"Um, maybe? I felt really sick but it's gone now. But I don't know where... I am?"

"This is the Scholomance. Magic is real, wizards send their kids here if they can, because the Scholomance has a survival rate of one in four over the course of all four years, as opposed to one in twenty for wizard kids who try to spend their adolescence not in a pocket dimension designed to keep out nasty creepy-crawlies called mals. It's not perfect at it, but it's a lot better than going on your own. If your parents aren't wizards, and you didn't know about magic, your chances were even lower than that, you'd probably have gotten eaten by one in your sleep while you weren't conscious enough to disbelieve it. You'll probably still die in here if you don't have any idea how not to. Wizard hair's a useful magical material, we'll trade you orienting you and a pair of silk slippers for your hair."

"I knew magic was real but my parents don't. Or any of my brothers and sisters. Were the - gross rats - mals -"

"Almost certainly. If a mundane sees a mal and kills it the remains usually end up looking more like a mundane critter than the mal would have when it was alive."

"Oh. Is having - slippers - important -"

"If you go barefoot all the time you'll get bitten by something small and have to cross your fingers that it isn't too venomous. This time. One layer of silk wouldn't be great protection usually, but ours is spider silk, from Darwin's Bark Spiders, it's better than Kevlar." She gestures at the little spider clinging to her neck, a little more than half a centimeter long. 

"So the rat things can't bite through it?"

"It's not proof against everything, you still have to be careful and watch your step, but yeah, it'll keep the little stuff off."

"If magic hair is so good why is practically everybody bald?"

"Because you can only bring so much mass into the Scholomance, and hair isn't a better choice by weight than useful potions or artifices or letters you're being paid to bring to people already inside. You grow it some after induction, but even seniors won't have it long unless they're really powerful, long hair is something a mal can grab onto in a fight. Plus, it's more useful for us than for most artificers, since Wilbur," she nods at her brother, "has an affinity for thread and fiber."

"I like my hair."

"The position you're in really sucks. If you wanna go off and talk to some other people to confirm that we're not just trying to scam you out of it you can do that; you might even get another bid for it that you like better. But you can grow your hair out again after graduation, if you survive, and in the meantime you're going to be without fresh air or real sunlight or anyone you've ever known or the assurance that anyone you meet today will still be alive tomorrow."

"Do you have the slippers right now."

She takes off the slippers she's wearing (she has socks on underneath, which are also spidersilk and therefore almost as good).

Rebecca tries them on to see if they fit.

The fit isn't exactly perfect, but they sort of mold into her feet instead of flopping around where they're too big. 

She takes a few steps in place. "Um. Okay. You can have my hair. I guess."

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. 

"Brussels sprouts? Really?"

"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."

"I... guess. So this is a school, right, where are the teachers."

"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." 

"...that's kind of cool."

"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 -"

"Nnnno, not really. You can ask the void for them though."

"The void."

"In your room."

"The black wall behind the desk? Will sing to me?"

"--No, no, it'll dispense papers with spells on them."

"Oh. With sheet music?"

"I think so? Nobody Mum asked had got any song-spells that way, most of them are spoken."

"Okay. So I just... need a song to kill monsters?"

"...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."

"So... where does mana come from then."

"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."

"Doing crafts?"

"Not the kind that you can do without even paying attention," she clarifies. "But I have a crochet hook and if I'm crocheting something and it's very finicky and I have to stop and rip out half of what I've done and curse about it every so often, I can get mana out of that."

"...are you going to crochet my hair?"

"Nah, human hair's finicky and wizard hair's scarce; Wilbur'll work it into something that's mostly silk."

"I guess I can do jumping jacks if I'm going to need to do magic every day. Till I can get like a sewing kit and fabric to make some... not... pajamas."

"There's workshops that have stuff but you need to be careful to make sure the supply cabinets don't have mals in them."

"Do classes start, like, today, or later...?"

"Tomorrow."

"What... time is it here, there's no windows."

"I'm not sure exactly, but evening sometime. Graduation in the morning and induction in the evening."

"And my schedule will be like, spat out of the sheet music void by the time I get back or something? Okay. Is there like paper somewhere I can use to tell my family I'm at Spooky Hogwarts, where's a mailbox...?"

"There isn't one. Any connection with the outside world is a way a mal can come in. Letters come in with the freshmen and if you can bribe a senior enough they'll bring a message to your family if they survive graduation, in a year."

"Oh."

"Try not to die. Your parents would probably rather have no idea what happened to you for years than to lose you forever because an opportunistic mal got you in your home."

"They were never that big! And it helped when maintenance redid all the anti-rodent stuff!"

