Normally, Berlin would assign one of its seniors to babysit the freshman supply run on day one, to give them directions to the shared reading room and show them how to interact safely with Scholomance storage cabinets and hear more detailed updates on their families outside and so forth. Plus hand off any resources they won't need for graduation, of course. But they've apparently had an unusually bad three years, even for a relatively small enclave that can't expect the kind of survival rates New York boasts of. The surviving two, twitchy and suspicious, don't want to get out of line of sight of each other for anything less than curfew, so they're both along, favoring an excess of What Not To Do lectures over personal gossip, and occasionally bapping a kid gently on the shoulder to warn them if their speaking volume exceeded a polite if you're eavesdropping closely enough to catch German that's on you.

"Don't try to do more than ten people's worth of maintenance shifts," one of them is saying to Lysander as they descend the stairs. "Three," he gestures at the other Berlin freshmen, "gets you your ride out, and you spend the rest on keeping them alive, and then when you run out of time you stop. Don't start thinking you can be a hero if you skip one more class; if they have to save you from your homework someone will die, most likely you." 

And then, of course, goes frustratedly unsaid, especially if this happens later rather than sooner, they'll be in exactly the unenviable position the seniors are right now, where all the good replacement options are already spoken for. 

"R...ight," says Lysander, who was one hundred percent going to do that exact thing and now feels kind of like an asshole.