The corners of Lucy's eyes indicate a grin. "Yes, just let me-"

She takes out her phone and pulls up a photo of a rabbit with snowy white bat-wings folded on its back, then a video of the same rabbit hopping into the air and catching itself with its wings. "They're only really good for gliding - not enough muscle mass to flap properly, and the poor thing already has to eat twice as much as it should. But it's a strong proof of concept."

"Awwww! That totally is adorable. Did you bring it to campus or is it still with your folks?"

"I left it with my parents. We're not allowed to have pets on campus unless they're 'bound or unbound familiars', whatever that means. And I try not to get too attached to lab rabbits, even the initially successful ones."

"Probably something yet another kind of mutant does, there are so many kinds! I'm sorry you have to not get attached."

She waves a hand. "No worse than a farmer and her chickens. Though I have heard that chickens are singularly unpleasant creatures."

"I wouldn't know, I've never met any. My mom's a vet but she just does cats and dogs and the occasional hamster."

Lucy nods. "Neither have I; they're not very useful to my work. I am curious about something - you put yourself in a robot body, but why? It seems very dangerous, and as you are now I don't see any major advantage over the human form."

"My previous body was . . . not great. I probably would have done this eventually, once I'd taken the time to build a really nice superhuman body, but . . . I couldn't afford to wait."

After months of hiding her illness and then her recovery from classmates, admitting it to someone who isn't a parent or a doctor feels like putting down a burden.

Lucy nods. "I'm glad you had the option, then."

"Yeah, my mutation picked a really good time to kick in." 

And that's about as much of that topic as she can manage right now. 

"Speaking of improvements on the human form, Tohji, you said you can speed up your mind? What does that feel like, moving your body when your mind is sped up? I've thought about trying to do something similar."

Tohji looks up from his sandwich. "It's kind of weird? But, like, weird in the way you'd expect, it feels like my body's lagging behind me. I've learned to adjust to it for aiming - you don't need to move quickly to be a sniper, just steadily."

"That makes sense. Also, when you say you manifest guns, do you have to know how they work, or is it any gun you've seen, or any gun you can name, or the same specific gun every time, or what?"

"I have to know how it works, yeah - I've tried making those Devisor guns you see on TV, but I get nothing. But, uh, I know a lot about guns. I can make a lot of different guns."

"I wonder if I designed a gun, one you'd never seen before but could presumably make in principle, how much would I have to tell you before you could make it? And would it matter if it was similar to guns you knew about versus if it worked on different principles?"

"That's right, you're a Gadgeteer, not a Devisor... I think it's the amount of knowledge I'd need to field-strip it and put it back together, that's the threshold I was at with the guns I already had before I manifested, but I don't know if the sci-fi-ness would interfere with that even if it was easy to physically put together. I guess I'll find out at some point!"

"Maybe we can make a class project out of it! Do you have any idea what classes you'll be taking?" This last is addressed to the table at large.

There's a general shrug. "Presumably I'll be in the Workshop a lot," Lucy says, "but as far as specific classes, no idea."

Sean Liam nods. "I've heard you can learn magic here, which I'm definitely interested in."

"Anything related to combat, I'm in," Riya proclaims.

"Same here," Tohji says.

"I'm with Lucy on this one, anything with a lab component. Plus something in the humanities, I think, wouldn't want to neglect that completely."

"Indeed you wouldn't," Professor Wolfgang interjects. "There are general education requirements at Whateley, like any other school. They're a bit less all-consuming than your average high school, more like the requirements for a college degree, but you'll still spend a good amount of your time here fulfilling them. We can't have illiterate supers running around; that'd just be embarrassing."

People are done eating. They get up and deposit their trays in the indicated location, then go around towards Schuster Hall.

Margaret wraps up her cable instead of dropping her tray, but otherwise follows the herd.

She will receive her laptop, handbook, and ID card, then! The ID card mysteriously has a picture of her robotic face, despite the fact that no such picture was taken at any point.

They didn't even request the blueprints! "Say, how did you get this picture?" she asks whoever is handing out the cards.

The guy shrugs. "Magic. -that sounds like I'm joking, I'm not, it's literally a spell on the card printer. Taking headshots of a couple hundred kids is a logistical nightmare, so some wizard thought this up."

There are so! many! kinds! of thing in the world! "Wow! Neat!"

She will resist the temptation to hold up the line interrogating the guy about magic.

Professor Wolfgang concludes the tour with a few words about how, as the school's new students, they represent the future, and something something make us proud and don't blow up the campus. Then they're free to roam, most likely to their dorms so they can get their stuff put away.