"I don't mind sitting with everyone else during meals."

"Cool. You didn't come to dinner last night but the only person you knew then was Idarai--no offense Idarai, you're fine, it's just, you know, you're only one person and now there's eight of us." 

"I'm not offended," he assures her. 

"If y'all are going to the chi teacher, I think I'll stick with group magic." 

"Isn't your thing technically chi?"

"Yeah! So I already know anything about it, and I want to learn things about the thing I don't already know anything about!"

"Fair enough."

They reach the cafeteria. Wei Wuxian grabs something spicy enough that the eyes water if one gets too near it. 

Lucy acquires VEGETABLES. 

Everyone else acquires food which, while certainly excellent, is less noteworthy than the Scoville measurement of Wei Wuxian's lunch or the delight Lucy still takes in fresh produce. 

Kiri assembles a wrap with lots of stuff in it. And gets two desserts when she can't decide on one.

Kanimir has acquired three desserts. 

"What ish this stuff," he says around a spoonful of something with processed cane sugar in it.

"Oh, you are pre- so much gastronomic world trade," Edie realizes. "I don't know what that in particular is--it looks like some kind of pudding? But based on the color, chocolate. People talk about chocolate as evidence of a loving God." 

"I will try not to let chocolate bias my research into the nature of my universe's divinity." 

"We have chocolate but we don't have whatever these are," Kiri says, holding up a pineapple tidbit that has fallen off her cake slice.

"Looks like pineapple," Emily says, leaning in and squinting. 

(She leans in far enough that Kiri gets a whole bucketload of pineapple context, plus a vague hazy childhood recollection that Papa liked candied pineapple, before everything went to hell.)

"Well, it's yummy." Nom.

"Plants are great," Lucy agrees enthusiastically, nibbling on a spanakopita. 

"You said something about living underground?" 

"Yeah, lots of meat and mushrooms, not so much with things that need sunlight to grow." Nom. "Except close enough to my father, because Mountain-light is close enough, but most of the Neath isn't that. I've had fresh produce before, visiting the Surface, but not often enough for the shine to have worn off." 

"It's a little hard to imagine," Emily admits. "Not that we had the leeway to be picky, most of our lives, but like--that meant a lot of eating mildly suspicious wild plants, not not having plants available at all." 

"She's exaggerating the suspiciousness. We ate a lot of dandelion root and we hunted and we found plants growing wild that we knew were legitimate food sources." 

"You didn't know those berries were legit, Edie." 

"They were blueberries!"

"You did not know enough about identifying plants to be sure they were wild blueberries and not some other blue fruit that was actually toxic."