Students of all ages make up the halls of Oz but the teachers encourage everyone to hide their real appearance.

With glamour spells comes a certain skew toward youth. Before Fog and Frost take their first class, they need a disguise glamour. Since they can't cast a glamor spell themselves yet, they're put at the mercy of a teacher who names herself Glinda.

Because she's in a hurry, Glinda's only partially taking requests. Generously, she gives them each a foot of height, then, muttering that teenagers are too skinny, she bulks them out a few pounds. A mirror conjured before them shows that this extra cushioning is flattering for their body type. The thighs and glutes they've been granted are partly muscle, like the developed hamstrings of a pop star who trains eight hours a day to perform high endurance choreographed dancing, and they look good in their jeans and huge wool sweaters.

Then the good witch pumps up their hair with volume and thickness, highlights it yellow and gold, magnifies their eyes as if they've walked out of a manga, adjusts the shapes of their noses (more buttony) and the colors of their irises (bizarrely high contrast ocean blue, not the ocean blue of nature but a cartoony Crayola color). And she's off.

They don't look enough like themselves to be recognized on the street. They still look alike, but a less identical. They look like fairytale divas and the hair feels heavy to carry around.

"Learn glamour spells yourselves so you can customize," a magic-augmented fairy godmother voice calls back to them.

Magic discovery class is the base of all of Oz's classes.

"Every magic spell is discovered through reenactment. Reenactment of its original discovery." That was Prospero's initial explanation.

In the classroom, all ages are represented but Fog would guess the older students take a decade or two off, more years the older they are, until the cohort looks like a combination of real teenagers and the near thirty-year-olds who populated the halls of high school TV shows and movies like Grease and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Scream and The Breakfast Club and The O.C. and Dawson's Creek.

The students, most in disguises made out of illusion spells, cluster toward Prospero, and some meander away on the periphery to listen in for a speech that's clearly introductory even though so many of them aren't beginners. You can tell they're in disguise because they look like characters out of Super Smash or Disney movies, hair dyed Ariel red or Lady Palutena green, wearing angel wings like Pit and revealing body armor like all of them and super hero capes, mostly black or slate in color.

You can tell they aren't beginners not only from the illusions spells that make up their costumes but from the flicks of magic going around, the flashes of parlor tricks.

In the wine cellar, every single day, Fog noticed within three minutes that not everybody was following Prospero's way of the libertarian.

The low gargling sound of low-grade choking is Fog's first hint, and she looks up from her seat to a student whose cape has been tugged such that the collar gagged him.

"Magic discovery is twofold," Prospero is saying. "To cast a spell, to learn it in the first place and later master it, it must first be uncovered, unlocked. Every spell must be discovered."

It happens again half a minute later to a girl straight ahead in a pruney purple cape, and Fog can see without a doubt that the cape was pulled by the yank of a spell; there's no one near to hand to grip the fabric, it's straight-up magic.

A boy with Sonic blue hair in the waistcoat and attire of a tidy pirate captain, complete with a stout curved saber blade, has to keep hiking his breeches back up because some repetitive telekinesis spell has pulled them down every thirty seconds to reveal pink boxer briefs entirely anachronistic to the period of his costume. After the seventh time using his hands to pull his pants up, he gives up and finds a seat in the back where the press of his butt and the pull of gravity between it and the seat will hold his pantaloons in place. He sulks, glaring around for any hint of whodunnit.

One girl listening absent-mindedly adds ice purple streaks to the natural pale tint of hair. Innocent enough, but as a strand turns puke algae green a second after she's finished dying it a glorious shiny lilac, it seems another magician is pranking her.

It's been distracting Fog from Prospero's lessons to watch for signs of who's the culprit, yet it seems important to deduce who's up to the tricks. Which of her classmates takes pleasure in violating the wills of fellow magicians? The answer might prove important should she find herself the victim of future pranking. Fog's eyes rove over the backs of the students who stand around Prospero, like trees in a forest thin enough to see through to the teacher, who paces back and forth in the center of the clearing.

There's stillness except for the twitching yank of a cape here and there. The taunter is sneaky, but Fog is observant. She's taking mental notes on who looks suspicious.

Fog's first note: no one reacts to the taunter. It's like they're afraid to stand up to the renegade. Maybe they know it wouldn't do any good. Fog thinks to check for who's wearing their rings right now to rule out anyone who isn't — but every hand she spots has one on.

Come to think of it, a bare hand might actually be more suspicious. Its owner might be trying to pretend it couldn't be them because they weren't wearing a ring at the time — when really they had on a hidden toe ring. The danger of that in the outside world would be if an officer told you to take off your shoes, you'd have no way of taking the thing off. Rings on fingers were easier to be sneaky with. In Oz, however, no one was going to demand seeing anyone's toes.

Something Prospero's saying steals her attention back. "I know you came here for some schooling. The first step to any spell is the one that can't actually be taught. Like learning to swim, I can teach you the component pieces, everything you need to know to cast a given spell. Until you make it across the pool in a sorry dog paddle, can you say you know how to swim? No. And the moment it clicks into place and you manage a stroke, that's all you.

"So part one, you must discover each spell yourself. Part two of magic discovery, which all of these more advanced students come here for, is to expand magic's known capabilities."

Stalking about with a wine glass full of non-alcoholic grape juice in hand, he explains that since magic is innate, it doesn't need to be taught at all. Any practitioner can be the one to expand the frontiers of magic.

"Everything we know, we learned from our ancestors. They experimented like mad scientists and passed their findings down. We've had so many dark ages. 'Witches' have been persecuted for much of history, and in certain eras enough of us have been wiped out to restrict our knowledge. Wash it all away. We're in an infinitesimal minority. A tiny fraction of the population. We're outliers. In a city of almost 800,000, I would estimate that there are fewer than ten thousand of us. And we congregate in cities, trying to find each other. We exist all over the planet, and have for time immemorial, but we aren't connected.

"We don't have a network, and we cannot have one, or we would be found, infiltrated, and persecuted. Magic is illegal in one hundred and eleven countries."

Students who had likely heard this speech before still leaned in toward Prospero, hardly daring to breathe over this part, and Fog suspected the taunter, or taunters, had ceased in the wake of the powerful speech.

"Why don't we rise up?" Prospero asked, a rhetorical question and not an incitement to do so. "We have the power. We can overcome the law and those in control." He spread his arms wide and met the eyes of one listener after another. "So many problems arise. We don't want magical development to become an arms race. We build up our capabilities in secret, and if they knew, the government would find magicians to fill their ranks. They have plenty sitting in the state and county jails. They would hire some of us to hunt the rest of us. Better we stay quiet."

Fog felt that she agreed with him, for the most part. Stay quiet, don't cause trouble, don't use magic to break laws or harm anyone. And follow a libertarian principle: freedom ends at the beginning of the next person's nose.

Though the hazing and teasing she had seen one spellcaster committing today brought up a problem. What can those who follow the rules and Prospero's Principle do if another refuses to play along?

Thank you for reading Frost and Fog! The story continues now. Don't forget to drop a star behind you!