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The twins pick out the single most obviously unprepared kid to approach first. The poor girl is in pajamas with no shoes, for crying out loud.
Lucy takes point because she's better at people. "Hi, are you okay?" she asks, tapping the girl on the shoulder.
She takes off the slippers she's wearing (she has socks on underneath, which are also spidersilk and therefore almost as good).
The fit isn't exactly perfect, but they sort of mold into her feet instead of flopping around where they're too big.
Wilbur pulls out his thread scissors, and Lucy carefully trims Rebecca's hair off, not all the way to the scalp but very, very short. It at least looks basically on purpose. Then she twists the hair into a hank and hands it to her brother, who puts it in his pocket, and starts explaining things to Rebecca like how you really don't want to sit next to a vent or go to the bathroom by yourself and the cafeteria food can be infested by poison or mals, except the brussels sprouts which for some reason are always safe, and how to store mana.
"Mum insisted on making sure Wilbur and I got used to them. It's better than it being something popular that they'll already be out of by the time you get there."
"There aren't teachers. You get taught by the school itself. Schedules appear in front of you when you look away, worksheets go in slots, language classes involve voices from nowhere talking to you in your little soundproof booth."
"It kinda is! The Scholomance is terrible but it's a lot better than the alternative. You said you'd figured out you were magic, any idea what your affinity is?"
"No, what's that? I didn't do a lot really... sang my plants back to life when they were wilting and stuff, mostly... I could always get Judith to go to sleep..."
"You did magic on purpose by singing without knowing any spells you didn't make up? Sounds like your affinity might be singing, or writing spells, or writing song-spells which would be really cool--affinity is a thing every wizard has, that makes it easier and more affective to do magic that ties into their affinity in some way. Wilbur's is thread, we haven't figured mine out yet, it wouldn't be at all weird for you not to know yours."
"Oh, if it's singing that would be really cool... how do I learn magic songs, is there a magic songs class -"
"...It's way more complicated than that. There are spells to kill things, but a spell has an amount of strength, and costs an amount of mana, and you need to have enough mana to fight or flee everything that comes after you. And some mals are insubstantial and a crushing spell won't do anything against them, and--you won't run into a maw-mouth before graduation, but there are, like, two times ever that people've managed to kill those."
"Effort. You build mana by exercising or doing crafts or getting out of bed even though you're sick or or slogging up flights of stairs or whatever. How much mana you build comes from how effortful it is, not what you physically do."
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