"Does anyone recognize this girl," says the New Orleans senior loudly.

Bella shakes her head rather than crowd the audio environment. Whispers something in French to see if she can get a look at what the fuck.

The girl has...some kind of magic on her! It is deeply weird and not like anything Bella has ever seen before. 

She finally gets up, twisting to her feet with a fluidity that seems to startle even her. 

"Hello. I apologize for intruding," she says in a crisp RP accent.

"Don't recognize any of that but there's lots of it," Bella murmurs to Suze.

"Where are you from and how did you get in here?" asks Sean, since the only other Manchesters who are on hand at the moment are younger than him and it would be a dick move to make them do it.

"Lon...don...I found a deeply implausible book that offered to help me get away from the maniac who kidnapped me in order to get at my Dad, and I played along because I didn't have any better options, and then it turned out to be real!"

...Sean looks around to see if anyone from London recognizes her.

There are three London freshmen and two sophomores occupying London's corner at the moment. The sophomores are rising to their feet with the intent of tracking down some upperclassmen. None of them look less confused than anyone else. 

"Not London enclave?" he says dubiously.

"What is an enclave."

"Are you in fact a wizard at all - you're clearly magical but I didn't actually see mana on you per se."

"She's not even a wizard?"

"Well if she was inducted into the library ceiling she also wouldn't have any mana."

"The deeply implausible book said it would send me to a different universe with different magic."

"I allow that your magic looks credibly different."

"Your book fucked you over. There's noplace for you to sleep."

"...Can you perhaps elaborate on that?"

"Everyone here has an assigned room. Not being alone in your assigned room after curfew results in being eaten by monsters."

"...Okay, I'm going to have to spend all night killing monsters. I suppose I shall have to become nocturnal for the moment. Ah well."

"...you sound possibly underfazed by this."

"My impossible book also gave me impossible powers. Name a small object that would be handy to have?"

"...ballpoint pen."

"Bella!"

"I'll check it."

She ducks briefly out of sight behind a bookshelf, comes back with her leggings replaced by cargo pants, and pulls an extremely fancy ballpoint pen out of one of the pockets. She tosses it to Bella.

Bella jumps back and lets it hit the floor. "Don't fucking throw shit at people, oh my god."

Shrug. "Sorry." She pulls another, identical pen out of her pocket and walks to Bella to hand it to her. 

Bella feeds a little more mana into her magesight spell, and - "They're fine," she reports to Suze, and takes the offered one and also the floor pen.

The cases are made of stainless steel with a repeating eye pattern etched onto them.

"That's one of my weird book powers, is I can pull things out of pockets and bags and so on that weren't there. And another weird book power is, I'm not going to get hurt in a fight."

"Why do they have eyes on them."

"They have eyes on them? Creepy, what kind of personality is an eye pen going to have..."

“Oh, it’s easier to duplicate an existing object than to design a new one. That was my dad’s and, ah, the power that my family held was…somewhat eye-themed.” Up close it’s perceptible that there are little eyes embroidered along the edges of her shirt and the seams of her pants.

"What power would that be?"

“Where I’m from, supernatural things tend to draw power from one of a handful of paradimensional entities aligned with various concepts. My parents are both aligned with the Eye, which does—watching, knowing, learning, that kind of thing. I was headed on the same trajectory but didn’t have any real power of my own yet when I met the book.”

"And what's the book's deal?"

“It wasn’t from my world. I thought it was, at first, but it said it wasn’t—that the being that created it was bigger and farther away than any of the Powers I knew, and that it gets sent to empower people—in this case, me. But there’s a lot I didn’t have time to ask it, because it didn’t come with me and we only had until my captor came back to talk.”

"...does it wanna share?"

"I do not want to explain your death to your aunt, Bella."

"She fell out of the fucking library ceiling, I think it is worth entertaining her explanation of what caused that."

“It didn’t come with me,” she repeats. “I have no way of asking it. But if a sparkly purple notebook writes back to you when you write in it, it might be that.”

"Can you magically generate a sparkly purple notebook?"

“Sure, just a sec.” She ducks behind the shelves again and comes out wearing an apron with a big, wide pocket on the front. She pulls out a very glittery purple notebook and hands it to her.

Iiiis it magic.

Nope.

She accepts it and opens it up and is it magic now?

Still nope.

She takes one of the spooky eyeball pens and writes the date on the first page in the corner.

Nothing happens. The spooky eyeball pen continues to stare at her.

"Well, it's still a lovely notebook, thank you - what do you want for these things?"

“Information! Please tell me more about the monsters. And also your magic system, and this location—we appear to be in a library, are any of the books hazardous to read? Where should I go to not get dismembered monsters on the books, come curfew? Does anyone else want anything, it doesn’t spend down a limited resource to make things.”

"Books are safe to read. We are in the school library of the Scholomance, it's the top floor, any random classroom or hallway or stairwell will probably suffice but if you don't care literally at all where you overnight I'd recommend the gym, it's best for holding up to heavy duty combat and its residues. There are many thousands of kinds of mals and we study them for years but in general if you see something in here and it is not a human being and it moves, or if it doesn't move because it is instead a mimic waiting for you to get near it, kill it real dead."

"Can you make food? Like. Real food."

"- oh holy shit can you make real food!"

“I can absolutely make food!” She pulls a large canvas sack out of her apron pocket, and begins pulling food out of it. No two things exact duplicates, she’s showing off a bit. Pizza, ice cream, Chinese takeout, ham sandwiches, curry, kebabs…

"None of this looks magic to me!" Bella reports to the room, and everybody does some combination of falling like they're starving on the real food, or running off to tell their friends. Bella grabs a slice of pizza and runs off to tell her friends.

Sean takes a curry and sends a freshman to go get the rest of his enclave and their minions.

“Is there a better place to do this? A cafeteria, maybe?”

"Cafeteria's not open yet," Suze says between bites of crab rangoons. "Fuck this is so good I could cry."

“Okay. Is this space big enough to hold everyone in the school, because if not people should start taking food and leaving to make room.”

"It's not a great place to do this especially if you don't want everything to seem like it's presents from enclavers but there's not a bigger place besides the caf or the gym."

“Does the gym not work, then?”

"Harder to convince people to show up."

“Dangerous, or just inconvenient?”

"Dangerous. It's lower in the school, it's full of mals. Seniors will start going soon to do practice graduation runs but nobody's down there otherwise most of the time, apart from Field Day."

“When does the cafeteria open?”

"In twenty minutes. So maybe just wait for that to feed anybody besides people who're welcome in this corner of the reading room."

Bella comes back,

with friends!

“Wow, you really weren’t targeted by a mal that causes hallucinations.”

“Sorry, why would anyone not be welcome?”

