This one is humming to an extremely ugly baby. She is doing a thing she seems to expect to prevent her from being mindread, at least at home, but it doesn't work on Edie at all. She wants to sing but it seems like under the circumstances that might parse as hostile?

The AI is pensive, holding quite still. HIs imitation of a human is very good, though.

The fire-minded girl is VERY STRESSED OUT. She's also wearing fire-reminiscent fancy clothes.

This one, on the other hand, is totally nonchalant. She already has her arm over the shoulders of her neighbor.

Who also looks really happy to be here and is whispering to her affectionate, red-eyed seatmate.

Hovering above everyone and sort of generally freaked out is this intensely psychic...horned...vaguely humanoid creature. 

Another woman's mind also feels of fire; her mind dances with strange inscriptions which encode meaning more deeply than human words. 

There are several people who seem more rather than less hostile, but this one has to be the worst in terms of perverse creativity. 

Edie backs hastily out of THAT mind for COMPLETELY DIFFERENT REASONS than from Fire Girl #1's. 

It isn't long before a figure appears in a flash of light. 

Every physical feature of this person looks different to each of the assembled students. They look perfect. Gorgeous. The platonic ideal of Sexy Dom, for whatever that happens to be for any given person. 

"Your attention please!" they call out. 

Attention!!!

This is going to suck. This ALREADY sucks and it's just going to KEEP SUCKING.

Wow. What are you supposed to call this guy? "His Lordship" is taken.

This SO INCREDIBLY SUCKS. 

Huh, this has to be some kind of illusion, there's no way what she's seeing is in some way actually physically instantiated within this room. Sexy, though. 

What the fuck, why does whatever weird teacher spirit thing this is look exactly like Lan Zhan!?!?!?

Wow he really hopes that everyone is seeing something different and this being did not decide to single him out by resembling Lan Xichen!!!

"Thank you." They clasp their hands, still beaming. "While I have many names, the one that all of you shall know me by for the following year is Mesmerra—Dean Mesmerra, for I am the founder, administrator and absolute ruler of this school." Pause for effect. "I am a god of mind control. That's not bragging! I am not merely deific in skill, but a literal deity who draws power from every instance of mind control in every single world I touch. And the number of those is always growing." They toss their hair a little, not quite smug, merely supernally self-assured.

"Welcome to Mind Control University. Ours is an intensive program, and by the end of the year every single one of you will have the power to bring nations to heel with nothing but your own will and a box of scraps. Of course, this is a competitive program as well, in more ways than one—some of you will no doubt be Emperors and Empresses in your own right before the year is out, while others...may be pets, or toys, to the others. Remember," they wink, "do unto others before they do unto you! But there are, of course, limits," They say, turning serious. "Rule number one is that you are not permitted to sabotage your classmates' studies, be they your rivals or pets. Subtlety is key—you are here to learn cunning and finesse almost as much as raw power. An attempt to enslave one of your classmates, discovered before the attempt is complete will result in your would-be pet being freed and a penalty laid on you, and no, I won't tell you what it is. there are so many possibilities, and even I don't know beforehand which one is going to be most appropriate. Any mind control instances that occur relevantly adjacent to a child must ensure that the child takes no physical or mental damage from the affair. Also, the library, classrooms, and cafeteria food are absolutely off-limits. Attempting to enslave one of your teachers isn't against the rules, and in fact will result in instant graduation magna cum laude if successful, but you will not be successful, and will no longer be off-limits to them. Don't do it." 

They smirk. "Any questions?" 

Beka raises her hand, since somebody over there is thinking that's what you'd do if you had a question.

"Yes?"

"Is there a rule against, uh, trying to attract the attention of stuff from people's worlds?"

"There is not. Nothing I do not permit will be able to enter the university from anyone's world, although communications should operate normally; if one wishes for whatever reason to attract the attention of an entity hazardous enough to be hazardous under the circumstances, that's considered fair play."

The rule about children is annoying but what can you do. 

"Are there any children to worry about besides that baby?" she asks, gesturing at Beka. 

"The University facilities include a 'town' surrounding the campus, made up of neighborhoods taken from each of the universes you come from. Except yours," she adds, gesturing at one of the young men, "we've discussed why. Many of these neighborhoods include children, and you may do as you wish with the adult inhabitants, so long as you obey the rule about children and you don't bring townies onto University grounds without permission." 

A man with long blond hair raises his hand. "Do the magic classes involve making pacts with the Devil?"

"No. There exist magics you can get by making pacts with entities which could be described as 'devils,' but doing so is relatively uncommon and certainly not required. The magic taught here is, in your paradigm, more similar to practices from the pre-Christian pagan lore than anything to do with the Christian idea of Satan." 

"Are any of the religions in my universe true? Christian, pagan, or otherwise, if there is an otherwise." 

She makes a so-so gesture. "Christianity is currently the closest, but you'd have to add in some currently-defunct heresies and some entirely novel ones to get it specifically right. And it applies only to your own universe; none of the other Earths represented here have an actual Abrahamic deity." 

"What does Abrahamic mean?"

"There are multiple religions in his universe worshipping the same deity, the founder of the original of which was a man named Abraham."

...that's so specific. Okay.

"Are there any limitations to the number or mind-control-relevance of questions we may ask you, now or later on?"

