Leander, meanwhile, is doing everything he can to ignore his feelings. At some point he's going to have to go back to his room and take apart his desk so nothing can hide in it, and also write down a serious prioritized list of everything Karen and similar need to know, but right now he really, really doesn't want to leave the cafeteria.  This is at least in part motivated reasoning because he hasn't given up on the idea that if he sticks around the cafeteria he might be able to find out what happened to Gaheriet but it's whatever, it's fine, he told himself he wasn't dealing with feelings right now and that means he gets to not deal with his feelings right now.

"Hi," he says, to someone who doesn't look like they're busy with anything in particular. "My name's Leander Marsh, yours?" 

"Val Reed."

American accent. Leander can't really tell most American accents apart, though. "I'm from Scotland, you?"

Oh, fuck. "I've moved around a lot - came from Seattle, originally, but I haven't been there in a while, I came here from a little town in Iowa that nobody's heard of."

Leander has no idea where Iowa is but Val's American and not from an enclave and being evasive which, given everything, is at least a fairly strong hint.

However it also means that Leander is not going to be the one to make him say it out loud. "Huh, cool. What languages do people usually learn in the states, I've never been, in the UK it's all French but that's because we've got France right there."

Oh, score, someone who speaks French. Remains to be seen if he can trade for anything but he really urgently needs to become fluent in French and Latin. "Spanish! Especially closer to Mexico. At least, I've got that one, and it's easy to find teachers for, but I can't say I've surveyed the other Americans to ask what they've got."

"Oh, cool, Spanish is one of mine, I have a sort of absurd number and I'm thinking about doing language tutoring if you want to practice or trade spells or swap homework help or similar." 

"I'll keep that in mind. What are you after in exchange?"

"The arrangement I made with one of the mundane-borns was that I taught her Spanish and Latin and in exchange I got to learn the spells she got in those languages, subject to renegotiation depending on how things wound up working out, I'd be down to expand that offer to other people. Homework help I think is usually tit-for-tat?" 

If Val is in fact wizard-born that was an insult. Let's hope he isn't. 

"...A lot of people this year didn't have much reason not to start a new language at thirteen, huh. Guess you've got it made, offering tutoring."

"Well, assuming nobody else undercuts me, but I have the advantage of knowing a ridiculous number of them and also the advantage of really liking linguistics and genuinely wanting to spend my spare time on it. And it's not like people don't pick up new ones while they're in as things come up, so hopefully it's a gig that'll last." 

(Which reminds him he needs to start working on... Nahuatl and Njerep, Julia said?)

They do? If they do then what's so dangerous about coming in with a slight head start on it? That's a way this and what Jian said don't fit together. Interesting.

"Does really liking and wanting to spend time on things... matter, in here?"

Shrug. "Hating things doesn't let you avoid them or anything but I've never had a subject where enthusiasm didn't help. And for tutoring it just straightforwardly does matter, have you ever had a teacher who hated their subject and wanted class to be over so they could stop thinking about it, it's the worst." 

"That's when you learn what else they have on their mind. It's very educational."

"This is true! But I still think if you want to learn something specific you're usually better off getting your teaching from someone who doesn't hate it."

"I guess that's fair. Hmm." Is it safe to admit he needs language tutoring now? It probably isn't but hiding it might look even worse. "I might want to pick up Latin."

Latin you'd almost certainly know, if you were wizard-born in the West, especially if you already had a romance language. It's not a 100% thing but combined with the weird evasiveness and the only mentioning one other language he's pretty sure at this point.

"Latin I can do you. It might make the most sense for you and Karen to learn that one together, I'm planning on figuring out scheduling at lunch tomorrow once we know what our class schedules will look like?"

"Haven't met her yet, I don't think, but sure."

"She's the American mundane-born I've already made this deal with. I think she went off with a group to do something, I don't see her right now."

"Ah, one of the ones that's going to die. Not that everyone else isn't, I guess."

"...so I'm not a hundred percent sure you're mundane-born, and if you're not I'm sorry, but if you are-- I've been trying not to make you say it out loud since you clearly don't want to but I will warn you that you're stretching the limits of plausible deniability hard and not mentioning something is one thing but outright lying is another." 

What even was it this time, or do they say this to everyone, or is there even such a thing as a person who isn't mundane-born - or is it that he was implying too hard that he's not, and crossed the mysterious fuzzy boundary from manipulation everyone does all the time to manipulation that is identical in all ways except that people object to it? If he had any non-talking-to-people information sources he could guess whether he should be calling this guy's bluff or tearfully coming clean or...

He doesn't know enough here so it'll have to be closer to the latter. But not an admission of wrongdoing, not backing down enough to suggest he'd apologize or anything - that rules out the strategy he used with the Chinese kids, admitting it is basically admitting some kind of wrongdoing at this point - and, shit, he's hesitated for multiple seconds, he needs to just say something.

"My dad had magic and I have fought and killed mals before and was literally running from one when I got picked up," he says softy. "But. You're not completely off base." And now if he's very lucky Leander will fill in the rest of this story for him.

"Ah."

This might be a bad idea. In fact this is probably a bad idea.

...whatever. He's not actually good enough at ignoring people who need help for his survival strategy to be based on it, today has proven his father right about that extremely thoroughly.

"For what it's worth, that was genuinely a warning about other people, I'm not offended and wouldn't have been even if I were completely right, it's a totally reasonable thing to want to hide and you don't actually know me at all," he says, just as soft. "And it's-- you're American and not from an enclave and being kind of oddly evasive and you don't have Latin and any of those on their own wouldn't have meant anything but all together it seemed like a pretty good guess."

Wow. Well, that didn't feed him a revised backstory at all, but at least this isn't a complete disaster.

"Yeah. I don't even know what not being oddly evasive looks like hereabouts, honestly. - Want anything for an entire etiquette lesson?"

"We can work out what kind of favor it's worth at some point, it's not like we're not going to talk to each other ever again. --and the subtext there is that I have liked you so far and am going on the assumption that we're going to have a working relationship going forward."

At least as long as they both survive. Please shut up, brain.

"So -- most of the time people aren't going to object to you not telling them your secrets, nobody spills everything all the time it'd be an enormous liability, but people do get fairly annoyed if they think you're being deliberately deceptive, because that impacts their ability to trust you as an ally? And saying 'ah, one of the ones who's going to die' gets... beyond the point where you're just not mentioning, if the thing you're implying with it is false."

"...I mean. I'm also going to die but I'm not going to die of somehow making it to age fourteen with no experience fighting monsters and long grabbable hair. If you seriously think you're not that seems... surprising." Is it going to turn out that this place has a ninety percent survival rate and he's totally read the room wrong. Is that what his luck is like today.

"Oh, I'm super going to die, implying you're going to die isn't the thing, although it's also not a great idea because you want to project a little more confidence than is warranted and you don't want people to think you're not even trying. It's the - if you say 'oh, the ones who are going to die,' what that is doing is implying very heavily that you are not a part of the category being discussed, which is deceptive if in fact you are a part of that category, which at the time I was pretty sure you were." 

"Hm. Okay. That only for things that affect how valuable an ally you are?"

"...no, in general people will be bothered by it if they think they're being deceived, even about things that don't really matter, because if you're deceiving them about things that don't matter that tells them about your willingness to deceive them about things that do." 

Okay, that makes it substantially more likely Leander is just trying to play him for a sucker.

Admittedly the part where everyone here agrees that people get attacked by monsters all the time is suggestive of their words being connected to reality in a way otherwise limited to weather forecasts and math homework.

He needs to discreetly feel out whether magic parents tell their children about Santa Claus without admitting that his lied to him in case that's an important tell. How the fuck does he do that safely.

