When he arrives in the cafeteria, Virgil stands by the upperclassmen who are handing out water. He would rather let someone approach him, really; he's horrible at making conversation. Any conversation that isn't just him standing around awkwardly turns into over-excited rambling on his part. So he waits, and keeps his eyes on the floor.

Alexius side-eyes the ventilation ducts on his way in, then accepts his water with a grateful nod and sincere thanks. 

First things first. He delivers his small packet of mail to the handful of Florida nonclavers and one Louisianan who are thankfully still around. One recipient is too dead to get theirs - suckerworm in the sink, eight months back, man is he going to have a phobia of plumbing soon - so he pockets it for raw material. His duty thus discharged, he turns toward the new arrivals and people-watches for a bit, to let the living pretend not to cry in peace. 

Wow that is a lot of unprepared freshmen. PJs, naked lady, obvious confused mundanes... He has to ration his help if he wants to actually survive this deathtrap of a school, but "ration" doesn't mean "omit." It looks like one of his side plans is shot, though. There's no way he ends up looking like the most vulnerable malia target around, not for months, and he can't bring himself to hope the weakest kids get culled even though he knows it'll happen. So he settles for dispensing some calming advice to the shellshocked. 

Hira checks in with the other Jaipur girls, first, to make sure everyone is settling in okay. After that brief and tiresome little charade, where they all pretend to like each other dearly (there's trust there, but not fondness), she looks for someone interesting to talk to. She really wants to find a charismatic or empathetic boy who everyone else is falling for- that's the kind of person that's on her level.

The cafeteria is swarming with thousands of people and she's definitely dealing with that fine. She's looking for a group of seven people, but maybe fewer than that, scanning for a knot of faces she knows all together, until—"Basira!"

They find her. Daisy is golden, vibrant and intense and gorgeous. She drags her eyes away to look to John, trailing next to Daisy, on edge with his hands balled up into fists.

And no one else.

Maybe they've delegated, she thinks. Daisy puts a cup of water in Basira's hands and she swallows it down.

"What happened?" she asks, and then she has to say it again to be heard.

It's John who tells most of the story, of course.

They tell her five months ago Elias's graduation alliance was murdered in a feud with some other enclave (what?), and when he couldn't immediately put together another he panicked and poached a junior's room. (A problem in the earliest years of the school, but then they changed the rules and it stopped - so what did they change beyond "no sharing rooms after curfew"? Did that make sense?)

They tell her Gertude declared him an outlaw before lunch, saying Oxford and their closest allies would handle it, her and Emma and Sarah and Agnes. They tell her that they had to deactivate the power-sharers to kick Elias off the network; that Emma joined him, pushed Sarah into the void; that Gertrude killed her and Elias killed Gertrude and Agnes gave up. Told the Oxford kids, and walked away. They tell her that the five of them faced him and Tim and Sasha died.

They don't quite tell her how a gaggle of fourteen and fifteen-year-olds successfully killed a full-grown malificer. John looks almost guilty, but Daisy's so shining proud of it, glowing in a way she—shouldn't. No one looks better in the Scholomance, except... there's - a gap there, that Basira thinks she knows how to fill.

(She asks after Martin, and it's Daisy who tells her about the suckerworms. Unrelated. Just one of those things that happens to isolated freshmen.)

Mostly, the narrative hangs together. But it would, wouldn't it? John's very affinity is stories; they don't need to be true. Maybe the others are really alive, and just... tied up somewhere to die, is how that thought ends, crumbling as she thinks it.

Daisy asks where her room is, they should get her set up, make her safe there, now now now. And Basira hesitates, but - in the end she can't help but trust her people after all.

[Oxford enclave Scholomance attendance]

senior +1: Elias
seniors: Gertrude, Emma
juniors: Daisy, Tim, Sasha
sophomores: John, Martin
freshman: Basira
-1: Melanie