Your parents warned you how cut-throat other practitioners can be. Hopefully you can find ones who aren't.
The crowd thins as you reach the library end of the quad. Few tables are this far from the action down near West, Carter, and Gilman Halls. The Xi Theta Phi table is a particularly poor specimen. Its only decorations are a woman asleep at the table, long black hair puddled around her, and a greasy pizza box lid with "ΞΘΦ" written on it taped to the table front. A bored man looks past you at the rest of the quad.
Then you pass an invisible barrier. Your and Darcy's bracelets flash blue. The pizza box lid disappears. Instead, an elaborate banner on poles stretches behind the table, Greek letters in gold against a deep purple background. The woman is awake, talking animatedly with the man. Fliers decorate the middle of the table. To one side of the students is a pile of magical artifacts; to the other, a stack of docile books.
When your orientation director handed you the slap bracelet, he said, "So our faculty knows you're in the practitioners' program." It was bright orange with the department's symbol, a shield with a maze, blurrily printed on it. You hid a laugh as you slapped it on your wrist. You assumed the department bought a case of them in the '90s to try to impress students and was desperately trying to get rid of them a decade later.
You didn't know it had magical properties.
Now We're Talking