"There are no such limitations to the questions you may ask, and there is no limit to the number of questions I will answer, but if a question isn't relevant in some way to mind control or the university I don't promise to answer. I will not, for example, tell you the exact strengths and weaknesses of your enemies in your homeworld; that you must learn for yourself."

"What about their mind-control-specific strengths and weaknesses?"

She smiles. "That I will tell you about, but I think doing so will take a while. Come see me after Orientation has finished." 

She nods. She writes that down.

"Is it against the rules to be detected using lighter types of mind control than full enslavement?"

"No. But, of course, once detected, it is likely that your classmates will be able to counter it."

"Mm-hm, thank you!"

"You promised my sister and I we definitely wouldn't die while we were here, can you expand on that?"

"The University grounds have a Death Ward. In the event that your physical body is destroyed, or damaged beyond the point of viability, the Death Ward will catch your mind, and your body will be reconstructed in the infirmary over the course of about twelve hours." She holds up a finger. "Which means, in accordance with the rule about not interfering with your classmates' studies, that you are not allowed to kill your classmates less than twelve hours before class!"

"If someone can be viable in astonishingly adverse physical circumstances, technically speaking, can they get medical attention anyway or do they have to die the rest of the way?"

"They can get medical attention anyway! But if you put someone in a position of being technically-not-dead in such a manner and do not get them to the infirmary in time to get better before class, or you aim to put someone in such a position and miss, you don't get any leniency for not having intended to kill them."

"Are there any other meaningful limits on student infighting?"

"If you somehow manage to bypass the Death Ward--it has never been done, but in theory nothing is ever truly unbreakable--then you will immediately be expelled and enslaved, personally, by me. You must leave your classmates in a condition such that it is meaningfully the same person attending classes as the person who enrolled at the beginning of the semester. If you leave a classmate incapable of attending to their studies or no longer themselves through non-mind control methods such as torture, you will still be fully liable. If you manipulate a classmate using a false threat of action on my part, I reserve the right to penalize you depending on whether I find the particular threat offensive or funny." 

"What does 'meaningfully the same person' mean?" asks a boy.

"It means you can't just completely erase their personality."

"But partially is fine?"

"Depends on which parts--some parts of a given person's personality are more key to their identity than others--but overall, yes."

"Do we have to go home to our own original worlds after?"

"No you do not. At least one of you can not."

"How is the Death Ward liable to interact with my universe's Law of the Judgments?"

"Since your world's neighborhood was sampled from the Neath, that's unlikely to come up for anyone here before they're powerful enough for it not to apply."

"Are the people in the neighborhoods protected by the Death Ward? What will happen to them when school is over?"

"The people in the neighborhoods are protected by the Death Ward. When school is over, those for whom other arrangements have not been made will be returned to their universes of origin."

"...in their original condition, or...? What kind of arrangements?"

"Students may, through extra credit or other arrangements, receive permission to bring townie slaves onto Mind Control University grounds. Any such slaves may be kept after graduation. Townies for whom such arrangements have not been made will be returned to their original condition before being returned to their original locations."

It's...probably better than being killed by a Sentinel. 

Edie so wants to give that poor girl a hug. Not that she's going to without permission or anything, but that doesn't stop her from wanting to. 

"If someone gets permission to bring a slave onto campus, is it allowed for someone else to steal the slave? If so, does the thief have permission to keep that slave on campus? Can we decide we don't want to keep townie slaves past the end of term, and send them back home?"

"You are allowed to steal slaves from your classmates regardless of whether the slave is a townie or another classmate. If you also enslave the classmate who had the permission, they keep the permission; if you steal the slave but their original owner goes free, the slave won't be removed from campus immediately but I advise that you see about making arrangements sooner rather than later. If you get permission to bring a townie slave on campus and they are stolen from you and you steal them back, you do not need to make new arrangements after doing so. If you have the sole claim on a townie slave at the end of term, you may send them home; if you steal one from a classmate, then if you decide you don't want them, the classmate gets them back--unless, of course, you have enslaved the classmate in the interim and order them to send the townie home."

Kiri acquires a VERY UPSETTING FLOWCHART in her notebook.

Several moments pass without any new questions. Mesmerra clasps her hands together. "Alright then! Each of you will be required to have a roommate, but you may select your roommates yourselves. Nobody can enter your dorm room without your or your roommate's permission. There is a board on the back wall with fifteen pegs and two keys on each peg; simply select the key for the room you want." 

Well Kiri does not especially want any of these people as roommates because it's not like she can tell who has a good reason and who's just here to prey on classmates and townies but she doesn't want a random assignment. A pair of keys go red-hot.

Edie gets up, strides within five feet of Kiri, and then stops just inside the edge of her mindreading range. 

She's a telepath; she comes from a post-apocalyptic hellhole bad enough that she thinks being an MCU townie is probably a better bet than staying there; she wants to fix her world; she doesn't trust anyone here without a good reason either so she lightly mind-read everyone when she came in and the first thing she saw in Kiri's mind is how much she hates having her mental autonomy violated (here is a sensory snapshot of Kiri's mind as of Edie lightly mind-reading her as seen through Edie's power). Edie hates being put in a position where breaking her telepathic ethics seems like the best of a bad set of options, but this isn't about Edie's feelings or excuses; this is about Kiri deserving to know and deserving an apology. 

