Orion doesn't really want to run but Chloe insists so he goes with her. He checks his whole room but there's nothing there, so he gets in bed and tosses and turns a little and goes to sleep.

Caio has gotten a bit turned around and has to beg a junior for directions but he makes it. He has not disassembled the desk yet. He settles for pulling the drawers out and setting them all over the floor, standing on end so they'll fall over if anything clumsy nudges them.

He sleeps... poorly.

Bella has been in her room since not that long after dinner, taking her desk apart with one of her tactical hair clips (they're very small, she has three). It's disassembled now, and she's had time to request a book and read a chapter and do some writing in her new notebooks and generally wind down for the night. She's already in bed when the bell rings, and it nearly wakes her up, she was so close to falling asleep. That's going to be very annoying, and it wouldn't be safe to sleep with earplugs, either. She eventually calms down from the racing heart of the bell-related startlement, and drops off.

Julia is not caught out away from her room, because she's been holding court in her room for the last while. Her room is glorious. It has Buddhist inscriptions in gold paint and shiny chrome walls almost so polished you can see your reflection, and an actual mirror and a desk lamp and her beautiful beautiful rug and a small shoe rack by the door for her outdoor shoes. She has changed into her slippers. 

"Well," she says to her rug, "I guess it's bedtime! That was a pretty lovely first day, almost entirely because I met you! Before I met you, I thought it was going to be a terrible first day. This place is depressing. But now I feel full of hope. And not even all that tired, because of the time zone difference, but I should probably ignore that and put down my ward and try to sleep. You'll look out for me, won't you? We don't want any mals in here slithering all over you trying to eat me up."

And she runs her finger along the room's perimeter, murmuring in Latin, and when she's done she does it again, because it's not like she's limited to her own fairly pathetic mana reserves, she's using New York's, and they won't mind a little extra use to make a little extra sure her room is as safe as a freshman can make it. Which isn't very, but the school isn't very dangerous yet, either, and she's not going to be the softest target on her floor. 

That was a depressing thought so she does a third run with the ward and then flops on her rug. "I want to go home," she says to it. "I know I'm safer here but at home it was more like - well, you could be hit by a truck, if you cross enough streets you'll eventually be hit by a truck, and here it's like, you're racing around trying to dodge each individual truck which is more stressful? It's worth it, though, to have come here, since otherwise how would I have met you? And I'm not alone, even at night, you're here, and I don't actually know if you're any good against mals but the mals don't know either, and I bet they don't want to find out. Should I do a Buddhist prayer or something? I don't actually know any. 

Buddha, if you're out there listening, please keep me and this rug and the other students in New York and the other students in the Scholomance and all the people in the world safe, but if that's too long a list, start with me and this rug, unless we're already all set, in which case start with Karen and Lissa, they had no idea about all of this and it wouldn't really be fair for them to get eaten on the very first day. And grant me virtues, I don't know what the Buddhist virtues are but I suspect I can use them - uh, patience, no, not that one, absolutely no patience and no fortitude either, grant me...optimism? And diligence? And - what else even is there. Chastity? Don't grant me chastity but like a slow burn romance where he admits he's not actually ready for sex and then we cuddle would be fine. Grant me .....pride, or is that a vice? Grant me the opposite of pride. Wow, I feel like I sound kind of needy here - uh, to be clear, if you grant me things, I will grant you things, I am a New Yorker and I pay my debts and I make people realize what they're capable of and people are safe around me and I can make their lives nice, and safe, and not miserable, and I hope that's what you're about, Buddha, but I will get some books from the library and learn."

And she kisses her rug, and crawls into bed, and watches her fairy-lights twinkle on, and thinks of and adds on some more prayers to Buddha, and cries a little bit for unclear reasons, and gets herself some water from the water cooler and then has to pee and pees into her void floor which she GUESSES has SOME advantages and then eventually falls asleep, not in her bed but on her rug, with her face a little wet and her makeup running.

No mals trouble her in the night.

He's done painting New York girl's walls well before eleven, but Julian has his own home improvements to take care of. He's got a cabinet with doors, which he manages to work off their hinges – he'll figure out how to turn them into shelves later – and spends a couple hours going at his drawers with a multitool. After a couple hours, he's produced a pile of wood bits he's too tired to do anything about and hopefully nowhere to hide.

He hopes all the banging isn't disturbing the kid in 77A. He hopes he won't actually meet the kid in 77A for a good long time, because it's probably going to mess with him the first time someone he knows dies and he really wants a double. 

His most valuable possession is a blanket enchanted to guarantee restful sleep. It doesn't do anything about the dreams. 

Annisa has a shelf, though it's a bit crooked, and a desk nothing can hide behind, and a pile of wood scrap to maybe improve this situation in the morning;.

And Annie has prospective - not allies, allies are for when you're older, but candidates for people to walk to meals with and people to trade with, people who seem like her, competent and careful and maybe a little in over their heads but - but some of them are going to learn to swim in time, right. Annisa's next to Daria who's good at wards and Shannon who's good at healing and one could imagine they make it through freshman year, watching each others' backs, though it does mean she has mixed feelings about Malak's stealth spell that would, specifically, encourage mals to pass her over and go for a neighbor -

She knows she's probably going to die but she doesn't feel like she's probably going to die? She feels like she's going to do well in her classes and be very careful and be stronger by the time things get bad. She has a month or two. You can build a lot of mana in a month or two.

She's been up since very early and she's utterly exhausted and she can only run her brain in miserable circles for so long.

Lucy feels worse pretty much immediately after parting from Wilbur. 

They did some more networking after dinner, but then they did have to go and disassemble her cabinet and his drawers, working together first in her room and then in his. They'll make something with the stuff later, probably shelves but maybe also something Wilbur can use for crafting. 

She dawdles until just before the bell rings before going back to her room; she's alert all the way and nearly tries to zap one of the walls before she bites her tongue. She doesn't have the mana to spare, yet. 

She is even more alert as she makes her way back to her room. She jams the door shut and locks it and relaxes, fractionally. She misses Wilbur. He didn't say much for most of the day, but he was there and it mattered. And her time zone is wrong and she's not even a little bit sleepy yet. But she has to wake up in time for homeroom tomorrow; it may be relatively safe, the first half of the first semester, but that doesn't mean it's safe to not be all there in class and maybe fuck up her homework and--

She forcefully derails that train of thought. She unpacks her bag enough to scrupulously check each nook and cranny for mal infestation. She rearranges the remains of her cabinet to make sure nothing could hide in the shadows cast by individual pieces of wood. 

She sits on the bed, pulls her knees up to her chest, and thinks morose thoughts for a minute, gazing at the lumber. 

Then she shakes herself, and walks over to her void wall. It's supposed to be disturbing, but it feels...comforting, almost. Probably it's the fact that it's the one direction mals can't come at her from. 

It takes some wrangling, but she manages to jam her bed across the void wall, head and foot pressed against the confining walls of her narrow room. At least she's more tired after doing that. 

She gets into bed, curling up with the blanket. "Goodnight," she whispers, drawing her fingers down the boundary of nothingness, and shuts her eyes. 

By the time night rolls around Leander has gone on a supply run to acquire paper and pencils and sticky notes, taken the drawers out of his desk — hasn't disassembled them, they make perfectly good trays for now and maybe in the morning he'll make shelves out of them instead but for now just having them be trays that sit on his desk uncovered and unenclosed is fine.

