Having an enclave is - nice. He'll go with "nice". It means there's a flow of things he can trust to be organized non-adversarially, at least to him, and he can slot in it. It's the difference between trying to build a city out of Legos instead of building a city out of whatever you find lying around in your backyard - people can and have built cities out of mud and sticks and stones but the mud and sticks and stones were not originally for cities and take a lot more work to make them that way than Legos do. It's still a lot of work to build a city out of Legos, though. There are so many Legos he can't think about them all at once. He has to build each Lego house and each Lego skyscraper one at a time and trade his Legos for other Legos so - the metaphor is kind of falling apart here. At least he is not trying to invent stone tools.

It also means his city is made of plastic and sharp corners and everything hurts to step on. He could probably try to talk to someone about how sometimes he's a she, but only sometimes, isn't that better than all the time, he's not going to try to go into the girls' bathroom, he's not trying to say people do sexism to him, he's just - he doesn't know what he is, but he's at least partly something that is very unpopular at least at home, and home has its Lego city-building enterprise here, and he'd rather step on the Legos than bake his own bricks out of clay and watch them crumble -

He is so glad of his affinity. He can claim with a straight face that he's got to have contouring and eyeshadow and lip-liner and no one will be the wiser, if they're magical, and if some days he applies them so his jaw's a little less and his eyes are a little more -

You can swap the hair, on Lego people, and swap it right back, and it's fine. They can still be Lego people.

He looks over his notes, organizes his assignments according to how much he'd like to hand them off to someone else, goes to bed.

Malak is, compared to where she expected to be on the second night of school, way ahead on social ties and way behind on mana. Relative to the other indies she's ahead on both. She thinks. If she's being honest with herself, her meals have been pretty weird and not an unalloyed good. Total meals: 4. Meals at enclave tables: 2. People coming up and interrupting her meals at enclave tables to be either awkward or threatening: 4. But, she has a - a partner-in-crime/very-early-stage-friend, and two other members of a group who all seem to be interested in making the group an enduring thing. Enough so that they are discussing whether or not to allow an enclaver to join. They're not friends, they're certainly not allies, but they are, perhaps, starting on such a path.

She is behind on mana, and she has some time before evening prayers, so she does Annisa's horrible wall sitting until she can't anymore, then collapses to the floor until she can muster the will to try again. She repeats a few times, spending far longer on the floor than against the wall, before the curfew bell rings and marks the time for evening prayers. Fortunately, lying prostrate before God does not require the use of her abdominal muscles. All glory rebounds to God, who guided the prophets and who guides me through these days of peril...

She tries horrible wall sitting and it's horrible. Kind of the same kind of horrible as holding squats for minutes at a time, but it feels like it's working slightly different muscles, which is probably good. She tests it and can manage to do horrible wall sitting at the same time as sewing, which is good, she's kind of low on things that she can do while sewing. She might work way ahead in Maleficaria studies and do it then, except maybe she should use Maleficaria studies as a place to also do a bunch of her other homework? She'll have to see.

She speed-reads through the first several weeks of Mal Studies material, figuring she can always go back and review if it turns out that she can't remember stuff for long enough. She already did the first set of homework in class; she does the second set. Then she switches to transcribing the specs for different language scrabble sets, and then to transcribing more stuff about medicine.

About a page into the medical stuff, she realizes that this is idiotic. She has no idea what information she's going to need for the next four years, and getting it out of the library is almost as good a bet as getting it out of her overloaded kindle. Fast as she's gotten at writing, this is a waste of time, and it's going to be a waste of a lot of time if she doesn't give it up in a timely manner. Also it's kind of disrespectful to the Kindle? Like, really rubbing its face in the fact that she's planning for it to disappear in three weeks.

She has a long talk with her Kindle about this. Eventually she agrees that she will not try to transcribe the valuable stuff off her Kindle. She will instead read her Kindle, like a normal person, at least for a few minutes every night, and love and appreciate the experience, and if the Kindle wants to stick around that's valid, and if it doesn't want to stick around then that is also valid. After that she reads for about half an hour, which is about two hundred pages, because obviously she spent a long time training her speed reading skills before coming here. Then she puts it in its embroidered case and stands it up on her shelf.

She spends most of the rest of the night making origami boxes and basic French flashcards for Annisa, because she has a point to prove. When the bell tolls, she sets her wards up, prays, and goes to bed.

Bella's day has been net positive but she is SO EMBARRASSED that she took a freshman's too good to be true potion and then it was too good to be true. She finds a nice place to install her dictionaries, a less nice place to keep her textbooks, since the textbooks will probably just scurry back to their classrooms if they get mad and only temporarily, not permanently, set her back on homework, and - she should go to bed early if she's going to be up and running at six thirty. She tries horrible wall sitting. IT'S HORRIBLE! Amazing. She moves over to her bed and does horrible headboard sitting instead, and when her legs give up she goes directly to sleep.

She wears her shoes to bed, but no one need ever know she does this.

