Teddy is baby!

"Oh, wild." It is not actually that wild; Teddy has quickly gotten used to, say, the age-confusion-factor given off by many of her fellow Exemplar students. That does mean she was expecting, like, Teen Wolf casting choices rather than... hmm. Wolf. Old woman. Little girl. Basket of goodies. Hmm.

To distract herself from that absolutely fruitless line of inquiry, Teddy turns to cockroach girl. "I'm pretty sure there are some mealworms in there somewhere, but I don't think cheddar powder is an insect, strictly. Sorry."

Teddy's nails are about a third bronze, now. The nail covers leave her hands feeling weirdly heavy.

"Can I get some more introductions? I'm Teddy, as stated, and I'm an embarrassingly-fresh freshman."

"Eleanor Trauger," says the arthropod. "Codename Samsa."

"Reba Litkofsky," says the old woman. "Codename Wicked."

"Isabel Chan-Schmidt," says the little girl. "Codename Alchemical."

"Zafira Serra," says Zafira. "We've already met but everybody else was giving you surnames and I never did."

"Oh, oh wow, you guys had that like rehearsed." Teddy looks both stunned and impressed, bottle of glue coming to a standstill above her hand. "I'm, well. I'm 'Dorothy Ntkima Terentin, codename TBA', but I go by Teddy." Her mom always yelled at her if she didn't give use her middle name. Not that it mattered now.

Teddy finishes applying the nail sheaths, and gives them an experimental drumming on a nearby surface. Ting ting ting ting.

"I mean, it wasn't that impressive, we know our own names," Reba says, her brow furrowing slightly. "Ntkima... I've never heard that name before. Is it Igbo? I know a Nkechi, and she's Igbo."

Well Teddy thought it was impressive. But onwards, to etymology. Teddy girds herself by grabbing a baggie of cacao nibs.

"My mom is, I'm pretty sure, from Senegal. She was never big on discussing it." Or anything. Discussions were reserved for other adults, with lectures for sweaty, loud children. "I'm kind of named after her, her name's Ntsiki. I don't really know what I'm talking about, here, I don't know much about her side of the family." If there even was one. Teddy had grown up with one grandparent, on her dad's side, who she had last seen five years ago at his funeral.

Reba looks entirely satisfied with this answer. "Senegal, okay."

Isabel snaps her fingers. "That's right, I just remembered I want you to teach me French."

"Sure," Reba says. "$200 or a skill or language I don't already have, not that you have any at this point."

Isabel groans. "Aren't we friends?"

"Yes, which is why I am accepting payment at 50% of my professional rate. You will not find a better deal from anyone competent enough to make the language stick."

Muttering darkly, Isabel pulls out her wallet and starts flipping through her bills.

Teddy could stand to learn more French. Currently, she knows a bunch of martial arts phrases, how to curse vividly, and not much else. (This was all from Jean-Paul, drunken sword-gardener, since Teddy's mother never spoke it at home.) Spanish is more Teddy's forte. She still doesn't speak Latin, regardless of any stray thoughts drifting through her mind.

"Is this a powers thing?" Teddy asks between nibs. She's not sure how she feels about instantaneous skill-gain, if that's what this is. It sounds dangerous, or at the very least boring. "Or do you just do language tutoring."

"I'm a psychic," Reba says. "And a very good one. I can take knowledge and intellectual skills from one mind and copy them to another; it is in fact my specialty. It takes me about an hour to really make it stick."

"That sounds convenient." That sounds like the kind of thing that would sap all meaning from Teddy's life, actually. One gained more from the process of learning something than just the knowledge by itself. But still, convenient. "Really popular around exams, I bet. When I signed up for Intro to Psych I was picturing more of a bending-spoons thing,"

"Telekinesis can't be taught," Reba says. "Telepathy barely can, either, but you can at least pick up how to read and transmit surface thoughts. And some level of protection from hostile psi."

"Well I definitely won't be able to do it with that mindset. The power of positive thinking, or something."

Arbitrary boundaries are for mortals for people who aren't Teddy. She will bend the most spoons and master the most techniques beginning with a silent p, mark her words.

"Thanks for hooking me up with Alice, Zafira. Maybe now I'll be able to stop ripping up my pillowcases in my sleep." Teddy tests the set of the glue, and then begins splitting cacao nibs in half between her new cyborg nails.

"I'm not being paid to crush your positive mindset," Reba shrugs, accepting her payment from Isabel. "Back to our room, Isabel?"

Isabel nods. They get up and go upstairs, presumably for the knowledge transfer about to take place.

"Bye guys," Zafira calls. "And it's no problem, I like putting people in touch with people who can help them out."

"Oh my gosh, they were roommates. The more you know." For no particular reason, Teddy directs this stream of babble at Eleanor. It's best not to leave new pals out. "My roommate, Parvati, we seem less contentious then that. We're both ballerinas? Sort of? It's a weird coincidence, but it's nice to have the common ground."

Eleanor smiles. "That's good! My roomie and I don't really like each other, but we don't bother each other either, so it works out."

"Katerina does ballet too," Zafira comments. "-my roommate. I don't know if you'd get along, though, she's, uh, intense."