He wouldn't call himself phenomenal with wards or anything but he got his room warded. (He really hopes Karen's warding spell is working well enough. She doesn't in fact speak Latin.) He's never been very good at sleeping on a schedule and the anxiety and pent-up feelings he hasn't been dealing with all evening only make things worse; he paces around his room for a few minutes, then gives it up as a bad job and sits down and makes a list.

Death rate. How classes work. How homework works. The languages thing. Graduation. (That one is underlined three times.) Tracks and what they mean. Drawer disassembly. It isn't everything that'll be important, but it's a hell of a lot better than no list at all. He looks at the sticky note for a couple of seconds, and then gets up from the desk and turns out the light and tries again to go to bed.

If he were a different person, he might try praying. He is not in fact a different person.

All evening he told himself he wouldn't deal with his feelings and then he didn't in fact deal with his feelings and that was the right move, there were people who did have breakdowns in public on day one and Leander was not one of them and that's a good thing, but it means that now at night in the dark he has nothing to think of but Gaheriet. He still doesn't know what killed his brother— Astor survived and Engravain died in junior year to something that burrowed into his heart and Noelle died in sophomore year after she picked the wrong fight and he has no idea what killed Gaheriet or when, presumably it was less than a year ago since there wasn't word of his death from the UK graduates last year but there wasn't word of him being alive either and all of this comes out to the fact that Leander has no idea how long it's been that he only had one living brother.

He has a good memory. It's been years since the last time he saw Engravain or Noelle or Gaheriet but he remembers their faces perfectly well. He has photos somewhere in the things he hasn't unpacked, wallet sized, barely a few grams each. But he doesn't remember Engravain's voice and he's pretty sure his memory of Noelle's is wrong and it's only a matter of time before the memory of Gaheriet's fades too.

He wonders, vaguely, staring into the void wall and doing his best to cry quietly, whether their parents will even tell any younger children they have about the siblings who didn't make it out.

Karen has a lot of work to do.

She has two very different desks, two very different shelves, a bed, a mostly empty backpack, and her survival pack. First thing's first; she paces the perimeter of her room, holding the edges at the bottom and the top of the room in her head, and says her latin ward and does the motion. Hopefully that means she cast it. Then she does the second ward, the one from Z, and that takes a while and she has to go very slowly to make sure that she's saying things the right number of times, but hopefully she does it right and that works, too.

Then she drags Julia's bookshelf - the big one, that sits flush against the floor grate - and drags it over to sit in front of the door, as close together as she can manage. She thinks about whether this is going to be enough, and then drags one of the desks to sit in front of it, to stabilize it and to provide a little more weight if anything really nasty comes by. She is not under the impression that this could keep out, like, a dragon, or anything. It could probably keep out a zombie for a little bit. And it can probably keep out - what, evil rats? Evil centipedes? pretty well. It can't keep out the Blob, but what are you even supposed to do about the Blob. Nobody has said anything about being terrified about the Blob in particular, so hopefully that in particular is not a concern.

Okay. Focus. Not done yet.

She goes through the backpack and the survival kit and lays out all of her stuff on her desk. She has a lot of stuff, honestly, which is sort of good but also sort of complicated because any of it could develop a personality at any time, and she wants to ensure that her stuff is on the same team as her. She gets to the pokemon cards - she totally forgot she had those - and then thinks, what if it's like having a pokemon team? And she's never tried to handle a pokemon team of this size before, but it helps it feel like something she knows how to do, something she's practiced. She lines up her most valuable and distinctive items. Let's see - lit textbook, splash goggles, frog pencil sharpener, mummy keychain (wow, blast from the past), Game Boy, Game Boy charger, Game Boy games, mirror, rosary, elephant figurine, dragon figurine, flashlight radio, phone, swiss army knife, power bank, travel bidet, lighters, mug, saw, sewing kit, wristwatch, camp stove, pillow, playing cards. That's - twenty-five pokemon, okay, way more than she's ever handled before but not on the face of it impossible to maintain relationships with.

"Okay," she says, addressing her little army of totally normal-looking items. "Um, I don't know if any of you guys are alive yet, and if you are I don't know what you need, so just, uh, move, or something, if you want me to know that you need something."

No one moves.

" - okay, I'm gonna just continue with the announcements, then. We are - in a really dangerous place. A really different place. I don't know very much about it, and I expect that neither do any of you, what with the having just got here and the possibly having just come to life. - I'm Karen, I guess I should introduce myself. Karen Tiu. I've been hanging out with most of you for a while, but you weren't alive then, so I'm going to try not to assume that any of you know me very well. I'm - I think my plan is to post a morse code guide somewhere in my room, so everyone can see it if they're capable of seeing things, and go over the letters with you out loud the first time somebody moves to let me know that they need something, and then maybe some of you will be able to find ways of talking to me and telling me what you need, if you're able to learn it. I'm going to try to make sure that everyone who wants to learn can learn it.

"Aside from that - I think things are going to be really hard from now on. And I'm going to try to take care of all of you, but I'm going to need everybody's help to do that, okay? I'm relying on you guys. I'm going to need everybody's help to make it through this year. And, uh, the three years after that, I guess, if I don't get to go home at any point before graduation, it sounds like I probably don't. So - I'm hoping that we can help each other."

The objects continue not moving. She picks them up from their positions as an assembled audience, giving some of them spots on the bookshelf and putting some of them back in their packs, where they're probably used to being with their friends. She stands the mummy keychain up like it's looking at the door, as if it's really capable of staring monsters into submission just by being an extremely shiny plastic mummy.

She puts the textbook and the swiss army knife on the other desk, and positions the desk close enough to the head of her bed that she can hopefully grab one of them immediately if anything does come through. On a whim, she gets her duct tape out and tapes a bunch of her pokemon cards to the space above her bed, like a bunch of tiny posters, and tapes the St. Michael prayer card up next to them. It bears the image of an angel with a sword, crushing the devil beneath his foot.

And then she's done, out of things to do that need doing, and suddenly she's not a game protagonist or a movie character or the most powerful pawn halfway through a game of Rebuild, she's just a kid who has no idea what's going on, and who sucks at Spanish, and who probably isn't going to see her parents again, ever.

"Beowulf was weak when he was a kid," she says, to the room, and wonders if she's talking to herself or to her textbook, which presumably knows Beowulf because it has the entire poem inside it, although now that she's assumed it she's wondering if that's a safe assumption. - whatever. "It's only in one line, after he goes home, but it's in there. Beowulf was weak as a kid. And then he slew Grendel and Grendel's mother and a dragon, on the way out, and he once swam for like seven days straight while holding a sword and fighting sea monsters the entire time. So it's not - it's not, like, modernity-specific optimism, or anything, to believe that any pokemon can be strong if you train it. That even a kid who looks weak can become really powerful, eventually. Some people have always believed that. So - I'm going to believe it, too."

The room is silent. She's staring up at an electabuzz card, but electabuzz doesn't seem to have anything to say, and she doesn't really know how he'd let her know if he did.

Okay. One more person to talk to.

"God, um - I know I haven't been that good at praying, and stuff. Sorry about that. But - um, I really need some help right now? Uh, I'd explain the whole situation but I guess you already know it, so. Uh - please look out for me? And please look out for everyone else here, too. And - help me to do all of my homework, and keep making friends, and hopefully become strong enough to take care of myself and make it through graduation, even if I can't be strong enough to kill a dragon by myself. And thank you for Julia and for Vernon and for Leander and Lysander and for all of the kids who helped carry the bookshelf in here. I - guess that's everything for now, I'm kind of worn out. Uh. Please be with my parents, they've got to be so upset. Or they will be when they notice I'm gone, if they haven't yet. So just - be with them and comfort them and help them be okay."

