:- Wait, so even the planet Earth does not have pools of ambient magic generated by other plant and animal life?: 

Pools, no. You can pull from plants and bugs and stuff - kills them, but works fine. Pulling from animals smart enough to not want to die fucks you up.

:Hmm. ...In our world, you can kill animals and people for magic, and it is - messy and damaging to the mage if one is unskilled, but there are techniques for doing it safely: 

Well, Pisa does something so they don't all go insane and rot from the inside. 

If someone knew how to kill people and not be damaged by it, that'd make them very dangerous to everyone else in here, because they'd have less to lose by going for it, so probably people'd kill them. So if you want to explore that maybe do it on Earth.

:- I mean, I am not going to do it here because I disprefer people dying. ...If the oldest students here are eighteen, I - do think it would be difficult for them to kill me even in a group. But I will explore all the other options first, and - there may be ways of getting myself and all of you out of here alive that are not energy-costly: He's not all that optimistic about it, though.

People die anyway; if she were going to be a maleficer she'd pick particularly doomed ones. But she has Lee's mana storage so that's not her best route from here. I mean, graduation alliances will take you, if you end up wanting to be public about being here, and they have their mana that they've stored up which their allies can use to get them out. If you actually had a plan to get all 800 seniors out and it was really good you could convince lots of them to feed you mana for it. Getting the younger students out wouldn't even be worth it because we're safer here than on the outside.

He's thinking. He doesn't have an answer, not yet, but he has the earliest embryonic form of one. 

:All right. - Breakfast would be good, I need to eat after doing magic: 

Yep. Watch my back. And she heads out into the hallway, which is now fairly full of students, and starts walking. 

Leareth, illusioned to look like a nondescript, forgettable teenager of fifteen or sixteen, ducks out after her - and reaches out to lay hasty temporary compulsions on everyone in range, to make himself even less noticeable, because he doesn't want it to be remarked on that he's leaving the room with her. 

He follows, Othersenses extended to their full range; he should be able to sense mals or any kind of other magical attack that way. 

There are plenty of mals within range, even with his range warped by the school cutting off into Void in various places; some in the ducts, some in the drains, some in the bathrooms that Annisa ignores to go up six flights of stairs, some in the classrooms that they pass going up those flights of stairs. They mostly seem to be lying in wait, looking for soft targets, which he and Annisa evidently aren't.

The cafeteria is enormous, set up to fit several thousand students at a time; there are lines against the walls for food, which Annisa joins. There are students sitting and eating at long wooden tables with attached long wooden benches. There's a normal sort of cafeteria babble of students chattering. 

Annisa looks around for Koreans she knows and can sell Lee's textbooks to. Spots them, eventually, and then redirects her attention to looking out for mals in the food line.

...Leareth is going to take this opportunity to try skimming the surface thoughts of everyone he can, and then focus more in depth on anyone whose thoughts seem especially interesting or informative, particularly about the local - geopolitics doesn't seem like quite the right word for an extradimensional school - the local political currents? 

This kid is talking with his friends in low voices about possibly changing which room they start from for graduation; the plan was to start from Aki's, which is closest to a hallway, but they've been approached by another group of kids about a loose no-promises partnership of the 'fight our way out of the dorms and to the hall itself' variety and that'd only work if they start from Pedro's.

These kids are going over today's disastrous obstacle course run and debugging what went wrong and how they can make sure it doesn't happen again; they're trying to do this nonjudgmentally but it was a real shitshow and nerves are a bit frayed so they're sort of bitterly sniping at each other whenever their self-control isn't quite up to the task.

This group is having a serious heart-to-heart with the girl who's supposed to have learned the time spear spell; she doesn't have it down yet and there's only a month to go and she insists she'll have it any day now but she said that a week ago.

These kids are in the final planning stages of an auction they're running this weekend to sell off four years' worth of stuff for mana. 

These kids are a study group for Akkadian Divinations and are desperately trying to finish up an essay due later today.

This girl is upset because her little sister got eaten yesterday and is trying not to let her throw her off because she has gym in half an hour. 

Annisa's busy finding Seoul. "Hi," she says, not at all sure they'll remember her but expecting they'll have a vague sense that they ought to, which is good enough. "Kid across the hall from me screamed in the middle of the night, so I checked in on him in the morning, and landed five Korean spellbooks, I'm going to shop 'em around unless you're offering something really good but I thought I'd come here first."

"Let's see 'em."

She lays them out on the table. "I'm in the market for steel, aluminum, and concentrated hydrogen peroxide."

A negotiation ensues, more comprehensible from reading the participants' minds than from listening to them talk; Seoul figures that Annisa doesn't know how much the spellbooks are worth, which is true, but Annisa is good at reading people and inclined to walk away if Seoul thinks they're getting a great deal, and that's almost like knowing what the spellbooks are worth. Eventually she trades them two of the books and goes to sit at a different table.

Leareth follows the flow of kids to collect food, even though the stimulant Annisa gave him seems to have completely destroyed any appetite he might otherwise have had. Half of the food is infested with mals but mage-sight makes it very easy to pick out which - and rather than risking disrupting Annisa's negotiation, he finds a spot to hover inconspicuously and wait for her to be done. 

One month. So that's his timeline, then. He takes down some other mental notes. Time spear spell. The students train using some kind of obstacle course. They need to fight their way out of their bedrooms to reach the graduation hall, but apparently not while the curfew is in effect? 