...well, that could be a shell personality created in the last fifteen minutes, because anything and everything here down to the tiles on the floor is one hundred percent permitted to be a TRAP, but assuming that's not the case for the moment, because she promised Aleko she would try to exchange at least five friendly sentences with her classmates so he doesn't get her back traumatized from isolation on top of everything else... "- thank you.

Probably you want to room with your sister?"

Pale-with-red-eyes and her friendly neighbor have sauntered off with the keys to room three already.

"Who here likes babies? She doesn't cry or anything but probably you should like babies if you are going to live with us. Or does she count as my roommate?"

"She does not count as your roommate," Mesmerra tells Beka. 

"That was the plan," Edie says, "but it does occur to me that there isn't any reason I'm aware of that I couldn't officially room with you and then Emily picks up a random key and sleeps in my bed, if that's a better bet than anything else you've come up with." 

(It flickers through her mind, too brief and wispy to be called a plan or intent, that she could in theory suggest that Kiri room with Emily and Edie room with the woman with the baby; Edie adores babies.)

"I don't really have a great plan for this, no. - you could go see if you get along with the baby-having lady?"

"--I could, yes." 

She turns and walks towards Baby Lady. 

Emily steps within the radius of Kiri's mindreading. 

There is a sense in which this feels redundant; to trust or not trust Edie is to trust or not trust Emily and vice versa. But, like, mind controlling both of them in ways exactly consistent with each other would probably be at least slightly more effortful than mind controlling only one of them, and Emily genuinely doesn't mind getting her mind a little bit read under the circumstances, it's not like she's thinking about PINK ELEPHANTS THINK ABOUT PINK ELEPHANTS INSTEAD OF THINGS YOU DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT WHILE BEING MINDREAD BY A STRANGER anyway hi. 

"Hi. It's, uh, as nice to meet you as it can reasonably be considering."

"Hello!" says Baby Lady when Edie approaches. She waves the baby's li'l gray hand at her.

"Yeah, this place sucks." 

Emily is aware of the possibility that everything is tiled in traps fifteen deep, but actually trying to calculate fifteen layers of traps everything could be sounds unhealthily stressful. Which is not to say she's ignoring the possibility that Kiri is a trap, but Kiri was the person who started asking questions about townie welfare, and the potential benefit of having allies outweighs the risk of not just holing up in one's room and never taking the same route to class twice and hoping that if you isolate yourself enough you won't get got. 

"Awwwwww, she's adorable." Also remarkably ugly, but whatever: baby.

"Thanks!" Wave wave. "Do you wanna be roommates? I think I'm an okay roommate, I have seventeen brothers and sisters and we all slept in the same room."

"Wow, that's a lot of brothers and sisters."

"Orcs have a lot of kids! That's what she is," she adds, jiggling the baby.

"Are you not?"

"No, I'm an orf."

"Which is...some sort of hybrid?"

"Not really, my birth parents were both Elves but if you do enough torture you can get an orf instead and then you do some more and get orcs."

"Cool, cool, I'm gonna kill your god." 

"Good luck with that!"

"I don't think I can now, just that I'll probably be able to by the time we graduate," she clarifies. "Anyway, I would love to be your roommate. My name's Edie."

"I haven't earned a name," but it's Beka.

"I can't say I like the idea of having to earn a name. Well. Pleased to meet you regardless." 

She plucks keys off of a peg that still has both and hands one to Beka. 

Beka does not super know how keys work but fortunately Edie isn't keeping all her thoughts private!

"- so I guess that leaves you and me." Kiri has heated up the keys for room six and starts towards them, moving slowly and giving everybody plenty of space.

Emily slips the heated keys off their peg and calls them over, one floating towards Kiri and the other hovering over Emily's palm. 

"- oh, cool." So to speak. She chills Emily's key and takes hers without bothering.

The key falls into Emily's hand.

(This is what she can do in the same way that telepathy is what Edie can do. It is, indeed, very cool; Emily has had limited opportunity to explore the less practical elements as much as she'd like, what with the whole post-apocalyptic wasteland thing.)

"Yeah. I wish you luck with that one. I have an alien invasion."

"Oh, that sucks." 

(Her world doesn't have any confirmed aliens. At least the Sentinels' stupid programming keeps them within the bounds of the former Continental US; the rest of the world is okay.) (Well obviously something was going on that sucked; Kiri is even less happy to be here than the twins are, and would presumably have needed a correspondingly stronger reason.)

"Yeah. I took down some scouts but I can't handle the full invasion without more tools."

Nod nod. That makes sense. 

(Are the ships metal? The ships are probably metal. Emily would be very useful for that. Less useful for making the aliens turn around and go home alive.)

"They're metal. I melted one open but the aliens breathe something green, not air, so they didn't live long. Long enough for me to get an idea of what they were about though."

Something green...if the school had lasted longer, maybe Emily would be able to speculate about what chemicals might be in green air, but, well. There will be chemistry lessons here, of course they'll be focused on a particular purpose but it's not like they'll be able to not teach them any non-mind-control-related chemistry. 

"I remember how it smelled, too - I think it wasn't good for me any more than our air was for them but it dissipated pretty fast."

Did it smell like copper? Copper makes things green sometimes. 

Headshake.

Wow, the room is really nice.

A girl in black silk with ragged edges, a sharp-shinned hawk perched on the back of her chair, asks Mesmerra if rooming is gender-segregated, and when she gets a no, she sidles up to Idarai.

