Here's a boy who looks just as reluctant to attempt socializing in this context as she feels!  He's going to try anyway.  "Hey."

"Hey. I'm Bella. New Orleans, creative writing."

"Murray, indie from semi-ruralish Nova Scotia, alchemy."

"Cool. I've never been to Canada but one hears good things."

"It's as fine as anywhere, I guess.  I've mostly heard about New Orleans in the context of y'know, Mardi Gras, partytown, that sort of thing.  No idea what it's like to actually live there."

"Mardi Gras is fairly big but only once a year. The food's good, the weather isn't, the mosquitoes are worse than some smaller mals."

"Yikes.  We've got black flies but I wouldn't say nearly as bad as that."

"There's more of them, half the year, and they'll come straight for you even if you're in a crowd of mundies. They can't even keep them out of the enclave sometimes. But it's kind of a petty complaint, at least where they don't lay you out with West Nile in the process, I know I've had it very nice."

"Sure.  If this was a different situation I'd ask what your life plans were but.  Seems maybe a touch ambitious."

"I'm not dead yet, I can have life plans. It would just be premature to make them very long-term. I want to disrupt the mal ecology."

"You don't say!  Got any plans proper or just a dream in your step and a bounce in your heart?"

"I need to learn more about it first. I mean, it seems really obvious to me that if you want to get rid of something you have a few options and those are likely to look similar at the high level of granularity in deer or ants or magical beasties, but as far as I know no one tries giving mals birth control or poisoning them, why not? Would it not work? I might do horrible things to agglos for a while and try to figure it out."

"Exciting.  I have a similar ambition, although very much in the dreaming and bouncing stage."

"Well, if you catch agglos and don't have a plan for 'em, I'll take them."

"Yeah, alright."

"Anything specific in your dreaming and bouncing?"

"I don't want to get too specific yet and cut off useful avenues with preconceptions.  But: lots of people have spent their lives improving the general situation, and I hardly think they should've skipped out on building this place and whatnot but instead I'd like to find a way to actually get at the root of the problem.  Disrupting ecosystems does look really promising."

"I wonder if Chicago are still alive. They probably didn't do it on purpose, but someone could, just toss their whole enclave out into the void like a generation ship. Wait until someone brilliant enough to make it safe to come home is born."

"Now there's a thought.  I wouldn't think they were self-sustaining but then I'd not have heard if they'd made themself so, would I."

"It'd cost a lot of mana, but the stuff we're about to enjoy for breakfast lunch and dinner as long as we're in here isn't exactly cooked by five star chefs, and they would be able to cut down enormously on defensive and offensive mana expenditures. I do think we'd have heard about it if someone tried it in the last couple hundred years but maybe there is an ancient offshoot of humanity from Tibet still floating around."

" - Huh.  Uh, my affinity's plants, I'm not sure whether I can leverage that into something good for poisoning mals particularly but maybe keep an eye out."

"That is a rough one to have in here, I wish you luck."

"Thanks.  What's yours?"

"Metamagic."

"Ooh.  How's that manifest?"