"Oh, I'm easy to get along with," Teddy replies, intensely.

Teddy chats for a little while longer but eventually decides to go back to her room. She's got some reading to do for class.*

*nobody has assigned Teddy any reading for class. she's gonna make educated guesses based on her syllabi. this is normal.

Her syllabi give her a decent amount of information about what she'll be learning this semester, but only one (Lit) gives her an itemized list of what they'll be doing each week. Read a book, write an essay, defend that essay. First week, the Tale of Genji. The rest of the weeks contain similarly hefty tomes, so she might actually be well advised to start early.

The rest of the classes, as mentioned, don't give her an exact roadmap, but she could always take a look through her textbooks anyway.

Teddy will defend the hell out of an essay. But first, she must write one. It's exciting that this literature class is, as far as she can tell, adjusted for her new and improved reading speed; six months ago, reading a 1000-page novel, that had been translated from a language Teddy didn't speak, and originally written 1000 years ago, and then writing an essay about it, all in less than a week, would have been a task even Teddy would have found daunting. With her Exemplar brain boost, she's considering it merely 'challenging'.

Of course, two hours in she's spent more time researching the book online than actually reading it. Not a waste of time, if she's supposed to speak competently about it, but still not an ideal workflow. She moves on to reading chunks from the beginning of her other textbooks instead, switching at the same time from soy-glaze goldfish crackers to cayenne-honey almonds. Studying means snacking in earnest.

(Teddy finds time to flash her new nail-sheaths at Parvati at some point.)

Parvati admires the nail-sheaths! Then she puts away the last of her backless peasant blouses in her side of the room's closet space, flips open her laptop, and checks her email, her own relatively unadorned (but blue) nails tapping away.

She stretches a wing in front of herself to straighten out a couple of feathers. "So, should we work out roommate rules? I'm fine with you eating in the room as long as you keep everything sealed so we don't get ants or anything, I sleep from about ten to six and I prefer if everything's quiet around bedtime, um, what else... Do you have anything you'd like to hammer out?"

Teddy diplomatically places her small plastic jar of animal crackers to one side, lide screwed tight.

"Nah, I should be okay," she says with the blithe assurance of someone who's always had her own private bedroom. "I'll probably be knocking out a bit earlier than that anyway, and the snacks will attract no vermin. In fact–"

Teddy slides bonelessly from her lofted bed and pulls a plastic tub from under it, from which she pulls successively smaller, nested tubs. Snacks go in basket, which goes in slightly-larger tub, which is left excised from its kin as they're all re-nested and slid back under the bed. "Ta-dah, total snack lockdown. The Fort Knox of snacks. Impregnable by antkind."

Unless there are hyper-intelligent mutant ants, but presumably Parvati wouldn't ask Teddy to deny snacks in that scenario. She seems nice.

Teddy begins to get ready for bed, which mostly looks like her swapping one sleeveless shirt for a slightly roomier sleeveless shirt. Where did she put her toothbrush? She might have to get a sheath for it at this rate.

Parvati giggles. "Alright, Snack Fort Knox! Man, I feel like there's gotta be some kind of common-sense roomie rule I'm forgetting to ask about here, but I guess there's no law saying we have to work everything out our first day."

Aww yes, peer approval.

"Yeah, I guess 'you can just grit your teeth and tell me if I'm doing anything heinous' is the best policy."

Teddy does an incredibly quiet series of calisthenics and then, having located her toothbrush in her raincoat pocket(???), proceeds to make her rounds at the bathroom.

The bathroom is, as ever, large and equipped with really nice showers. It is also - and this part is new - full of girls, some of whom have much more significant bodily alterations than Teddy's fingernails, going about their toilette in various novel ways. There's a girl whose skin appears to be made of glazed ceramic buffing herself, a mermaid floating in a personal bubble of water and going over her tail with polish and a cloth, and a girl with swanlike wings combing out her feathers.

God, Teddy would be so annoyed if she were Parvati and she found out there was another girl with wings in the dorm. Get your own thing, swan girl.

After that brief look around as she enters, Teddy ignores everyone else in the bathroom. For reasons obscure, Teddy is unwilling to start conversations in locker room environments. Usually, the thing she tells herself is that nobody really wants to talk while they shave their legs or struggle into a sports bra. Today, she is telling herself it's prudent to not give unasked-for once-overs to GSD students while they're in various states of undress. Nobody else here wants to be stared at, especially, she assumes, if they're part-fish.

Teddy prepares for bed like a general girding herself for war. She showers in the morning as a rule, so tonight she gives herself an efficient wipe-down at a sink, in the interest of not sleeping in sweat. Wash face, brush teeth, moisturize, tick-tick-tick. Teddy's heard various opinions about whether or not Exemplars even need to floss, but it's not like it'll hurt. Gingivitis is for suckers. It's nice to see that the thread doesn't get snagged on her fingernails anymore, and the nail glue holds up as promised, even to her firmest handwashing efforts.

Onlookers would be forgiven for assuming Teddy thinks she'll die if she breaks eye contact with her own reflection during this whole process.

Perhaps because everybody else agrees that nobody really wants to talk in a communal bathroom, or perhaps due to her thousand-yard stare, no one bothers her while she does so.