...Well, it's not like the dead kid is using that. 

Leareth pauses to get his scrying spell up again and centered on the hallway, to get a sense of what he's up against, before he distracts himself by experimenting with pulling from it. 

It feels - sort of like tapping a node, there's as much mana here, but it's - different in flavor, sort of more like directly getting power from another person through a link -

Outside the monsters seem to have mostly switched to devouring each other.

That's...not actually as hard as he expected. 

The other girl used all of her stored power and seemed very panicked about it, though. And her reaction when he asked about nodes... He has to assume that this is an incredibly limited resource at this school, for some reason? 

He takes only a small trickle, enough that his vision clears and the room stops spinning, and then he settles in to shield the door against any monsters that feel like attacking it instead of all the nice tasty dead bodies piled up right there. 

There are only a couple, over the course of the next hour. Mostly now that the rules aren't being broken the most delicious mess around is the mess of corpses on the floor. 

Leareth stays standing, because there isn't anywhere that reasonable to sit except the bloody bed and because it helps him stay alert. 

The stimulant eventually takes full effect and...is pretty great, actually? His mage-gift is still kind of resenting the workload he's given it, but he doesn't feel the least bit sleepy or physically fatigued. He scries the hallway, paces and stretches occasionally, and at ten-minute intervals reaches out with Thoughtsensing to check on the girl in the other room. 

She is bitterly regretting not telling him not to use all Lee's mana. There would have been no point in telling him, she has zero leverage on this front, but it's the only really obvious way to survive at this point. (She bets it's less than she had. She worked so goddamned hard for it...)

Hypothesis confirmed. Leareth doesn't actually need much more energy, now, he's barely having to do anything. He vaguely wishes he'd thought of this plan sooner, except that he really didn't have the context to do that... 

He doesn't interrupt the girl again, just occasionally peeks at her thoughts to get a sense of the time remaining before he can leave this room and get some more answers. 

At six o clock sharp some bells ring and she's out of her door and trying magic to open Lee's, instantly. It'd be hard to open if he were alive but since he's dead it shouldn't - ha. 

She dives for his mana storage and starts trying to lug it across the hallway to her room. It's fifty pounds or so, so this is awkward.

Leareth, unlike her, is a fully-grown adult. He startles slightly when she shoves the door open, but was expecting it enough that he doesn't actually reflexively attack.

:Would you like some help?: 

What do you want for it I want to be done before the hall's full of people.

:- We can agree on a sensible trade later: If they’re in a hurry the Leareth is just going to pick the box up and haul it. His shoulders have some complaints about this but it’s really not far, and then the box is in her room. Leareth sets it down, carefully, slightly out of breath.

:Right. Now what:

- I probably want to pick over the rest of his stuff too but I can answer questions while I do it? You probably want to stay here unless you want the whole school to know there's an adult here.

:All right. I have a number of questions: With both doors open, it's very easy to park himself out of sight in the girl's room. :Although, to start - I am not sure I managed to introduce myself. My name is Leareth. I - lead a large organization in the far north of Velgarth. I was experimenting with Gate-transport and that appears to be how I ended up here: 

There's another kid up investigating Lee's room. "I heard him scream in the middle of the night and checked at six and took his storage," she tells him bluntly. "I checked and whatever did it's gone. You can have your pick of the spellbooks, I'm art track, and the clothes, they won't fit me, but I want his care packages."

I haven't heard of Velgarth, she tells Leareth. Is it in Russia? It'd fit with 'far north' and with her not having heard of it; there's a lot of Russia and she hasn't paid very much attention to it. 

:...Russia is a country? I highly doubt it. Velgarth refers to the whole world - but I suppose the word is different in different languages. Is Russia anywhere close to - Valdemar, Rethwellan, Karse, Iftel, Hardorn, the Eastern Empire...?: 

Nope nope nope nope and nope. 

She comes back, clutching a beautiful sandalwood box and a backpack, dumps them on her bed and starts combing through them. Religious inscription of some kind, a couple particularly treasured spellbooks, in Korean but she can trade those at breakfast, a tube of salve which goes straight into her lockbox of treasured possessions, spell notes, bandages...

Leareth sits down on her bed. He's VERY AWAKE thanks to her stimulant, but his head aches and he wants to conserve his strength anyway.

:I am starting to wonder if I somehow ended up literally on another planet. ...Your world is a planet, yes?: 

Earth is a planet. The school is an extradimensional space as segregated from it as a hundred magical engineering genuises could manage. Headache? I have ibuprofen and you can have it in exchange for having lugged the mana storage. She's feeling generous now that she is not incredibly doomed. 

:What is 'ibuprofen'? Is it strong enough to make me foggy?: 

Huh? No. Why would anyone have a painkiller that made you foggy. At that point you can just slit your own throat. It just eases headaches and cramps and so on. The backpack has Lee's coursebooks and a couple small jars of alchemy supplies and a water bottle she can sell a freshman and a bunch of lumps of metal she'll have to identify later but can probably use, and it's in better shape than her own backpack so once she's emptied it she starts moving her stuff over, not like she's going to be pretending she didn't loot Lee's room. 

:Then I would be very grateful for it: Though if it's equivalent to willowbark, it's not going to help that much with a reaction-headache. Oh well. If he can manage not to need to throw around any more magic until he's had a nap, he'll be fine. 

:- Why is the school in extradimensional space?: Also HOW, but he's guessing the teenager doesn't know, if it took a hundred elite mages - wizards? - working together. 

She fishes out an ibuprofen tablet for him, hands it over. Pulls out a comb and brushes her hair and drinks some water and splashes a little on her face, she doesn't feel like crap right now but she bets she will once the high wears off. It's to keep us all safe from the mals. How do they do it where you're from?

:We have much much less of a monster problem where I am from! Even the Pelagirs - the most dangerous regions in Velgarth - are not as bad as this! And you are saying this school is safer than outside? ....How is anyone in your world still alive?:

The school's not that bad if you don't break curfew, it has, like, a 25% survival rate for four years and that includes all the kids who had no business being here and have emotional breakdowns or something. And if you make it, then you're an adult, you're not a soft target, you'll probably make it to a hundred, a hundred fifty, have twelve kids if you're the kind of person who wants to do that, or spend fifty years earning your way into an enclave - the enclaves have alliances, in here, and much higher survival rates, I think lots of them only have three or four kids and can reasonably expect two to make it. 

The world used to be less dangerous but mals've been getting worse. If there are other worlds that might actually be helpful for figuring out - why they got worse, if there's a way to reverse it - except interworld travel will introduce our mals to your world and then you'll probably be in our boat, so it might be better not to do it.

This is way too much to absorb, too quickly. Leareth is going to have to do his processing later.

:I...see. Yes, that situation does sound very bad. I - would like to figure out what I can do to help, but first I need to be much more oriented than I am currently: