Well, you're welcome to be my guest until evening curfew, and then we can set you up in Lee's room for the next two weeks at least - at end of term the school will merge his room with one of his neighbors, but in the meantime it evidently thinks you being there is fine. I need to go to breakfast in ten minutes, especially if I'm trying to grab enough food to feed two, but I can answer questions until then.

:...Where does the food come from, if the school is outside of normal space?: 

It's nutrient paste with really sophisticated persistent illusions and partial transmutations on top. The school is very, very mana-intensive, but we all feed it with our homework and our horrible protracted deaths.

Was it something she said. 

....cheer up? Death is the fate of all men anyway? Or if that's not your preferred style of coping there's Edna St. Vincent Millay, right. I know, but I do not approve, and I am not resigned, which is why I'm gonna go sell all Lee's spellbooks and coursework to Koreans at breakfast in exchange for steel and alchemical silver.

Leareth is still holding very still. 

I know, but I do not approve, and I am not resigned

A...quote, or something, from a song maybe? It's very evocative. 

Vanyel would appreciate it, he thinks quietly to himself.

(And wonders if the dream is possible, here, and if not, how long it will take him to find his way back to Velgarth. Which he can only do after he's solved their local problem with awful magical monsters. It might take a very, very long time. He wonders if he'll ever speak to Vanyel again.) 

:I know: he says, quietly. :Your world has - even worse problems than mine, which is really saying something. I am going to find a way to fix it. I am not sure how long it will take: 

Well, he's an adult. Maybe you can dream like that, once you're an adult. 

Probably it'll take you a while, she says. Usually when people try to fix the school they get eaten by maw-mouths, or more of them would try it. But, like, by all means have a go, I've never seen magic like yours and that's a place to start if you're trying to do something no one else can. 

He's spent two thousand years trying to do things that no one else can. This is hardly new. 

:So - do you have classes in this school?: 

Yep! I'll be out all day - there's an afternoon work period but I need to spend it in the shop. Last class of the day ends at 4 for juniors - uh, the Americans count hours as six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve one two three four, so that's ten hours from now when I get out of class. I think an hour is approximately a candlemark. 

:Is there - anything I can usefully do in the meantime to learn more about this school and your world more broadly?: 

I don't know, you presumably can't read any of our languages? If you've got mana to burn and something for being uninteresting to people around you you could follow me at least to Mal Studies, which offers textbooks in one's native language and might do that for you too. I am now significantly behind on the mana I need for graduation and won't do it for you without compensation.

:I do not have a spell for literal invisibility, but I have a fairly low-powered illusion spell that can make me very difficult to see, like this -: 

And he's suddenly - mostly not visible, except as a slight shimmer-distortion in the air in front of her wall, if Annisa moves her head. 

:- and then if someone is suspicious I can use subtle mind control to redirect their attention away from it. ...I can pay you in mage-energies, if you want?: This translates approximately just as 'mana'. :But I am very drained right now - I did not take anything from the dead student's box except for the minimum I needed to avoid passing out. So it would have to be an I-owe-you for later: 

If you do that you'll look like a mal. I mean - not invisibility, but boringness, a general mind-control spell that makes you the least interesting thing around, and then you can supplement it by knocking off anyone who still notices you. I - she's eyeing his artifice. I might do that for an I-owe-you. What do those do, they're not shield-holders, are they -

:I - can do that and also illusion myself to look like a teenager? Like this: And he randomly picks the mental image of one of his researchers' fifteen-year-old son, and pulls the magic over himself. 

Probably works. There's more than 4,000 of us so no one knows everyone. I guess you can then come with me to breakfast. Can you do the telepathy all day?

:I can do it over a range of a few miles as long as there are no shields in the way. ...I cannot reach any of the other rooms if I am in your room or Lee's, though, it does not feel like shielding it feels like...something else: 

There's Void between dorms, yeah. Keeps the mals out.

:Between lecture rooms too? …Are there in fact classrooms. This is a noncentral case of a school in many ways!:

There are lecture rooms. Sometimes there's Void between them, sometimes they back each other, you can look at the blueprints to get a good idea how it all fits together. Mal Studies is in a big lecture hall; the rest of my classes are shop, this term.

:...Right. In that case, I will be able to stay in touch with you by Mindspeech sometimes, but not if you are on the other side of some void: He's suddenly desperately curious to have a look at those blueprints. The topology of the school must be bizarre. :Oh, and - I did not think to ask. How do students actually get between the school and Earth which is a planet? By something like Gating?: 

The freshman class gets inducted all at once when we're fourteen. I don't know if it's like Gating - I think not exactly? It doesn't bring the surrounding air along, that'd let more mals through. The senior class graduates by fighting their way through the graduation hall to the gates and then if they make it magic takes them back to wherever they were inducted from.

:Ah. And they have to fight their way past because of all the monsters?: 

Yes. The school's set up to keep most mals out, and most of the ones it can't keep out trapped in the graduation hall, but there's a lot of 'em in there. It's why I need the mana - gesture at Lee's box. I've been saving it up for three years. I won't get out without it.

:And there is no source of magical energy in here except for what the students can individually produce and store?: That...does sound incredibly limiting. No wonder she's upset about burning all of hers on defending herself against him and the mals his presence summoned. 

Well, they could also kill each other. She doesn't specify this, though she suspects his mind reading gets more than what she's sending. Yes. You build mana through effort. Exercise and embroidery and homework and so on. Adults who don't have extremely magic-intensive careers can often build enough mana to use magic when they want to just by living normal lives, but in school you have to work at it every waking moment or you won't have enough come graduation.