"... Horrible wall sitting?"

" - yeah, it's a core exercise. It's incredibly simple. You just put your back to a wall and then lower yourself to a sitting position, but with nothing to sit on. For about ten seconds you will wonder what all the fuss is and then if you hold it five minutes you'll have enough mana for anything you know how to cast. You won't hold it five minutes, though, the first time, because it'll hurt too much."

"Huh! That seems like a good one, if it's some of the same muscles as crunches, it's kind of hard to do anything else while you're doing crunches. I'd worry about doing it against the stacks, though."

"Yeah, I wouldn't do it in here, I do it in my room at night. Maybe once I'm in better shape I'll toss my desk chair and position my desk such that I can work at my desk while doing it, but I'll have to be in lots better shape, I can only manage a couple minutes at a time right now."

"I wonder if there's an optimal level of shape to be in. Like, you don't want to be too fit until senior year, right, since you get diminishing returns on mana. Maybe the thing to do is focus a lot on one muscle group at a time and then let it atrophy while you cycle through the others." 

"Well, only if you can't get comparable mana from stuff that isn't exercise. There've got to be some other things in the same class, right?"

"I used to be able to get lots from copying characters, when I was a kid. They make you do the same ones over and over and over again and it's just completely awful. Unfortunately, I am now fully literate." 

"I think exercise is recommended mostly because it's so universally good, everyone's got things they struggle with enough to get mana from them but exercise works well for most kids our age."

"Did anyone else read Scholomance Confidential even though your parents told you not to. Or specifically because your parents told you not to."

"Mother told me to."

"There was a thread titled 'which sex acts do you get the most mana from, assuming you don't like your partner' and I took a lot of notes but am minding the possibility that everyone was bullshitting us."

"...that has got to come down to individual preference." 

" - uh, is this, like - an internet forum?"

"I mean, some things are objectively more effortful than other things, independent of how much you like or dislike them! Though certainly everyone did not give the same answer. - yeah, it's an internet forum. You can only post if you send the mods proof you graduated but you still aren't supposed to, like, trust the stuff there, it's not actually meant as advice for incoming students."

Malak did not read that thread. She saw it and rolled her eyes at the degeneracy of westerners and wasn't even a little tempted to click it, because, ew, gross.

It seems really useful to know if you can double up on earning a favor from some enclaver boy and building mana!!

"Man, I kinda wish I'd read it. - not that specifically, but in general. My internet was pretty bad, though, probably wouldn't have been worth it to load that many pages."

"A lot of it's - I think better not to read, really - there was a lot of stuff about, uh, trouble reintegrating, and feelings - I think people have lots of feelings once they're out because you can't have them while you're in, but it's not in fact at all helpful to know about those feelings - but there were useful threads about, like, is it true that you get better things from the vending machines if you hold a coin for a long time, what's the best exercise, what's the best history class you ever took, who's someone who died who you really thought was going to make it and what happened..."

"Huh. Well I guess I'm glad I didn't read it if it would've been harmful. - that thing about the coins is fake, right, that sounds fake."

"Tentative consensus was that if you have treated the coins as having more significance than usual - traded them for something of great value, or stolen them from a dead kid's room, or something - they're more likely to get you either something really good or something really bad. But again, I don't know how much to trust it - I always asked my parents if the thing I'd read on there was true, except about the sex acts stuff, I did not ask them about that."

"I used to read it, but, the thing is, it's just the ones who lived. So you can't actually learn anything about what it's really like, for most people." 

"Huh," she says, and then realizes that she's gotten distracted from the history of alchemy homework, so she goes back to that without any further comment or transition.

Annisa has ground through her French, unpleasant as it was, and there's still a little time before dinner so she'll dash together an essay on amphisbaena, Mal Studies is worth trying hard in when it's a common and dangerous mal and barely worth doing at all when it's not. 

Eventually she's mostly gotten this history of alchemy homework how she wants it. "Okay, did anyone want to spend a while looking for French syntax books? Or anything else interesting?"

It would probably be in Annisa's best interests to do her French homework again, instead of mal studies homework. Malak considers whether to encourage her to do this. That would be the friendly thing to do, but... they are not friends. It's a bit too proactive for someone she's just in a study group with.