"Not a ton, but some people. It's just bad enough and common enough that the school likes having accommodations for it. But I think people have been allergic to gluten since we started eating grain, they just usually died of it instead of getting special bread."

"Oh."

Rebecca looks around, decides she has no more questions immediately, and goes through the steak line to get whatever looks recognizable. And she swings by the desserts.

There's plenty of good-looking meat-based food in the meat-based-food line, pork fried rice and chicken casserole and hamburgers and shepherd's pie. There are desserts, cakes and pies and other forms of pastry and ice cream and something claiming to be a "dessert pizza", whatever that is.

She'll take shepherd's pie and a slice of cherry pie, since those look sort of normal.

Ariel waves her over once she has her pies. Ariel, as promised, has an entire rack of lamb along with a couple of hand pies.

"Find everything okay?"

"Yeah. How are you going to fit all that?"

"Some mutant powers require a lot of food to work properly. My powers do. So I eat a lot, but I don't really put on weight, it all just goes into the furnace. It's all very unfair to normal human women."

"Enh, I've never really sat down to dinner and wished I could have another one." She eats a bite of the shepherd's pie. "...this is lunch so that's still true." Om nom nomnomnomnom.

Ariel giggles. "Whateley food is really good, yeah."

Speaking of which: Whateley food! Ariel devours her lamb efficiently and with a minimum of mess. She easily cracks open the bones and licks out the marrow, her tongue leaving scratches in the bone.

That's sort of alarming! "You didn't even just shapeshift that on purpose, right? It just happened and now you have a... sharp... tongue?"

"Oh, my tongue isn't actually sharp per se, it's- my main power is that there's a force field around me that I can manipulate in various ways, and I can make parts of it sharp for a little while so I can get the marrow out, or extend it around something and then pull it back so I can get the meat off the bone. I can also do other things with the force field, my powers are not actually primarily about consuming meat."

"Those'd be weird powers if they were! What do you do with it usually?"

"I use my force field to fly, protect myself from rain and mud and bullets, and enhance my own strength - I can lift about ten tons. And it's not my only power either - I can manipulate gravity, and fire blasts of icy force, and I have a natural talent for hermetic magic."

"What's hermetic magic?"

"It's the most common kind of magic. You visualize something happening in a certain way, do some things with your mind and your Essence, and it happens. -Essence is just the stuff you do magic with. There's a bunch of other kinds of magic but hermetic seems like the most convenient kind, to me."

"Is that 'cause you have a natural talent for it?"

"Yeah, probably. But, like, there's theurgy, which is all about calling on gods and spirits, and you've got to worry about what if they don't want to answer? And there's chaos magic, where it does what you want without having to focus on it, but if you feel strongly enough about something it might act on its own, and that just sounds like a clusterfuck. And erebeal magic is kind of like hermetic magic but a little easier and a little creepier, but its strength depends on the lighting conditions, and that's way too situational for me. Hermetic? Just works."

"A lot of these things sound very pagan."

"I... guess? Is it still pagan if you're calling on powers that actually exist? Or is that even worse?"

"...I'm not sure but probably worse."

"I know a girl who calls on saints instead of gods, works the same way but it's Christian. Well, Catholic, I dunno if that's any better come to think of it. I'm an extremely secular Jew myself, I'm not really up on all that."

"I'm Catholic."

"Ah. I didn't mean any insult, I just know that Catholics and Protestants get very... very, about each other. Still, could've worded that significantly better. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, they do. Is it mostly Protestants here?"

"America's largely Protestant, yeah, though the school itself is a little more diverse than average because they take students from all over the world. Uh, for a value of 'diverse' that for some reason doesn't actually match up very well with global demographics or American demographics - Jews are hugely overrepresented, f'rinstance, the global percentage is less than one percent and we make up about fifteen percent of the school. Nobody's sure what's up with how many Jews get superpowers. -question, right. Mostly Protestant but we've got Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, I think at least one Zoroastrian."