"Oh. Yeah, because you're getting worrying amounts of practice in, I guess."

......that isn't wrong exactly but it's a very I-guess-dot-jpeg sort of not wrong. 

"Uh. So, part of it is that, but mostly it's that in the Scholomance there isn't... really... any such thing as a low-stakes thing to lie about? If someone trusts you, and they're modeling the world wrong because you told them an untrue thing on purpose and they believed you, that has a substantial chance of getting them killed no matter what the thing they're wrong about is."

"I intend to be as honest as a meteorologist with a PhD in math." Possibly starting after he figures out how to even do that but.

Blink blink. "Is that a thing people say where you're from, that's great." 

"It's. Well." Right, the right answer depends on whether he has ever heard anyone else say it. He has to stop to think about that for a second. "I don't really know the answer to that? Because I'm from a lot of places and they have different people." Ugh this is so awkward.

"--oh, sorry, I meant, is that a regionalism slash common idiom, not, is it a thing any person has ever said."

"I don't think it's common?"

"Fair enough. Still great, though." 

"Thank you. Say, how do you square being honest with overselling your chances of survival, anyway?"

...god Leander is so fucking doomed. 

"Empirically when I want to have an ongoing relationship with someone I go all the way for honesty and abandon the confidence. I would not recommend this strategy because it is probably going to cost me an alliance and get me killed but I don't have a better one in my pocket or anything." 

Oh, he thinks he gets what Leander's up to with all his talk of honesty, now. He's making people think he's trustworthy. Cool.

"I think maybe the better strategy is to actually not be going to die but. Well. I'm trying."

"Well, yes, if you can pull it off that is the way to go."

"Really, if making alliances keeps you alive, is it dishonest to convince people you're going to live so they ally with you?"

"I-- have no idea. Suspect it depends on implementation details." 

"Fair enough, I guess."

(Is this just what talking to people is going to be like from now on? Deeply awkwardly trying to cross inferential gaps while having no idea what if any common assumptions he can rely on them both having? Probably not, right???)

"So one last thing, can you point me in the general..." direction of the bathrooms, he was going to say, and now instead he's coming to the horrifying realization that being female is strategically relevant. Fuck. He can totally say it. Totally. Eventually. Any minute now.

"If you're looking for directions to somewhere we should go together, actually, and maybe get someone else too since neither of us have any mana after induction, it's not a good idea to go off places alone." 

"Oh, huh, that must be why it's so much safer here. All the teamwork. Do you know, I have literally never had someone offer me anything like that before." It's like fucking Girl Scouts, actually, but his mouth is on autopilot saying things that aren't horrifying.

"You know, I've only ever heard the explanation that we're in the middle of the Void and the school is specifically designed to be hard for mals to get into, but that could very well be part of it too."

"Yeah. Um. - Are the bathrooms here gendered or can pretty much any group bodyguard each other."

"They're gendered, I... don't know how theoretical that is and if you're nonbinary or something probably nobody will object to you just picking one?" 

"Do you mean intersex or are you seriously suggesting there are trans people here?"

"...I mean I have no reason to believe there wouldn't be?" 

"What about the thing where you were just telling me everyone tells the truth to their allies about all their combat-relevant traits? Or is your expected adult height and muscle mass somehow not relevant."

...

"....so, one, nobody is allies yet it's the first day, people have working relationships at best unless you're in an enclave. Two, while those things are not irrelevant, you.... are aware that there exist tall muscular cis women and short skinny cis men, and this is not, like, unobservable in people, right?"

"I guess." Nothing about Leander makes any sense at all. "Well, I'm not nonbinary. So, bathroom run?"

"Bathroom run!"

He fills up his water jug so he'll have water later, does his very level best to stop thinking about all of the things he told himself he wasn't going to think about, keeps an eye out for mals in crevices, does manage to work up some mana carrying a giant full water jug back, and wonders if every time he meets a new person it's going to be as confusing as this.