The next person who enters the room is--there's really no better word for it--horrifying. 

Outwardly, they project the mien of a cheerful, bubbly, attractive teenage girl. The mind inside, however, is ancient and cunning and extremely preoccupied with causing as much suffering to other people as possible. Sure, it's only pain they draw power from, but that's no reason not to indulge. As their eyes sweep over every other inhabitant of the room, their outward appearance is almost secondary to the internal calculation of: from their behavior, what can I derive about how to hurt them as much as possible? 

Holy crap, Edie lived through a murder-robot apocalypse and has secondhand memories of the Holocaust and some of those images are new and disturbing to her. 

The door opens.

All attention in the room is instantly drawn to the person who walks in. The effect is brief, fading as soon as you see her, but it's powerful; the interruption breaks trains of thought and cuts short murmured sentences.

She has long straight jet-black hair, glowing golden eyes, and a faint shimmering pattern of scales gleaming on her porcelain-pale skin. Her fingernails are opalescent claws with short sharp points. Her hair is ornamented with pins and combs shaped like stylized flames, and the black silk robe that swirls in the wake of her long stride is embroidered with more flames in red and gold.

Trying to read her mind is like staring into the sun, or plunging your hand into hot coals. It burns in there. But you don't need to be a mind-reader to feel the confidence radiating off her. She's—not spoiling for a fight, exactly, there's no eagerness there—but expecting one, expecting many in fact, and expecting to win them all.

Whoa hello. 

Nerding thoroughly interrupted, she gets up and slinks over to the newomer. 

"Hi, you're gorgeous."

The newcomer is still walking toward a seat in the middle of the room; she glances at Dafina without breaking stride and raises her eyebrows slightly, as though to say yes, and your point is?

Dafina raises an eyebrow of her own and sweeps her gaze up and down the newcomer's body, as if to say, what do you think my point is?

She doesn't maintain eye contact long enough to see the gesture. A few seconds later, she's found her seat and is sitting in it.

(She smells like fire.)

...Hot. Figuratively as well as literally. 

Still, she can tell when her advances aren't wanted. She returns to the most unfairly beautiful person to continue talking about the endocrine system. 

It's not long before the next student arrives.

She is definitively the smallest person in the room, two feet tall if that, and her delicate wings make a sparkling blur in the air behind her as she darts and hovers near the back of the room. Her dress is a clingy silver-grey thing like a figure skater's leotard, with a skirt of artistically ragged ribbons so light and gauzy that they nearly float on the air.

Her mind is shielded. Trying to touch it stings slightly, like a zap of static electricity.

What if a little stinging doesn't deter you?

When she pushes, there's a flash of pain much stronger than the initial sting—and the fairy girl flinches back a little, too, like it hurt her just as much. All that's visible in that brief glimpse of her thoughts is a wordless impression of playful curiosity.

Whoops. 

The fairy takes a moment to recover, orients herself, shoots Edie a somewhat nervously grumpy look, and then darts forward to perch on the back of a seat somewhere near the middle of the room, well out of Edie's way.

The next person who enters the room is generally unremarkable - on the pretty side of average for most contexts, maybe, but this room has a higher average than usual - except for the fact that her surface thoughts are all about biochemistry. Not even mind-control-related biochemistry. She's thinking over the implications of a recent experiment - something about producing synthetic spider silk - contemplating how she might follow up on it, what the most promising next steps are, which relevant papers she should reread before moving forward. It gets a bit technical and the details are hard to follow.

She absently finds an otherwise unoccupied row in the middle-back and takes a seat right next to the wall.

Edie notes down some of the general resources for future reference, observes that this person doesn't look immediately threatening or interesting, double-checks that impulse to make sure she thinks that for reasons and not because of some subtle don't-pay-attention-to-me effect, and then settles down when she's satisfied that that's the case. 

There's a gap of about a minute before the next one.

He looks to be somewhere in the late teens/early twenties age range, and his surface thoughts are mostly occupied by the empathic landscape of the room. He's getting a lot of depth and detail on everyone's emotions, and processing it all, and reflecting it in little eddies of reaction, but not really having thoughts about it per se; the vast majority of his mind seems to live on the physical and emotional levels, in the movement of his body and the input of his senses and the direct concrete experience of existing. Within that framework, though, his analysis of the dynamics of the room is pretty nuanced; he notices the way Elodea is sitting with Liamar and Atali, and the way their emotions interact, and he isn't quite sure what's going on there but he definitely concludes that there's something like an alliance or friendship forming tentatively on shaky ground between Elodea and the Liamar/Atali unit. He notices Crystal having friendship-shaped feelings toward someone he can't sense at all, and makes a pretty close guess from her body language about where they're sitting.

