I don't think there'll be more than that, just, most people can't afford to burn mana fighting off an ambush every day even if every one individually is no big deal. If you're all right on mana then this way.

:- I am definitely limited on energy, but using my Othersenses takes minimal effort or - mana, I suppose, in your terminology. And if I have the option of running away then I will almost never need to fall back on mana-intensive fighting magic. So I think that I might as well go have a look: 

The supply cabinet is at one end of the cafeteria; there are mals lurking under some books on one shelf, and in that dark corner over there, and in that dark corner here, but none of them imminently about to pounce. Annisa sticks near the door, pokes the pens with her dagger, then takes five.

How many of them are the kind of mals with enough mind that Leareth can make compulsions work on them, and then compulsion them to HOLD STILL? 

Most of them; not all, though.

...Well, they might in fact be more scared of him and Annisa than Leareth is scared of them. He'll leave them alone for now, anyway, and just go open the cabinet, prepared to throw a levinbolt and force-net and fireball and ice-dagger all in rapid succession, as needed, if anything actually comes at him.

The shelves have - a fairly marvelous assortment of supplies, actually; aside from the fact the students seem hesitant to get them they'd be stunningly wealthy. There are stacks of hundreds of fabric-bound empty notebooks, and thousands of sheets of loose-leaf, high quality paper, drawing paper and lined paper and graph paper; there's notecards and pens and pencils and erasers and highlighters and markers and colored pencils and file folders and poster paper and glossy photo paper and construction paper in three dozen colors.

Nothing jumps them. On observing this Annisa additionally takes all the highlighters and colored pencils and as many erasers as fit in her backpack, those being the best trade goods by volume.

....Leareth stares at the supplies in awe for almost five entire seconds. 

:....Will anything terrible happen if I float all of this out of the cabinets and bring it back to the cafeteria?: he eventually manages to ask Annisa. :There is - just - so much - I do not need all of this myself but I am sure others in the school could make use of it...?: 

Well it'd be hella conspicuous! If you want to go 'hey, there's an adult here now, come to him with your best sob story and there'll be occasional supply drops' you can totally do that, but I'd think it through a bit? Especially if you want to filter the sob stories at all in any way. Also the art shop needs it more, there's nothing that valuable in here, just school supplies.

:- What does the art shop have? I - in the world where I come from, just - this - would be very valuable!: 

....In the meantime he will at least grab a stack of notebooks and a bundle of pens and - all right there really isn't any good reason why he needs the shiny paper or the coloured paper or the colorful paintbrush-pens but it....is definitely taking nonzero willpower not to grab them anyway. 

Just paper and school supplies? In - poor countries - most people couldn't afford this much but in rich countries like America practically everyone can. The artificing supply room has steel and gold and gemstones and ball bearings and machining tools and - useful stuff.

:In my world, making paper of this quality is moderately costly: 

(Leareth is trying to think whether even in the Eastern Empire it would be the case that practically everyone could afford a cloth-bound notebook and pens in multiple colors. He's...not sure. It might depend on the exact state of the economy. Honestly it's probably just been too long since he personally checked on the Eastern Empire and so he should downgrade his confidence in any of his guesses...) 

....He floats out the entire stack of graph paper as well. 

She is slightly judging him for using mana on anything you could in principle do by hand even though for adults that's probably a reasonable tradeoff. Okay, now let's get to class, I can't finish my essay if we end up in the front few rows.

Maintaining his teenage-student illusion, and the associated loose network of compulsions to make him look boring, also takes extra energy whenever he moves, and from this angle he can appear to stand perfectly still and not do anything while grabbing items and then concealing those behind illusions as well. 

Leareth nods and follows her, carrying his (incredible, amazing, remarkable) haul of note-taking supplies. 

The classroom is an enormous circle with more than a thousand seats, centered around a very large stage, which is - crawling with monsters, so dense with them that it'd be hard to even move through iut. The types he fought last night are on display, along with buzzing swarms of fanged things, enormous snakes, octopodal sorts of things with a thousand tentacles crawling along the edges of the ceiling, and, on either side of the door, two utterly enormous sacks of goo with tormented human faces on all their visible surface. 

They do, to Annisa's annoyance, end up in the front few rows; she makes clear in her thoughts that the reason this is annoying is because the lecture mals sometimes eat the kids in the first few rows so you have to pay attention and not do your other homework. She seems otherwise unfazed by the lecture hall, and sits down and takes out a notebook with a sigh.

The 'lecture' mals....which implies not the usual kind...and they only 'sometimes' eat the students -? Interesting. Also confusing. 

:- I can probably shield both of us while you finish your homework: Leareth offers, and then extends his mage-sight and Thoughtsensing to check how powerful and/or intelligent-seeming the mals on the center stage actually are. At the very least he should be able to get some warning if any of them are headed for him and Annisa specifically. 

To hia Othersenses they are totally - inanimate? Not alive at all, illusions or sort of constructs, rather than living beings. 

One of them animates, suddenly - it's still just an illusion-or-a-construct, though, but now instead of writhing in the crowded hall it wanders the perimeter, showing off.

