her chest, even as she clumsily wiped at her puffy eyes. She pulled off her round glasses and wiped away the tears that accumulated on them with the hem of her skirt.

“It’s okay.” The tech witch said simply. She looked to Beatrice and nodded towards the busted electronic in her arms. “I know you just wanted to help in your own way. Thanks.”

“But I broke your computer!”

“You didn’t know that water was bad for it, it's okay.” Nova chuckled lightly. “And it’s my fault for not explaining to you what all my things do. I’m still getting used to being, you know…”

“At Ravensburl?”

“A witch.” Nova sighed, while beside her Beatrice watched her with wide, curious eyes. “I wasn’t born into a magical family, remember?” She chuckled darkly. “This is all still so weird to me. I even had to ask the Headmistress to install an internet connection in Ravensburl just so I wouldn’t flip out. Thankfully a few other students had been asking for a connection too…”

Beatrice listened solemnly. She handed Nova her broken laptop. “I’m not used to being away from the world of magic. It’s weird to even be in Ravensburl, always behind stone walls. And coming to the city was terrifying! There are so many artificial lights! And people!”

Nova threw her head back and laughed, startling the earth witch to hear this much laughter coming from her roommate. “Cities are terrifying all over the world! But you get used to it. It’s the same with Ravensburl, I guess. We’ll just have to work on getting used to it.”

“We?” Beatrice cracked a small smile. “Together?”

Nova smiled back. “Yeah.”

“But…What about your laptop?”

“I’ll get my cousin Jae-in to send me a new one. I still have some money saved up back home, and he’s agreed to loan me the difference to ship it over here.” The tech witch turned the broken laptop over in her hands. “I might be able to make a little extra if I sell it for parts.”

“Will that be okay? Is there any way I can help?” Beatrice wrung her hands.

“Well, you can help by figuring out how we can get back to school. It’s late and the bus stations are closed.”

“I, um… I’m pretty lost, actually.”

Nova swore in a language unfamiliar to Beatrice.