There. That's everyone.

Her internal clock is really confused, but given her failure at sleeping last night, it's confused in such a way that it actually seems to still think it's night and that this is a perfectly good time to sleep, so in not that long, she drifts off.

She thinks her affinity is metal, which is wicked cool. One of the spells in the old German book that the creepy black wall gave her is for 'repelling malign spirits most foul', and another is for 'removing elements of metal such as shrapnel and projectiles from organic materiel in a nondestructive manner'. That one is just a sort of lengthy chant of 'fruit of the earth and fruit of stone, brothers in refinement but not nature, be separate now as you once were' and it doesn't seem to take hardly any mana even as it jerks out screws into her hand. It's smooth and easy. Is this how you figure out your affinity?

Her furniture's now converted into a few shelves, for safety. There weren't any mals in it. She dashes back out to ask her neighbors if they want disassembly help, and then to the cafeteria after confirming there's enough people in the halls that she feels safe-ish about it (still watching drains and corners and vents carefully, of course), so long as she gets to keep the screws. She gets a few takers, and now has a small bag of slightly rusty metal that will probably be useful for something.

-What does she have, aside from that. A spellbook that she's having trouble getting all the information out of, but can mostly struggle along by reading out loud with. Some stimulants and some antipsychotics. A bit of paper and a pen begged off a neighbor in exchange for a future favor. Her phone, with the important notes from earlier, the simple shield and force spell, copied out, so it should now be safe to disassemble it. The clothes she's wearring. Six rubies, one of which she thinks she's managed to put mana into when she was doing burpees earlier? A water bottle (full), a switchblade (carefully cleaned with her shirt and a bit of water and praised for making her feel safe), a tiny mirror that she looks at her shaved head pityingly with, and a tube of lipstick she's saving to trade off to a senior who seems well off.

Well. She's still breathing, so it could be worse.

Okay, no slacking off. Especially not the first night. After dinner, she takes apart her desk enough to be sure that nothing's hiding inside it. She gets her stuff out where she can see it. She prays.

She's a lot weaker than she's going to need to be by a month in. She's pretty sure that you can do a lot of training up in a month, if you're serious - she looked up suggested training regimens that real people really do - and she ought to get a huge amount of mana from doing something hard that she isn't any good at. But if she's still the slowest kid around when the serious mals get hungry, she's dead, and nothing will save her, so this is the sort of plan that you can't let yourself abandon halfway through.

In the future she's going to try to exercise in the morning, not in the evening, because exercising sort of wakes you up. Tonight, though, she needs more mana to protect herself. She doesn't have a good weapon, so when she's inside her room, her only real option is mana, and she doesn't want to leave that until morning. She has a theory that strength training interferes less with sleep than aerobic exercise, so she's planning to do push-ups, sit-ups, and squats, and she's planning to do them a couple hours before she has to sleep, so that hopefully the waking-up effects wear off before it's time to go to sleep.

Push-ups are ridiculous. They don't look like they should be that hard, you know? But she gets, like, four in, and she sort of hits a wall, like her arms are totally incapable of doing a fifth one. This is moderately planned - it's supposed to feel impossible, that way she'll get more mana for doing it anyway - but she thinks she might have overshot and that it might actually be impossible?

She wrestles with this one push-up for a long time, trying to get back up to the upward position. It's good for mana. It's terrifying, realizing how weak she must be compared to other people, if she can't even make the fifth one happen. Eventually she gets it, although she sort of cheats, doing this weird shift in her shoulders that she's pretty sure is not a part of proper push-up form. Then a different exercise, then a different one, until every major muscle group has systematically been turned to jelly. 

A month in this strategy would probably kill her. She's not going to be able to run very fast tomorrow, even with adrenaline. But she's willing to take that bet on day two, if it means she doesn't have to take it on day thirty. Besides, sleeping on it will help.

She just wants to rest on her bed, when she's done. She doesn't do that. She sits at her desk and takes out the kindle and opens it up to some of the medical reference material she thinks she might need when she's older, even if she can barely wrap her head around it now. She takes out some paper, and she copies. Tries to understand what she's copying, too, partly because that's more mana and partly because she does, actually, need to understand it at some point, if it's worth copying in the first place. It sort of hurts, even if it hurts less than the exercise.

When the curfew bell rings, she turns the device off and puts her basic ward down, noting with satisfaction how much mana she has now. Hopefully that doesn't just make her tastier than the other freshmen. That would be pretty ironic.

She prays again, and she goes to sleep.

She dreams of the testing room, of a handful of faceless French people sizing her up, determining whether she really is so gifted that it is worth sending her to school just for the chance to capture the value she will be capable of producing if she ever comes out. They want to hear her solve trigonometry problems, and write her languages, and cast her spells. They want to see her weave her magic into something in front of them, so they know she's not cheating, so they know that it really was her and not her mother who made the mending-shirts. You'll already have an enclave coming out, says her mother, and neither of them says that they both know she will not be a person to them, that they are only not using the word 'slave' because it seems very dramatic, doesn't it, in this modern world of theirs.

In the dream she realizes that it is a dream, realizes that this test is over, that the real test has begun, the one that is very directly a matter of life and death. So she ignores the trigonometry problems, which weren't making any sense in the dream anyway, and instead, she thinks about how she will spend her time tomorrow.

Inventory
1 tiny notebook with pencil
1 composition spellbook, English and French (I'll tell her to expect you. She likes star motifs and being sung to. I think she'd be okay with being traded to a creative writing student.)
1 blue silk scarf with star pattern (wrapped around spellbook)
1 blue fountain pen (the spellbook likes it)
2 boxes of 12 ink cartridges each, for fountain pen
1 compass that points to the most dangerous thing in the room (unreliable, drifts clockwise)
1 Sharpie marker, glittery silver
12 sheets of gold leaf
12 sheets of silver leaf
1 small craft knife
1 box of 6 spare blades for craft knife
1 crochet hook
2 knitting needles
3 dark blue shirts with star patterns
1 pair dark blue jeans
4 pairs plain black underpants
6 pairs socks, 3 dark blue, 3 black
1 pair black Converse shoes
1 dark blue backpack with star pattern

It doesn't take him till curfew to get to his room; he goes straight there from dinner and checks that he's alone in there. There are drawers; he just takes them by the handles and opens them - he's never yet seen a mimic and isn't worried about that - and when he doesn't see anything immediately alarming inside he shuts the drawers and gets down on his hands and knees to check for a monster under his bed. There's some kind of hermit crab thing that he can easily chase out, and then the room is probably empty, so he shuts the door after the crab thing and wards the place. Supposedly. If Jian was being honest with him about the spells.

He considers putting his things into the desk drawers but after being teleported with just the stuff in his pockets he finds himself incredibly reluctant to take anything out of them. He has to lie on his back, to avoid being poked by or crushing all his stuff. Without a change of clothes he's pretty sure you're not supposed to lie under the blankets, but on top seems fine. Probably. He hopes. With extreme reluctance, he takes his shoes off, and that's all, and lies down for the first time in an entire day.

- The bell wakes him. At first he thinks it might be morning but he's much too tired for that. Still, now he's awake, and has slept at all in the last day. He does another cursory scan of his room, only mostly trusting his exhausted zombie self from after dinner to have noticed anything. Although at this point if he's still alive then the room is probably empty and will just - stay that way, probably - if the ward holds. Right? Frankly, that's the safest he's ever been and he's already in love with this place.