Aaaaaaaaaah? Aaaaaaaaah. 

"Um. Hello." 

"You're cute. Want to get a room?"

"Um--I'm sure you're perfectly lovely, but--"

"But what? I should be hot enough for anybody with eyes. You have to have a roommate, anyway, let's get the keys to ten and have some privacy."

He flushes. "It's not--I'm not here for--how hot you are doesn't have anything to do with it."

"Well, you have to have a roommate and I don't see anyone else I have to stab to get you."

"- excuse me, would you like to be roommates?" says the robot, holding out a key to Idarai.

"Yes. Please," he says, taking the key immediately. "Sorry," he says to the woman, because there's no reason not to be polite. 

She tries to stab him. He catches the knife in his hand, unharmed, and takes it and returns it to her handle-first.

"Erek," he says to his new roommate.

"Idarai," he says to his new roommate. To the woman: "That was rude."

She storms off.

"It's nice to meet you," says Erek.

"Aside from the, er, circumstances, I concur."

"She couldn't have hurt me. Not with a knife."

"If only knives were the worst thing we had to worry about," he sighs. 

"Rather." He shrugs.

Many people have paired off by now - a set of twins, the rude stabbing person with a guy with bright red hair, someone with eerily dark eyes with someone in a t-shirt reading "KHERSIS LOVES LYRE PLAYERS", a pale blonde with a fellow who came in with a pigeon on his shoulder. This one hasn't picked any yet; she's surveying the remaining students, looking sort of bored.

There isn't anyone obviously better to approach. Meng Yao has examined each of his classmates, and the only one who looks potentially easy to manipulate is the floating creature, and he can't be sure he's reading their body language at all right because they're not human. Bored is at least a step up from "pulling knives when someone spurns you."

He approaches the woman and bows. 

"Excuse this one for his presumption, but this one has not yet managed to find a roommate, and this one notices that you are also alone."

Shrug. "All right." She snags a pair of keys for room thirteen with a red glow of magic and drops one into his hand.

Well that was easy. Meng Yao very much hopes he hasn't just made a terrible mistake, but it's too late to back out now.

She doesn't seem in a hurry to proceed directly to their room. She goes out to explore the campus instead.

That's fine. It means he'll have time to settle in, unimpeded and unobserved. 

Emily migrated out of range of Kiri's mindreading not long after they entered the room, motivated partly by having it occur to her that theoretically there could be a hypnotic signal implanted in her brainwaves that takes effect over time if someone is reading her mind; she's pretty sure that's not the case but it would be a reasonable thing for Kiri to worry about--and partly motivated by oh wow a bed, a real fresh not-in-a-warzone bed. 

She'll bathe before she gets under the covers, but even just lying on top of the blankets is concerningly good. 

Kiri does not urgently need a bath or a nap. She starts unpacking. She has books, many of them blank, and also a... bin full of weird coins, which clink when she drags it out to a position next to her desk. She has lots of clothes, mostly red and orange and mostly pretty fancy looking.

Emily sits up. 

"What are those coin things?"

"Blessings. You draw some randomly and they have a little divination power." She rummages and grabs one. "I got 'resolve'. Big surprise there."

"Do they actually work or are they more of a folklore thing...? Resolve is evidence but coincidences happen."

"They work. There's one I never get, I can pick every blessing but that one out of a bin blind."

"Huh. Can I try?"

"Yeah, all right." She tosses 'resolve' back.

She slides out of bed and walks over, pulling one out by hand in case magnetism wouldn't "count" or something. 

"Synthesis," Kiri reads.

"Does that mean the obvious or something else?" She draws another. 

"It's complicated. It's one of the ones without an element associated. ...so's that one, time."

"Huh..." She draws another one. 

"And that's the other one that isn't an element, triumph. That's weird, getting all three extraordinaries in a row."

"This sounds like maybe something is happening but not the normal thing?" She draws a fourth time. 

"That's... travel? That doesn't seem right... we just got here."

She puts all the coins back in the bin and tries drawing one by magnetism. 

"Fertility? I think maybe it doesn't work for people not from my world or something."

"I really hope so!" she says, dropping the coin like a hot potato. "Maybe I should go down to the nurse's office and ask what they have in the way of birth control, just in case."

"You'd go to a nurse for that? We actually use these for that - you pull out a limited set, fertility and luck and surprise and health, draw two -"

"We have like...condoms, which are little waterproof sheaths you put on a man's penis so the sperm doesn't go anywhere it can find an egg, but like, magic, chemistry, technology, they probably have something better here?"

"...huh. I guess that can go on the list of things to bring home." She pulls out one of her books and writes it down.

"It seems maybe a little less urgent considering you have your thing and also invading aliens. But no point in not taking advantage of the little things." 

"I'm going to be here for a year, and am ostensibly supposed to pop out prepared to bring nations to heel and suchlike, so I figure I have time to make it more worthwhile than that."

"Yeah. Edie and I were thinking of not just destroying the genocidal robots but, like, rebuilding the country. In a non-mind-control way."

"Do your robots even have minds to control?"

"Well, no, but given what Mesmerra said about the death ward, I bet we'll learn things that can be used to destroy things that don't have minds."

"Might just be about people who walk in with already lethal powers."