"Yeah, for now. If your mana kept growing and you never learned to make yourself unappetizingly dangerous? Bigger ones would have come."

"They're going to think I ran away! I wouldn't do that! And if they think someone kidnapped me from thirty stories up that's worse!"

"Yep. It sucks."

"And there's no way to get them an email or anything? For a year?"

"There's a reason people sacrifice part of the precious weight allowance to bring in letters. There really is not any way to get things in and out except once a year."

"Well that sucks, I wish I'd told them I was magic."

"Convincing them would have been hard, magic is a lot harder to pull off when someone who doesn't believe in it is watching."

"Well they could've gone out of the room while I sang to my pothos!"

"Maybe you could've done it. Convincing mundanes isn't impossible, our dad is a mundane."

"Okay. I think - oh, I think I don't have any mana right now, where did it go - I usually have some, I guess from walking around and doing math homework or whatever?"

"The induction spell sucks it all out. Wilbur and I had some filled mana storage, it's empty now; you can get extra weight allowance by providing mana to the spell."

"Okay, I guess the thing I whipped up for killing the monster rat won't necessarily get me all the way to wherever sewing stuff is?"

"There's safety in numbers. You can walk with me to the workshop if we get it at the same time." 

"Get what at the same time?"

"Artificing classes."

"We can't just go, like, now?"

"--Well not now. Now everyone is feeling very generous towards the freshmen who bring in news of the outside world. Maybe after, but Wilbur and I have to do some settling-in stuff. Plus the upperclassmen have already cleaned out the shop some since graduation."

"The upperclassmen probably already have needles'n thread 'n fabric if they want them already. Maybe. I don't really know. After's fine, at least I don't sleep naked."

"When you're getting things out of shop stores, you don't just get what you personally need, you get things you can trade," she explains. "Every trip to a cupboard like that where a mal could be hiding is a risk."

"Oh. ...I don't have anything to trade now that I gave you guys my hair."

"You can trade your spells, and mana, and there'll be more stuff by tomorrow."

"Trade my spells?"

"Teach people the song-spells you've made up, in exchange for stuff. Information is a trade good! That's why it's not ripping you off to exchange your hair for the slippers, is because we're telling you all this stuff too."

"Oh! Okay, if people want them I can do that. And make up some more."

"Yeah! There are three academic tracks, basically. Artificing, Alchemy, and Incanting. Wilbur's doing artificing. I'm doing incantations; that one splits up again into two parts: creative writing, and languages. I'm languages. I don't write new spells, mostly; I learn ones that exist. I speak loads of languages so I can draw the spells I ask the school for from a wider pool."

"Oh. I know how to sing some other languages a little but I don't speak them particularly."

"--That's not great. The Scholomance will give you spells in any language it thinks you know, and it doesn't need much provocation to think you know a language, and if you don't learn a spell it'll start giving you worse spells or none at all. You'll want to bargain for help translating any spells you don't understand and work really hard in languages class."

"I mean I know how to look things up so I know what the song is about and I can pronounce it all! I just can't like have a conversation in Spanish."

"Trying to cast a spell without a really good idea what it does is a bad idea, and it's also a bad idea to take library books out of the library, and there isn't a great other source for language dictionaries besides the library. So you'll have to wait until you can go to the library to look things up. And there's curfew, and if you're out past curfew you'll die."

"...okay. So is there like, Spanish club. Or Latin club."

"...No. There are not really clubs. There are--alliances, of varying degrees of strength, culminating in the official alliances of senior year, but alliances aren't about shared interests, they're about shared survival."

"I can't be the only person who needs Spanish practice! There are so many kids here!"

"Kids with mundane parents usually don't get picked up by the Scholomance. There must have been some deaths before anyone could find out to re-allocate spots. Wizard parents make sure their kids know languages well enough or not at all before we go."

"Okay, well, who else is there, I can start a Spanish club."

"I don't know, I haven't approached anyone else so far. Let's go find some more muggleborns and we can discuss Spanish and maybe we can buy their hair." 

"Okay." Also it has begun to occur to Rebecca that she might now in real life be living out a weird sex fantasy where she's arm candy for a powerful chieftain of some kind in olden times and he will protect her from bears, except for bears read monsters, so. Eyes peeled for cute boys. If she lives she'll apologize to her parents and if she dies she'll apologize to God.

Eventually she decides that a cute boy will plausibly be more help than a Spanish club and gives Lucy her room number so she can leave her a note or something later if such a club materializes.

Lucy starts scanning the crowd for muggleborns, particularly ones she noticed earlier. 

Notably, her scan skips right over the cutest boys.