Over here are a couple of kids, a guy and a girl, huddling together looking shellshocked. The guy is still visibly wearing a Chicago power-sharer, the girl isn't. 

Oh man, sucks to be them. The Scholomance-internal Chicago enclave is still intact, of course, but its freshmen would've been coming with supplies and now they aren't, and there are no spots to offer anyone on graduation, and also all their friends and family are missing, maybe dead!

Julia waltzes over. "Hey! Want to help decorate my room?"

"--Uh--probably--you're New York, right?"

"Yeah. I'm Julia. I think we met this summer at the lecture by Magnus's grandpa on low-powered detection spells? Or, uh, I don't actually recognize you but Chicago was there. Sorry to hear about your enclave! Hopefully they find whoever did it and feed 'em to a maw-mouth. We can take the salvage run by the graduating Chicago seniors's supplies, too, if you'd like, you guys must be shorter than expected."

"I don't know if the new seniors will be interested in handing down the hand-me-downs, they cut us off the mana, they seem like they're scrambling pretty hard for every advantage they can get. But if you don't mind trying we'd be happy to come on your salvage run."

"We managed to fill a few crystals before word got to whoever it was who cut off the mana, and neither of us had anything critical in the bag of someone who didn't make it, we're not totally sunk," the boy supplies. "I think I remember you from the lecture, you were wearing this pale blue top?"

"Yeah! I wanted to take it, tried to convince my mom that the extra Vitamin D in the cafeteria was worth some exposed shoulders especially since we've got Orion, but she pulled her trump card of bursting into tears about how I'm not taking anything seriously enough. They cut you off the mana? That's so mean! Well, we can swing by and see if they'll let us have stuff, and if not, we're going to be lugging furniture up eight flights of stairs, that's some mana right there." Julia doesn't herself intend to do the lugging; she will generously leave it to the people who need mana.

"There is that. Got anyone else recruited yet?"

"Yeah, Karen's on my hallway, she's a rando from Saint Louis who got pulled in when, well, and she's probably screwed but this project should be safe enough for her, Orion'll be protecting us, and she understands the aesthetic I'm going for, which is a big plus! And Vernon, mousy little kid over there, is coming in exchange for whatever no one in New York wants. Silas - he was at the lecture too, redhead, bit pudgy - will be able to grab the stuff other people in New York've laid claim to. Do you know anyone else who should come? And I think I need a couple more, many hands make light work and also that way we'll be able to make it back up even if Orion dies of someone dropping a bookshelf on him, which is pretty much the only thing that could hurt him.". 

"We've identified a couple other Chicago survivors, I dunno if they'll have something else lined up by now though. We can ask. When're you planning on going?"

"If I can get ten people together now, probably now? That way we can lug the stuff up before dinner, get dinner, decorate afterwards, get to know each other a little bit and have it out of the way before people have assignments and stuff to worry about."

"Okay, probably not enough time to hunt down the other Chicago expats then."

"I mean, I'm not at ten yet, I'm at seven, so by all means go looking for them. But plan on meeting me back here in - ten minutes?" She's having good luck on the minions front so far.

"Ten minutes, okay." 

The two of them melt off into the crowd. 

Julia looks for more candidates.

This kid just finished delivering letters to the Paris enclave's upperclassmen and looks like he's practically itching to disassemble some furniture! He has a serious carpentry tool on his belt, and as he drifts through the room smiling at people, intermittently introducing himself, most of his attention seems to actually be on the grates, sunlamps, tables, dish-bussing mechanism, etcetera. 

Oh, perfect! Julia does not hurry over to him, she's not in a hurry, but she does head in his direction. "Hello!"

Nice outfit, power-sharer, carries herself with immense confidence. Yep, this calls for replacing the Generic Friendly smile with the Customer Service smile. "Hello! Lysander Vedelev, Berlin." He doesn't actually need to say that he's technically not part of the enclave; the lack of a power-sharer says that for him. 

Yeah, she caught that. "Julia Sanderson, New York! I'm getting some people together to go down to the senior dorm where all the graduating New Yorkers dumped their stuff and help me decorate my room. We have protection covered, but we could always use more people to carry stuff. Want to come?"