"Well. Either they'll be friendly and we can ask them a favor or they'll be unfriendly and we'll have to do something to stop them from coming after us. Edie and I won't do anything to anyone who doesn't come after us first, but..." Shrug. "I'd love to say 'neither of us will nonconsensually mind-control anyone no matter what,' but. That's really not practical here."

"If I have to for my classes or something I'm planning to rescue townies."

"That is an excellent thought! Edie and I were planning to do class exercises on each other wherever we could get away with it."

"That works too. Neither of my brothers were invited and I don't think I'd have wanted them here anyway, though."

"Yeah, in our case...I mean. Killer robots. I think even our townies are better off here than back there, honestly."

"Are they likely to be from the part of the world with the killer robots?"

"I think so? If they're not then I retract that statement but Edie and I are both less at risk here than there."

"I wish you luck. I can't really say the same for my townies, the scout didn't do that much damage."

"Yes, that would be the difference between an imminent problem and an ongoing one. ...I don't know about you, but we weren't warned about the neighborhoods thing beforehand."

"I wasn't either! It - wouldn't have changed anything, but."

"But this way you at least didn't decide to sacrifice them, which might help if you have to actually interact with them. I don't know, I'm probably not helping."

"I dunno, the one way you've got guilt about deciding to sacrifice them and the other way you've got guilt about taking on behalf of my entire world crazy risks that I was not fully informed about."

"Somehow I suspect we have still not been informed of all the risks."

"Yeah-huh. Except insofar as 'there are lots' covers it."

"Yyyep. Oh, uh--do you want an overview of who was, like, bad news and not successfully concealing it from Edie, I have qualms about mental privacy but I also have qualms about some of those people."

"Yes please." She flips to her notes on the attendees of the orientation.

"The most concerning one was the bubbly girl with dark hair who asked about children. She's from some kind of hell dimension or something but she's one of the people making it hellish, not one of the victims. The one with the baby that Edie agreed to room with isn't, like, malicious, but she came from some place with an evil god and doesn't really understand why someone might want mental privacy aside from, like, 'I want to hurt you and I want to hide it.' The cheerful blonde who asked about non-enslaving forms of mind control wants to use some non-enslaving mind control to make everyone love her. The guy holding the flute was a devotee of an evil god. The guy in the plain black robes is really racist against anyone who doesn't have his kind of magic. The really pale brunette with the really blue eyes has some kind of passive mind-affecting ability that makes people like her and want to do what she wants. The guy with the white hair and the guy with the bronze hair were both unhappy to be here and both thinking about slavery-related issues back home that needed dealt with. The Asian woman--you probably don't have an Asia, um. Okay, did you notice two guys and one woman as being noticeably a different ethnicity and/or looking noticeably similar?"

Scribble scribble - "With the kinda -" she squints - "eyes?"

"Yeah exactly--she was thinking about some girl from back in her universe, in a very protective sort of way. The not-human purple creature was terrified of everyone else; Edie got the impression they've had bad experiences with humans and was lured here without a good idea of the risks either. That's everyone who was actively thinking anything we could use as evidence one way or the other."

"Huh." She finishes writing down these assessments. "Thank you. Um, I'm not urgently hungry if you want to settle in a little longer but I would prefer not to go alone to the cafeteria for dinner."

"That's valid. I, uh, just came from a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I will welcome food whenever it's convenient and can be arbitrarily patient about it; if you'd rather go now that's fine by me."

"Okay. Let's go - maybe meet white hair and bronze hair, if they're there, form a here-to-save-our-worlds-from-shit coalition."

"Sounds legit!"

"Do you mind if I sing?" Beka says, when she and Edie have reached their room.

"Why would I mind?"

"...well, if I knew a reason you'd mind I wouldn't ask." She kisses her baby's head and starts swaying and singing.

Awwww. 

Edie sits down, watching the baby and lightly monitoring her roommate's thoughts for mind-affecting attributes to the song. 

This one is not magic but she is considering switching to a sleep song if the baby has a hard time falling asleep on her own. She usually doesn't.

That's valid of her. 

Edie turns to peruse the bookshelves. There are books there already; nothing she couldn't theoretically obtain from her homeworld, but she's been hard-pressed to prioritize books, these past years. She traces her fingers along the spines, tears coming to her eyes when she finds her father's thesis. 

What's a thesis?

"It's, um...it's something he wrote, to prove that he was really really good at his field. Genetics." She picks it up and hugs it.

What's genetics?

"It's...hereditary information."

I think maybe that isn't how it works where I'm from.

"I could check!"

How would you check?

"The hereditary information is coded in a chemical called DNA, which exists inside your body in itty bitty bundles, so if I got, like, a swab off your cheek, I could check your cells for the chemical."

I mean, my parents were Elves and I'm not, is why I think it doesn't work like that.

"Well, a lot of genes are expressed differently under different circumstances, plus of course there's magic to consider."

It's not really important.

"Fair enough." That really is an adorable baby. Edie wonders if Beka is likely to be interested in child-care products from other universes like extra-snuggly baby onesies. 

Sure! I don't know how you get them here though.

"Probably you can buy them in some of the neighborhoods."

I don't have any money.

"We can probably fix that! Busking if nothing else."

Oh what a cool idea! It could be practice too.

"Yeah! Do you know if your magic songs work for people who aren't from your world?"

