I don't graduate in a month, only the seniors do that. But I can avoid spending down irreplaceable resources for the next week while you figure out prospects of a plan, and then if I like your plan I can trade everything away and spend all my time on it. She gestures at the graduation hall. Here's the main constraint: seniors have to get through this and out the door, and there's eight hundred of them, and they have half an hour.

Nod. :Many of my questions for you are about the graduation logistics, actually. I picked up that seniors need to fight out from their rooms, but - presumably their rooms are not connected to the graduation hall most of the time, so how does that work? And why is there a time limit on it?: 

School's shaped like a giant corkscrew. The rooms descend, and the senior ones come level with the graduation hall, and the junior ones turn into senior ones, and the school creates new freshman dorms up at the top. - the top of the school is safer so it's generally set up so the older students are between the places where monsters get in and the younger students who can't defend themselves yet. The longer the gates are open, the more mals can get in, so it's half an hour - long enough for everyone to make it out who is going to make it out - realistically most successful exits are in the first ten, fifteen minutes - and then they close again. There's a lot of mals in here but it could be much worse. Prepared kids generally survive to graduation and that's not at all true on the outside.

Nod. :What a fascinating design. Where do the gates open to, when they are open?: 

They just reverse the induction spell that brought us all here. Drop us where we were pulled in from. The gates must anchor to Earth somewhere but it's very secret and it's probably deep underground in the middle of nowhere.

:It must not be an exact reversal, since I am guessing the newly arriving students do not come in that way?: If eighteen-year-olds die half the time, fourteen-year-olds wouldn't have a chance. 

They come in in their dorms, top of the school. Annisa should have a little sister among the new batch of inductees, though she's not given that very much thought; you only get to care about one thing.

Leareth has so much respect for her way of thinking, and he hates the school - and the whole world - that must have produced it. That squeezed her down into such a narrow shape, just in order to survive existing in it... 

:I have gathered that the graduating seniors usually form alliances, and coordinate on what magic to use?: he adds. :What are the common strategies for that?: 

Yeah, you more or less can't fight your way out on your own. Four or five is typical, adults do workings in larger groups but they have longer to train and more mana to use. There are mana-intensive approaches that are known to work pretty close to reliably - a timespear speeds you up, a kettler is a bit like a rocket - I'm good at weapons, so I am probably going to try something a little fightier than those -

Nod. :And students practice on an obstacle course? What is the obstacle course like - is it meant to imitate the graduation hall, like this display?: He gestures to the front of the room. 

Yes. It's in the gym, it changes every week and you run it every day with your alliance. It's a complicated working so you only use a thousandth of the mana to cast spells. You can get a bit of a sense, from how you're doing in the obstacle course, if your alliance is good enough, but of course there's luck.And only so much you can do if your alliance isn't good enough.

:Fascinating. That must be a very clever working: 

Leareth falls silent for thirty seconds or so, putting his thoughts in order again. 

:- Also I have gathered that the graduating seniors will be trading away various possessions that they are not bringing with them. What kinds of items are usually available?: 

They'll be trading basically everything they own for mana and critical materials. Clothes, spellbooks, homework, supplies, snack tokens, drugs, knives, maybe their hair if anyone has good scissors. I want steel and aluminum but I don't want it bad enough to trade much mana for it so I probably won't get it. Some seniors also want to get laid before they probably die! This is another avenue by which Annisa might get steel and aluminum.

Leareth catches that thought and doesn't find it very notable; it seems like a sensible enough strategy, if it would work. 

:What are the main critical materials limitations? If most of the difficulty is because the supply rooms are dangerous, I may be able to help clear them first. ...Also, what is hair useful for? And is there no way to cut it with your kind of spells? I ought to be able to cut hair just fine with magic, and it would not be mana-costly: 

Everything’s mana costly. Or - not individually but if you are in the habit of using mana for life things you will have half as much saved for graduation as people who did it all by hand. Hair is a decently powerful spell ingredient, better if it’s long. Supply rooms are unsafe but also the good supplies are just scarce, there’s not enough aluminum or gold for everyone who wants some. I guess you could give it out evenly and let people trade from there.

Leareth nods. :I suppose. I do suspect that in some cases, my magic may be much cheaper than your variety? For example, I seem to be able to use mind-controlling magic on most mals above a certain level of intelligence, and that requires minimal power input - it is certainly difficult, but mostly on skill and concentration: 

Mal-targeting mind magic is a thing but yeah, not a particularly efficient thing if you're trying to target specific mals rather than trying to lure some and you don't care which. I guess I assumed magic would...only work one way, like your electricity can't really be different from ours because there's only one way for electricity to work.