Lucy turns, looks him in the eye, gives him a once-over, and approaches him. 

"You're going to want to trade for better shoes," is the first thing she says. "Little ground-level mals like biting feet if they can."

....Well, if she's going to just spontaneously decide to be friendly, he won't tell her to go away. 

"Are there a lot of those here?" he asks her, in strongly-accented but perfectly understandable English. "Harder for them to sneak up, I'd've thought." Masozi has not had a small ground-level mal successfully get within six feet of him unseen on a clear floor for at least a year. 

"Well, they're thinner on the ground than outside, but that's not saying much, we're very tasty in here. And it's easier for the little ones to get this far, the really big ones are all trapped in the graduation hall."

"Right. Thank you for the advice." He says it very politely, taking care to enunciate clearly - he's paying a lot of attention to her accent, trying to guess if she's American, he's ever heard American accents before but not many times. Tourists never tended to come to the areas of town where he wouldn't have stood out, and nudging people not to notice you only goes so far. 

He makes himself smile. "My name is Masozi." 

"I'm Lucy! And this is my twin brother Wilbur," she gestures to him. "It's not wholly altruistic advice, we're going to be selling spidersilk as soon as we get production going. I mean, you should still get better shoes even if you don't buy them from us, it would be self-sabotaging to lie when we're blatantly advertising our product."

He looks thoughtfully down at her socks. "Those're spider-silk?" 

"Yep! From Darwin's Bark Spiders. They're from Madagascar and their silk is the strongest organic substance in the world that isn't from a mal, if you tried to stab me you'd have to go for exposed skin to do anything but bruise." She gestures at her whole outfit.

"You're very prepared!" He's impressed, and his brief smile is almost genuine. Then he looks puzzled. "...You're not from Madagascar, though, are you? How did you get spiders from there?" 

"Dad's a mundane university professor, and people all over the world like to study them. He managed to call in enough favors to get an unrelated breeding pair from the biology department of his university for us to make into familiars."

That's so many things that Masozi had had only the faintest inklings existed! Universities are...like libraries, he thinks, though he's never met anyone who knew anything more than that about them, and he's suddenly ravenously curious but he shouldn't ask all of his not-even-coherent-yet questions right here and now. He'll organize them later and ask them a little at a time, and see what he can pick up from listening in on conversations, because it's occurring to him that if this 'Lucy' is a more typical example of how prepared the other students are, it really won't be in his favour to reveal how little he knows. 

"That's very clever of your parents," he says. "What sorts of things would you want to trade, for socks like that?" 

"Depends on what other students have to trade. I sold my slippers plus information to a kid with mundane parents who got scooped by accident as a result of the Chicago fiasco in exchange for her hair--Wilbur's affinity is thread, so fiber-related artificing materials we can't trivially get on our own is a big one. Any kind of artifice or alchemy that's useful and we can't make. Or things we can leverage into more resources later. We're also planning on selling baby spiders, that's why a breeding pair."

"...I don't have very much to trade yet and I don't know any artifice or alchemy but since this is a school I'll probably learn and then I could trade something? I guess I have some things that are fibres, if you think shoes would be more useful than - hmm I have floss and I have a spool of fishing line that I found. If you think shoes are more useful than that, right now, and you want it. - Also where's Chicago? And what happened there?" 

"No--hair is useful because it's wizard hair, that stuff's all mundane. You'll probably be alright for the first few weeks anyway, between graduation and induction the halls are scoured with mortal flame so the mal population is down by a lot. Something happened to the enclave in Chicago right before induction, there are a couple survivors among the freshmen who weren't there when it happened but the enclave is gone along with most of the inductees, so the induction spell just swept up the closest wizard kids it could find to replace them, and that happened to include some kids with mundane parents who had no idea what was going on."

"...That's terrible. Who - who could do that? Destroy an enclave?" 

"We don't know. The Chicago kids didn't even know until they got here except that one of them was the one who found the entrances leading nowhere. It happened too soon for anyone to find out and reallocate the seats. Maybe we'll find out next year when that batch of freshmen brings in news." 

Shiver. Masozi hates feeling like he's stumbled up against the very edges of some massive intrigue that he has zero context on and no way to protect against. 

This makes it even higher priority that he orient, even if it makes him look ignorant and useless. Probably this girl isn't the worst person to look ignorant and useless in front of. She seems....nice. Kind. He hasn't met many people like her but she might at the very least give him advice for free. 

"Do you know if they're going to give us a map of the school at some point?" he asks her, very politely. "I'm - not from an enclave and I didn't have any family to tell me things, and it - seems like you know things. ...I don't have much to trade but I could trade you a - dung beetle? Although you probably don't want that if you have spiders that'll have babies." 

"One dung beetle isn't worth more than the protein it's made of to us, but we'll take dead mal grubs in trade, those are way more plentiful and the protein's good enough for the spiders. Dung beetles, that's clever. There are blueprints all over the place so we can reinforce the school with our belief so it doesn't just dissolve into the Void. 

“I can get you mal grubs!”

Probably even cheaply enough that he can grab the mana for it from his surroundings rather than sacrificing any more precious beetles. Which come to think of it he really needs to get out of their jar and into a receptacle where he can give them food. And maybe he can ask some older students to trade for their shit, since he’s apparently not going to be producing any for a while. 

“Do you know what happens next?” he asks Lucy. “Is there a schedule? This is the place where they’ll bring us food, right?”

"Nobody brings us food, we line up to get it," she points. "Our schedules will appear tomorrow morning in homeroom."

Blank look. “What’s a home room? - Oh does that just mean our bedrooms?”

"No, it's the first place you go in the morning at the start of the day. A piece of paper with your homeroom number on it will be slipped under your door right before first bell tomorrow." 

“Oh. Thank you.” He ducks his head. “I can owe you a favor for telling me, if that’s all right?” Being extremely polite to her isn’t costing him anything, at least not yet, and he wants her to think he’s someone who will recognize when he’s been helped, even if her giving him advice didn’t exactly cost her anything either. 

"Sure. --I won't hold you to any specific favor without having negotiated it in advance; I'll probably start charging when we get into things that anyone couldn't tell you off the top of their head, but it does me no harm to tell you in exchange for goodwill and/or a nebulous favor instead of you hearing it from someone else in exchange for something with them that I get nothing out of." 

“That works for me.”

And he’s now spent a lot of seconds talking rather than focusing on situational awareness which means it’s time for a sweep. He pushes some of his personal mana into looking, not in the effortless way that he can sense nearby human minds but in the other direction that sees mals. His eyes scan the room, moving in a practiced pattern - 

- and then jump to the ventilation grate three yards over, a second or two before the shimmery iridescence would in fact be visible to sufficiently attentive eyes.

He considers pushing it to go away, but it’ll probably just come out a different grate instead. 

“There’s a mal there,” he tells Lucy instead, pointing; his tone of voice is exactly as calm and conversational as before. “Not a big one but I don’t recognize what kind. Are you or your brother good at killing them or should I tell someone else.”

Her eyes widen slightly as she spots it. "Not the insubstantial kind. Definitely tell--I don't know, Orion Lake? From New York? I've heard rumors about him."