It's that thought, of all things, that drives it home to him that he's not going home tomorrow. And that's - that's good. That's going to keep him alive. That's also going to put an end to all the fights he was having with his parents. And he's going to learn magic, and interact with Leander, and be around people who openly talk about the things that keep happening. This absolutely wonderful and he shouldn't be crying for his parents.

He is, however, crying for his parents. They're not going to know - even if he does make it out he'll show up at age eighteen as a missing person, probably presumed dead, no driver's license, and that's going to be horribly inconvenient but - he's going to show up looking different and there's no reason to expect them to recognize him - and even if he gets out and goes home and tells them all about it, that won't be for four years - he could bribe someone to take a message out, right, but they might die on the way out and he might have to explain that the people they're looking for don't do magic, and anyway they might not believe the messenger. There's nothing he can think of to do about that, and they're probably so worried, and even when he does get out of here and find them they might have moved - they might have died - they might have died by then of something he could have helped with - they might have died thinking he hates them and ran away... He thinks about ways to give someone an address without tipping the whole school off to his secret but actually that's a year in the future and he's not sure he can keep up the act that long, so maybe he'll just be open about it, pay a whole crowd to try, and then they'll know to wait for him...

...When he shows up at age eighteen looking different... he's not sure what kind of different to picture. But given this place's entire vibe he bets they absolutely have steroids available, one of which might be testosterone...

He makes a mental note to see the nurse at some point. Then he rearranges his pockets a bit so he can lie on his side, and goes back to bed.

Lily returns early from the cafeteria, and immediately gets to work disassembling her desk with her multitool, using her struggle with the wooden planks to build mana. She stacks the wood in a corner, largest pieces down, and sits in front of it as an improvised low table and gets out her bracelet kit. 

She checks her wire and her pliers and her wire cutters. Still tame. Good.

She clips a piece of black wire off one of her little spools, and curls the end of it around her rounded pliers into a loop. Then she takes the standing part (carefully eyeballed through long practice) and twists it three times around one of her precious rubies. 

- noise. 

She spins quickly, athame in her right hand, her blasting and shielding bracelets interposed between her and the threat -

- it was just someone stepping heavily in the hallway outside, hurrying back to their room. 

She sweeps the room carefully. Checks all the corners, under the bed, and the ceiling despite the fact it's made out of void. Something could be clinging to a wall, at least. 

Nothing. 

She doesn't relax, but she gets back to her work. A second loop on the other end of the black wire and a snip to remove the excess material (carefully swept into an empty compartment of her beading kit) and she has the first link done. 

One down, eleven to go. She has just enough rubies to make a full bracelet.

It takes her two hours to complete the bracelet itself, and longer to get the overlaid storage enchantment right. She stays up an hour past curfew making sure of the details. She has caffeine pills, she'll cope. 

She has no mana left to ward her room once the enchantment is laid.

She stays up another thirty minutes building mana, lays the best wards she can manage under the circumstances (her warding bracelet a steadying presence on her wrist) and falls asleep, exhausted.

Vernon's exhausted, but not so exhausted that he doesn't make a point of being careful. He coordinates a trip to the bathroom with some other students who he frankly doesn't remember the names or faces of, because he's far too busy eyeing the vents and drains and dark corners and whatnot for stray mals. The only way to make up for being tired is by direct, systemic attention, and it's a shitty patch job at best. The bathroom is used, he has as much water in him as he can comfortably fit, and then he (after coordinating with other students) returns to his room. He wants very much to collapse face first onto the bed and start a brand new day, and forget this one of confusion and terror and extremely dumbly motivated interior decorating work that will definitely leave him sore tomorrow, and the many mundanes who are now at this school and how likely they are to be dead in the next couple of months.

He does not do this, because he's not stupid. He sets his backpack down, with all of the stuff he got from playing interior designer with New York (and he doesn't even want into the New York Enclave, he still thinks Manchester or London is a better bet) and he retrieves his scissors. They come apart into two tiny knives, and he sets about checking over his room for mals. He finds a tiny set of cocoons nestled between his desk and his wall, and he smashes them with his foot against the wall and throws what's left of them out of the void hatch.

"Sorry, guys," he apologizes to his scissors, putting them back together and returning them to his pocket. He thinks he can keep from going bad by acknowledging how it really is quite insulting to be made of knives and then only used for mundane things like 'cutting hair' or 'cutting paper' or the like, and instead also using them to stab things. So they know he appreciates them for what they actually are, not just what they can do for him. "But I'm sure you'll get plenty of chances to be sharp and deadly, and I really do need that, here."

His room made safe, he gets to warding it. After thanking his door for staying nice and locked while he was away. ("Keep up the good work, 'ppreciate it.") Fortunately he has the mana to do this, between wall polishing and math problems and the like. He has two wards, the standard warning if anything comes in, and a sneakier one about being beneath attention. Something that directly stops mals from entering would be better, but also more mana intensive, and he'd rather save those for when it's actually dangerous enough to warrant them. Then, despite how much he desperately wants to go to bed, he takes his desk's drawers out, and then apart. ("We'll get to know each other better in the future," he says to his multitool, "figured putting you to use was the best introduction I could make.")

Then, at long last, he's allowed to sleep. The curfew bell doesn't even wake him, when it rings.

Rebecca keeps a pleasant smile on her face till she's back in her room. Then - she has a little mana, from helping Julia, she can feel it there, but not much. She doesn't have anything to store it in, though, so until she can get something like that, she might as well spend it.

She doesn't actually know a warding spell. She asks for one from the void and spends a while reading it over, humming the notes, pronouncing the words - it's in Latin, but she recognizes most of the words from church music, church music asks God to keep people safe pretty often. The rest she can stare at till she has a good guess from context.

She clasps the book of Latin songs to her chest, and sings it, and feels the mana go out of her, and hopes that's enough. She sleeps in her pajamas and her slippers, shoes and handmedown clothes waiting for her in a pile by the door.

Jean says bonne nuit to the other Parisians, and a couple of the older boys walk him to his door, and they trade around cheek-kisses and remind him to set his wards, which he doesn't need reminding of.

Every single item in his room gets a good-night kiss, and then he sings a little song with all of their names in it, in French and in English, which he's been composing for weeks for this very occasion. He unspools a long gold-and-scarlet thread his sister wove for him, humming with her comforting mana, and wraps it around and around the perimeter of the room in a spiral upwards, tacked gently to the wall, and whispers the Hebrew rhyme that hooks into his new tripwire. Then there's a keep-out verse and an I'm-bigger-than-you song in French, for which he has to tap into the Paris mana store even though they're not very strong spells, and finally a one-sentence not-tasty spell in Iroquois just to be safe. None of it would keep out anything really determined, but it's not meant to; it's meant to give him a shot at sleeping through the night.

After that there's vocal exercises and stretches, to pay back the mana he borrowed and to build up his own; and then he snuggles into the bed, which is more comfortable than he's used to but very lonely, and closes his eyes and imagines beautiful things.

El is exhausted. She has never talked to people that much in her life.

She doesn't have enough mana for a ward, so she does pushups, until she does, until her arms are screaming at her, and then squats, till her legs are screaming too and she has a little extra. She puts the extra in the crystal she's wearing. She does crunches - she doesn't have anywhere to put her feet for situps yet - till her abs are screaming; that goes in the crystal too. She lightly alarms the room so she'll wake up if she needs to try to kill something.

