"Oh. That's fine. Do I need to do anything?"

"You need to be closer than that."

He walks forward. Since she didn't specify the five-foot radius, he doesn't stop until he's right in front of her. 

(He thinks there's at least a sixty percent chance the group is exactly what it seems. In the forty percent or less chance that it actually is a mind-controller and their gaggle of victims, he puts it at a greater than eighty percent chance of her being the controller, what with her power being so crucial to group function. He doesn't attach any particular emotional valence to this opinion; he weighed the odds and decided the risk was worth it, so there's no point in worrying about it now.)

(He's annoyed and frustrated by the fact that the transdimensional institution of learning is all about mind control. He just wants to learn magic and protect himself and his beloved twin sister and maybe resurrect his late lamented mother and not be more of a bother to anyone else than they are to him, is that so much to ask?)

Well, this vote of unconfidence is fair, she suppose, she's not in the most exalted company at this school.

"This is getting to be a lot of us who are twins," she remarks. "- I think he's clear."

"He's a twin? I suppose between Edie and Emily and I and now him that is a bit much..."

"I'm a twin too."

"This is indeed an excessive number of twins. Is anyone else here a twin without having mentioned it?" 

"I have an older half-sibling on each side but that's it." 

"I'm an only child." 

"Even if twinning were a meaningful concept in my case I don't have anyone who was part of the same production batch or anything."

"Okay so it is merely absurd and not, like, unanimous. I'm vaguely curious about the rest of the class but not enough to take any risks about it." 

"Surely it doesn't matter that much."

"Maybe there will be icebreaker exercises in the first class."

"I did say I'm not going to take risks about it. But it's really weird, and it seems like Dean Mesmerra must have done it for a reason, and if Dean Mesmerra is doing things for reasons I'd rather know what they are." 

"Perhaps there will be. Maybe we should just ask the Dean about it. Kiri, you were going to ask her about your aliens, right?"

"Yeah. I think if we go see her we should go all in a pack, so there's no cover for one person reporting to her that they've enslaved somebody else. Kanimir already thinks I might have bagged the lot of you but that doesn't get worse if we're physically in the Dean's office whereas if any one person were hiding something..."

"I don't think it's likely," he says defensively, "and I think it's a lot less likely since you didn't grab me when I walked up to you."

"Oh hey speaking of that you haven't checked me yet." 

He walks up to her. 

He's thinking about Lan Zhan and how he and his older brother are called the Twin Jades because they're really similar but Lan Zhan's older brother is like at least a couple years older than him (background facts about Lan Zhan: Lan Zhan is GREAT and Dean Mesmerra looked exactly like him and Wei Wuxian is Not Examining Why). Also he wasn't lying about being an only child but now he's thinking about his sect-siblings Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli and how he's gonna miss them being away from home for so long. 

He doesn't think Kiri has probably scooped up all these people? It's a lot of people to have scooped up on the first night, he's not saying Dean Mesmerra wouldn't invite a student with that much of a power differential but it seems unlikely that it's the case both that she's powerful enough to have grabbed this many people and that she feels the need to be sneaky about it and pretend otherwise. 

"He's clear too," she says after a moment of inspection to see if these are just distraction-surface-thoughts.

They totally aren't! His is the kind of mind that has a LOT of things going on at once but he, too, is kind of annoyed about the whole mind control thing (the letter he got didn't exactly lie, but it did downplay that element a lot, including not actually including the name of the institution, which in retrospect probably ought to have been a red flag).

"Awesome! Can I do science to you drinking immortality cider?" 

"Yes, absolutely, I am on every level down for this." 

"Yay!"

"Do you want to go to the Dean's office sooner rather than later? --Not before we're all done with the library, of course, but tonight." 

"I'm not sure how long the conversation about my aliens will run, and you guys might have questions for her too, I think save it for after class and lunch tomorrow."