"Do you want instant ramen to keep in your room?"

"I can't make water where it doesn't exist. ...yet, I might be able to do a decanter. But I maybe keep more of it around in my room than most people in the first place so sure? - and oatmeal?"

He can have instant ramen and oatmeal. "I was more concerned about heating it than having it around, for most people."

"Oh, no, I can boil water easy, I'm always on tea duty. - not real tea, people, like, dry out cafeteria fruit and you can make something sort of tea-ish with that. Can we have tea."

Wow, what a depressing tea-related anecdote! He can have real tea for sure. 

"Thank you!!" He kind of hugs his tea and carries his tray in the other hand.

"You're welcome!" She knew Americans did patently ridiculous things under the name of tea, but this is Manchester. What a horribly desperate situation.

"Hello there!" says Aadhya when she arrives at the head of the line. "Ooh, soup."

"Hello there! It occurs to me that I've been learning a lot of people's affinities, but yours hasn't come up yet." 

"Exotic materials. If there's any weird otherworldly magic nonsense from your planet which you can hand over I'm the one to make it into a doodad."

"...Well there is otherworldy magic nonsense from my planet but it's all incredibly dangerous if handled improperly, so I'd want to supervise. How d'you feel about mal parts, I killed a lot of mals in the gym last night."

"Love 'em but some of them need pretty specific harvesting to be useful, often right away, I don't know if anything you killed last night is still good. Maybe some bones and stuff like that."

"I picked up a whole buncha corpses right after killing them, so I can duplicate them in that state." 

"Oh well in that case you and me should go down to the shop and take 'em apart."

"Sounds wonderful! After lunch, when the cafeteria closes?"

"Sounds good to me."

"If you do want to experiment with stuff from my world also, I'm willing to do that but also would reserve the right to yeet the whole thing into the void if things start to go sideways."

"The shop doesn't open onto the void but we could work somewhere that does. I'd want to start with the safest least magical thing you've got, to see if my affinity twigs to it at all, of course. Maybe have the metamagic girl, what's her name, Bella, on hand."

"Bella's neat, I like her." 

"She's very organized and too smart to try to be valedictorian."

"Valedictorian?"

"Is that a wizard thing? I thought regular schools also had valedictorians. It's the person with the best grades, A's in everything and if there's a tie the one with the harder classes wins. Enclavers never try it, the reason to do it is so you can have your pick of enclaver alliances."

"I don't think it's a wizard thing, I've heard the term before...I think it might be an American thing."

"Huh. I don't know if it's new since New York took over."

"I'm not going to lie, that's fairly low on my list of things to look into. Are there any enclavers you wouldn't describe as too smart to try for valedictorian?"