Wendy struggles with the German some more in the morning but is accumulating words she just has no idea about. She did at least figure out a cleaning spell for her one singular outfit.

Apparently they're supposed to go to homeroom now. After a quick bathroom run with her next door neighbor to drink up and refill her bottle, she eventually makes her way to Room 330, worried the whole time that something will pop out and kill her. (She didn't sleep super well.) Hopefully magic becomes less terrifying and more awesome with time.

"-Uh hi," she says to the girl already in the room after peering under a desk or two and looking at the vents herself, and claiming a corner desk. "I'm one of the noobs, can you tell me what happens next?"

She doesn't know what a noob is, but she can answer that question. "We are here to select classes. My understanding is that the school will provide suggested classes when homeroom starts, and then accept adjustments, although you will need to confer with your classmates and see their suggested schedules in order to know what sections are on offer. It's not terribly important to get right as a freshman, though, when most classes will be the same."

Miguel is pretty sure that wearing a girl's backpack is absolutely the kind of thing that makes gangs pick you out as someone to bully, so he goes without a backpack entirely. Slips into the classroom - no one here yet but some girls - and sits down not particularly near them, tense and trying not to show it.

"Oh okay, I heard there's no teachers? The school just decides the schedules? Hi," she says to the other guy with barely a glance.

He checks his own chair and desk, but not every single desk, before sitting down. "There's no teachers. I think there's a nurse? But she's the only adult here."

"You'd know more than me."

(Camillo is so lost. It's the first day, and he's lost, and he's going to die in some hallway before he finds his homeroom. Great.)

The spellbook Anastasia desecrated last night is vamoosh, leaving only the remains of a crushed mal. She winces, gingerly steps over the corpse, sits at her desk and starts writing a letter.

Dear The Elemental Maledictionary for Mages Eight and Up by Ethan Pascal and William Dotter,

Do I put 'The' at the front of your title when I'm talking to you directly?

Sorry. I'm sorry for mistreating you, I hope the school finds you some better readers. I liked your smell and I liked that you had a lot of illustrations. It was such a pretty style, bold and crisp, all shadows and absences.

I saw that there was the same girl in most of the pictures, showing what the final casting was supposed to look like, and she had freckles, which is a little bit of a weird detail to add. So I wonder if maybe she was an author's kid. Or maybe the artist just wanted her to have freckles.

I apologize for the mal stains. If I were you, I'd try to sneak into a library that gets cleansed with mortal fire sometimes. I don't know if you actually can try to do that. I don't know how books work at all, except they like being cherished and don't like being abused.

You seem like a very good book to me. I will die waaaaay before I have eight-year old kids, but I will give you a glowing recommendation if anyone is ignorant enough to ask me for advice, but only if they look like they treat books better than me.

—Anastasia Kravtsova

She scrapes most of the mal off the floor and chucks it into the void ceiling with the letter. She's under no illusions that the book will somehow see it, let alone understand it, but you should still apologize even if you don't think you can be heard.

Then she heads to room 330, Rainbow Dash backpack bouncing as she walks. It's hard to keep her teeth from chattering with excitement, despite the fact that she knows she's not going to make it. Everything just feels so bright and new and they're gonna teach her magic, which is such a good distraction from the prospect of death.

Half of the room is occupied by six thick black tables with stools around them like you'd see in a school lab, the other half is patterned with those desk-chair things. The walls are outlined with low wooden shelves, some of which have empty glass tanks sitting atop them. The upper walls are patterned with the kind of stupid posters teachers adore: The Best ANGLE From Which To Approach A Problem Is The TRY-ANGLE! advises one.

She doesn't check for mals. There's already people here, she's not going to find something sneaky they passed over. Instead she inspects the people.

There's a girl with a sword of all things, which means it's the best tool she has to defend herself, which means Stasia mentally sorts her into the bottom 10% of the class alongside herself. Ten percent gang!

There's a boy without a sword who's staring straight ahead instead of reading or chatting or hunting for mals. That's what kids do when they'd rather skip out on their choice of activity than be judged for it. Maybe she can prey on his insecurity, sell him cosmetics, sell him on the promise of surviving by dating a senior girl.

There's a boy with fluffy hair. Aww. She wants to touch it.

There's a chatty girl. As soon as Stasia hears the kind of questions coming out of her mouth, she takes the desk behind her and to the right, so the cannon fodder takes up a path  between the nearest vent and herself.

