Orion opens the cabinet. There isn't anything in there. He sighs and sits down near a vent.

El picks the best seat she doesn't expect to be shoved out of - near a drain but also near the door, in case of a stampede.

Bobbie is tired of correcting people who don't know where to sit, so she takes actually good seat for herself in silence. She shifts her desk so she can at least keep an eye on El if anything happens.

"Look, you haven't clarified if you construe it as a professional obligation to sock an enclaver in the nose if they go after my chair," mutters El.

"Depends on the enclave. Come sit over here and they won't, though." Bobbie does not know whether to mention that she is an enclaver. Probably not, it's not going to be relevant to her deal with El unless she needs to draw enclave mana to kill something.

El was mostly fine, it's mostly that idiot under the vent she's worried about.

El goes and sits over there.

Idiot under the vent keeps peering into it like he thinks he can see pirate treasure in it or something.

Oh he is so dead. Not her problem.

...

OK maybe it's a little bit her problem because if a chicago mundie gets eaten right before her eyes she's going to feel bad about not doing anything.

"Hey, you, you're from Chicago, right?"

He looks around but can't figure out who she's talking to.

"You. Blondie. Under the vent."

He is sooooo dead.

"- I'm from New York," he says, puzzled.

What.

"Like... upstate?"

...he taps his wristwatch-y power sharer.

...OK then.

"... You sure you want to be sitting there?"

"Yeah," he says, peering up at the vent for pirate treasure again. "I think I saw a bit of an octopus-y thing and if it pokes out at all I wanna kill it."

...New York has too much mana for their own good.

"Carry on, then."

Zed and Angie enter not long after, Angie scanning the room and then pulling Zed along to go and sit near Lily. Zed looks half awake and is seriously considering whether they can afford to take a stimulant potion or if they should just suck it up and wait till later.

Kevin comes in, walks around the room with his head swiveling like it's not attached to the rest of him, pauses next to Orion and peers up the vent. "I don't like the look of that vent," he says, and goes and sits elsewhere.

Lily looks over at Zed. "Hey, I remember you. From the supply run, right? Nice to see you again."

The more Stasia thinks about physics class, the more the idea grows on her.

It's like. People are all sitting on a giant rug that Forces are trying to pull out from under them every second of the day. Learning all the proper rules is helping everyone pound nails into that rug. The sky doesn't get to open up and swallow agoraphobes. Crappy self-esteem doesn't get to turn Mr. Samsa into a bug. Because that's not how it works. That's not how anything works and it never will be.

The fact that the class exists also answers the question she posed to the school on the first day. Whether it wants them to be the marrow in its bones, building consensus, or if it wants to be all squiggly and storylike.

She stops in front of a blueprint for a minute to smile at it, grinding its pattern into her head. Carving the lines along the grooves of her brain, steel screeching into steel. She doesn't have time to copy it into her notepad, but she tells the poster that she will at dinner and then she'll hang it up in her room.

By the time Stasia gets to class, she's kind of hyped herself up for it, promising to do her absolute best in this class no matter how boring it might be and how soon she might die.

She picks up a corner seat a few desks behind The Girl Who Lifts and flicks her eyes around for textbook! Textbook! Textbook please!

Kevin has a textbook. He's going to listen to the lecture as carefully as he can, which will be enough to pick up on two or three key facts, any spell-incantations, and what the homework is, and then he's going to bring all of it to Marcy and she's going to get him a B-minus, unless she wants to build up a buffer for later in the semester in which case she'll get him an A. And while she does that he's going to do things that don't involve sitting down with a pencil.

Orion takes some notes but mostly looks up at the vent. The octopus does not deign to extend a tentacle in his direction.