"Well, hundreds and hundreds of kids go here and we don't, like, all know each other?"

“And there’s some concern that a stranger might be a disguised mal?”

"Not a mal, but like, a thief maybe? A maleficer? A moocher? An asshole who'll start yelling in Amharic? And not everybody'd fit anyway."

“Please explain ‘maleficer’ and also whatever’s wrong with Amharic.”

"Not Amharic specifically, any language people aren't expecting. A maleficer's someone who takes mana from other creatures, including in advanced cases other wizards. Very dangerous, they get stronger while their opponents get weaker."

“—Okay, anything else that’s going to be unusually dangerous to you compared to a non-magical human I need to know right now. One of my book powers is that I speak all the languages.”

"Okay, well, don't do that, we need to keep it extremely clear between us and the school which languages we are studying. Everyone in the school takes instruction in at least one of English or Mandarin, but don't just walk up to anyone who looks Asian and start speaking Mandarin," she gestures at Suze, who is half-Asian, "some of them are transplants brought up in the West. Misleading situations the other direction are not impossible but rarer. That's school-specific, adult wizards you can speak whatever. Uh, it's dangerous for us to not believe in magic, or in any particular spell we might want cast. Dangerous to have our mana taken. Bad to be eaten by a mal but that can affect mundies, we're just tastier. Those are wizards generally. More school-specific ones include that we can't have, like, sleepovers - I mentioned that, but to reiterate - we have to do our homework and class projects, there are no adults so don't rely on anything that would call for bring in adults..."

“Otherwise trivial injuries can kill us if they make us look weaker to the mals, or mean we can’t fight them off.”

“I can probably help some with schoolwork, I have book powers for learning and teaching things particularly effectively.”

Maybe he should revisit the hallucination mal hypothesis, things this nice don’t happen in real life.

"Most of what we need to learn as opposed to plagiarize is magic, which you presumably don't know."

“That’s why I said ‘learn and,’” she says, shooting a brief delighted grin into the stacks.

"...but you aren't a wizard, or so I am given to understand," says Caio around a kebab.

“Oh! Right.”

And then something in her complicated tangle of magic shifts, and she starts accumulating a trickle of mana. “Okay, fixed that.”

"WHOA what the fuck. - she's a wizard now."

"What are you going to do, shadow a freshman to all their classes? The school doesn't know you..."

“No, I was planning to read every book in the library.”

"...the library does not have a defined size."

"Oooooooooooooh."

"But you can probably make at least some progress that way, I guess, outside your designated monster fighting hours all night long."

"Well, like I said, I'm supernaturally good at learning things. I'm sure I'll figure something out. And I can give other people magic I have, too, but I'm not going to start handing out the stuff I've managed to retroactively copy from back home until I've got a better handle on what that is."

"You mean stuff besides the notebook that wasn't magic for me?"

"Well, you see, I had a handle on what that was. The notebook was thoroughly benign. A lot of the magical people back home that I've met to copy weren't. Also, that was just a notebook, I absolutely cannot copy the notebook's entire deal, I was just hoping it would decide to show up."

"So you can give people magic you have except for the good shit," mutters Bella.

"Harsh, she gave you pizza," Caio murmurs.

"I cannot give out the really amazing stuff, no. There wasn't an option to be able to do that that I chose not to take; I took all the giving other people neat stuff powers on offer. I can understand how the threat of death might make you tetchy."

"We're enclavers, we're probably going to live. - sorry," Sean adds to Caio.

"Okay somebody needs to actually explain enclaves to me."

"When wizards are not attending the Scholomance some of us live in normal places and some of us live in other, non-Scholomance pocket dimensions. The second thing is safer but more expensive and requires considerable coordination to establish, so it's sort of a de facto nobility - and you're not seeing any kids who didn't even get a seat in the Scholomance. If someone here says they are from a city, or that they are a city, like, 'I'm New Orleans', like they think that's significant, they are referring to an enclave they belong to."

"I am allowed in this corner of the reading room 'cause I'm Bella's friend but I am merely from São Paulo, I am not, myself, São Paulo."

"Manchester."

"Manchester also, who's this, Sean?"

"...I don't actually recall if she gave her name."

"Oh, well, I'm Ennis, you've met Sean here, one of our frosh just came by to tell us there was quality food going spare...?"

"Kareen," nobody here will ask any weird questions if she uses Dad's name and not Papa's, "Magnus. From another dimension with very different magic, arrived by way of a third form of magic that is much, much better."

"...smashing, and it does food? Have we a plan to keep her alive -"

"She is planning to be nocturnal and fight mals all night long. She has magic she expects to make this work."

"Lake'll have an entire sports rivalry or something."

"I have an explicit power for not being able to get hurt in a fight."

"Hurt meaning, like, physically injured? There's mals that do other things."

"I have a separate explicit power for not having irrecoverable things happen to me. Or for recovering from them anyway. Maybe I should actually just make pamphlets about all the powers I have and asking people to let me know if any of them unexpectedly patch a huge crisis."

"Sounds handy. But if you get chased into the void by a mal that makes you psychically terrified, perhaps you'll simply fall out of another ceiling, but we'd miss you."

"--Oh, fear I can handle!"

"That's just an example."

"Well, fair. But my mind is categorically protected."

"Well, I certainly hope you are still here in the morning."

"If you have additional precautions to suggest, I won't turn them down."

"Do you need some sort of weapon?"

"It's not just food, she can make whatever, I assume that includes a sword or whatever."

"Oh, probably don't make a gun, objects can pick up personalities if they're around enough magic and that's bad enough if it's scissors."

"I don't know enough about swords to make a good one and I've never held a good one to duplicate it, and I have, in fact, held a gun, so that's very good to know!"

"People wouldn't bring them in here anyway because ammunition would be a pain and a half, which doesn't apply to you, but, yeah."

"Do your powers make you - only as good as you need to be, so if we give you stuff to help you out, your powers help you less and we're still out the stuff -"

"Okay, so firstly, I'm going to actually sit down and write up my power list now. Secondly, I only need to borrow something for a second to be able to duplicate it, you won't be out anything if you hand me a sword."

She pulls a sheaf of printer paper out of her food sack and another spooky eye pen out of her pocket and sits down to write. 

Suze has a rapier. She hesitates, but hands it over. "It's magic, I don't know if you copy that."

She hefts it and then hands it back. "As long as I can copy the part where it's a sharp chunk of metal, it's probably fine."

"It wouldn't be too durable against anything with armor, if it weren't magic."

"Fair. As I said, I don't know much about swords. Here." She finishes writing her pamphlet and offers it to her, then pulls a handful more out of her bag to distribute.