Curfew is... a little bracing, the feeling of the discipline settling in for a place where every dictat matters, where everything is a test and every moment a risk. 

All unpacking really does it establish how little the boons she can bring are - tricks and fantasies she could throw together with what time they had. 

They drew Ecya Ecet Elena- A 'sharp sword of the stars', and held it in her hand. The enchantment was a worthwhile one, but hardly something that fit with the legends that the name came from, despite how humble those were, in a sense. 

It was odd to think that they had even gotten a chance to practice the magic of a language like that - that some linguists dream of a fantastical world could become true, through them. 

At least... 

Eventually.

For now...

It was a long day, and it would be no good to abandon rest so early. 

Her sword went to the side, her skin shifted, the inscriptions of warding forming from little discolorations of skin. It wouldn't be too much, if worse came to worst, but they needed every edge they could get. Besides... Figuring out what worked best here now was as good an idea as any. 

They tucked themselves in beneath the heavy sheets and let themself drift off, the warm heat of the sheets washing away her worries.

Camillo has twenty-five items of clothing. Twenty-five is five times five. It's a multiple of five (bang), and the sum of two perfect squares (squawk) and a perfect power greater than one (zip).

His first aid kit has one hundred and forty items in it. One hundred and forty is ten times fourteen, or two squared times five times seven. That's a multiple of five (bang) and of seven (buzz).

He brought in three pictures: one of his family, one of his friends, one holy card. Three is a prime number (crash) and a Fibonacci number (fibbi) and it's square-free (whizz).

By the time he's finished with his inventory, he has ... not much more mana than he started with, oops. So he pulls out his stupid crochet hook and struggles with the stupid half-finished project he inherited from a Tejano senior until he can ward his room, and then a little bit more so he has a shot at squishing anything that wanders in during the night, and he says his prayers and then he cries himself to sleep.

What this room needs, Mal figures, is a hammock. Nice an' cozy right up by the void ceiling. Nothing's coming at him out of that, and if he sleeps in a hammock, the critters might as well give up: he's got the high ground. It'll make a mighty fine crochet project.

It also needs wards, but he ain't exactly got mana coming out his ears. He sticks to his old stand-by, the fuck-off spell:

Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,
Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,
Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,
Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!

It's in iambic pentameter, and it rhymes, which Mal feels oughta be fancy enough for anybody.

Lissa's already in her room by curfew, having quickly rinsed her hands and face in the sink. She's disassembled her drawers with help and handed over the screws, and after a bit of thinking she drags the disassembled shelf into the center of her room as well, just in case. She stands up on her bed and asks for a spellbook and catches it, reading through several times before doing her best to set up the warding spell it gives her.

She sits on her bed and takes some time to draw and write, sketching her new friends and writing down their names and room numbers so she won't forget, before pulling out the Swiss army knife and easing it open. She does this a few more times, muttering encouragement to try and get it to open smoother. She's not quite sure if it worked, though she does feel more tired after that.

Yawning, she does one last circuit of her room, knife in her hand, and manages to find and stab some weird many-legged thing that almost looks like a weird bug. She falls asleep with the knife closed in her hand, her new spellbook and sketchbook carefully set up on the shelf with a muttered "play nice with each other, okay?"

Z returns to his room.

The desk is sturdy and simple. No drawers. That’s a mercy.

He checks each drawer in his dresser, and then shoves it around to face the wall — better to keep everything closed up until he can actually ward it, he thinks. He lines his belongings up carefully in top of it, and scrawls an inventory on the wall above them in Sharpie.

He wards his room, reciting his spell at the door, and then the four corners, and then the door again. He gives his few precious piercings a half-turn and a good-work, imagining each one pinning his body together, keeping it solid and stable and whole.

Behind one of the posts of his bed, the second time he checks around his room, he finds an egg, about the size of a ping-pong ball, round and soft and papery, and his stomach swoops and then sinks.

He takes it to the middle of his floor, next to the drain, and slits the leathery shell open with his razor. Some acetone-smelling purple fluid spills out, viscous and clinging to itself like the white of a chicken egg, and along with it the curled-up fetal form of some shelled reptile, veiny and thin-skinned, dark eyes empty under semitransparent eyelids.

It takes a minute, staring at it twitching slightly on the ground, thinking it hates you, it wants to eat you, it will kill you if it has a chance, before he manages to lop its head off with the razor.

He cuts away the shell, setting it on his desk to dry, and then takes the bleeding body to the threshold to smear its insides in an X on his door, chanting go-away go-away go-away under his breath.

Then he goes back into his room and throws up into the void.

Zeke feels kind of sad and small about being all alone in his not-yet-orange room, but this is a correctable problem! He gets out his paintbrush and his orange paint and… the paintbrush he has is kind of small, actually, to paint an entire room with? He is briefly stymied by this before deciding to use it to flick paint over the wall, instead, and this is not actually much faster but it’s a lot more fun and oh whoops now an entire wall is speckled orange and it’s already later than he was supposed to be asleep.

He had been planning to build his own mana and stuff but he really needs to go to bed and using the power sharer sometimes is, like, fine, and paint flicking had at least contributed a little bit. He casts a set of three old Italian spells for warding, invoking the trinity, and a set of eighteen spells in Hebrew for physical wellbeing and strength and stuff; they each, individually, do almost nothing, but if he remembers to do them every night for the next year his room will be completely impenetrable and he’ll be even more of a Growing Young Boy.

(Having an affinity for incremental layered spells is honestly pretty lame but it’s also cool, sometimes, and his parents had found some excellent spells for working with it, and if they did almost nothing at first then they at least also cost almost nothing.)

He remembers to do a standard warding spell, too, which should actually work immediately, and he inspects his room for mals and squishes a little orange spider-y thing and feels kind of bad about having removed something orange from the world, and he does a handstand, and then he actually does go to bed.

Dasha reassembles herself some shelves and meets the awkward American girl and gets through most of her workout routine and wards Annisa's room for her and by curfew bell she is exhausted even though it's nowhere near night by her internal clock yet. The safest place for all her things is in her backpack, so she packs all of her things back into it except a small bronze icon of St. Olga of Kiev. Grandmother's choice of enchantment on it had been for fresh air, and soon as she pulls it out the room feels somehow less confining. Father's was an alarm - she taps the rim and asks "6:00 in the morning tomorrow, okay?". Hers had been for clarity of thought. She traces the spell-words carved in the back of the icon and stares at the faded paint and brilliant gold halo of the icon.

She hasn't prayed before bed since she was a little girl, but it's comforting to imagine Ruslan doing the same, safe at home for two more years. By the end of отьчє нашь her hands are shaking, because she's remembered about Chicago and maybe he isn't safe after all. So she goes through it again and again until her hands are steady again, because there's nothing she can do for her siblings but survive this year (and then three more, and then graduation -)

She means to put the icon up on her new shelves, but she falls asleep clutching it instead of her borrowed knife.

Ribo finally returns to her room after dinner. She's made some useful contacts she thinks and perhaps if she's lucky some will become friends. She spends an hour doing exercises to build mana and then uses a small amount of that mana and her trusty wire to dismantle all the furniture in her room. She reassembles the parts into shelves, terrariums and a desk built into the walls and uses the materials from her mattress to make a high tension hammock also anchored into the walls. She leaves the spare materials carefully stacked in a corner. She'll trade them away or make something out of them given some time.

