Lucy glances at the two pairs of Boys. 

Erek chooses ten books available only on paper and cited by promising items in his e-library.

She decides she trusts Erek and Idarai more than Kanimir and Wei Wuxian, and once everybody has finished checking out their books, she asks them, "Will you walk with me back to my room? I'd rather not be alone."

"Of course," he says, then belatedly glances at Erek. 

Erek is happy enough to collect his chosen ten paper books and accompany them.

Thus accompanied, Lucy returns to her room, where she discovers that her roommate has mostly spent the evening there terrified and bored since returning from dinner, since she didn't want to go out among all these humans unaccompanied and nobody had ever taught her to read. 

Lucy spends the rest of the night skipping sleep in favor of teaching her roommate to read. 

Kanimir drags Wei Wuxian back to their room when everybody else leaves, deeply bemused by being the more practical person in a pair. 

At breakfast, Erek appears in the cafeteria unnecessarily, to distribute communicators to the rest of the group and explain their use. They all look different, except for Edie and Emily both having watch faces on friendship bracelet straps as though they'd worn through previous straps and made new ones out of scrap thread.

That is EXCELLENT and CREATIVE and Emily loves the concept. 

Oh good. Here is how to alert the comms to an emergency; here is how to make it display all the other communicators' relative locations; here is how to get it to speech-to-text your remarks and how it will display such remarks to everyone else.

Lucy listens intently and tucks her glim-watch into a pocket with satisfaction. 

"I'm looking forward to technology class; my world has some exotic substances that I'm eager to synergize with higher tech levels."

"That does sound interesting."

"There's some of that at home already, making steam engines out of Nevercold Brass, but almost nothing at home has reached its full potential."

"Is Nevercold Brass some sort of metal that holds a lot of heat, or...?"

"It is a metal that never gets cold. Ever. It comes from Hell, I dunno how the Devils make it." 

"Hell? Devils?" 

"--Well, they're called that in English, because Hell is where the Devils live and the Devils are called that because they live somewhere warm and underground and they have this bizarre fixation on people's souls. But Devils are actually space bees that go around in paper-mache humanoid bodies."

"Space bees. - more importantly, do you have any? I want to see how I interact with it."

"What's its minimum temperature?"

She rummages in a pocket and produces a bar of Nevercold Brass about the size of a chocolate bar. "It actually turns out it depends somewhat--I haven't been able to pin down all the factors, but one of them is size and I think there might be batch variation or purity factors or something. But for a piece that big about seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit."

"How warm is that?"

"A little warmer than this room, a little cooler than your eggs."

"It's warmer now, probably because it was in your pocket..." She turns it over in her hand. "Is it expected to do anything bad if I -" Hm. She reaches into her shoulderbag for her paper blessings and pulls a couple. "...okay, cool." She puts the papers back and tries cooling the brass. "- huh, I really can't make it any colder than about yea much."

"They call it Nevercold for a reason. I don't know, obviously it's magic but I don't know specifically how it works, I only have so much leverage with the Devils and I mostly use it to try to get them to cut back on the souls thing."

"It could definitely be a component of a power source even on a scale smaller than a steam engine."