KAREEN MAGNUS'S IMPLAUSIBLE NOTEBOOK POWERS

Size Difference
At all times, you are exactly the right height. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. It will usually keep any height changes fairly subtle, but at dramatic moments you might discover yourself able to shrink to the size of a bee or grow to the size of a giant.

Dressing Room
No matter how ridiculous your outfit, it will stay pristine and perfect, unless it would be more dramatic for you to be artfully bedraggled. You can use any quiet moment to yourself to quick-change your clothes, shoes, nails, and hairstyle into a completely new look. (You cannot change your hair length or colour this way without Perfect Hair, but you can braid or style it.)

Pocket Dimension
You can reach into your pocket, purse, backpack, or other storage accessory and pull out anything that can fit through its opening, even if it obviously could not fit in the pocket and even if you've never carried that object in that pocket before. In order to summon a specific object this way, it needs to belong to you; in order to duplicate an existing object this way, you need to have held or examined it at least once; in order to invent a new object this way, you need to be familiar enough with what you want that you could tell the real thing apart from a fake made with the same materials. So jewelry you make will be real gold or silver or platinum, but if you want to pull a refrigerator out of your backpack, you need to have a reasonably good idea of how a refrigerator works.
Note: This is where all the food comes from

Soundtrack
Your life has a soundtrack, expertly composed in a mix of musical styles that suits you aesthetically and personally. You can hear the soundtrack at all times, but are never directly impaired by it—you can still hear other things just as well, and can still rest normally, enjoy the quiet, enjoy other music, and so on. By listening to the soundtrack, you can discern a lot of information about what kind of situation you're in and how your choices are likely to play out. (The soundtrack will often either go quiet or fade into the background to complement other music playing around you, but might pipe up if it has something important to say.)

Soundboard
Your sense of hearing is clarified and enhanced. You have full control of the relative volume of all sounds you can hear, including your Soundtrack. Changing your audio balance feels intuitive and natural - and if a source of sound you turned down and forgot about has something to say, your Soundtrack can cue you to listen to it again. You can also enhance audio sources if you want to hear a distant or distorted noise more clearly, and you're better able to process and understand multiple people speaking at the same time.

Hollow Leg
Regardless of your diet and exercise habits, your body maintains the physique and silhouette you prefer. Lack of visible muscle never impairs your strength or endurance. As your preferences change, so will your body; you are no longer bound to the generous figure stipulated by Well Endowed.

Lightfoot 
You are perfectly, superhumanly graceful, with reflexes and agility to match. You can cross a field of snow without leaving a footprint, or stand on a slender branch without bending it, or jump so lightly that you soar through the air instead of falling.
Note: Has Hollow Leg as a prerequisite

Battle Angel
Somehow, you never get significantly injured in a fight, unless it's a very dramatic and plot-relevant fight in which case you might be glamorously wounded and pick up a cool new scar.

Battle Demon
You have an unerring intuition for gaps in an opponent's defenses, though it may be beyond your power to exploit them.

Battle Maiden
No matter what kind of fight you're getting in, you're always a match for even the most skilled opponent.

Omniglot
You learn languages insanely, ludicrously fast. You know exactly what any word said to you means, and you make strangely accurate guesses about how to phrase things you're trying to say. You never forget any grammar or vocabulary you learn.

Anything You Can Do
You learn implausibly quickly from friends, rivals, and love interests. If you have a personal connection to someone with a certain skill, talent, or expertise, you'll learn it five times faster than they did, or twenty times faster if they're actively trying to teach you. This applies even to forms of magic that you ordinarily shouldn't be able to learn.

Dragon Fairy Elf Witch
You can at any time discover previously unknown heritage from any type of being you encounter, even if this makes no sense or contradicts previously established descriptions of your family tree. You always get their powers without their drawbacks, unless the drawbacks are cool and dramatic. Any visible features of this heritage will appear at narratively appropriate moments and be cute, pretty, beautiful, or striking rather than awkward, weird, gross, or scary. This ability works even if the beings in question cannot reproduce with humans, or at all.

Snowglobe 
In worlds where people can have individual special powers, such as powered superheroes or personality-based magic, you find that you can pick up a power of your own even if you don't meet the local requirements. Drawbacks of these powers, such as uncontrollable power manifestations or a tendency to attract unwanted supernatural attention, will only apply if they are cool and dramatic.

Unleash The Magic
Any form of magic or other special ability you encounter can be yours, regardless of prerequisites, as long as you see it in action at least once. Your various powers and attributes will never conflict with each other or come with annoying drawbacks, and will often synergize in cool and interesting ways.
Note: How I acquired wizardry, although I expect Dragon Fairy Elf Witch would also have done it.

Inner World
The world of your imagination is a real, concrete, persistent place, which you can experience in parallel with the world around you—though you might find it easier to focus on one at a time. It makes an excellent setting for lucid dreams, telepathic conversations, and notetaking. Mental enhancements affect its size, depth, and detail; mental defenses guard it against intrusion. Your control over it will grow with time and practice.

Inner Housekeeping
You can understand and alter your emotions and other mental states by interacting with their manifestations in your Inner World. Some interactions will be more straightforward than others.

Closed Book
You're immune to any supernatural, pharmaceutical, or other effect that would let people directly read your thoughts or feelings.

Indelible 
You're immune to any supernatural, pharmaceutical, or other effect that would let people directly alter your thoughts or feelings.

Iron Will
You are immune to all forms of mental illusion, alteration, interference, or control. Even extreme torture, extended solitary confinement, advanced brainwashing techniques, and so on cannot touch you. You can be lonely but not cripplingly lonely. You can be upset but not traumatized. (You can choose to allow specific effects like communicative telepathy on a case-by-case basis.)

It Gets Better
You're going to be okay. Your mind and body may never be perfect, but they are yours, and cannot permanently be taken from you. In time you will heal from any injury, escape any imprisonment, and recover from any trauma; maybe not in exactly the ways you hoped, but always in ways you're okay with.

Disney Princess 
Animals are always friendly to you, especially the small cute ones. You can effectively tame any animal by feeding it and speaking gently to it.
Note: Prerequisite to Cotton Candy, which is why I have it.

Cotton Candy
The sharp edges of the world are blunted around you. That's not to say that nothing bad can happen, but that the worst things happen a lot less often, and happy endings large and small are much easier to come by. This effect can ripple outward to improve the lives of people you've never met.

Backchannel 
When you're talking to someone and you think you might not be getting through to each other, you can take a step back, look deep into your heart, and really try to understand where they're coming from, and it will just work and you'll know what they're trying to say and how sincere they are about it and have a good idea of what you should say if you want them to understand you right back.

