Amphisbaena are venomous, but the venom is deadly only from the adults, and you'll probably survive a single bite, assuming you're not insane and carry antitoxin; they usually only kill people if you somehow step into a whole cluster of adult ones, which is hard to do by accident, because they like damp warm places and what are you doing in a damp warm place. The most annoying thing about them is that they breed in the shower pipes; you can expend mana killing them up in there, but it's a waste of mana, the ones small enough to wiggle through the faucet are small enough their bites merely sting. In the outside world, they're common in these regions (including Indonesia); mana-efficient ways to handle them include net spells that hold them back and cold spells, which will probably make them decide to be elsewhere. They can't bite through thick clothing and can safely be handled with gloves. They're bred by alchemists for their eggs, which are good ingredients for vitality, periodicity and viciousness. "All right, this isn't brilliant but it's done and those of you not going for valedictorian are welcome to copy it, if I can have the same off you some future week when I'm busier."

"Sure. I can check if any of my siblings made copies of their essays on safe mals, they were supposed to if they had time."

"I wish my parents had clustered more closely." She hands the essay over.

"I sort of wish my parents had spaced us out more. I'm the oldest, but it's sort of a toss-up right now if they'll be able to get testing spots for the next two." 

"Testing spots? Wow, the Sinosphere is brutal - in Indonesia anyone can test and honestly if you don't make it you wouldn't have done well here anyway, it's just a medical evaluation and some interviews and a fluency test and killing a couple of dogs."

"I think my family is more tightly spaced than usual. I would've had four older siblings here if none of them had died and I'll have four younger siblings here when I'm a senior."

"Halfway to an enclave, that."

"Hong Kong's weird. The enclave had historical ties to Britain – not enough to get British slots, but enough that they don't get along well at all with the rest of China. So we always get shafted, and since the enclave proctors the tests, they want to stack the deck as much as possible. The tests are bad everywhere, though, and for pretty much the same reason." 

Not talking about tests. Not talking about siblings. Not sure how to do this without looking like she's asking for sympathy. It's very unfortunate how she doesn't have any unfinished homework out in front of her and can't just be appearing to work on that.

"Halfway to a small one, maybe. They're mostly focused on their own classes, and we don't have that many shared resources. Mostly just reusing pointless essays, and that's only really good for mal studies because all the other classes vary so much." And a mouse collection for graduation or other dire circumstances.

"And as we all know, Naima sprang fully formed from the void," Annisa says. I have noticed your avoidance of this subject and am going to turn it into a Group in-joke so that it's a shared thing not a you thing. 

"... That she did."

- is that - is this the sort of thing where it means she has to explain now or is it permission not to explain, what does that mean?

She looks at Malak in case Malak has any additional information on what this might mean.

It's permission not to explain, obviously, but Naima seems confused about that. She doesn't know how to communicate this to Naima with just body language. Softly, (as a courtesy to Annisa) in Arabic, (as a courtesy to Naima)

"You don't have to say anything."

- she nods, then.

"Uh, so, does anyone know how much time we have left before dinner?"

Okay, something definitely just happened there. And we are – not talking about it? Cool. Not talking. Not talking about it is the thing we are doing. 

(Julian wants to know real bad). 

"Looks like maybe twenty minutes."

"That's probably enough time to at least see if we can get a sense of how the library likes to organize itself. If anyone wants to try."

"Finding the language reference section is going to be important for all of us pretty soon. I say we go for it."  Also, it has the advantage of being less awkward than this non-conversation. 

"I am the one whose life depends on learning French this weekend but we might want to strategize before enclaver dinner about how adding people to the Group works."

" - oh, right. Um, I think that being an enclaver is a bonus but we really don't want anyone who's going to slow us down when studying or make the rest of us really uncomfortable, because it seems really valuable, actually, having a place where we don't have to think about all of the complicated enclaver rules as much? And it seems hard to un-add someone to the Group, you know, once you've added them? Maybe we could... invite her to some things and not other things, if we like her, and see if we want to end up inviting her to everything the Group does later? - like, we could invite her to the gym thing. Maybe."

"Yep, that sounds good to me. The thing I said to her at first, about how she could find another carrell - I was thinking that a thing we can do, that's less likely to anger enclavers or offend anyone than just directly turning them down, is give them - tasks that if they succeed at the tasks, would suggest they're in fact quite valuable as allies, and then we sort of have an initiation procedure, and it makes groups more real, if they have an initiation procedure. But we probably don't want to only add people who have carrell-coaxing spells and are willing to spend them on studying with us, that might be too high a bar before we've even had the chance to develop a reputation as impressive."

"I think Bella only wanted to study for history of artificing together. Which is less of a big deal than joining the Group, obviously. We should have Standards and not just let any enclaver who asks join, because - if we do just let in every enclaver then that gives us a reputation as suck-ups and not as impressive cool people who can handle themselves."

"That makes sense. We could have, uh, a specific after-dinner time a couple times a week where we specifically do history of artificing homework, maybe in the carrel or maybe somewhere else, and we can invite Bella and other history of artificing people to the specific-class study time? If it turns out that Bella wants to make studying a regular thing at all, she could also end up not liking us. - probably it shouldn't be in the carrel because the carrel would get cramped with very many more people."

"New Orleans might have reading room space. I'm not expecting 'lots of enclavers want to join our study group' to be a problem we have but if it is I think - Boston's probably just in if they want to be, other US enclaves that aren't insane like Toronto and Sacramento we probably want to hang out with at least sometimes to see if we get along with them...I'm fine with snubbing enclaves elsewhere to establish we're not suck-ups, but it seems like the rest of you might be less set on America than I am?"