" - with Chicago, you mean? No one knows that, no one will until next year." Somewhat snappishly. "They were fine yesterday. They'd have called us, if they were under attack or something."

"Something happened to Chicago?" 

- the population of Chicago is not this Asian, she's pretty sure, so probably they were not all evacuated from Chicago. Also she doesn't, uh, live in Chicago, so that would also not explain her, although maybe whatever's going on with her is - weird.

Deep sigh. "That's what people are saying. If that's not what you meant, what did you mean. Did something happen to Seoul, too."

"Not that I'm aware of. I'm from the St. Louis area." She might not want to know that, but maybe it's relevant, somehow, to know where people are getting pulled from.

There's no good way to ask this.

"I meant, uh - do you know where we are now?"

"Oh geez. We're at school. You're - oh shit, I guess that is what would've happened."

"I'm sorry, can you - expand on 'school'? At all?"

Even deeper sigh. "Yeah, okay, but you owe me. So, we're wizards. Some places they call it something different but we're wizards. It used to be, wizard children in their teens mostly got eaten. Your mana - your magical reserves, that you use to cast spells - grows really really fast in your teens, and you don't know how to use it yet. So, big juicy snack for mals, which eat mana. But obviously, no one wants all their kids eaten by mals, so a couple hundred years ago, everyone got together and built the Scholomance. It's detached from the rest of the universe, so mals can't get in. We get teleported in at induction - that's today - and the gates open for half an hour on graduation day to let us out. That way, not too many mals can get in and try to eat us - and they do try, because a whole school full of us is a really good snack. You got lucky, getting in here. At home you'd probably have been eaten by something."

Karen is distantly wondering if it should have occurred to her to be mad at her mother for not letting her read Harry Potter back when she was nine. That's probably not important right now.

" - okay. Wizards. What are mals, exactly?"

"Predatory mana-eating things. There's thousands of different kinds, some you memorize because they require special handling but most there's no point in learning anything specific about, like bugs. They're bigger than bugs, though, and some of them are smart. Some of them happened when wizards tried to create a construct, or smashed a couple animals together, or tried some other ambitious stupidly dangerous experiment; some of them must've been around forever. Mostly, you see anything move that isn't a student, you jump out of its way, you shield, and you yell for someone more experienced to come and smash it for you."

" - okay. So - okay. Little bit to process, there. Um - how many of those should I be expecting to be around?"

"There's kinda a lot of them? Like, less than in the outside world, and smaller weaker ones, but you don't want to go places alone, and you don't want to just stick your hands into the supply cupboards reaching for stuff, and you want to look the cafeteria food over closely before you take it, and you aren't supposed to stand or sit beneath the ventilation grates, or stand close to the drains in the shower, or sit down without checking under the desk, stuff like that. The start of the year's safe, because they just ran walls of mortal flame through the whole school to cleanse it, but it gets worse as the year goes along. It's not that dangerous for someone who's prepared. But you're not, so - I'd be a little freaked, honestly."

"I'm a little freaked," she agrees, in a surprisingly matter-of-fact tone. Surprising to her, anyway. "So, okay, don't go places alone, constant vigilance, run away from anything that moves and isn't human until - is the idea that we go to school and then we, um, you said we didn't know how to use our mana yet, so - this is where we learn?"

"Yeah! Study hard, get fast with spells, in four years we fight our way across the graduation hall and then we're out and much less yummy, we have lots of mana but we know how to use it and there isn't much that can threaten an adult wizard. - study hard at the stuff that's actually relevant, the school also has history classes and it's fine to slack off in those, and if you aren't actually planning to become an artificer or whatever you can find someone to do artificing class for you. If you don't do your homework, it comes to life and tries to eat you, but it's fine if you have someone else do it."

" - okay," she says, weakly, and then looks around the room for a second. " - um, is there something I should be doing right now? Or - no, I should get your name first. I'm Karen."

"I'm Julia! The first thing I'm going to do is find some people who want to help me redecorate my room, it's unbelievably dreary - we're not allowed to swap, which is really stupid - and then once we get schedules you'll want to figure out who's going to walk with you to meals and classes and the bathroom."

"Okay, that makes sense." She almost asks if Julia will walk with her, and then remembers that she's supposed to wait until she gets her schedule. Although she could probably still - "Do you want to? Walk together, I mean, if our schedules happen to line up. Uh - I could help you redecorate your room, when there's time for it?"

"I walk with New York but you can tag along, as long as you're, like, showering regularly and not being stupid? And I would love help redecorating my room, it's going to be such a chore, we'll have to go down to the junior dorms to retrieve the stuff the New York seniors left behind and I have no idea where I'm going to find a rug. At home I was going for a kind of solarpunk vibe, but I meant to do something different here anyway - I was thinking that if this place looked less like a dump it could look like a spaceship?"

"Yeah! I was honestly kind of thinking that, too. - well, I was thinking we might've all been kidnapped by aliens, but you know, under the assumption that if that was what had happened we would have been in space. Mostly because of the darkness beneath the floor of my room. - is that normal? I shouldn't be worried? About the pit of blackness, I mean."

"Oh, did you get a void floor too, they're the worst, I'm so annoyed about it. But yeah, they're normal. Lower floor of middle ring all gets void floors. I don't know what to do with it, from a decoration standpoint - probably the ideal thing would be, like, glass, with a chrome hatch? But there's no way to get anything good in here so I'm probably just going to put a rug on it. But for the rest of the space I'm thinking people can install good lighting, polish the tiles until they're properly shiny, break down the stupid desk and bookshelves and replace them with something that fits the theme, put up a rod to hang my clothes from, get some mirrors since we can't have windows..."

"That makes sense. Is there a place to get stuff like that, for decorating rooms?"

"There's supply rooms but they get picked over pretty fast and they're full of mals, you want to go with older students or with Orion - Orion's New York, he's incredibly good at killing mals, he's cute but kind of dense. For my room we're going to start by going down to the senior dorms, where all the New York graduating seniors left their stuff before graduation, and hope they've got mirrors, lighting, polish, stuff like that. Oh, and I guess you can have my bookshelves and desk once I've replaced them with nicer ones."

"Oh cool, thanks! I think my room was pretty small, so I'll have to think about how much space I have for them? But more space for papers and books could be cool." She glances past Julia at the group of people she came from, who - all still look pretty upset. Something about Chicago, right. She tries to memorize the faces of some of the older students in the group. "Is Orion one of the ones over there?"

"Orion is the fluffy-headed one in the blue shirt over there." She points. He's patrolling the perimeter of the cafeteria, because of course he is. "And yeah, the rooms are tiny, they shrank them in the 1880s to let twice as many kids in, it makes sense I guess but it sucks. If the kid next to you dies your room'll expand, so you have decent odds of having more space by senior year."

" - do kids die a lot?"

"Not New York kids! But kids who don't know what they're doing and stay out past curfew, or wander around alone, or don't check for mals, or fail all their classes, yeah, that can get you killed."