"Well, for maximum paranoia this conversation should take place over telepathy in a dorm room."

Yep, the problem isn't paranoia, it's stupidity.

Shrug. "I don't feel we've much raised the ambient horror quotient."

The stupidity isn't talking about it out loud, the stupidity is worrying about it that much while also talking about it out loud. 

"Fair enough."

"Might as well ask about it then." She takes a swig of astonishingly delicious mango lassi. "This place is so depressing."

"You're telling me. Personally I hope to walk out with enough goodies to track down all these other universes and make them cut it out with the being implied by this place."

"I'm not optimistic about graduating with enough power to deal with everyone else who's ever graduated. But it's worth a shot."

"Well, step one, become immortal."

The white-haired woman gets up from her table and approaches them. 

"I can help with that." 

"Hi, who are you, please don't set us on fire." 

"That happened one time," she protests. "--I'm Lucy. And I'm good at immortality."

"You can set me on fire if you want. How does your immortality work?"

"My personal immortality comes from not being entirely human, but my research into immortality for others is going really well! I mean, things are different, here, of course, but--anyway. I haven't gotten anything to scale yet but I have some stuff--if I say I've had promising results in replicating Hesperidean Cider that's not going to mean anything to any of you is it."

"No."

"Hesperidean...it sounds sort of vaguely familiar but I can't place it."

"Okay, do you want me to start with explaining the mysteries of my universe that most people on my Earth don't know about, and then explain the implications, or do you want me to start with 'so there's apple cider that grants immortality' and then work causally backwards from there."

"Second thing, not all of us are from an Earth."

"Okay, so Hesperidean Cider is cider made through a special process using apples grown in the Garden at the foot of the Mountain of Light. The Mountain of Light is a living being comparable to a mountain in size, shaped sort of like a crab with a lot of extra material on the top of their shell. The Mountain is sapient. The Mountain produces light like the stuff I used to heal Addy," she gestures over at the vampire. "When I say 'like' I don't mean that they're similar in some but not all ways; they're the same thing. The Mountain is my father. Hesperidean Cider is extremely rare and expensive. I've been trying to create a substitute that scales better, and I've had some promising results involving algae."

"Point of order: you look nothing like a crab."

"I do in my natural form. I learned to assume this one as a teenager."

"Fair enough, point withdrawn."

"Promising means what here?"

"I can get the extra aliveness to pool in the algae as it's growing; I can process the algae into a form where people can usefully consume the aliveness stored in it. The problem is the process is still pretty lossy and I've hit diminishing returns in terms of how much aliveness pools in the algae per unit time."

"...well, that doesn't make sense to me on a level where I could propose to troubleshoot it for you."