"I'm sorry to hear it," she says of the instrument, and holds out the applesauce while making a speculative hand gesture towards the bread.

"Fine." 

Marcy is slightly too far away to just pass the bread, so Vanya sings a line of some mystery language under his breath, and levitates it over to her without any apparent effort. 

"If I run into music pajama girl do you want me to send her your way? I know it's uncommon to collaborate across years much but with the same affinity it might be worth it."

"If you want." He sounds fairly indifferent to it. 

Blink. She knows juniors have more mana than freshman but that was still weirdly casual; maybe he's in better shape than she thought or maybe Sacramento collectively has buckets of mana. She accepts the bread and chows down.

"I'm in creative writing too but my affinity's metamagic," says Bella, to fill the pause.

This actually gets her eye contact! 

"Metamagic," Vanya repeats, thoughtfully. "What does that mean - is it like Raleigh's, where you can do things to other people's spells?" 

"Oh, you know what I bet you'll be great at? Spells for countering psychic mals. It's all blocking and redirecting and interfering with their magic." Marcy has extra special beef with psychic mals because of how you generally can't throw things at them.

"Yeah - I was able to learn a French generic counterspell New Orleans has kicking around, and I can also disenchant things, and I'm not sure how well it'll apply to making my own artifice or alchemy and I don't know how much it helps me write spells but I like it pretty well. Psychic mal spells seem like a good idea, maybe I'll ask for some once I know how hard coursework is going to hit me."

Vanya curls up and hugs himself and goes quiet again. 

Okay what was it that upset him this time. He seemed to be actually participating in the conversation for, like, point five seconds there. 

Awwwww, Marcy wanted to talk about coursework!

Maybe she'll just do it anyway. "I think we're supposed to have some time for doing projects on our own initiative? If you get assignments you hate, I'm open to homework-for-spells deals."

"Sure, I might be up for that." Raleigh has never once failed to do homework, but it seems friendly to show interest and he's trying to make friends here. (Even though Vanya is not making this easy.) 

"Are we all going to have mostly the same homework assignments?" 

"I might want to offload some math or history at some point! Assignments will differ - a lot, I think. More later on."

"Yeah, people get different projects in the same section of shop and what have you. Which is great for selling the projects and for avoiding everyone needing silver nitrate at the same time but does make it harder to do other people's work."

"Right, that makes sense. I'm good at history, I wouldn't mind helping with that." 

Vanya is very good at math but, one, he's a sophomore, and two, he really does not seem in any shape to be doing his own homework let alone other peoples'. 

Vanya pushes aside his tray. "I'm going to my room." 

"Not by yourself you aren't!" Besides the obvious reasons why that's a bad idea, Larisa specifically told him not to leave Vanya alone anywhere but his room, if he could help it. "I can walk with you?" 

Helping out with their mysteriously-incapacitated teammate seems like it could be a good way to earn some goodwill from Sacramento, and honestly she likes the Vanya kid fine, despite his constant misery. Plus he's got mal-fighting spells, apparently, and judging by his random casual use of magic, he must be pretty strong for a sophomore. 

"I'll go, I don't mind." She stands up. 

"You don't ha–" Raleigh stops himself. Smiles at Shannon. "Thanks, appreciate it." 

Vanya leaves the cafeteria with her, still dragging his feet but maybe a little less than before. 

Raleigh lets out his breath and relaxes. Slightly. 

"Uh, I'm - sorry that was weird," he says uncertainly. "He, um, wasn't like that when I last saw him."