You Can Teach Better
If you have a personal connection to someone, you can teach them anything you know; depending how motivated and engaged they are, they could learn it up to 110% as fast as you could have learned it using Anything You Can Do. If you consider them a good friend or otherwise especially close, this applies even to forms of magic that they ordinarily shouldn't be able to learn.

More Magic
Abilities you pick up through Unleash The Magic can be passed on to others. Unique per-person abilities from Snowglobe may be passed on either as a direct mirror of your own unique ability, or by sparking a unique ability in the recipient. The deeper your personal connection to the recipient, the easier it is for you to pass on abilities to them and the more potent the results will be.

Time Enough For Love
No matter how many people you want to date or be close friends with, you will somehow find the time to hang out with all of them and express your love and care. This power can only be used for relationship activities and not for anything else you might want to use the ability to be in two places at once for.

I Can Help Them 
Regardless of how lost to darkness someone is, your love can save them, if they're willing to accept it. This power will not directly alter someone's mind except to allow them to believe a true thing they couldn't have believed otherwise, or to change something that their pre-alteration and post-alteration selves would hypothetically be able to agree was good if they talked it over honestly with full access to each other's perspectives. In cases where the outcome of the hypothetical is uncertain, it will default to not making the change.

Ever Onward 
When you reach out to someone with love in your heart, whether to redeem them or just to connect as friends or lovers, your power can spark something in them. If they choose to believe in love and kindness with you, they can draw strength from your companionship, and pass that strength on to those they spark in turn. The effects of this power are subtle, but very far-reaching. Those you uplift with it, directly and indirectly, become better both at living their own best lives and at helping others.

True Love's Kiss
By kissing your true love, you can break any curse, heal any injury, and cure any illness. The same works in reverse.

Eternal Love
Those you love cannot be parted from you by anything short of their own uncoerced decision to leave. Anything else—war, politics, death, interdimensional travel—you will find a way to overcome and be reunited.

The Rescuer
If someone is dead who would want to be alive again, and you set your heart on returning them, you will find a way. It may have costs or difficulties or take a long time, but you will find it, and it will work.

Dream Together
When you truly miss someone who truly misses you, you will see each other again in your dreams. If dreaming is not possible, a daydream, meditation session, or moment of wistful yearning will suffice.

Providential Parenthood 
You can only have children when you're really ready for it, or if you actively and specifically decide to.

Signature Style
You are now locked in to a single personal style. It can be an established fashion genre, or just the expression of your personal taste in clothing, but it must be something that resonates with you narratively and personally. It will never change, and your clothing, hair, makeup, and other styling will always conform to it, no matter how hard you or others try to dress or decorate you differently. You may find yourself at peace with this style in the long term, or not.
Note: Most of the powers on this page consume "points;" this one grants them. My style is an eye motif.

There's Another One
You are not the only vessel of the Spirit. You might meet someone else with similar powers to yours; you might even meet more than one. Your susceptibility to one another's powers will be governed by the narrative.
Note: This one is why I had any hope that handing someone a sparkly notebook might work to summon the notebook that empowered me.

Nullified 
Any aspects of your powers that would affect the minds of others in ways they might not like will instead not do that. 

Grimm's Fairy Tales
Bad things can and will still happen to you in particular.
Note: Also a point-granting option

Great Responsibility
When someone calls out to you for help, you can hear it no matter how far away you are, and you know exactly how they feel.
Note: If a mal is trying to eat you, and I am in a different part of the building, I can't promise to get there in time. But you might as well try.

Her handwriting is remarkably elegant, without being harder to read. Lightfoot helps with manual dexterity, too.

Bella starts reading this and then before she's gotten very far she pulls out the sparkly purple notebook again and writes PLEASE?! beside the date, waits a beat, and puts it away again.

"So, mals aren't 'people', and your Indelible thing says 'people'."

"Indelible does. Iron Will doesn't."

"True, just, if there is a loophole you want to find it now and not at two a.m."

"What time zone are you coming from, Kareen?"

"Uh--it was late morning when I was locked in the warehouse, but I'm not sure how long I was in there for."

"Almost lunchtime, here, so... you'll maybe want to borrow some kind of stimulant off somebody to duplicate before your all-nighter, if you don't have anything already in the bag of tricks, there's coffee but it's not good."

"I have had coffee. Among other things. But I appreciate the thought. Why is the food here bad enough that everyone is descending ravenously on my cornucopia powers?"

"It's a nutrient slurry lightly illusioned to pretend to be bad cafeteria food. There is also a weird vending machine but it's as likely to get you something that expired in 1967 as an edible candy bar."

"...I...see. Well, I can certainly fill this gap." 

"We appreciate this about you."

"A lot!"

She goes back to pulling food out of her bag. "I presume there's a reason why the food situation is so dire."

"Any channel by which anything enters the Scholomance, other than the Void which can by special purpose enchantment offer us books, can allow mals in. So channels have to be as few, far between, and small as possible. This is why we don't have adults, Internet, sunshine, correspondence, or more than a very limited weight allowance of luggage when we come in. Nutrient slurry can enter by a very small aperture. Better food illusions are possible and every now and then someone splurges on one but the school is generally running on a very tight mana budget, and so are we."

"I have a spell to make the water taste better but Poppy says if I cast it I will deserve to have my toes gnawed off in the night."

"So I have been informed that mals exist and some of them do non-physical harm but I think it's time to learn more things about mals." 

"You may choose to rely on your powers here but the reason we all have short hair is so mals can't grab it or hide in it; anyone here with long hair is showing off or stupid or both. You can see an illusion of the graduation hall, which is full of all kinds of mals, in the mal studies auditorium, should you so wish. Some mals are only quasi-real, or made of information, or capable of drawing out quite elaborate ritual diagrams, or insubstantial, or otherwise exotic, but the normal case is that there's some kind of monster with teeth or tentacles or claws or pseudopods or shapeshifting powers so they can split the difference, and it does physical harm till it kills you or receives physical harm till you kill it. Mals come in an enormous variety of sizes ranging from grub to elephantine. Agglos are technically a kind of mal but they do not take mana against resistance, and instead live off the leftover intent in discarded and scrap objects like broken-off pencil lead or nail clippings or lost hair ties, which they attach to themselves like decorator crabs."

"That is very useful information to have but also I would like to know what the general mal background situation is. Is it better in here, or worse but the magic infinite library is worth it? Fatalities have been mentioned; what are the ballpark death rates? Over what demographics? Where do they come from, do they have their own ecosystem or are they a byproduct of something else or are they an end-state of maleficing, I can't help but notice a plausible etymological connection."

"The graduation hall is very bad, but the rest of the school is better - for our age group, little kids are less tasty and grownups are more dangerous - than anywhere else we could be."

"Most enclavers and about a quarter of indies, in the Scholomance, live. Outside the rate's like one in twenty making it, but that's indies, I don't know what kinds of statistics an enclave who has to keep, say, a diabetic, home, might pull."

"Some mals are in fact made or descended from the creations of wizards, who might or might not be maleficers in the technical sense - in some cases we know the details, like chayaenas were supposed to be exciting big game hunting targets and the guy they were commissioned from jazzed them up; quattrias have useful alchemical properties if you can keep them from escaping while simultaneously starving them. Some of them might just be the magical equivalent of wild animals; I think that's likely for agglos and a few extinct kinds that may've been outcompeted by more aggressive types. Many mals will eat each other."

“One in twenty? Is that somehow less apocalyptic than it sounds???”

"Wizards breed true so an embarrassing amount of our population bounceback has always been from individual guys running around knocking up dozens of mundies, but also historically it was less bad, we're not sure why it's gotten worse but the Scholomance isn't that old."

“So these are only wizard mortality rates?”

"That's right. I don't know what non-magical mortality rate you're used to but it used to be that they died more than we did - albeit as babies more than as teenagers - because they got sick and couldn't fix it, but that hasn't been true for a few centuries."

“So mals target wizards preferentially?”

"Mals eat mana. We have it and mundies don't, to a first approximation. So you just made yourself real appetizing and I hope your powers work."

She would ask who even has kids with a one in twenty survival rate but Caio did already answer that question.

Dad may be an undeniably evil person but at least he never failed to care about her.

“Okay. Back home the monsters tend to preferentially target—mundanes—since they’re much less able to fight back. The mana thing makes sense but I hadn’t made that connection yet.”

"Mundanes don't believe in magic, which makes it work less well around them - that includes spells we cast but also mals being anything other than aggressive animals, it's pretty protective for a vulnerable wizard who can't defend themselves to be around mundanes. I went to mundie elementary school in part for this reason."

"Yeah, a mundane will look right at a swampgleep and be like 'that is the ugliest seagull I have ever seen'."

"What the hell is a swampgleep."

"They've got too much wingspan to operate in here very well but we get them around where I'm from sometimes."

“I would say that magic where I’m from doesn’t care if you believe in it or not but one of the conceptual entities has gaslighting as a central focus and I imagine that monsters associated with it actively delight in picking on people who don’t believe in things.”

Actually since most people fear what they don’t understand the Spiral is far from special in this but she’s trying to avoid admitting that her native magic runs on fear.

You’d think that the kinds of people who invent Bigfoot and El Chupacabra would see swampgleeps and so on just fine but it’s entirely possible that those people don’t live long, here.

"Anything else you need to know before we head down to lunch and you pull a thousand cheeseburgers out of your pockets?"

“Not that I yet have the context to ask!”

"Well then, let's all the lot of us head down - would you be so kind as to take point -" Ennis assigns various people convoy positions that happen to leave Kareen in the middle with the enclavers.

Kareen doesn’t know who isn’t an enclave besides Caio but she isn’t surprised to end up in a protected spot when she is these people’s only source of real food.

But also if she sees any mals she’s going to see if Lightfoot plus the battle trio let her put a steak knife through them at forty paces.

Mals do not choose to approach this large coordinated group of well-maintained wizards as they go downstairs and make their way into the cafeteria. Something has taken up residence in the baked potatoes, if she'd like to try knifing that?

She would love to try knifing that!

Battle Demon affects her perception in interesting ways. Even if she never expected to have to fight for her life against something she’d still like this power. She’d just have to take up martial arts or something.

Anyway. Potato mal go bloosh.

It covers the mashed potatoes, and the adjacent brussels sprouts, and the handful of seniors who were already in line look in her direction more betrayed than any child should be about the contamination of their brussels sprouts.

Whoopsie.

Okay, well. Time to pull some particularly fragrant food out of the sack and start setting it out on a table.

Now she has quite a lot of attention. Ennis identifies a few key people and sends Sean to talk to one, asks Suze to speak with another, goes to address a third and fourth himself, and presently people are queuing up for her food, though a few people are suspicious and taking the safe-looking cafeteria grilled cheese and steamed peas and bananas instead.

“Father Christmas doesn’t care if you’ve been naughty or nice! Natural justice doesn’t exist, but human compassion does! I have bizarre powers from other worlds and the enclave kids will confirm it or I’ll know why!”

Bella takes up a position at her elbow to do confirmations on request. And steal fries. "You definitely don't need translation, right?" she asks when some Chinese kids start lining up.

“Right.” She also has a stack of pamphlets of implausible notebook powers that anyone can take.

"People are going to take those just for the paper," Bella mentions, "when the lunch rush slows down you might want to hand out school supplies. - Everyone has an independent work period right after lunch, so we're not in a hurry. Do they look like they're in Chinese to Chinese kids?"

“…Ah, no. Um…” She thinks about it for a moment, brow furrowed as she continues to pull food out of the bag. And then she pulls a stack of papers out of the bag. “Check if I missed anything? I think you implied you do Chinese.”

"I do, yes." She compares pamphlets.

There are a few places where she didn’t use the most direct or idiomatic possible translation, but it’s fine.

“I can design new things, but I have to do all my own detail work—but then, you read the description.”

And since people are going to want paper, and Kareen isn’t especially interested in wasting opportunities, she pulls out a stack of glittery purple notebooks as well.

"Good enough," she pronounces the pamphlet translation.

The Chinese version can go on the other side of the sparkly notebook stack from the English version, then.

Bella tears a corner out of her own sparkly purple notebook's first page and writes FREE BLANK NOTEBOOKS in English and presumably the same in Chinese and props this up on top of the stack. Kids take them along with their lunches, sometimes two or three at a time.

That’s fine! She can pull out more! She also pulls out a cup labeled FREE PENS and filled with spooky eye ballpoints.

Bella checks the translation of FREE PENS but otherwise resumes her duty of confirming to people that this is what it looks like and if they don't believe her they can check with her senior or with the Manchester kids.

“I fell out of the void ceiling in the library,” she adds helpfully at one point.

This doesn't make her much more believable - anyone could say that - but she sure seems to have infinite cheeseburgers. A Chinese junior asks tentatively for youtiao.

“I’m very sorry, but I can’t make foods I’m unfamiliar with, and I’ve never had that.”

Aww. "It is a fried dough thing, can you make some kind of fried dough thing?"

“I can absolutely do that!” She pulls several varieties of fried dough things out of the bag, they can take their pick.

The Chinese kids load up on donuts.

"There is no chance," says a non-Chinese kid, "that you've already ever had specifically my grandma's aloo gobhi, but do I hope too much that you've had decent homemade -"

“You do not hope too much.” She produces the requested dish. “My great-grandma’s and not your grandma’s, sorry, but she did teach Papa to cook before she passed.”