...He can have feelings about dead little sisters later. 

:May I sit at this table or should I look for somewhere else?: he asks Annisa once she's finished her trading and moved along. 

You can sit here, just act like you're looking at the Korean spellbooks. That'll help with getting Seoul to pay more for them anyway. Annisa sits with four other kids; they take turns keeping a lookout, this time of the year, and the others tend to be working on homework. She gives a perfunctory explanation of the dead neighbor and the Korean spellbooks to discharge "before they wander off" and then pulls out some homework herself; her plan for today was to get her Middle English Lost Poetry essay written during Maleficaria Studies but she suspect she's going to spend that distracted by questions for the adult, so maybe she can dash it off now. 

Leareth is not actually inclined to cause Annisa to fall behind on her homework, since apparently that can kill you here! 

He will pretend to look at inscrutable text. ...Very neat text, they clearly have printing presses in this world, good for them. :If you prefer, I can learn as much as possible via mindreading on my own, and take down a list of questions to ask you later when it is a better time?: 

Mal Studies isn't an awful time for it and there's not really going to be a better one, end of term is coming up and it's always the worst time of the year. More monsters, exams to study for, seniors frantically selling all their stuff and you can't miss out on the stuff you desperately need or you'll be dead come senior year. She is shoveling cafeteria food into her mouth while she tries to think of more things to pad out this essay with; maybe she has affordance for a digression into how mores of the time would have shaped interpretation of the flirtation scene, you can get a lot out of literary analysis that's actually just history in a funny hat...

Leareth would offer to help, but he doesn't know anything about this world's poetry or their literary analysis traditions, and really has no particular advantage to writing school essays at all, so he settles for not distracting her. 

Some questions to resolve later, which he uses mnemonic techniques to remember since he still doesn't have notetaking supplies: 

- Lee's room should remain usable for the rest of the term, so if he intends to make his move at the end of this month, he can use it as a base in the meantime? 

- What sort of stuff will the seniors be selling? Can any of it be used by Leareth, who clearly has a different kind of magic than the local kind? 

- Why are there more monsters in the last month of the term? 

- What are the exact logistics of the graduation event? Students have to fight there way from their rooms to the hall, but what does that look like? 

- If room-sharing is okay, then can anyone graduate just by being in a senior student's room at the right time? 

- What does the 'time spear' spell do? 

- ....Not actually an important question, but what in all hells do essays on literary analysis of poetry have to do with learning magic and surviving the mals? 

Leareth methodically eats his food while he thinks. It's pretty unimpressive but honestly he's had worse. 

Flirtation, Annisa is busy writing, is a common theme of poetry in this time period and close to a human universal as a theme in storytelling, see for example themes of flirtation in a dozen other poems she can list off from her notes on previous poetry classes, but unusually resistant to analysis focused only on the language within the poem itself, because of how flirtation generally relies on - and is in fact a way of establishing mutual knowledge of - the society's norms for romantic pursuit and affection; therefore to evaluate this scene in the poem one ought to look to external sources on relationship dynamics and conceptions of romance in the time period. Some of that can be identified in contemporaneous French literature, and some in comparison across the many poems the course has covered, and some in looking to surviving Middle English literature, which is of course to a first approximation just Chaucer, and with less reliability by looking at Early Modern English conceptions of flirtation and romance, of which Shakespeare is the obvious abundant source of examples....

She's definitely going to get marked down for how little this essay engages with the actual works it's supposed to be about, it's at least half comparisons to other stuff by volume, but she doesn't think she'll get marked down past a C, which is all that matters. She has it more or less finished by the time the juniors start standing up to go to Maleficaria Studies. 

Leareth feels like he's learned nonzero things about flirting in this culture just from skimming Annisa's surface thoughts while she was in the process of writing her essay, which is...really something, honestly. 

He stands up when she does, scooping the remaining Korean textbooks into his arms. 

:- Is there any school supplies room or something where I could find pen and paper?: he asks Annisa. :If not I can trade you - something - for it, but it would be simplest if I did not need to take any of your possessions that you clearly need: 

We can make a supply run if you're up for defending us for it, otherwise I'll have to call in some favors to get a large enough group for it and it'd be cheaper just to give you a pen and some paper. Be nice to those spellbooks, I don't want them to run off before I can sell them.

:...Do you think that I would actually need defending on a supply run? Since I assume I am more powerful and more experienced than you or your classmates: Pause. :- Also what do you mean by 'be nice', for the spellbooks? I - are they sentient? I am not going to damage or deface them but I am unsure how to be nice on top of that: 

Spellbooks are powerful and valuable and magical enough they tend to have minds of their own - not, like, as much as people, but as much as dogs, surely, and a dog will run off if you neglect it. If you drop a book you should apologize to it and give it a kiss and dust it off, you want to keep them somewhere pretty, during a confusing transition like this you want to speak to them soothingly.... the supply cabinets are going to have lots of mals this time of year and maybe none of them will want a piece of you but some might.

Leareth has so many questions about the instructions given for how to be nice to spellbooks, but - probably not urgent? Since he's mostly confused about how the underlying ontology there makes any sense, and that doesn't sound quick or easy to resolve. 

:- How many mals in the supply cabinets?: he asks instead. :I can easily detect them - well, most of them that I know of so far - at a distance, and last night I did not have any difficulties fighting up to half a dozen at a time: