Dennis is NOT PANICKING. He is NOT PANICKING because he is incredibly prepared for this. Everyone says so. His odds are - nine in ten, they keep saying, and he doesn’t think they’re lying to him, although probably they’re being at least slightly optimistic. But his parents are both powerful mages who made a lot of his gear themselves, and everyone says he’s better than either of them was at this age.

Still. Dennis is very aware that if you, under other circumstances, say, play a game of Russian roulette that only has a one in ten chance of killing you, people do not say that you’re pretty much safe, they say “holy shit, why the hell would you do that, that’s absolutely the sort of thing that’s going to get you killed, do you also leap into burning buildings for the fun of it”. 

Not that he’s under the impression that there are any better options. Of course not. Just. He feels like people are kind of overstating the extent to which being the most well-prepared Scholomance student his tutors have ever seen is, you know, the same as him actually being safe.

But he is prepared, if anyone is. His parents have crammed as many languages into his head as possible, and he’s pretty sure he’s picked up full or near-full fluency in English, French, Arabic, Mandarin, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, and Kanuri, and he’s got enough Hindi, Greek, and Latin to consistently puzzle through difficult texts. He’s good enough at magic already that he’s been pretty well able to defend himself when he has to, not that he considers this an excuse to let his guard down, like, ever. But his real talent is alchemy, and even though he’s kind of nervous (kind of terrified?) about the added risk of more lab classes, it’s good to be good at lots of things, right? Right. Totally.

His parents have sprung for the best for him, which he guesses is sort of just what all parents do, so he shouldn’t get too cocky about that, either. They hover over him as he gets ready to leave, and remind him not to panic, which he’s not doing, and that he’s very well-prepared and that all he has to do is be careful. He’s got three sets of enchanted clothes, two sets of enchanted running shoes, the first aid supplies for both himself and Owoye, some basic tools, various alchemical ingredients, potions, beads for mana storage, a bundle of letters, six tubes of poison-sensitive chapstick, six healing cookies, ten (collapsible, currently empty) water bags (because he does not want to go to the bathrooms every time he needs water), twenty tubes of GorillaWeld (because he’s extremely freaked out about the fact that apparently the walls of your room sometimes have cracks in them that are big enough for mals to get through, and he figures that maybe some other people are freaked out by that, too), and a crank charger with a flashlight on it. Also some sugar beet seeds, because they weigh pretty much nothing, and Owoye’s got him all curious about whether it’s possible to grow stuff inside the school, and wouldn’t it be cool if you could figure out how to produce refined sugar in a place that contains a ton of candy-starved kids.

“Remember to get enough sleep. You won’t learn as fast if you’re tired. And meet up with the Ethiopians and the Zanzibar wizards as soon as you can,” says his mother, doing some final fussing over him after he takes his anti-nausea meds and weighs in. “You two stick together.”

“Yes, mother,” he says, and sees that his dad is trying to shoot him a glance that he thinks means something like ‘ah, women’, but he can’t really successfully return it because he’s actually trying really hard not to look like he’s panicking, right now, because he’s not, and he mostly thinks his mom is helping him out with that. 

“Just -“ he can hear the pause where she realizes that saying be careful would do more harm than good - “Just remember everything we’ve taught you. Do your best, and you’ll do fantastic.”

He nods. 

And that’s the last thing that happens before he’s pulled away from everything he’s ever known.