"Yeah, I am vaguely planning to catch a bunch and do experiments on them and hope they generalize to worse mals. Why do you ask?"

"What kind of experiments? I might be interested in buying the dead ones off you if they're not too contaminated, protein is kinda the bottleneck on producing spider silk." She waves a hand in the general direction of her familiar, who is currently quivering above her right ear. 

"They will probably be contaminated. You know those ant traps where the ants don't die right away but they bring the poison back to the queen and kill the whole colony? Though I guess I might have a control group."

"Ah. Hm. Yeah, I dunno how well that'll work, but it's still worth thinking about if you try poisoning them with anything that isn't harmful to spiders." 

"We'll see, this is early planning stages yet. I can take down your room number, if you want, and bring you dead relatively-unpoisoned agglos or excess baby ones."

"Cool. I'm in 630B. My brother," gesture, "is an artificer with a thread affinity, so he can do some cool stuff with it. That's a really neat idea about ant poison. I'm Lucy and this is Wilbur."

"Hello."

"Hello." She pens the number (630B Lucy grubs) on her arm. "I'm Bella."

"What track are you thinking? I'm languages."

"Creative writing. My affinity's metamagic though, so I'll probably generalize a little."

"--Oh, nice. I haven't managed to figure out my affinity yet but I speak twenty-three languages."

"Jesus! Well?"

Giggle. "Yep, Mum couldn't find a wizard who met her husband standards so she married a mundane who spoke fourteen languages and they spoke all of them at us at home, all the time, sometimes I'd get confused in public and ask someone for directions in Gaelic. I've already found a couple people here who weren't expecting any overlap on obscure ones that I have." 

"I haven't got anything obscure, though I figure I'll have to add at least one or two while I'm enrolled and I would consider suggestions."

"Basque and Marathi will as far as I know get you trades with all of me and one girl who's definitely a maleficer and one girl who has maleficer vibes but she says she's strict mana and I believe her, and maybe some of Weird Vibes Girl's distant cousins, so probably not that. What do you already have?"

"English French Spanish and tolerable Chinese. Why do you believe her? Maleficers claiming to be strict mana do not burst into flame."

"Several reasons, partly there was no reason to go farther than 'not a maleficer,' in her claim, partly that she was very into responding to things sarcastically and could easily have done that, partly that I wasn't actually outright saying it and she could easily have let the hint slide, partly that she didn't have any weird marks and she wasn't weirdly pretty."

"Huh. Okay. Good to have intel, I suppose."

"Do you have any preliminary ideas for mal poison survivable enough to make it up the food chain?"

"Possibly something in the heavy metals genre that concentrates as it goes up, like in fish, possibly something that is mostly neurotoxic and will hinder if not kill dumb ones and leave the stupid little ones functional enough to go get eaten..."

"Makes sense...might make sense to dissect some agglos to get a better idea of what organ systems they have to mess with."

"Yeah, though I expect that to vary enormously between types and agglos are a major outlier."

"Yeah. But they're, you know, a thing, and if you can send some poisoned agglos off to get nibbled by chayenas that's better than nothing."

"That's the idea! I could carry a bunch of them around in a bag and throw them at things while running away."

Snort. "Probably better to focus more on the running-away part."

"Yeah. I suppose Orion could throw them at anything that was running away from him."

"There is that. --Actually throwing the agglos might not be a bad idea if you were confident they'd eat the agglos, same logic as some students'll push their classmates."

"Yeah, but the action of grabbing one would slow me down. I guess I'll have to see what the attack patterns here are if I get to the point of having poisoned agglos to toss."

"We'll see what happens! Throw agglos if and only if it seems like a good idea. --I wonder if malia is poison for mals, it'd be a little odd but mana is the thing they're eating us for, right, our flesh is a bonus if anything, and malia's bad mana, and you hear that maleficers almost always survive--"

"Huh. If you find any to sell spiders to - I'm guessing on that one - who seem minimally murdery maybe I will get them to put a bit in some scraps for my agglos. Or I could hit up the Pisa kids, I guess."

"Do you know what the Pisa kids look like? Probably they have plenty of their own bugs but it couldn't hurt to offer. Darwin's Bark Spiders are useful for more than just malia anyway, their silk is the strongest mundane organic material in the world and making them familiars doesn't hurt their use in artificing one bit."

"I don't know them personally. If I don't encounter them organically I might ask Suze, she's a sophomore from New Orleans."

"Are you New Orleans?"

"Yeah - it's like at all complicated but rounds to yeah."

"Enclaves are useful enough for complicated to be worth it," she shrugs. 

"They've been very nice to me. Though it's small enough I don't have any yearmates, and I'm not authorized to hand out a slot, so."

"So you won't get any minions who think they can cozy up to a bigger enclave, that still leaves plenty."

"I mean, if I desperately needed someone specific I could offer to insist to my aunt that they should have my slot. I don't want kids and I won't be an hors d'ouevre any more on the outside. But it wouldn't be a guarantee. I can recommend people for interviews, Evelyn promised she'd interview anyone I promoted to her attention, but that's a very flimsy offer. We'll see how it shakes out, I guess."

"Lots of kids won't get any better offers than that," she predicts grimly. "I don't know that the other thing would work, it--doesn't sound like the kind of thing people follow through on."

"I really really don't want kids! I don't know why any wizards have them and yet here we are! My mother tells me I was a surprise, but still."

"Mum decided she was willing to risk it once--having twins was a surprise--but she spent several years before that and then the next fourteen years working her ass off to give us every advantage she could, like, we had enough mana on us for another kilo of weight allowance working her ass off."

"You seem very nice and I am glad to make your acquaintance but did she consider visiting an orphanage!"

"You know, I suspect she literally did not. ...Everyone's got blind spots."

"I guess. I will take out an ad in the journal of maleficaria studies or something. Public service announcement, orphanages exist and the children in them have normal life expectancies."

"Well, even if I die tomorrow I don't regret existing, but yeah, that is an excellent idea."

"Thank you."

"Perhaps if we get out we can point it out to her and then acquire the little siblings we never expected to have. Somehow I feel kinda pessimistic about it catching on in general though."

"Yeah, probably. But if there were even just slightly less competition for slots..."

"It wouldn't be nothing. It probably wouldn't be a good thing if everybody decided to stop having kids, anyway, you know how magic is, I bet we'd get a boom of doomed muggleborns in response."

"Yeah, I don't think we should coordinate to drive ourselves extinct even if that were realistic, but on the margin."

"On the margin, yeah, definitely." Sigh. "I was going to say something about the safety levels of enclaves versus independents but I assume you've heard about Chicago by now."

"Yeah, poor Chicago. I guess in a year they'll probably have some idea what the fuck. I hope the gates are smart enough that any Chicagoans who graduated this morning land in the city and not in the void."

"...Well that's a question I doubt anyone's had reason to consider before."

"I was speculating before that they could all be in fact fine, and just unanchored in the void. They could magic up their food and be okay for generations. So I suppose it would be all right if their kids went home where they expected in that case."

"I have no idea if somebody'd have noticed Chicago was gone if it was before graduation. They'd stop being fine eventually, I assume, like...I mean, Chicago's not a small enclave, but it wasn't going to send much more than a dozen students this year I think, that doesn't scream to me 'sustainable gene pool' but then what do I know."

"I mean, losing half your kids to genetic defects is arguably more humane than getting to know them all as individuals and then losing them to monster attacks."

"Yeah, definitely, I just mean it seems like they'd probably die out before they could evolve away all the birth defects. Which is, you know, better than some of the possible outcomes of being dropped off into the void."

"We will probably never know how they fare. Alas."

"It's not like we can't ever get things from the Void...it should be possible in theory, although I suppose it might require more cooperation between people who know critical bits but live in different enclaves to ever be practical."

"...I guess that might be an interesting project. Investigate the feasibility of void-ships."

"I should write it down somewhere someone else'll find it if we don't make it. Just in case." 

"Send your mother a letter out with a few graduating seniors, maybe. I'm sure some of those will want baby spiders for last-minute malia."

"Good thought. I'll still scribble it in the margins of a spell I'm copying down or something, just to be safe."

"Won't hurt."

"I wonder if the religious kids think this is all," she waves a hand around as though to encompass not only the Scholomance but all of wizard society, "going to get better someday." 

"It has been more than forty years in this here desert, but I try not to underestimate the logical creativity of religious people."

"I'd like," I need, "to think things can get better. I just don't particularly have any patience for nebulous beings who 'work in mysterious ways' to get around to it."

"Well, I hope you're right."

"We'll see what happens. Good luck with acquiring useful minions."

"Thanks. I'll see you around." And that seems to be that.