"That sounds like fun!" he says brightly, as he is given to understand that Americans quite like it when you pretend that they are doing you a great favor by purchasing your labor for the minimum reasonable price. "I'm great for carrying things." This is, for a fourteen-year-old who is not even taller than her, actually surprisingly true; he is wiry and mostly shoulder. 

"I think it will be fun! I hope you still get mana out of it. We're gathering over there - " she points at Vernon - "in about ten minutes, once I get our numbers to ten. We're at eight now."

"Great," he says, and makes a note of Veron's face, and scoots off to let her keep looking. 

Zeke approaches Julia with Rebecca in tow.

”Hey. You look like you’re doing a thingy, do you need help with the thingy?”

"It's nice to meet you, I'm Rebecca," chirps Rebecca.

Of course Zeke found a hopeless girl in ten minutes flat. "Hi Rebecca! Yeah, we're going to make a run down to the senior dorms to pick over what the graduating kids left behind. I badly need to decorate my room. - seems like you might want yours a little snazzier, too?"

"I could probably use some stuff! Especially if they have clothes."

"I already promised another kid the pick of whatever New York doesn't want but if Zeke wants presents for you that's kosher since he's New York, and ahead of them in line. Are you both in, or do you want me to keep an eye on her for you, Zeke-"

“I’m coming too. When are we going?”

"As soon as I got ten, which I now have - well, I have to tell Silas and Orion that they've been drafted." Silas is New York's errand-runner and Orion is absolutely not going to turn down a chance to go down to the lowest level of the school where more mals are. "I'll do that now. I told people to gather thereabouts."

“Cool!”

And Julia tells Silas that they're going on a supply run and then goes looking for Orion. Where has he got to.

Sort of standing around. Someone helpfully told him where a mal was, and then he set it on fire, and now he has nothing to do. "Hi. Julia." He has to mentally pull up the flashcard in his head for that.

"Hey, genius. I got a bunch of people together to go down to the senior dorms and pick up the stuff that the graduates left. But it's the lowest level, you know, so there might be a lot of mals, do you want to come along and protect us?"

"You think there'll be many today? I mean, sure, I just don't know that we're going to find anything."

"Yeah, we might not, but if there are any anywhere, senior level's where they'd be at, right, and a bunch of yummy freshmen tromping around are what'd draw them out. If there's nothing I'll make it up to you. We're this way!" and she points towards her assembling group.

Orion comes along agreeably.

Then Julia will run around trying to herd Vernon and Karen into line. She finds Vernon first. "I've got ten of us now! You ready to go?"

Vernon has been ready to go since basically he agreed to this whole vaguely stupid affair that he might nonetheless get something more directly useful than intangible goodwill and confusing nice people out of. He has been doing a mind numbing mix of checking for threatening mals and doing math problems to pass the time. He has any mana now, which is better than the none he had before. ... He put it in the crystal Edmund gave him, because at least it doesn't leak.

"Yep!" he says, not quite brightly, because it's Scholomance and that's creepy even for a freshman, but, you know. Like a good, attentive minion, who definitely doesn't have any of his own opinions, no sir.

And Julia wanders off again trying to find Karen, who was last seen trying to memorize the blueprints.

She's still over by the blueprints; she has most of a rough copy of them in her notebook, and is diligently trying to finish the job right now.

"Hey! We're about ready to go get the supplies to redecorate my dorm room. You can finish that at dinner, the blueprints are everywhere."

"Oh, okay! Hello again. You don't think we'll miss anything in here if we leave now?" The cafeteria sure does look like it's a site of, uh, a lot of things that one might miss, but she is interested in seeing this desk and bookshelf she's been promised, even if she has no idea how she's going to fit them in her room yet even if they are better than hers, or whether that'll even be physically possible. 

"I mean, there's lots going on, but I bet any kid who speaks English would love to trade you. We're going down to the senior dorms, so you'll get a sense of the layout of the place, and you'll get to meet half of New York and also what's left of Chicago and also some other people I thought were cool."

"Oh I wanna go! Just double checking that there's not going to be an orientation in five minutes, or something."

She puts her notebook away and follows agreeably.