"Sup," she says quietly enough that she hopes it's clear she does not in fact want to know sup.

Instead she flips over her homeroom note, leans over her desk, and starts writing down every word in Russian and Spanish she can think of.

Homeroom! Fortunately for him, it's with Leander and someone clueless.

He shows up in the same clothes he's been wearing for the last... thirty-six hours now? Now with a full water bottle, at least.

"Is the school going to produce schedules where we aren't looking or something?" She asks Daya.

Schedule! Miguel is sort of expecting one of the enclavers to start the schedule-sharing, because he doesn't remember all the rules. He remembers some of them. You want something safe and high up in the building first thing in the morning. You don't want honors classes if you can avoid them, though that doesn't come up first semester. You don't want something really far away from Maleficaria Studies right before Maleficaria Studies because then you'll have to sit near the front.

"Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what happens, if you can arrange to be distracted by something your schedule will turn up while you aren't looking. Hi Val."

Camillo is NOT EATEN by mals on his way to his homeroom. He considers this a success.

He waves to Leander.

He has NO TROUBLE being distracted by something. There are many places a mal could theoretically be and many people who are observing and reacting to things. His schedule can show up pretty much whenever it wants.

Well, on the bright side, seems like everyone else here is about as out of their depths as him, so probably his parents were right that no one really comes in with a huge advantage. 

Stasia shifts her paper to her thigh to face away from her desk, and scrawls on the bottom of her note: Thank you for looking after us, miss school. I'm excited to see what you have planned for me. She spends the next minute scribbling it out hard so none of the words are legible.

She's pretty sure her relationship with the Scholomance is standard fare. She doesn't see how anyone could live in an all-encompassing all-providing sentient world for years and not end up viewing it as parent and deity and companion, but she still wouldn't want people reading 'I love you' texts she sent to her parents.

Then she goes back to Spanorussian listing, shrinking her handwriting drastically halfway down the page — there's a lot more than she realized she knew. She's going to have to cut ALL OF THESE WORDS out of her head.

...she's so glad no Russians are looking over her shoulder to see how she's transliterating their words in Latin instead of Cyrillic.

Daya is very successfully distracted, which gets her her schedule as quickly as possible. She sprints up to the blackboard at the front of the room and begins writing headings - maths, alchemy, workshop, languages, literature, history - and the classes that she was first assigned under them.

"Shout out what you have or write it on the board; we should learn where we stand as quickly as possible."

Oh, cool, there is an enclaver here to take charge. He reads his schedule off for her.

Things that definitely exist, in English, between those: Intro to Shop on Fridays after Maleficaria Studies and right before lunch, Intro to Lab on Tuesdays right before lunch and right before lunch on Wednesdays, Introduction to Probability, Abacus Skills (really?), Algebra I, Babylonian Numerology, Western European History through 1500, Diaspora Enclaves: A History, History of Maleficing, Ancient History of Maleficaria, Early Modern Continental Drama, Magic and Ritual in the Hindu Vedas (ooh), Vir Gatha kal: Poems Extolling Brave Warriors, some language lab slots, and a couple slots of freshman composition classes.

If no one else calls out by the time she's done writing those out, she'll add a note that the Friday shop class will be bad for actually making anything and that the Tuesday alchemy lab is a solid balance of safety and ability to actually make things. People really should call some more things out, though.

Camillo manages to stop staring at his desk long enough for his schedule to arrive.

M, 8:45-10:45 AM
     Household Bookkeeping

MF, 10:45-11:45 AM
     Santa Muerte, Pray For Us: The Holiness of Death in Southwestern Literature

MF, 11:45 AM-12:45 PM
     Language Lab

MWF, 2:15-3:15 PM
     History of Maleficing

MWF, 3:15-4:15 PM
     Rituale Romanum: Pre-1962

TTH, 8:45-9:45 AM
     Beyond King James: English Translations of the Pentateuch

TTH, 9:45-10:45 AM
     Introduction to Probability

T, 10:45 AM-12:45 PM
     Intro to Shop

TTH, 2:15-3:15 PM
     Number Theory

TTH, 3:15-4:15 PM
     Applied Electromechanics

WF, 8:45-10:45 AM
     Freshman Maleficaria Studies

W, 10:45 AM-12:45 PM
     Intro to Lab

TH, 10:45 AM-12:45 PM
     Beyond the Quixote: Short Stories of Cervantes

Well, it sounds like other people think it's safe to share their schedules. So does he.