I guess I haven't tried it but it would be weird if they didn't! She decides to go ahead on the sleep song.

Edie listens attentively. "I guess I'll try it next time she's fussy."

She doesn't usually fuss. Orc babies are easy. Edie is getting veeeeeeery sleeeeeeepyyyyy.

Edie bites the inside of her cheek. "That's convenient of them. Human babies vary wildly in easiness level."

I think Elf babies are more annoying. Soooooo sleeeeeeepy.

Edie gets up and starts pacing. "I don't know anything about Elves to compare."

I'm halfway between them and an orc, so, like me compared to her but moreso. Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep.

Okay WHY does Beka want her to go to sleep. 

To see if it works!

If that's the only reason, then...Edie walks back to her bed and flops back on it, closing her eyes. Better to be underestimated than overestimated, under these circumstances. 

Presently she has a little nap. Beka's very pleased with herself. She puts the sleeping baby down too and goes to have a look at the bathroom, which is interesting and novel; when Edie wakes up some twenty minutes later Beka's in the shower and the baby is still dozing on Beka's bed.

That was probably objectively kinda stupid but we all have to take risks sometimes. 

...

Edie does NOT go over and pick up someone else's baby without permission. DOES NOT. 

She opens the copy of her father's thesis and starts reading, waiting for Beka to return from bathroomland. 

Beka emerges stark naked with her hair in a towel! "This place is AMAZING," she says.

"The facilities are pretty neat!" 

She puts down her book and goes to check out the bathroom. 

"I'm gonna go get some food!" Beka chirps, apparently seeing nothing objectionable about wandering into the hall in nothing but a hair towel.

"--Naked?"

"I don't have anything else to wear and the clothes I came in with have blood and stuff on them." Also, Beka has a very elaborate array of tattoos.

"Uh hang on." 

She walks to what sure does appear to be a closet door and opens it.

"Ooh! Those are pretty! Like Elf clothes!" She traipses over and coos over every individual set of robes and eventually chooses a dove-grey one embroidered so densely with leaves it looks green if you squint.

"Neat." 

Edie goes to her own closet, filled with soft blouses, skirts and slacks. 

"...Soft," Edie says admiringly, feeling the arm of one sweater.

A happily garbed Beka skips along to dinner.

"Wait! What about the baby? I know you said orc babies are easy, but..."

"...I'm not going to go a hundred miles away! If something goes wrong with her I'll notice and run right back. She's asleep and nobody's allowed to hurt her."

"What if she crawls off the edge of the bed and falls on the floor and hurts herself?"

"I don't think that would hurt her."

"...I guess, if orc babies are a lot sturdier than human babies..."

"I don't know how sturdy a human baby is but you'd have to drop her farther than that to bother her at all."

"...Okay. Sorry if it seemed I was doubting your parenting skills, I'm just paranoid, and human babies are more fragile than that."

"It's okay!"

Meanwhile.

...

"I don't need to eat," Erek remarks eventually. "Don't wait for me to get dinner."

"Thank you for letting me know." 

He continues to sit there like a lump for a few minutes, then drags himself to his feet and goes off to get dinner. It won't improve anything if he starves and the Death Ward has to catch him.

At the cafeteria, Addy is filling a glass from a drink dispenser with what looks suspiciously like blood. She downs it and helps herself to another and busses her glass and starts circulating through the room to see if anybody looks friendly.

Fun fact: Idarai does not look especially friendly. 

He acquires food items and finds an unoccupied table to eat them at. 

Emily comes into the cafeteria alongside Kiri, spots Idarai, and gestures quietly at him to her companion. 

"...honestly he looks like he might rather be left alone, but."

"Yeah, but. Do you want to ask if we can talk to him before or after grabbing food."

"After, I think." She heads for the food and loads up a tray. At least everything looks yummy.

It has been a LONG TIME since it has been practical for Emily to eat kosher. She appreciates the opportunity now. She grabs an array of meatless dishes including ice cream, wow, it has been a very long time since Emily has encountered ice cream. 

You know who looks much friendlier than Idarai? This white-haired girl striding into the cafeteria, apparently in conversation with the non-human being floating over her left shoulder. 

"Hi there!" says Addy, appearing beside them. "My name is Addy."

"Hello. You look slightly other than human. My name's Lucy."

Pause. 

"This is Mewtwo. She's shy." 

(Hello)

"Hi Lucy and Mewtwo! I am not a human, good guessing, most people can't tell straight off without hints."

"Your skin does a thing," she says, waving a hand in front of her face. 

"Yes it does! It does it more outdoors. Anyway, lovely to meet you." Handshake?

Sure, handshake. 

Addy promptly catches fire and finds it necessary to dash back to the drink dispenser and rip it open and dump Sprite on her head.

"--Oh shit are you okay that has literally never happened before!" Lucy exclaims, hurrying after her. 

(She's not vampire-fast. But she's fast.)

"I'll be fine," sighs Addy, looking disconsolately at her Irish Blood Transfusion Service T-shirt, which is looking pretty singed.

"Let me just--" 

She glows. Her light acts like sunlight in throwing rainbows off of Addy's skin. Her light acts unlike sunlight in that it immediately regenerates any burn damage Addy took before she put herself out. And any other damage she's taken over the centuries; scars from other vampires' teeth melt away. 

"Oh, wow, that's a very cool ability. How's it work?"