He doesn't notice the statue in the corner, at least not in the first two seconds while his direct line of sight to her is still blocked by the door.

Edie decides to be friendly, and gives him a wordless mental nudge that communicates hi! and this person exists (you're not the first one not to notice right away)

—huh. He glances back toward the corner and then over at Edie, picking her out of the crowd because her feelings match her telepathic communication in timing and content. (Along the way he refines his picture of the Emily-Edie unit a little, observing that their connection is not just familiarity but actual telepathy because of the way the echoes propagate between them. He's still undecided about Liamar and Atali but is leaning toward 'they just know each other really well'.)

Because she's communicating on his level, he says hi back the same way he'd announce himself at home: he reaches out with his power and taps the outermost edges of her mind with a gentle nudge containing everything he feels about her, curious/intrigued/friendly/thoughtful/grateful/wary/attracted/pleased, wrapped up neatly so that even if she wasn't already a telepath she'd be able to tell that these were someone else's feelings and not hers. The way his power works seems to have almost no overlap with her own; he can't speak telepathically, wouldn't even know how to try, and it takes active skill and effort—though it's well-practiced enough to end up pretty seamless—for him to use his projective empathy as communication instead of mind control.

--Huh. She bounces back a package of information containing

handwave

her telepathy is receptive not just projective (this is how you respond) 

curiosity whether her natural defenses block his emotional mind control? if he wants to try to shove something minor at her to see if it works (whether it takes more effort if it does work) that'd be cool (if now seems like not the time the offer's open) 

(Emily turns and waves physically.)

He shrugs slightly as he heads for the back row to find a seat, returning Emily's wave along the way. Sure, seems like it'd be interesting to find that out.

Using his power this way is much easier, more fluid, more natural. He taps Edie again, much harder, with a spike of mild startlement—the kind of thing you'd feel if you heard a sudden noise that was louder than expected but not painful or alarming.

Her defenses catch it, but—barely. It's not at all clear whether she'd still be able to block him if he tried harder; it's not at all clear whether he knows how to try harder, because he's never encountered a power that could shield against him like that. It's an interesting feeling and he's not sure what to make of it.

She observes, privately between herself and her sister, that if the two of them fought now it would probably come down to first-mover advantage, possibly modulated by the limitations of what he can make her feel and how those feelings impede her. Also possibly modulated by Emily but that might depend on if she even had a chance to intervene. 

He takes a seat and settles in to passively listen to everyone's feelings. (Wow, the sad statue is having a time. He taps Edie again with a nudge that, if translated into words, would read something like wtf is she okay??)

Almost in the same moment, the next student enters the room.

She's easily Crystal's height, more if you count the horns. Her long barbed tail sweeps back and forth with serpentine elegance as she walks, and her half-mantled wings gleam with a dull red light that also shines faintly from beneath her ash-grey skin. Her fingers and toes end in long curving talons with razor-sharp points. The overall impression is undeniably demonic. In a room like this one, her unnatural beauty falls a little flatter than it otherwise might have, and the expression on her face isn't helping; she looks around her with utter contempt, dismissing everyone present as unworthy of her attention.

There's not much going on in her head that her face wasn't already saying, although there's plenty of extra detail available, most of it very concerning. She doesn't exactly hate everyone here, because hatred is an emotion reserved for people who are worth thinking about, but she expects to take some amount of satisfaction in crushing them all. Some of them might turn out to be useful and she supposes she will have to put up with letting those ones keep the ability to speak and act and sense their environment, at least temporarily; the rest, though, are going to stop having experiences other than pain. (It's offensive to her, on a deep level, that anyone gets to have experiences other than pain.)

She stalks up the aisle between the two blocks of seats, toward the woman with the drapey sleeves, and she recognizes that there is someone in her way but she has no intention of slowing down or turning aside to accommodate their presence. It's up to the stranger whether to get out of the way or be trampled.

Edie is going to destroy that person. 

Between the Nazis and the Sentinel-creators, that kind of malicious entitlement just scrawls aaalllllllll over Edie's trauma buttons. Also it is actively evil. Fuck that bitch. 

The sheer magnitude of the wash of RAGE that passes over her would be hard for an empath not to notice, no matter how little attention they were paying her.