Annisa knows how to fight llendevers, there was one picking off students out of their dorms her sophomore year so she looked it up. She will accept the promise of adult shielding and finish the poetry essay, which only takes about ten minutes, and then -

- no, it'd be dumb to start studying for her math final. One of the things you need to be trying to accumulate, in the Scholomance, is slack, and the thing you need slack for is responding to unexpected changes in circumstances; having the resources to weather a sudden setback or take advantage of a sudden opportunity. She has a sudden opportunity; she has an adult, who didn't know about the Scholomance and who wants to help, and who might be willing to trade her adult-made protective artifice for very basic orientation stuff. And she might not have this opportunity for very long because even adults can get themselves killed in the Scholomance and one who doesn't know what he's doing is more likely to. Plus they don't have a plan for him to have a room past graduation so probably he'll have to go out with the graduating seniors.

Okay. Reassess. The plan should be to get as much out of the next month as she possibly can. That means trading away resources for favors on her finals, so she's not studying for them, and working with the adult on whatever he wants to do about the situation now that he's aware of it, assuming he'll pay her in adult-made artifice. It means - maybe contemplating graduating early, if his graduation plan is sufficiently good that she thinks she stands a better chance this year without an alliance than next year with one; that's a terrifying thought but should be considered further, terrifying or not. It means - if he's altruistic, then maybe he'd actually want a junior to graduate early, free up their room for him, and stay behind, to protect the younger kids? She doesn't know how to think about what priorities adults have. They can have whatever priorities they want; it's a space far too big to contemplate. 

.....Whatever else might or might not be the case, Leareth has to admit that this school seems to provide intensive training in strategic thinking. 

(Or maybe that's just Annisa and her own specific, personal traits? Leareth isn't sure, and he doesn't have good avenues to check the hypothesis, yet - he can read other nearby minds but that's not comparable, right, since the other students don't know about this sudden change in their circumstances and resources, and Annisa does...)

He leaves her alone to finish her current line of thought, both because he's still keeping an eye on the animate illusion-or-construct-or-whatever prowling the edge of the stage, and because he's very curious where she's eventually going to end up. His questions aren't time-sensitive on the level of minutes. 

What does she know that's valuable to an adult. - who is bullshitting him. If he sets up shop and offers to take charity cases he will immediately be flooded with four thousand petitions; Annisa knows who is a good investment of resources and who isn't. What things trade for fairly, if he's impressed by the printer paper he's not going to have any idea whether mercury or iridium is worth more by weight. Things like how to treat spellbooks, where the supply rooms and bathrooms are, that he can learn from anyone but that's lowest friction and lowest exposure risk while he still cares about that to learn from her. Mana, which she shouldn't trade away without a damn good reason but which he does want and she does have - and it sounds like he's used to places where it just pools on the ground like water, so he might not even know how deliberately generating it works? And might not be in physical condition to be very good at it, though he'll still be better than her at it, because he's an adult. Might want various creature comforts once he's over the novelty of being here - sex? That sounds stressful to navigate but worth it if it ends up being available to navigate, adults are probably more likely than teenagers to indulge the known human tendency to not want people you're sleeping with to die. (She's not attracted to him; she is not thinking of him as a person with traits beyond adulthood at all.)

So probably the thing in her interests is to offer to skip her next classes to give him an orientation, trade favors to get the rest of her homework dealt with for the term, and then encourage him to announce himself or whatever, with her help to figure out the flurry of attention that'll attract. ...does she need to be worrying about physical security, hers or his - his no, you'd have to be a moron to try to kill an adult who isn't coming in with a preexisting reason to do you harm or track record of harming anyone, plus only a senior could and it'd be suicide for them. Hers probably also no, as long as it's ambiguous if it'd piss him off. 

Leaving aside whether Annisa's impressive strategic thinking is an inevitable result of having trained for years in the Scholomance: is it impressive as measured against the smartest and best-educated children of her age in Velgarth? Yes. Absolutely.

So - either he's gotten very lucky, by finding her specifically, or else he's even luckier and actually everyone who's lived to her age - of, what, fifteen or sixteen? (he can have feelings about that later) - is just as careful and strategic and paranoid as her. 

The illusion-construct is still leaving them alone. Leareth maintains his discreet shield over both of them, and reaches out to Annisa with a mindtouch. :Is now a good time to ask you some questions: 

Telepathy isn't common here and she startles slightly. Yes, now's fine, I'm done with my homework - and planning to arrange to trade off the rest of it.

:- Sorry, it just looked like you were finished your essay, and the demonstration construct seems to be leaving us alone. ...You can trade to have other people do your homework for you? I am confused how that works if the school itself is grading it - can it not tell that you are having someone else do the work -?:

It can probably tell but it doesn't mind. I'm not sure if it's confused, or if it's just only enforcing the rules it was created with which didn't happen to prohibit that, or if its goals are to reap mana from the homework and are served just as well regardless of who does it. But cheating is fine, it's just that you have to call in a whole lot of favors to cheat on a month of all your classes around finals. I'll end up spending most of the mana on it, probably. I am willing to do this if you have a plan that seems likelier to get me out alive than my existing plan, which has probably a 50-50 shot.

Leareth....is somehow unsure if she is overrating or underrating his planning abilities. 

:- I do not have much of a plan yet, I am still trying to orient to all of the constraints here. I - am fairly confident that given a month, I can come up with something that will give you much better than 50-50 chances?: 

Really he wants to try to do that for as many additional people as possible, but Leareth doesn't think that repeating that will increase Annisa's confidence in him, right now.