"I imagine that if I say I'm the daughter of the Mountain of Light this will be less elucidating for you than it would be back home."

"Little bit, yeah."

"What if I say, 'I am one-quarter star.'"

"...I continue to have questions!"

"I am only half-human. There have been no instances of humans having sex with full-blown stars. My grandmother was much smaller than a star and much larger than a human."

"Cool. That is aesthetically concordant with the fire." She turns to the floating one. "How about you, your handshakes hazardous?" She sticks her hand out.

(She says her handshakes have never done that before. I am not going to shake your hand until I know why you caught fire, even if you've solved why you caught fire.)

"I'm very flammable."

(...Okay.)

She tentatively extends one hand. 

Instead of four fingers opposing one thumb, she has three wide digits each positioned equidistant from the others. 

Addy will gamely try to figure out how to shake this hand anyway.

On Mewtwo's end, it mostly involves grasping Addy's fingers with her mutually-opposable digits. 

It is a disappointing handshake but Addy doesn't complain. "Charmed!"

"Sorry for setting you on fire, that really doesn't usually happen. I wasn't even--I mean, my light doesn't set things on fire; my language does, sometimes, but I don't set things on fire with it by accident...I'm pretty sure it's some kind of magic system interaction but I'm curious what the magic is on your end. Besides, uh, whatever makes you flammable."

"Well, I'm a vampire."

"--Okay, that doesn't give me a good working model of how it interacting with my everything set you on fire but more importantly, do not drink my blood. Do not. It is a bad idea. I say this not because I expect to suffer the usual consequences of having one's blood consumed but because historical precedent suggests you will regret it even if it doesn't set you on fire."

"Noted. Cafeteria's got me covered."

"Good. It's not, you understand, that I specifically suspected you of it, just, it's very dangerous. And the way in which it is dangerous would not involve you dying and getting neatly picked up by the Death Ward."

"Oh really?"

"My light is incredibly vitality-promoting. Someone shoved a chunk of my father's flesh into a guy once and now the guy is an island, every inanimate object from which is alive. The ones that are sentient and the ones that are independently motile have areas of non-overlap. Nobody involved is happy."

"Well that sounds fascinating but I will not snack on you unless I come over determined to explore islandhood."

"The King With a Thousand Hearts did not actually eat the flesh of a sentient being, and, probably not coincidentally, is the single most harmless relevant example I could think of. --Sorry, I'm--I can't say 'taking this too seriously' but perhaps being too serious at you in particular."

"You don't need to worry about me. I'm in full control of my diet."

"And things are different here." She shakes herself and goes off to acquire food, her roommate darting along behind. 

When Kiri has all her food she approaches the opposite side of the table from Idarai.

"Hey. Can my roommate and I sit here?"

"You're not going to pull a knife, are you?"

"I'm not. Emily, do you plan to pull a knife?"

"If I wanted a knife I wouldn't have to pull one, but yeah, no." She sits down near but not directly adjacent to him. 

Kiri gives him the table's worth of space. "So what brings you here."

"In my world, sentient beings are routinely enslaved so that humans can exploit their magical power, and raped so that humans can have more powerful children."

"Eesh. I have an alien invasion and Emily has killer robots."

He looks very slightly less dejected. "You have my condolences. What are 'aliens' and 'robots'?"

"Aliens are beings from a different planet and robots are creatures constructed out of metal without the use of magic. Your roommate is one, though not of the kind we have at home; those ones don't really have minds."

"He did say he didn't need to eat--how do you know this?"

Emily demonstratively levitates a fork. "But also my twin sister Edie mindread everyone a little bit when we came in, sorry about that, we really wanted to know who was the most dangerous."

Bitter smile. "I can see why."

"Edie came up to me to apologize and we worked out this roommate situation. We came and sat with you based on what Edie'd picked up off you, you seem, you know, not the default classmate one expects at a place called Mind Control University."

"I should hope not. My roommate seems alright so far, for whatever it's worth." He doesn't sound terribly optimistic. 

"Edie and I were originally going to room together; it would have been safer but Kiri needed a roommate and Edie really likes babies."

"I suppose I can't blame her for that. I would be much more comfortable rooming with the infant than with the infant's mother, personally." 

"I think they're a set. Hopefully she and Edie get along okay but I don't see Edie yet..."

"I don't mean to suggest I would separate mother and child," he says hastily, "just that babies are significantly less concerning than, well," he nods to indicate the entire population of the cafeteria. 

"Yeah. Hopefully the baby is not secretly some kind of mind control baby but I wouldn't put it past this place." Nom. "- okay wow the food is really good."

Nom. "It really is. This place is really good at...I don't know how to say it. Appealing to the kind of person who would come here without some kind of crisis back home?"

"Come for the hapless townies, stay for the delicious entrées?"

"More like...encouraging people who hadn't thought a lot about the ethical considerations to go on not thinking about it. You know how people can be when asked to sacrifice personal comfort for ethical concerns."

"Yeah. Very easy to be personally comfortable here."

Idarai stares down at his plate of food as though it has personally offended him. 

A moment later, Edie and her roommate enter the cafeteria sans baby. Edie spots their table immediately and hurries over, sitting on the other side of her sister from Idarai. 

"Hi," she says to him. "I'm Edie. I read your mind a little bit in Orientation and I should apologize for that." 