It would be bad to be the first person to take orders from Swordgirl and people think you're a doormat, but worse to be last and people think you're contrary.

Stasia shares her schedule, the unique classes thus far being Calamities/Consequences, Intro Mechanics, Anglo-Saxon Poetry.

Calamities sounds needlessly depressing, most poetry is crap, and mechanics — mechanics of what exactly? But it'd be silly to shoot for different classes because why would she know better than the school.

Miguel is gonna...nod like this has been a very useful exercise and keep his existing schedule, it doesn't have obvious bad stuff like shop or lab early in the week and most stuff is on high levels of the school. Probably he's fine.

He's in a bunch of history classes including Green Knights & Questing Beasts: Magic and Maleficaria in Medieval Literature and History of Alchemy and Medieval Debate Poetry, Intro to Statistics, and Intro to Incantations.

"If you see any classes on the board that you very much want and don't have, you may request them by writing those classes on your paper. Don't write them down until you're sure, though, and be mindful of what they move. Remember that you can only request three classes. And, of course, if anyone has shop or lab first thing in the morning, especially on Monday, change it to a different time slot; any freshmen who keep those slots will certainly be killed by the end of the semester. You may risk Monday immediately before lunch if you are very brave, but only do so if you plan to be an artificer and will benefit greatly from the increased supply access at the beginning of the week, because the danger at that time is still significant."

She would think that most students knew these things, but several of the students in this room look... confused, and she would not prefer to embarrass any of them by commenting on anyone in particular.

She's just been staring kind of blankly at the desk wood for the last minute, but hold on. Why does she have Monday morning lab? She starts writing.

Excuse me miss school, but you put me in a non-freshman class which is concerning because I can't see how it's smart.

I know you need mana so that you can stay open. I know you need to eat so everyone else can graduate. But I am literally already dead. The very first time I bump into a mal that mind tricks are bad against, it peels my skin like a candy wrapper and eats everything.

Maybe you put a lot of work into designing the schedules of people who are going to live longer and made them all very good but could only spare a little bit of attention on mine. I would also find it very hard to arrange 1500 people's daily lives with zero conflicts. You are truly awesome. :)

But if it's not too much trouble, I think it would be a big improvement if I could switch to—

She stares at the board for a while playing Schedule Tetris.

—Tuesday lab at 11:45 and then 1800s French poetry on Monday morning. Thank you for understanding, Anastasia♡

She slips it into her backpack and watches the vents and door while everyone fusses over the perfect classes.

"Does anyone have anything right after lunch, Monday-Wednesday-Friday? I don't really want History of Maleficing if I can avoid it."

"Looks like there's Maleficaria from 1700 to the Present and Abacus Skills? Whatever Abacus Skills is." 

After moving some things around he manages to get a schedule he likes fine.

Abacus skills sounds cool but that would leave him without a history class, and the Scholomance would reshuffle his schedule, and he likes most of his classes. He takes Anemone's Ancient History of Maleficaria instead, and requests to keep his shop and lab classes just in case.

After studying the available changes to her classes for a while - Random bits of magic history seems fine, she doesn't know any better, but she needs to move the monday morning shop class so nothing eats her and she wants Intro to Electrodynamics actually it sounds interesting and she'd rather move the language lab so she doesn't have an awkward gap in her schedule and she wants one more making-things-related class, how about ''Introduction to Runecraft" and like hell is she going to take Pre-Calculus when she's been struggling with algebra-

She writes all these requests in and then lets herself get distracted. She gets another version of her schedule a bit later.

...Aw, shit.

She still has shop first thing Monday morning.

She went and assumed the first three things she wrote would be her guaranteed changes. No. She has Electrodynamics and her Freshman Geometry and Runecraft and that's three things, nothing else changed-

That's what she gets for not wanting to look stupid. Fuck.

She tries not to audibly groan or make it too obvious she fucked up, flipping her schedule over as calmly as she can manage.

Hell.

Well, she has a critical shortage of stuff already, and is probably going to die already. If she catches up and survives it'll be by making and accumulating stuff. Enchanted objects sound like wonderful boosters. And she wants to make stuff. She fixed a busted bike and rode it until it got stolen and it felt good. She can just... Be vigilant. Right. When a thousand kinds of things she doesn't understand positively infest the place first think in the morning.

That feels like lying to herself and a pit of dread settles into the pit of her stomach but she's fine everything is fine.