“I would be in the market for hidden or hiding objects.”

She turns to the new person.

”Hello.”

"Welcome. You're not interrupting we were just introducing ourselves. Haniyah Malik, creative writing and/or artificing, affinity for concealment. You?"

Hiding things, not finding hidden things—doesn't matter, she couldn't bring someone else in on that regardless.

Announcing your greatest strength and implicit weakness as introductory boilerplate means you're... advertising, right? Offering your skills because you're looking for the static resources and outside connections that, technically, Basira does have. Just, not as much as she was supposed to.

Not thinking about that. The reciprocal of her introduction is, what—"Sounds useful. Basira Hussain, Oxford. And I'll be in incantations, probably writing." In some other situation she'd round down the uncertainty, but if Haniyah's saying she's undecided it won't sound unprepared.

No mention of her affinity, so it's probably a weak one. Or maybe just one that's not very compatible with trade and she's being more secretive about it than Jaime. Either way, she's signaling pretty strongly that she doesn't want to talk about it.

"Pleased to meet you." Turning back to Jaime, "How much dance is required for a spell to work with your affinity? Can you do something with just three steps or are you stuck with really long incantations?"

“It cares about the ratio between incantation and dance, not about the strict quantity of dance; a long incantation with three dance steps wouldn’t work, a short incantation with three dance steps would.”

"Does music help?"

“No.”

This sounds very like the continuation of a conversation she interrupted. About, of all things, a complete stranger's exact limitations. How do you contribute to this without sounding like a murderer.

"Can you dance while traveling forward?" she asks, which hopefully conveys 'will you definitely die and not graduate?' and not anything before that.

“Obviously.”

What, more obviously than "music doesn't help"? ...maybe. And maybe she should be poking for strengths and not weaknesses.

"And obviously there are dances you can do with just your arms or just your legs, if something grabs you." If there aren't then this girl is going to die and it doesn't matter if she's unimpressed.

How did they even get on this subject.

“I will have to invent a new tradition of magical vogueing. What do you do, exactly.”

Does that mean she doesn't have dance for that situation? That - doesn't guarantee she's going to die, but. How do they get off this subject.

"I adapt to the circumstances."

She looks over at the table where John and Daisy - is watching her right now. Basira tries to force a smile and can't quite manage it, so she waves a little instead.

Malak watches the conversation in silence.

Obviously you can't dance much while restrained and Jaime will just have to cast off-affinity. Which everyone does, every day. Most people spend all of graduation day casting off-affinity!

Basira is being incredibly cryptic here, which is her right of course, but does not seem like a good strategy for building positive relations.

“Showstopping, never been done before, put it on a T-shirt.”

Basira planned to spend the entire graduation casting within her affinity, because nothing was predictable year on year except the locations of Patience and Fortitude so "improvisation" was very much the theme of the day.

But what she wanted to do right now wasn't adapt to the circumstances.  She wanted to get up and walk over to where Daisy was still looking out for her and eat with her and John and the people they knew and trust them to help her and understand her and introduce her to people she could work with for years—but she can't do that, because that would be leaning on something that she did not have, to pretend that she had all the resources and the arcane energy and the allies she was supposed to have here, everyone she had lost here before she even knew. She couldn't ask for their help.

She could say that, no, she wasn't just being snarky, that's literally her affinity, unlike everyone else doing that, but she doesn't owe it to this girl just because she thinks she deserves to know. Maybe that is standard here, for everyone,

She wants to say something stupidly pedantic about "put that on a t-shirt" not being a brand new phrase either, but that's pathetic and maybe the dancer is a lost cause but the other two here might not be. She wants to say something awful like "sure, I'll get them printed after I graduate", but that isn't even rude, it's a lie, and if she thinks what her odds are now (what, 1 in 2? at best?) then she wants to cry and she cannot do that.

So eventually she just says "OK." as flatly as she can, then turns to the other girl who wasn't Haniyah, who'd spoken one sentence in an accent Basira might've misidentified, and asks "so are you from Australia?"

"I spent a couple of years there. But I'm from Surabaya originally." 

She chews some arguably-potatoes. (Where... is Surabaya. 'Not Australia'. Another country? ...enclave? But wouldn't you be more specific if..? Does that sound like she moved back or..?)

"Hard to imagine moving countries with a wizard kid. I guess the part where you're in an airtight metal tube crammed with mundanes is pretty safe."

"It was when I was pretty young but it was a massive endeavor, to be sure. I wouldn't say the travel was itself very challenging but at home we had lots of people to call and in Canberra we didn't. But I had formed a determination to emigrate when I grew up and my father thought I'd be served by having stronger English, in here, and it's hard to beat living somewhere where they speak it."