It's not a big enclave, if she graduates she'll aim higher, but it is an enclave, so he's ahead of her. And he looks both well-equipped and serious. She nods at him. "Surabaya. What do you plan to study?"

"Alchemy. Not sure what my specific affinity is, I feel like I'm pretty good at a lot of different corners and I'm not sure which one of those will pan out the best, but definitely alchemy. You?"

It costs - tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands, to get a diviner to look your kid over and tell you their exact affinity. Maybe Lagos can't afford that; maybe it was inconclusive, which does happen; maybe he's lying. "Artificing; mine is weapons."

"Oh cool, that sounds useful in here. Congrats. I'm looking for people to add to a supply run before the closet's totally picked over, you want in? So far I've got me, the other kid from Lagos, some kids from Ethiopia, and a guy from Dubai who does poisons." Probably he should have stretched that out a little more but like, weapons, he would be into some weapons. And it's a quest to get paper, it doesn't make them best friends or anything.

"Who's the other kid from Lagos? Are there any older Lagos kids who can cover us, I know it's the first day but also it's the first day and we haven't got much mana yet."

"Yeah, I've got a couple upperclassmen on board already. I don't want to go anywhere I don't need to with just freshmen until I've got some mana back. The other kid from Lagos is named Owoye, he's - " he scans the room and points. "The big one over there, doesn't quite look like a freshman but he is."

"Then I'm in, sure." Is there a polite way to observe that none of those are white people and ask if he's making a political point, Annisa still hasn't ruled out going by Annie and mostly hanging out with the Americans if they'll have her. "Do you know the Ethiopian folks well?"

"Yeah. Well, mostly the freshmen and sophomores, but we've talked before today. Neither of us has that many spots, so we're supposed to stick together like a single enclave once we get inside. I am told it sort of works. Trying to branch out some now, though."

"Indonesia sent ten kids this year but most of them are doing coursework in Mandarin. I talked to an extremely bizarre British enclaver and that's it, so far."

"Oh, that's rough. Yeah, we try to know everyone who's coming in from our corner of the world, just because nobody else is gonna look after them. I'll probably meet a bunch of Americans later, I'm gonna be taking plenty of classes in English and they're everywhere, but maybe after I have any obvious interesting traits and won't be 'that African kid who keeps trying to talk to us for no good reason', you know?"

America does have NASA and SpaceX and almost everyone else who does any cool space stuff, so he's probably gonna have to get over himself at some point, but he'll look like an airhead if he tries starting conversations about future wizard moon bases on the very first day.

That sounds halfway to a political opinion and Annisa hasn't got any of those. "They seem very distracted right now," she says instead, "what with the destroyed enclave."

" - oh shit, I didn't hear about that. Which one?"

"Chicago. Which is one of the big ones, if not one of the rich ones; there are like a dozen unprepared kids from all over America wandering around. One of them was in pajamas." She initially assumed this was also what was up with the naked girl but apparently the naked girl just weighed 70 kilos even and knew exactly what she was doing.

"I guess that explains the number of people who look really thrown off by just being here. I was wondering what was up with that. I guess it must have been right before induction?"

Annisa has mostly only been paying attention to them so as to write off everyone trying to help them as idiots. It seems like the kind of thing you shouldn't say, though. "Must have. I heard it from a Seoul junior I had a letter for, you might hear more closer to the source."

"Makes sense. Damn, that's got to have been deliberate."

Why would you blow up Chicago, America has way more than its fair share of spots but it's not like you get deserving kids in by killing a bunch of them in the wrong part of the world right before induction, that'll just hit kids who don't know anything - unless it wasn't about this year, Chicago must have had more kids coming in the next and the next and the next, and maybe those slots will at least get sold off, but if there is reason to believe that some specific enclave did it that's gonna be a horrible mess for them -

Ugh. Either way, he feels like he should probably get over himself sooner rather than later, if the Americans are gonna be suspecting that anyone with complicated feelings about them might be affiliated with whoever just destroyed one of their biggest enclaves, fuck.

"I hope they have some idea who did it. Ugh."

"There's not really any obvious beneficiary. The replacement kids still aren't gonna stand a chance, if you had the resources to take down Chicago you'd have the resources to get someone in anyway, and the rest of us aren't even that much better off for the easy pickings from all over America. But probably they'll figure it out, on the outside, and we'll know in a year." Shrug. "I figure it's better to approach enclavers from a position of strength anyway." Oops, technically he's an enclaver, and clarifying that she means the enclaves with something to offer her would just be rude. 

He doesn't really entirely understand how that last sentence is even related to the others, so he's going to ignore it. "Yeah, it seems like a weird thing for another enclave to do. Just hoping the Americans aren't going to spend the year looking at everyone else like their parents might have just murdered hundreds of their people. Anyway, thanks for the tip. You wanna go get supplies now? I feel like we should probably start down in enough time that we're not late for dinner when we get back."

"Yeah, sounds good."