Owoye is so annoyed. Like - yes, he’s very grateful that Dennis is going with him, it probably doubles his odds of survival, but it’s so maddening how the guy is effortlessly brilliant at everything, and then still insists on having a heart attack every time his shadow looks at him funny, even though he’s far more likely to survive this adventure than Owoye is. He’d be much more tolerable if he were smug. 

It’s not like Owoye’s stupid. He’s not. Only half the kids from the Lagos enclave are going this year, and the adults picked him because they really think he has a better shot than Azuka and Cornelia. But he knows that it was a close thing, for him, and for Dennis it wasn’t. When they were younger, he could ignore the difference between them, or tell himself that the difference was mostly luck. He can’t do that anymore. Dennis has twelve languages; Owoye has four that he really has a handle on, although he thinks he’s finally also gotten his Chinese up to the point where it isn’t a liability. Dennis doesn’t even need more than a few languages, anyway; he’s obviously going to be an alchemist.

He knows the allotment isn’t fair. He knows he has to be twice as good to get half as far. But what if he’s not twice as good? What if almost every kid in the Scholomance is as good as Dennis is, or at least in his league, and the death rates are as high as they are anyway?

It’s this stuff that keeps him up at night. And this is the reason he feels that he needs a plan.

The plan is dung beetles. He thought it up himself, so he’s pretty sure it isn’t already standard practice, and maybe it’s clever enough to give him an edge. You don’t have to sacrifice calories to raise dung beetles, at least if you get the right kind, the ones that can handle waste from omnivores. They take a long time to grow, for insects, but he’s already got some families going, and he’s able to select the sets that have healthy numbers of tiny baby grubs to take with him. He’s not sure it’ll be enough, but it’ll give him a fighting chance. He hopes. 

Dennis, obviously, knows about the dung beetles, and even though they freak him out (because for all his talent, he’s pretty much a baby), they also get him talking excitedly about what else they can use shit for, and saying that Owoye was really clever to think of it, and - at times like this he doesn’t even know whether he mostly loves him or hates him, but he’s glad they’re going in together, in any case.

The bugs had better be worth the weight; Owoye’s on the tall side, so even after some pretty intense dieting in the months leading up to induction, he’s not going to get to pack much else. Apart from the beetles, he’s got three outfits, two sets of sneakers, some beads for mana storage, a couple water bags like the ones Dennis has, and - that’s pretty much it, actually. He’s lucky that Dennis is lighter than he is; they’re going to share a lot of the stuff that he’s bringing in, especially the medical supplies. He may be really jealous of him, but he’s pretty sure that Dennis’s bag is a relatively safe place for his ibuprofen and penicillin to live. And he’s going to pass half the letters to him when they land, so they both get to make social ties going in.

His mother doesn’t fuss over him before he leaves, like Dennis’s does. Just smiles at him sadly, after handing him his anti-nausea meds. He can’t tell whether she’s scared, or proud of him for going, or already grieving losing him, or what. Maybe she’s wishing that she’d had a different son. Maybe that’s a crazy thing to think. For what it’s worth, Owoye wishes that he was a different person, too. But he’s not. So he’s going to have to do his best with what he has.

He’s looking at Dennis when the tug comes. Dennis isn’t looking at him.