The hard part done she casts some simple wards and feeds all the critters her mother sent her with carefully running a diagnostic on each one to ensure it's still within parameters and also petting them and telling them she appreciates them. As expected they're all ok, it would be bad luck if any went bad on the first day. She makes sure they're all situated in their terrariums and that the alert bugs have a good view of the room so they can wake her if her wards fail for some reason.

She unpacks the rest of her possessions, mostly mana storage, spare clothing and bits of crafting materials, she'll decorate a bit tomorrow.

She lies down on her hammock and falls asleep instantly, being engineered has its benefits.

There's a skittery black thing under Anastasia's pillow.

All legs no substance. Like a hand with dozens of spindly fingers. As soon as she finds it, it scuttles into the nest of furniture with a jerky quickness.

She sits in the far corner of the room and hugs her knees. She really really hates creepy-crawlies, but her blind spot is expensive. One activation costs hours of being seen and she'd have to turn it off anyways to trade tomorrow and she's not sure if this one even has a brain. It didn't look like there was space, but insects manage okay.

"Excuse me, miss school. I'm sorry to bother you on my first day but could I get a spell for murder? An itsy-bitsy murder, I don't need anything fancy. I bet there are lots of crappy little hexes no one else wants that are just gathering dust, and I'd gladly learn one of those."

"I saw your blueprints on the wall. You're very pretty and I love you already. Do you like it when people think about your blueprints? Or do you prefer to be a bit more freeform? I could tear them down if you wanted, erase them from my brain. Or I could hang one up in my room."

"I'm going to pay you back, okay? I know you tend to lend out books without asking anything, but I won't take without leaving. Is there a way you prefer for people to die so you get as much mana out of it as possible? I might be doing that soon, so I just wanted—"

"—probably it's maw-mouths. Sorry, but I'm not going to jump in Fortitude for you. I guess there might be something big enough you could trade me that I'd jump in Fortitude for you, but we're fair trade partners, not—"

Anastasia notices the open spellbook on the floor nearby, thick and black, leatherbound and dust-scented and in English. What a perfect book. She whispers a soft thank you.

An hour later, she has made precious little progress learning the curse because she is DUMB. She digs her heels in, pushes the dresser aside with a screeeeeech against the floor, and when the mal scurries out of the darkness she slams the book down on top of it then steps on it and grinds it into the floor. She listens to the sound of hundreds of tiny little joints cracking under her weight.

When she doesn't hear it anymore no matter how hard she presses down, she apologizes to the spellbook and goes to bed.

Bobbie runs back to her room as soon as she's escorted El to her's. It's not that close to the bell, she doesn't need to run, but it's early in the year and she's starting off behind in terms of resource accumulation. The jog gets her a smidge of mana, (downsides of being fit, exercise only ever gets her the tiniest smidge) and she needs the extra time.

She takes apart her drawers and puts up a trap-ward with the mana from disassembly. She uses a grease pen to write up her priorities on the wall.

1. Shoes

2. Mana storage

3. Armor

Then what? She's been here one day and only met a handful of people, but among that handful she's found two serious maleficers (...one of whom she's indentured to for the next six months, or until she finds something else with which to pay off that debt) and a wannabe crime lord. This does not speak well for the overall population of the school. She might be in over her head. She needs her time back.

3. Armor Freedom

4. Armor

...

5. Stop El?

She's not sure if she should bother. She's going into security when she gets out but that doesn't mean she needs to start hunting down maleficers in here.

She smudges it out. She's still thinking about it, but it's a bad idea to leave written on her wall. And she's got time, she should not be plotting to maybe kill El while also under contract to keep her safe.

Bobbie can sleep wherever and whenever, it's a skill she's been honing since she was eight. She's out as soon as her head hits the pillow.

When her door is hidden from mals and her drawers disassembled and her possessions unpacked and organized neatly so as to present as few hiding spots as necessary, Malak sits on her bed and takes the time to build mana and think.

What she thinks is this: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Today started well - OK actually it started horribly, but it got better pretty quickly; Most of the other freshmen were less competent than she was expecting, which means that she is better off than she thought she was. She's met some competent people and hopefully not given them too terrible an impression of her - Marcy, who is smart and practiced and confident and smart and prepared and kind of scary, the platonic ideal of an enclaver. Probably that won't be a close connection, Marcy has her pick of associates, but Malak has some useful skills and once she demonstrates that missing her room number was a fluke maybe that will count for something. Annisa who is - a little bit in over her head already, but only because she's swimming farther out than the rest of the freshman, and inviting Malak to swim out to join her, sharing the dangers and sharing the rewards. Naima who has a great affinity and no ability to tell anyone about it and will hopefully be overlooked by everyone else. Dennis who takes mals seriously and is clever enough to make good inferences even when distracted and will probably either go far or burn out.

But then she'd talked to Annisa after dinner and - not even tried to talk the Toronto girl out of suicide. She didn't talk her into it or anything, but she lied and pretended to want to help and then deliberately failed. She doesn't know if that makes her a bad person, leaving the enclaver to die like that. It's not like not stopping to help someone in order to protect her own life - she's letting this girl die-or-worse so that she can have a share of her stuff. (a voice in the back of her mind whispers she would have done it eventually anyways and she was so sure though, I couldn't have done anything and you're in the scholomance, anyone who would do any different is an idiot. She wonders idly if it is the voice of Shaitan, lurking in the graduation hall with Patience and Fortitude, whispering evil into the hearts of children. Perhaps it is, but it is also the voice of Mother, teaching her how to survive so that she might someday be loved by another mortal. No soul escapes the Scholomance unstained, but God knows this and He is loving and will not hold it against her.)

She's - committed, already, on the moral question. She does not have time before curfew to rush off to the Toronto girl's room - which she still does not know the location of - and beg her to reconsider taking her life. She still has room to decide on the practical question of whether she should help Annisa plunder the room afterward and maybe earn the enmity of Toronto and any other enclaves upset at their boldness.

She is still undecided when the curfew bell rings, which - by convention, as the Scholomance has no true day or night - marks the evening call to prayer. She sets aside the embroidery she was building mana with, orients herself in the direction of Mecca - again, chosen by convention of course (There had been some debate, in the early days, whether one ought properly to face the graduation gates as the school's tether to the Earth, but the logistical difficulties of prostrating oneself with one's head pointed straight down killed that idea even before the hall became overrun with mals) - and knelt on her mat to pray. It's different, praying alone without the communal call-and-response. She cannot rely on rote or habit and instead must focus more on the words, turning them over in her mind. She gets a bit more mana this way, which probably means she was not being sufficiently intent on her prayer before. She resolves to do better henceforth.

And then, at the end, a new prayer, not a part of the normal routine outside but which will over the next four years become ingrained as deep as any of the others in her life and those of the other faithful students here. All glory rebounds to God, who guided the prophets and who guides me through these days of peril. All praises to You, God, who I thank for my life, who guards me in peace while I sleep. With the ritual prayers done, she remains prostrate and speaks her own words to God. Almighty God, glory be to You, be kind to the spirits of the child from Shanghai who is slain already, and the girl from Toronto who hurries to You tonight. I beg You, God, to forgive her her haste. Protect me from peril, and Annisa, and let us not be falsely accused. Protect the children from Chicago who did not know where they were going and have only Your hand to guard them. Continue to guard Maryam and Safiya and Alexios. I submit myself to You, God, who is worthy of all praise.