"I will sing your praises eternally, you don't seem like you need anything but if ever you do..." And then her face is full of cauliflower omnomnomnom.

“I’m Kareen, what’s your name?”

"Aadhya Iyer," she says around some potato.

“I’ll remember that.”

Aadhya salutes and moves the line along. There seems to be a tacit pecking order; the kids coming through after her are maybe none of them enclavers, if you can judge by some ineffable quality gradient in the universally scruffy and ill-groomed presentations of the students.

This girl is pretty close to the end of the pack of juniors, though the school itself is enforcing enough of a stagger between years that she is ahead of the sophomores who didn't have enough clout to cut in line explicitly ahead of older kids. (Some of the enclaver sophomores are getting their seniors to pick up extra food for them, but that's perhaps not the same.)

"Cheers."

“Cheers! Sorry about the shitty caf food, I wouldn’t have expected that real food was the thing people were going to jump on using my making-stuff power for.”

"What've you got to be sorry for, you didn't invent the sludge." She loads up on cheese pizza.

“Oh, well, if I were only sorry about things I were personally responsible for, that’d be much easier, honestly.”

"You said it." That's enough small talk for the week. Pizzaaaaaaa.

What a neat kid. There’s something homey and comforting about her.

Bella's kind of wrinkling her nose but doesn't say anything about her. Last handful of juniors and then the sophomores come through.

Well, Bella is very helpful but she also wrinkled her nose about Kareen not being able to to hand out notebook powers, so Bella’s nose-wrinkles are not an especially credible source of information.

Sophomores! Sophomores can have food and pamphlets and extremely distinctive pens and notebooks.

And eventually everybody's been through once. People are coming through for seconds - "Any chance of things we can stash in our rooms? Like, dried fruit, nuts, candy, crackers, chips, anything like that."

“Oh, of course.” Candy. Crisps. Beef jerky. Chocolate digestives. Granola bars. Nuts, crackers, meal replacement drinks, a variety of canned foods with small can openers taped to them.

"Marvelous!" He loads up his bag and then goes and gets some kids who live on his hall to do the same so they can all walk back together.

"Are you going to be offended if people try to hoard this against the possibility that you vanish tomorrow?" Aadhya asks when she comes by for canned soup and granola bars.

“Absolutely not! Nothing about this situation is plausible! Please take as much as you like.”

"You are a gentlewoman and a scholar." Hoard hoard. Chocolate covered almonds, score.

Avoiding coming into direct undeniable social range of Aadhya less than she avoids that with most people, the homey comforting girl reappears to load up on crackers and nuts and Ensure.

"Hi, El."

Good for her!

“If you can think of anything non-perishable and convenient I missed, let me know. —I left instant ramen out on purpose, not assuming there would be convenient access to boiling water.”

"There's largely not, no. Juice boxes? Peanut butter?"

"Canned tuna? - also the Scholomance is an extremely low mold and bacteria environment, there's viruses all over the place but live microbes are casualties every time a kid cheats. You could maybe get away with those little wax-wrapped cheeses even at room temp."

Peanut butter, juice boxes, wrapped cheeses. “There’s a canned tuna over there,” she says, pointing at a particular corner of the Miscellaneous Cans pile.

"Fancy that, thank you." Yoink.

Kareen pulls more tuna out of the bag to replace it. “You’re welcome,” to Bella, and “Thank you!” to El.

El goes off to her room, trailing Aadhya, and then comes back not too long after and offers Kareen a crystal.

Okay it's not cursed or anything she's just... huh.

Kareen accepts it. “What is this?”

"Mana storage."

"Oh, you don't even know how to build mana, yet - if you want to cast wizard spells you need mana, you get it by doing things that are effortful, that can be like, exercise, or it can be like having a really annoying hobby, that's why there's embroidery all over my clothes because I hate embroidery so it works great."

“Oh. I see. Let’s see if…”

She puts the bit of mana she has into the crystal. Then she pulls another, identical crystal from her bag, pulls the bit of mana out of that one, and puts it in the first one. Then she pulls out another crystal, and pulls the amount currently in the first crystal out of the new one and adds it in again.

By the power of the chessboard parable, it doesn’t take long until she has a pile of empty crystals, one full one, and a delighted cackle.

"- oh that is absolutely bloody brilliant, I didn't reckon it would work for magic things, I just thought -"

“I really appreciate the thought! I didn’t have any mana storage! Also, it works for magic things.” She pulls five more full crystals out of her bag and offers them to El.

El cackles - then cuts herself off when she gets a few alarmed looks from nearby kids who are grabbing raisins and potato chips - and puts them in her pockets.

Kareen pulls out more and scatters them across the table with the other things. “Thank you so much.”

Ennis swings by with some other Manchesters a bit later. "Are those Radiant Mind crystals? - they're full? You're proper nonsense, you realize."

“El gave me one, I put a bit of mana in it, and I used powers of two to fill it up.”

"Who's El?"

"The spooky Welsh indie."

"Huh, wonder how she came by one."

“Spooky?” …Actually that sort of tracks. Considering Kareen’s entire everything.

"Did you not notice? I don't think she's a maleficer, or if she is she's managing it incredibly conservatively, but... yeah."

“No, I just thought she seemed nice. Even before she handed me the crystal.”

"Everyone'll be nice to you, you're the miraculous food fountain."

Shrug. “Well, that was the impression I experienced. You know, as opposed to ‘confused’ or ‘intimidated,’ which there was also a fair bit of.”

"Fair enough."

"If I take one of these, I can use the mana for things that aren't worth using ours for, right?" Sean asks Ennis.

"I don't see how the seniors would catch you even if they didn't agree."

Yoink!

She can pull so many mana crystals out of the bag! They are not a meaningfully limited resource!

“I’m looking forward to learning how to use mana for things.”

"If you're a wizard properly now, you'll have an affinity, but some of us come to school still not knowing what it is, it's not trivial to tell till you've learned enough spells to have a pattern of which ones come easily."

“Ooh! I bet it’s something information-related.”

"Huh, why do you think?"

“Because you can take me out of Beholding but you can’t take Beholding out of me. And the notebook powers are explicitly stated to work in a way convenient for the user. …Beholding is another name for the Eye.”

"That makes sense. Hmmm, I could teach you a simple poison detecting spell that I could cast as a freshman? I don't know if 'a freshman' is the right understanding of your magic handling capacity but I don't know anything easier that might be in-affinity for you and you should probably not start with higher-level stuff."

“Sounds good!” She has absolutely handled things that count as poison so there’s no risk of being unable to tell if it’s working.

Bella writes it down in a fresh purple notebook that can be Kareen's first spellbook. "It's okay that it's in Spanish, right?"

