"It's never done that before!"

"Next time, ask first!" She shakes herself. "I'm fine."

Annisa does not like any of this! She laughs and sits down with everyone else, though. El was - injured in some way that - tandem casting something with Orion could fix? But he hadn't seemed to expect the second part - El was....possessed, and that display broke it? Her rod should've picked that up, though.

She chews herself in circles with uncertainty about this for a solid while and eventually concludes that she should be investing more in a shield artifact. On general principles. Also because there was a mal attack in the library yesterday, they almost never show up in force that far up... that, at least, is something she can mention to El during artificing without being obnoxiously nosy.

"Never heard of them showing up in those numbers in the library."

Shrug.

Or not, then. Fine. She impales a grub.

At breakfast the next morning, senior Todd Quayle is sitting alone.

Oh goody, drama that has nothing to do with anyone Annisa's trying to suck up to/ally with and that must be remarkably high quality, if Todd, who is New York and almost definitely already has an alliance agreed-to for graduation day, is in hot water, something seriously bizarre happened. She's not sure New York would even turn him out for malificing - maybe if he targeted someone in-enclave? 

She joins El's table. If El and Lake break up she's going to have strained her friendships with saner, more reliable people but it's just impossible to pass up Lake if you have the opportunity, and El if she's not in fact going to kill anyone is very solid company. 

She doesn't ask the story with Quayle. Presumably everyone'll be talking about it without a newcomer to the table needing to.

Orion buttonholes somebody to ask.

Apparently Todd poached somebody's room.

Annisa makes a judgmental face, that apparently being the expected thing to do here.

So, murder is wrong. On the outside, if you murder someone, you're a bad person, and you should be punished. On the inside... well, a lotta people want to pretend that they're still outside. Annie doesn't, particularly. No one's given her even the slightest side-eye about stabbing Jack, and admittedly that was self-defense, but they only had her word for it and El's, and everyone's pretty sure El is malificing. 

From one angle, murdering a child is about a quarter as bad as murdering an adult, because that's their odds of making it. Though of course the senior whose room Todd poached would've been up to fifty-fifty odds, now, depending on his alliance and his skills and how bad the graduation hall gets this year.  From another angle, murder is mostly such a horrendous crime because on the outside, there's almost always some other way, and here there isn't.

If you have never been kidding yourselves about the fact that people will kill you if they're desperate, then there's not a lot of reason to be shocked when they do.

And probably - 

- probably people are shocked because poaching isn't, exactly, like throwing a lightning bolt into someone's neck in the heat of the moment. The rooms open into the Void. All of them. If you put some wall in between the Void and the dorms, you'd be creating more dark crawlspace mals could get in through. It's not a huge deal, having your wall open to the Void. You can't exactly fall in, it's too rubbery, and if you do you can climb back out. People have walked in on purpose, and then thought better of it, and walked back out. Not wholly intact, but you know, the human experience is not best described by 'being fully intact'.

You can push someone. You can use magic to shove them - slowly, because the Void doesn't part easily - back out the wall of their room until they're far away, and the rubbery path you've made closes around them, and then their room is yours.

This is more disturbing than the lightning bolt to the neck but Annisa doesn't actually think it's worse, an opinion which she does not volunteer. Either way they stop existing. How scary their last moments are just pales in comparison to the magnitude of everything they lose. 

"Because you wanted a new room" does seem like a hell of a reason to do that to someone. 

"Were they having some kind of dispute?"

Orion has decided to SIT AT TODD'S TABLE and ask him really loudly in front of everyone.

Apparently Todd's old room was by the stairs and he is upset with Orion for killing enough mals to disrupt the food chain such that more of them are coming up the stairs. He claims to have heard a maw-mouth.

This is completely her fault for thinking how it'd be cool to have some drama that had nothing to do with her. 

There being a maw-mouth wandering around in fact, unfortunately, affects her. In a 'she should rethink the enchantments that protect her from injuring herself with her dagger' way. 

El stands up.

"So you think you should sail right out of here, you enclave tosser, and let the next-door kid get eaten instead? That's more your style so you're having a go at Orion? Remind me please what gives you more of a right to live than Mika? Or anybody Orion's saved while he was disrupting the food chain? Did you explain why your life is so important to Mika while you shoved him in? Did you look him in the eye? Or did you use your New York mana to shove him in while you looked away and plugged your ears?" She picks up her tray and leads the way to another table.

There's something wrong with Annie. Or right with Annie depending how you look at it, but there's something that's true of most of these stupid kids, gaping at each other - something that's certainly true of El and Orion, that's not true of Annie. El wasn't calculating how much she'd be burning her bridges with New York. Orion wasn't calculating whether confronting Todd in front of half the school was a good idea. They just did stupid unstrategic things because they were upset about people dying.

This makes them not great allies, objectively speaking. 

On the other hand Annisa doesn't have the slightest impression she's welcome at the New York table without them. 

She looks at Liu. Her question should be obvious. Are we following the crazy people to the crazyperson table?

Liu sure seems to be. Aadhya is too.

Fine. 

She can even look like she doesn't think this is a dumb idea, because she's a good actress.

Ibrahim makes room for them at his table. El leads the charge for reconstructing a passable lunch out of donations all 'round for Orion, whose tray was a casualty during the confrontation earlier, and then she is drawn into displaying a very cool Sanskrit book of spells.

"So," she says to Orion once he seems to have cooled off slightly, "what...were you hoping to accomplish by confronting Todd."

"...I wanted to know why he'd do it! And if there's a maw-mouth in the school learning that seems, you know, important!"

"You can't go after a maw-mouth, Orion."

"I mean, I wouldn't rather, but I've got a better chance than a hall full of freshmen, or - El, are you okay -"

El is not especially okay.

"Do you in fact have a better chance than a hall full of freshman? I figure you have precisely the same, which is to say, none -" She cuts off because El is losing it, then continues because it's rude to acknowledge people having a breakdown. "They tried clearing the maw-mouths out of the graduation hall, you know, fully trained teams of adult wizards power-sharing with an entire enclave - they lost - Shanghai did it once but it took a week and a team of dozens of combat-trained highly prepared wizards twice our age, and half of them keeled over from the sheer exertion - I figure it still gets the hall of freshmen, just after an appetizer."

"If there were a maw-mouth in the school and it had been here that long," says Liu, "we'd have heard of it from more people than Todd. It wouldn't be hiding."

"Also that, yes, thank you Liu. Todd must've been lying, or - there's some psychic mals that look like your worst fears, maybe he's been dwelling on maw-mouths lately -"