"...I understand why you did it." 

"Yeah, but you still deserve for me to acknowledge that it's fucked up." 

"If you don't want me reading your mind and you can't shield you'll need to give me some physical space, I don't have control yet. Maybe they'll help me figure that out, I can dream."

"That would be nice. If you want me out of your space I can exit your space but I don't, personally, mind."

Fewer barriers between people's minds is viscerally satisfying to Edie; keeping her telepathy bottled up is annoying, but it's a relatively minor irritant and she's lived with it for a long time. There isn't any conflict about it in her mind; if you have to wear an itchy sweater to avoid violating someone's boundaries, you keep the damn sweater on. 

"You don't need to give me space for my sake."

"The inside of my head isn't always a pleasant place." 

She tries to avoid dwelling on ways it isn't a pleasant place, but she can't help but think of glimpses of people being killed in horrible ways by terrifying humanoid machines. 

"I have enough control over my attention not to see troubling detail even if the information is available to me."

"Oh, that's good then." 

"What is it you do, exactly...? If it isn't prying."

"In my country there are five magical people called primes, representing the five elements, each of which has two aspects, one a part of the self and one a part of the world. I'm the sweela prime, fire and mind. There's only one at a time - I inherited the title from my great-aunt when she died - and the powers are also idiosyncratic between people, I don't have her exact set of powers. So I have fire- and heat-related powers, and also I involuntarily read nearby minds, and I can do some things to them and have done so when begged to by for example addicts, but I have had no training and while I can go off somewhere and experiment with the fire..."

He winces. "Oh, yes. I see." 

"Plausibly if you messed up I could fix it, but no, it's not the sort of thing one wants to have to test."

Her telepathy is not restricted to communication and mind-reading; her control over the human mind is both comprehensive and largely theoretical. She has been able to practice skills on consenting subjects, such as copying languages out of one person's head and into another, but only a very limited number. One of them, however, is the ability to hold a person's precise current mindstate in her working memory, and then overwrite their mind with it a few minutes later. Used primarily for people who had to do extremely unpleasant tasks (like, mercy-killing a loved one unpleasant) and wanted something more comprehensive than a relatively simple memory excision.

"- interesting application, huh. I guess if I fuck up rescuing a townie - or a student - I can see if you can patch it."

"If you fuck up rescuing someone the best I can do about that with that technique is putting them back in an unrescued state."

Depending on what various kinds of mind control end up looking like, it's possible she might be able to remove them without even looking at the underlying mind--the mental image she has is sort of comparable to rummaging through a bucket of marbles with your eyes blurred so you can't make out details and picking out the cubes someone else dumped in there. 

"Yeah. But then I guess I could try again. Or get someone else to try, maybe."

"I have a feeling it won't be that easy with any victims of the teachers.'"

"Well, if the teachers routinely prey on the student body the entire premise of being here is kind of shot, so."

"Mesmerra said the teachers aren't allowed to enslave the students, but I was thinking about the townies."

"Good point. I guess we can ask Mesmerra if that's common, she said we could ask any number of questions."

"I am slightly concerned about the possibility of giving her ideas."

"There've been how many hundreds of these sessions?"

"The concern is less that she might not have thought of the possibility of encouraging teachers to take townies; the concern is that she might identify this as a useful lever to get us to do more mind control."

"I guess, but I feel like putting townies in harm's way is already a pretty obvious tactic."

"Yeah...maybe we're overthinking this."

On the other hand, it's only paranoia if nobody is out to get you. 

"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."

"Yeah. But, um, I've overheard a whole bunch of your conversation so far, and I like the cut of your jib, and I do have some Hesperidean Cider, it works perfectly well as far as it goes, the problem the algae experiments are meant to solve is scaling. Aaaaalthough, uh, maybe it wouldn't be the smartest thing to consume substances offered to you by a classmate at a place like this so maybe that's less helpful than I thought sorry."

"...hm. Uh, maybe if you let me and Edie check you over? You haven't had time for a lot of very specific prep work, and the upside is good..."

"Check me over like read my mind? Sure, is there anything I need to do?"

"Not for me, but step within five feet of her." 

Peeeeeeek. 

Lucy steps into Kiri's personal space. 

Lucy is thinking about Hesperidean cider and how ANNOYING it is that His Amused Lordship's research into it involves destructive testing, that stuff is legitimately scarce, and also Hesperidean cider is in and of itself legit but she could, if she wanted to, which she does not, spike it with moon-miser venom, which causes a seven-year obsession with the first thing the poisoned person sees absent some kind of amnestic, she does actually have a non-zero amount of moon-miser milk squirreled away in her room because this seems like the kind of place where it could be used in justified self-defense (the venom of a moon-miser-human hybrid would work better, it causes actual devotion and not just obsession, but there's only one of those and considering that they were created without their parents' consent so Mr. Fires could harvest their venom she was NOT going to go bother the poor kid to ask for any). Anyway she keeps it FAR FAR AWAY from the cider and she definitely wouldn't spike the cider but she could if she were evil and most people are evil so it's not like it would be reasonable to ask these people to just trust her. 

Lucy thinks in words, but they aren't, for the most part, words in any kind of normal language. Each word has fractally detailed layers of meaning, and users who don't know what they're doing with it to a sufficiently precise degree end up setting things on fire that they didn't mean to.