“Yep, that’s fine!” She peers at it.

It's a short poem and she's added that it only works on food and beverages, not contact poisons or venoms.

“D you think much of the cafeteria’s offerings are contaminated enough to use as a target, or should I try spiking a protein shake with bleach?”

"I would expect it to ping on those baked potatoes. Though you need to be pretty close. I can go get you one."

It is a pity Kareen couldn’t afford the power that makes you immune to poison but oh well, the cafeteria food was supposed to be really bad anyway. “That would be convenient, thanks, I’d rather not leave a poison shake lying around looking innocuous.”

"Quite." She goes to the deserted cafeteria table with one of the mana crystals in hand, casts an unsustainable-under-normal-conditions number of spells, and then returns to present Kareen with a baked potato.

Kareen hands over another mana crystal and murmurs the spell over the potato. She beams. “Well, the spell seems to have worked, but not having tried any others I can’t say how comparatively easy it is.”

"I can teach you more spells, what do you want to know how to do?"

Everything More information gathering Neither of those is useful for the experiment at hand.

“Something for mals too incorporeal to just stab?”

"Hard to pull off if you're like a freshman but you are probably not like a freshman." She thinks for a bit. "This one's in-affinity for me, is why I know it, but it'd be hard for you -" Fresh page. Scribble scribble.

She studies it.

It’s not exactly hard to learn, not with Anything You Can Do, but it doesn’t slide into place like a missing puzzle piece the way the other one did.

“Is it dangerous to try to cast without an appropriate target around?”

"It's a waste of mana but you have that overflowing your pockets so no."

She casts. Even though it doesn’t really do anything, there’s still an effervescent joy to doing magic.

“That was—definitely harder? But it sounds like it would be anyway.”

"Yeah, it would be anyway. Another clue we get is what kinds of spells the void likes to give us - I don't actually know if that will work for you, since you aren't enrolled, but if I ask my void for something to spellcheck my homework I'll get a way to borrow the same part of the school magic that grades the assignment and Caio will get a recipe for magic ink."

“I assume there’s void other places than the library ceiling.”

"All our bedrooms open onto it."

“Do you only ask the void for things in your bedrooms? I suppose that would generally be more convenient than asking the library ceiling for things…can you ask for spells in other people’s rooms?”

"Yes, we can ask for spells in other people's rooms, but that might run off the enrollment still, the school isn't going to forget who I am because I'm visiting Caio or Kanimir and studying with them. I think the library ceiling does not in fact have this function, you're supposed to find books in the library part of the library when you're there..."

“Sensible. I might try it anyway, just on principle, though of course trying someone’s room is the more important test. I expect I’ll get by fine with the library if I can’t make requests, though.”

"And you can ask people for spells, and hold the food hostage if they're trying to be cagey about 'em."

“Pff. I’m not going to do that. Food is a right, not a privilege. I’m very sure I can find things to trade that I wouldn’t automatically give out to everyone no matter what.”

"Whatever that might be, sure. Though you could conceivably get tired of being an automat at every meal, especially if you're up all night fighting every mal in the school."

“Admittedly being an automat is less important than it would be if it hadn’t been established that there are spells to illusion the cafeteria food more thoroughly and I weren’t able to dispense mana as profligately as food.”

"That's true. Any minute now it will occur to Aadhya that she can illusion up her grandmother's cauliflower thing with the free full Radiant Mind crystals. We can do quite well for ourselves with enough mana, really - a main reason enclavers have it better is that we have power sharers, so whoever's running surplus can cover for emergencies and the people who had the emergencies can pay it back later when they survive their emergency. Though New Orleans actually just got ours, we're a very small enclave and I didn't have this for my first two years." She indicates her sharer.

“Good! Maybe we can get the death rate down to zero.”

"So, in the graduation hall in addition to a menagerie of horrible things there are maw-mouths, which do not, in fact, kill people, they just absorb them and have them forever."

“Oh, okay. I guess I’ll need to figure out how to get to the graduation hall, then. How long until that becomes an active risk? I’m guessing only once a year from the name, but I don’t know what time of year it is now, here.”

"It's November eighth, graduation isn't for months and months, seniors aren't even doing runs in the gym yet."

“I don’t know what seniors doing runs in the gym means but more time is good!”

"They practice what it'll be like trying to fight through the graduation hall. By that time they're all supposed to have their alliances sewn up and be working on a strategy."

“Ah. Hopefully that’ll be a waste of time, then, but there’s no reason to expect them to risk it.”

"Quite. - clothes. The standard is people come in with four outfits, one per year, and we can do some repairs in here, but we're guessing how much we'll grow, and -"

“Ah! Okay.” She has a pretty reasonable understanding of how clothes work so she doesn’t have to limit herself to things she personally has handled. On the other hand, she doesn’t really understand the ambient risks of exposed skin, so not every garment she invents out of her Santa sack is remotely practical for the Scholomance. But there is a good selection of practical stuff, including miscellaneous forms of underwear.

"- generally we're going to want sleeves, stuff snug enough that it would be hard for a grub to drop down the neckline, thicker fabrics than that as long as we're not trading off weight allowance..."

“Oh, huh, okay.” Lots of turtleneck jumpers, then, that seems to fit all requirements. Though even there she gets pretty creative with the designs, just because why not?

No complaints about the designs. "I'm personally a fan of my mesh pockets in my pants but they're not universal so I assume other people are partial to other ways to solve the 'mals hiding in your pockets' problem."

“Of course that’s a problem.”

"Oh, if you can't see some place there's probably a mal in it, as a general rule. Most people come in with instructions to disassemble the desks that come with the rooms so they don't have drawers, day one, before going to sleep, and there aren't even that many mals in the school after the between-term mortal flame cleanse."

Well, Kareen will throw in some mesh pockets. Also lace pockets, fancier but just about as transparent.

"Oh boy, lace. I decided early on that if I ran out of space on my clothes for embroidery I'd take up lacemaking, I'd hate it soooo much." She's holding up turtlenecks to herself to guess at a size and goes for a blue gradient one and she will also help herself to a lace pocket pair of jeans.

“Well, it will take you much longer to run out of space, now. I don’t do much in the way of physical crafts, generally, but this is a very nice exercise for the visual imagination.”

"It looks fun. I am so, so jealous," sighs Bella.

“I bet there’s some way to get at least part of the benefit with your magic, if you don’t have to ration mana.”

"The spells don't exist yet. There are not - spells designed around not having to ration mana. Nobody's ever been in that position. There's frivolities, but... that's not the same thing. But I'm creative writing track, if you live through the night I can start whipping stuff up for it."

“I figured there had to be some way to come up with new spells!”