Marcy and her squad have furniture configurations they like and all their own possessions and decent room wards and have swapped gossip on their own social interactions and anything they heard secondhand. The class is collectively about what they expected, with the exception of the Chicago mess and the number of emotional breakdowns. On an individual level:

Destiny is fun and will be a fun sparring partner and very convenient going-places company.

Malak found her room, so if that was a fluke rather than her not being the sharpest shuriken in the box she's good to go.

Bella seems competent.

Sacramento has fucking epic unit cohesion and has managed to keep Sadness McDeathwish alive for five months, which makes them a relationship worth cultivating even given Sadness McDeathwish himself.

New York is Orion Fucking Lake and his pack of coattail-riders and Marcy is kind of glad she's less stuck in Lake's shadow than them even though this is stupid and hanging out in a nice safe shadow is a perfectly valid way to get through school. Still. Fuck New York.

Shanghai, if she can believe the gossip through the game of bilingual telephone it reached her through, has managed to lose someone already and also has kind of terrible unit cohesion.

Names and faces and key facts reviewed, Marcy spends the next thirty minutes exercising to build mana and tire herself out so she won't wake up unless her ward pokes her. It's hard to build mana with bodyweight exercises when you have Marcy's bodyweight and muscle tone to work with, but she can do arithmetic in her head at the same time and she's only a normal amount of dissatisfied with her results.  Not long after curfew she puts up a cheap "wake me if something happens" ward, gets into bed, tells her dagger that they had a good first day and that she'll see it tomorrow, and goes to sleep with it under her pillow and her father's joking voice in her mind's ear: "Early to bed and early to rise makes a girl healthy, stealthy, and wise."

Theun goes back to his room early enough to see the outrage that is Julia Sanderson enlisting a dozen people to decorate like it was the most important thing in the world. Fucking enclavers. And also dwelling on the dozen poor bastards who got drafted and are dead meat walking, and the fact that he really can't afford to do much more for them than he did for the redhead - Wendy.

Plenty to make him angry. More than usual. But it is usual. And while anger is not very conducive to sleep, burning off his anger and turning it to mana is a familiar problem with a known solution, namely meditation. Which he dislikes even when it isn't a reminder of all the injustices he has to ignore to survive, meaning he absolutely hates it, meaning it's very good at generating mana.

After he's spent an hour or so on that, he considers what positives he saw. Boston's interesting and seem a cut above the enclavers he's met before, so he may manage not to offend them for a long while. He wasn't the only one trying to help the mundies, there was a pair going around trading with them and he saw others taking them aside to give them advice. Wendy had good situational awareness and seemed resourceful, so she's probably going to be in relatively good shape for a mundy. Does he actually feel good about Chicago? Maybe a little schadenfreude, but no, not really. Probably someone did something to deserve it, but the most inconsiderate, self-important enclave kid he's met - so, Julia Sanderson, probably - still hasn't been that awful. Similarly with whatever the hell is wrong with Shanghai. Closer to home, he lucked out with furniture and didn't have anything that needs disassembling, so that's a small blessing.

He lays his basic ward - mainly alarm, slows things down a little - on the threshold, and the air vent, then takes some time to skim the family spellbook again, thinking about which are worth practicing sooner rather than later. Soon he's nodding off slightly, and he goes to sleep properly.

Alexius unpacks his precious alchemy equipment and clears out his room after dinner. 

He cries for the dead. Briefly. It's not a waste of time, it centers him, clears out the day's accumulated grief. 

After a final mal sweep (die, spawn of Ungoliant) he goes through his evening exercise routine and recasts his gut adjustments to handle the carbon residue from half-burned dinner calories. Next, he recasts the spell that speeds hair growth. Selling his haircut to artificers should recoup the costs later.

Speaking of long-term rewards, it'll look especially impressive if he shows up to breakfast on Day Two with his potions already prepared. And the eidetic memory will help him with all those delicious, delicious new spells. But homeroom, drat that Scholomance scheduling, is at 6:30am, neatly in the way of any brewing he might do. It's okay, he has ingredients and knows how to set up a makeshift brewing station in his room. He casts the more controllable of his stimulant spells and sets to work. It takes nearly all night to do the setup properly, but eventually he's got a poor man's working station. He's got just enough time to batch the eidetic memory potions and quaff one before he has to head to homeroom. 

Ghassan returns to his room in a good mood. He’d been hopeful when he arrived, that he might be one of the lucky ones. He lucked out with just a desk, not a dresser; nowhere for mals to hide. The Dubai upperclassmen all know him and are expecting him to ensure his fellow freshmen make it out . He met a kid (possibly a maleficer, but then, Ghassan has a poison affinity) who can find mals that no one else can see that clearly needs someone to take him under their wing, and Daria, who could be his ticket to finally making his affinity useful.

Ghassan did get a human eye out of his supply run, though he didn’t make any new connections. Still, it’s early. During dinner, he got a second chance to impress Daria, and he thinks that could be a fruitful collaboration. After dinner, he stops by her room and they brainstorm ideas for creating a ward that incorporates his poison.

He still has four years to go, so he’s not going to get cocky, but- Ghassan has always worried that his affinity would be useless in the Scholomance unless he turned to murdering every student who had a better shot than him. Things aren’t looking nearly that dire, yet. He does push-ups, building up some man, and he heads to sleep feeling the good kind of tired.

He's got some time after dinner. No classes, yet, so he can't read ahead, which he's absolutely going to do at the first possible chance because he really doesn't trust more stuff not to come up in the weeks to come, and any time crunch he can save his later self could easily be the difference between life and death. 

Today he needs mana, and also to fix his room (and Owoye's room, and the kids from Ethiopia). Luckily fixing the rooms should give him some mana, and it's not like he can do maximum intensity exercise for three hours straight anyway. He does about fifteen minutes of it, and that's some mana, and then figures he'll multi-task catching his breath and fixing rooms.

He does the same thing for each of them: goes over and over the walls, moving all of the furniture, looking for anything that looks like it might be a crack in the wall. Anything he finds, he seals up with his metal glue, which says it's good for four thousand pounds of force, which might not be enough, but hopefully it's at least good enough to convince the mals to go after someone else. For a while, anyway.

Owoye's desk has drawers, so they use those for wood. He measures the length and width of the doors with a piece of string, saws that much wood off, and then tries his best to glue that piece of wood on under the bottom of each door, taking the cracks underneath them from a couple centimeters to a couple millimeters. He needs Owoye's help for it; it's hard to apply force under a door, but they have some strips of material that they brought specifically to run under the doors, and if both of them pull it up towards the door as hard as they can for about fifteen minutes, that's - well, it's probably not as good as a clamp, but it bonds. Probably some mals can fit through a couple-millimeter space, maybe even some nasty ones, and probably some of them can burrow through the wood. It doesn't make them safe, but it'll at least make them a pain. 

They go to the bathroom together and fill up the water bags and transport said bags back to their rooms (five for Dennis, five for Owoye; Ethiopia brought their own). Then it's up to everyone to build their own mana, enough to set their own wards and to put some apology mana back into their storage. He has enough for a ward, but his storage is a different matter. It's a mask, and it's being stubborn, so most of his body is aching before he gets enough mana back into it for it to stop leaking so badly. And then, of course, he doesn't have any mana left over for anything that comes after him tonight, even though probably nothing will. Maybe he can do math problems. He's really pretty good at math problems, though, and right now he's not thinking of any that he doesn't immediately know how to solve.

