Which is WEIRD, El doesn't say. She just nods.

Kareen hasn't forgotten El using the word "lonely" to describe, not even the condition of being El, just the condition of liking her. It fills her with a fierce protectiveness that--she doesn't really have an outlet for, that one incident where she stressed that Bella needed to be polite if she and El were in the same place at the same time aside. You can't make it like the Lonely never touched someone by crowding them or overstimulating them. 

"It'll probably be weird when I get Papa's parents back, too. I'm not sure how old they were when he died but he was really small, he's probably already older than them. And they aren't even sorta older than they were then, they're really properly dead. ...I...think."

"Arjun is - Dad - I don't know what to call him, I've been avoiding it at the mirror, I just say 'oi' or whatever - anyway he didn't grow up. He didn't graduate. Not quite."

"...That's gonna be awkward for your mum, too, isn't it."

"Well, I don't know if she has specific hangups about whether he graduated per se or not but she may find it odd that he's basically eighteen if we get to a point where he exhibits this in some shape other than 'bits of a maw-mouth', sure."

"I probably don't fully understand the graduation-related hangups. I mean, I understand that they're a thing, but," shrug, "I didn't grow up a wizard."

"It's a very stark dividing line. Between still at least half likely to die and just not likely to die any more."

"That makes perfect sense in principle but I don't think I'm going to fully internalize it until someone dies while I'm here. Between the mana handouts and Great Responsibility there've been a few close calls but if anyone's actually died in the past week I haven't heard about it."

"I don't think anyone has. It's getting to be a kind of long time without any deaths."

"It's going to get longer, if I can help it. But...yeah. He isn't just, 'has a fifty percent chance of making it,' he is in the fifty percent who didn't."

"Yeah. ...it's kind of neat having company in my pocket dimension. On top of it being neat to have one of those at all, I mean."

"Oh! Everyone gets a different symbol on their chair. What's yours?"

"It's just a circle. Or, like, rings, I guess."

"It's different amounts of obvious to different people, why they got what they got. --That's not really important though. I'm glad you have company."

"Cheers." And off she goes with her steak and potatoes and pie.

And Kareen...checks some assumptions that she hadn't especially had an opportunity to check before. 

She is mostly successful in suppressing her foul mood through her study groups, but at lunch she has less interesting learning to distract her. She pushes it aside well enough to not frighten people, hopefully. 

"Is something terrible afoot or do you merely need a heavier duty nap?"

"Found out my grandma isn't dead."

"Oh no??"

"We don't have maw-mouths specifically, but we have--some things--where not being dead isn't a good thing. And apparently one of them got her. We thought she was dead."

"Oh no! How did you find this?"

"Oh. Uh, that's kind of a long story. Do you know Aadhya Iyer?"

"Not well but I do."

"Her affinity is odd materials, so I showed her some materials from my home dimension, and she said one of them could be used to maybe communicate with people inside a maw-mouth, if I wanted to do that for some reason, and I said giving people like that any stimulus whatever that wasn't the maw-mouth seemed like a good idea, and together we made a mirror, but it's not just maw-mouths, it's anyone who's trapped and suffering horribly. So I've been using it to check whether various people are actually dead or not."

"Oh dear. Well. You can fetch her out presumable-like?"