"Yep, we write 'em! But it's like writing poetry, sometimes surprisingly time consuming for how short the spells often are and sometimes unsurprisingly time consuming for long ones."

“Are there textbooks for writing spells?” Kareen wants textbooks for writing spells VERY BADLY.

"Yeah, the one I have on me is the junior year Traditional Metered Forms book but you probably want to start with the intro level, the library may have a copy. Do any of your powers let you just patch into the school system, it seems like it might be useful to let it assign you classes, it'd give you books and worksheets and it's - not exactly adaptive, but it's attentive -" She flips through the pamphlet. "...you could try Backchanneling the Scholomance directly and see if it can make an exception if you dump a backpack full of mana on it?"

“Backchannel only works to help me understand other entities, not to help other entities understand me—there was another power that added the reciprocal, but I couldn’t  afford it on top of everything else. …That being said, I did get something from Dragon Fairy Elf Witch that might work. But I think I will wait until the cafeteria closes to try it.”

"...did you Dragon Fairy Elf Witch the school?"

“…No! Although I should definitely try it. I Dragon Fairy Elf Witched my dad, and I’ve been running through things he can do and not getting anywhere, and one of the things I haven’t tried yet is—‘projective telepathy’ isn’t really the thing but it’s closer to the thing than most things I can think of.”

"Gosh, okay. The school is - complicatedly smart, it can do things like grade homework but I'm not sure exactly what you'll have to finagle to get it to enroll you or if you even actually want to do that just because it sounds to me like it'd be convenient, maybe you'd rather inhale the library without getting a class schedule and having to add the occasional worksheet to the hordes you must battle."

“I don’t really care if I have to fight a worksheet or not but I am very tempted even just to find out what classes it would think I ought to be in. But actually between Anything You Can Do and Time Enough For Love I think probably a class designed for normal people would be too slow for me.”

"I actually think it might assign you a heap of independent studies, for exactly that reason."

“Oh, that would be wonderful. We’ll see how my attempt to commune with the school goes when I get around to making it.”

"Maybe it'll run out of mals to steer toward you in the gym by four in the morning and you can just have a nice chat after that." Sigh. "I got assigned an independent study once, sophomore year, and I was so tempted, to the point I wrote a little apology on my schedule when I crossed it out, but it's really taking your life into your hands to go to any class that's going to have only a handful of kids in it, safety in numbers applies very much to mals."

“That’s not objectively worse than the pocket mals but but it is more viscerally upsetting. Everyone should be free at all times to pursue knowledge recklessly, not that that’s ever actually a good idea to take to its most desirable extremes.”

"We can do it when we're grownups, just... without the school, and most of the time in most ways we all hate this place but it's very good at many aspects of the school part."

“The mortality rate is very upsetting. First the graduation hall, then I figure out a more generalizable solution for everyone outside.”

"One guy has killed a maw mouth one time, so it's possible in principle!"

“Even if it wasn’t, I could figure something out like shunting them all into a pocket dimension they can’t get out of. Just as an example, the real solution would probably take more than five seconds to think of.”

"Bit rough for all the people they've absorbed."

“I would be very surprised if The Rescuer is very strict about requiring people to actually be dead qua dead.”

"That's based on... vibes from your notebook?"

“Right! It’s—not a system of rules for lawyering. It’s a system of there being a specific shape within the infinite plane of people getting to have nice things. Femininely.”

"Why femininely."

“Fuck if I know! But it’s an emissary of something called ‘The Spirit of Femininity Unleashed.’ I don’t know what its definition of femininity is, it didn’t object to my not taking any of the options for being prettier and it didn’t object to my Signature Style being an eye motif instead of pink or lace or frills. But I get the impression that it’s not a coincidence that it was purple and sparkly.”

Anyways, if it were just that I had The Rescuer, I would be less confident that I could do something for the maw-mouth victims. But I have The Rescuer and It Gets Better and Cotton Candy and Ever Onward, and I feel like together those describe a space where I can rescue people who have been taken by things like maw-mouths or an evil coffin of burying people alive forever.”

"I don't think we have an evil coffin of burying people alive forever but if it turns out there's one somewhere I'm glad you can fix it."

Across the cafeteria, a boy who didn't say much when he came by and took four cheeseburgers - if Kareen's inclined to remember, he had to be prompted by his clavemate to say "thank you" - spots something moving in the hallway through the door and charges after it with a sword.

Everyone acts like that's a very normal thing for him to do. This girl (whose response to her various gifts was "a thousand times am I grateful to you!" in an unplaceable-but-learned-from-Brits accent) sidles up to the table. "Is it true you mean to be up all the night long?"

“I don’t have a room so I expect to spend the night killing mals, yeah.”

To Bella: “No, the coffin is a thing we have back home.”

"I have the affinity of sleep! If you need to not do any of it, or do it real fast before curfew, the right place has come to the you."

“Oh! Brilliant! Did you get one of the pamphlets about my powers—”

"Did indeed from the beautiest crown jewel of Manchester."

“If you were willing to babysit my sleeping body a bit I bet we could work in some extra time/sleep efficiency with Time Enough For Love. And I would really like to use Dream Together to let my parents know I’m alright sooner rather than later.”

"Where do you mean to sleep?"

“Liiiiiibrary? Probably? Unless someone has a better idea.”

"When people die the school doesn't turn their rooms into more space for their neighbors till the next time the floors rotate down, so there's certainly some room available for naps during the day - they'll be stripped of, like, blankets, but usually the mattresses aren't worth taking and you can supply your own sheets and stuff."

“How charming. With luck I will have to relocate to the library or something the next time the floors rotate down but for now that will certainly do.”

"Nobody on my hall has died this term yet..."

"Boy in my lab had an accident but I do not know his number."

"I'll put up a sign." English and Chinese both, of course - "Kareen, how do you want to spell your name in Chinese?" - Kareen needs a vacant room to nap in during the day.

“咔认, aaaaand there’s already a specific spelling of my surname but I don’t remember what it is, I’m going to have to ask Dad about that.”

Bella adds the chosen spelling. "That's fine, they'll figure it out."

El drifts over presently. "Girl on my hall is dead."

“What was her name?”

"Luisa."

Kareen grabs another fresh notebook and writes this down. “Thanks. I don’t know if you read the whole pamphlet but I have a power called The Rescuer—anything you can remember about her would be helpful.”

"She didn't know she was a wizard till she got inducted. That happens sometimes if somebody can't come at the last minute, gained an ounce or got eaten too close to induction for their folks to sell their slot, but she made it to junior year anyhow before she got offed."

Kareen scribbles that down. “Thanks. Room number?”

El gives it.

“Thank you—oh, I don’t think I had clothes, last time you were here—”