Sigh. He writes up a to-do list in careful, beautifully formed Chinese characters. That's a pain. He needs to read as far ahead as possible on his assignments tomorrow, and he needs to find study groups for whatever his classes end up being, and he needs to ideally make second contact with some of the people he met today, so he can use them - Ghassan might really be useful, if he's got poisons, maybe they can make something alchemical and put that in the millimeter-thin space under the doors. And Annisa and Malak had good affinities and no enclaves, he might be able to benefit from making friends with them, too, especially if they don't snag anyone better. Maybe even if they do snag anyone better, it's got to be a good thing to hedge your bets.

This is not enough mana and he doesn't know what else to write. Maybe he'll... but does he have time...? You know what, no, he doesn't have anything else to do for the next hour, and he's only going to have one day of classes before the weekend, there's never going to be a better time to focus on learning some extra spells.

He goes up to the void hatch and asks for a book of spells to learn. The void spits out a book of Hausa folktales, written in Latin letters and with English commentary.

"...thanks," he says, and tries to sound like he means it, even though this doesn't look like it's going to be very densely packed with spells and also doesn't look like it's going to be that hard to read, which isn't great in terms of how long he's going to have to spend time-wise to get enough mana out to protect himself. But that's just gonna be how it goes, sometimes.

The first fifty pages are a guide to Hausa grammar, which he doesn't need, which leaves about a hundred and eighty pages of folktales. He reads for about an hour, and then the bell tolls to let him know that it's curfew, and then he reads for maybe another half hour after that, at which point he's halfway through the book. He finds only four spells, but he dutifully begins the process of memorizing them, and writes down their page numbers so that he can find them again easily tomorrow. He sets the book on his shelf, and tells it that it's a good book and that he liked reading stories that reminded him of home.

Then he sleeps, and hopes that nothing comes in the night.

The first thing Hira does when she gets to her room is start smashing apart her dresser drawers with her axe. It'll make some noise, but that's her neighbors' problem. Maybe they'll get some mana out of it. It's only for this first night, when there isn't homework to bleed for mana, too. She checks her clothes for mals- it's the first day, but anyone who has takes that thought seriously doesn't respect the power of good habits.

Her conversations in the cafeteria were somewhat productive. She wanted to find a charming boy and she did! Hira doesn't think Alexius will be her best friend or close ally, but he's charismatic and she doesn't mind soaking that in. Ennis, with his Manchester links, might be more helpful.

Hira spends the better part of the night trying to coax something good of the void, but she doesn't get anything. Maybe she hasn't impressed it yet. Hira Khan is not going to let the void or the school pretend she's not impressive; she'll just need to prove herself. As she goes to bed, she practices her English and Mandarin in her head; she might be conversationally fluent, but she's sure there's room for improvement.

The two new Callocontis visit the family terrariums to deposit eggs and get keyed to the wards that keep anyone else from reaching in, physically or magically - it's not impossible to sabotage them or for someone else to poach their malia, but it makes it tricky. The snake one even lets you draw on it if anyone keyed in is standing sufficiently nearby, though they are reminded (basically by rote) that this is primarily for graduation and if you use it while not in mortal peril you will owe substantial favors in their internal economy. The sophomore cousins swing by Marino and Teresa's rooms, warding them better and using utility spells - cheap for them - to secure the furniture.

She was disappointed with how the cafeteria entrance went, she didn't garner much attention, but the freshmen merchants were an excellent opportunity and she's gotten one over on the older cousins in the bargain. Which reminds her, she needs to get proper mana to pay them - they'll want to store it, and most storage dislikes malia. Not Teresa's, she can stick the rat's power in hers (and does), but in general. She works out a while - never hurts to look hotter or run faster - and then does her favored detail-work mana generator: imaginary piano, both picturing the music in her mind's eye and moving her fingers through the motions along a flat surface. Crochet is slightly more efficient and produces something useful, but aesthetics are important, and she likes the music better.

When the curfew bell rings, she stops, casts a pair of family spells in Etruscan only ever written down in cipher, and goes to sleep fairly promptly.

Ennis does her simple ward on her bedroom, and asks the void for some spells to study so she isn't wasting pre-class time she could be using to get a jump on things, and tries to relax. Relaxing is hard, so she studies her spells (they're not terribly useful, but the one for making woad stick is probably adaptable as a general fixative), and does crunches, and finally manages to pass out.

Nia organizes her things. She has TOOLS NOW and she takes apart her desk, sets about the beginnings of a workbench but will make more progress on that later with more supplies. The mana from this process goes in a sapphire; she has enough on her to handle early-in-the-year mals that bump in the night.

After spending most of his day avoiding Riley, who has taken an interest in him for no reason, ignoring offers to cure his depression (he can't trust them, and anyway he doesn't want one), and helping Caio in the library, Virgil retreats to his room. He reads, well into the night, turning page after page in the spellbook the Void happily gives him. Happily, he thinks, because the Void must be happy. As happy as you can be, when there are no thoughts left. He's always wondered what it would be like, inside. There must be something there- a lost city, something kept suspended in a fragile bubble of magic, full of people desperately trying to find their way out...objects that have come alive, traversing the Void with no concern to all the things that make it inimical to life...no one knows what's in there.

Maybe he'll find out someday. Not yet, though. Before he goes to the Void, Virgil needs to do what he can for the people here, first.

Riley misses Dr. Walsh- who is not his mother, he reminds himself- during the hour before bed. It won’t be productive to feel anything like that during the rest of the day, so he needs to put an end to that. His room is almost comforting in its familiarity. It was a good start- he met someone from the Manchester enclave who might be a useful patron, and two alchemists who might be useful collaborators later on.

He’s a little worried about the depressed wallflower, Virgil, that he ended up following when he went for supplies on his own. He did a mundie kid, Wendy, who seems to have good instincts. He’s spoiled for choice, really. There’s someone in this school he can latch onto- he just isn’t sure who. Maybe Manchester. He’s hopeful that he can work something out there. Riley falls asleep thinking of drills with Dr. Walsh and wondering whether he’ll live to see his brother.

Tonight, she dreams of the walls, and the things beyond - the sketched designs, the sword by her side, the little drifting bits of power between them all, and the possibilities of things to come, for them all. 

She hopes that it won't be folly to think that there will be such a thing - that there will indeed be this place, going forward. It's aging, at the end of the day, and the mals are not exactly known for being unable to overcome static opposition and it's not like she has the best chances.

But still. 

She has faith that her sword will reach the stars with her, one day. 

And so. 

She sleeps, the peace kept by the wards holding, for now. 

Alyona spends the evening sorting through hand-me-downs from Santa Barbara upperclassmen. She ends up with some more clothing, a long string of little glowing blown-glass orbs like fairy lights, various school supplies, a chainmail sheet with an odd assortment of minor protective charms woven in, notes on some of the classes she's more likely to take this year, an enchanted comb with nice wide teeth, a small box of spells on color-coded index cards, and a few other odds and ends.

She takes it all back to her room, then does a very careful sweep for any nasty surprises. There's an odd little egg sac on the underside of her desk, which she decides is safer to burn to ashes than to attempt to store for possible future trade. Once she's certain the place is completely clear, she starts laying out wards around her light fixtures, air vents, door, bed, and drain.

She unpacks her bags and puts all her clothing in the wardrobe and lays the chainmail sheet on her bed and hangs the glowing string of lights around the room as close to the ceiling as she can manage. Spell cards and notes and school supplies go on the desk. Once everything is in place, she takes her incense burner and places it on a shelf and puts in a cone of incense and lights it.