Julia is exhausted when she gets back to her room, from the strain of all that spellcasting, but Annaka seemed impressed with her and that's worth it all by itself, really. And she will get good at this, with practice. Illusion's a good affinity on the outside, everyone in New York said so, and it's not useful in school but Julia doesn't owe this school her usefulness, she is giving it four entire years of her life and that's quite enough. 

She flops on her rug, pouting. 

"Annaka asked me a million questions about sketchy maleficer kid," she tells her rug. "I feel like I did something wrong? I mean, I was hard on Annaka but I don't feel bad about that, someone has to sit on her when she starts acting like she rules the world. She's going to rush the same sororities as everyone else, next year.... I asked her and she is still planning to go to college. She said it might be hard but it seemed even more important to her now than when she was fourteen. Except I don't think it will be hard, the Scholomance is way more intense and also trying to kill you? Anyway that's not the part where I feel like I did something wrong. I feel like I did something wrong with maleficer kid. Every question Annaka asked it was like...there was a right answer, and I hadn't come up with it? She asked our formation and we had a formation! I recruited ten people and Orion was one of them and - it just felt like I'd done everything wrong and maybe if I'd done it right then we wouldn't be murdering someone now - not that - we'll only kill him if he's a danger to other people and probably nothing I said would've mattered for that - 

- I don't like it. I don't like feeling like you have to do absolutely everything the way the grownups say or oooh, scary, the monsters will eat you. I mean, I am gonna, because I don't want the monsters to eat me, but - 

- so do you know the plot of Legally Blonde? The plot of Legally Blonde is that there's this girl in LA and her boyfriend is going off to Harvard Law and he dumps her for being - too flighty and SoCal and not knowing how people act in Boston, but then she's like 'well, I'll apply to Harvard Law School too', and she does, and she gets in because she was never actually stupid, she was - doing the thing that made sense in her environment, she was good at things, and everyone hates her because she's dressed wrong and she talks wrong and she doesn't know the rules - I guess I'm making it sound like I identify with her but I wouldn't dress wrong for Harvard Law School, I know those rules, so I'm not very much like her at all really.... but there's a thing where the game she's playing actually isn't stupid next to the game that the grownups are playing, she can beat them at their game too?

It's a really good movie."

Alexius goes to his room and cries. Not the soft tears of old mourning that make you feel better once they're done, but the deep, wracking sobs of someone whose world has just come crashing down around them. He set out to do right by people, not just to survive but to give people a reason to want him on their team. And now he's a fraud and a fuckup, and everyone he could ever have hoped to befriend knows it. They traded him honest work in good faith, and he traded them poison. It doesn't matter that he had no way of knowing the potions were bad, not with all the tests coming positive - they were still the work of his hands, they were his responsibility, and neither ignorance nor incompetence can excuse the results. 

And as if that aching guilt weren't enough: alchemy was his force multiplier, his strategy for the future. It was his chance to reach outside himself and offer value to others, in trade or dire need, and now it's gone, poured into the void like Lily's worthless undrunk vial. If he can't trust his memory potion to be safe for others, then he can't trust antidotes or healing or growth or sustenance or anything else he makes to be safe for others, not with his affinity fighting him, not without a hundred tests which he can't run on people who will die if they get sick for three days. Now he's just going to be another draining resource sink for however long he lives, indebted for his mistakes, scrabbling for survival against monsters who shouldn't exist, with people who shouldn't exist, in a school that shouldn't exist, in a world that shouldn't exist. 

Mechanically, he kneels on the floor grate and opens his hatch, his own personal gateway into the abyss. He stares at the inviting darkness and broods. Connie knows his room number. If he doesn't show up to breakfast, she or someone else will check. She'll get a brewing kit to trade and some enchanted room seals that might help keep her alive until she gets eaten by Patience and then suffers until the sun burns out.

Alexius leans forward, towards the blackness, and breathes deep. He imagines he can smell the nothing; it smells like blood and dead sisters. Where does it all go, he wonders, the things the void takes? Could he fall, and keep falling forever, sustained by who knows what magics, until he one day appears in some other place, pristine and preserved like a thousand-year-old tome? What would he be, after that long in the dark, alone?

He leans further, all but pressing his face against the void, forehead swathed in utter black. "Fuck you," he mutters. Then, louder, "Fuck you." He grips the hatch in white-knuckled hands and snarls into the void. "FUCK YOU and all you stand for, evil school and mals and five fucking percent, you can't have me, I am not going to die here, and, and, I'm going to live, and so is Hira and Riley and Alexei and Angie and Zed and Bella and Tomonori and Yolanda and Hannah and Suze and Miguel and Nia and Lily and Anastasia and Connie and - " the floodgates are open now, and every name he's heard, every person he met in this deathtrap since induction dragged him in, burned into his memory by a potion that works only on him, he gasps out into the void, "they're going to live do you hear me I'm going to stop this madness if it kills me! No, it's not going to kill me, I'm going to stop this madness and survive and have fourteen children and none of them will be eaten by FUCKING MALS!"

He collapses into a heap, utterly drained, with barely the strength to drag himself up onto the bed. He almost, almost forgets to cast a wake-up ward, an omission which could very well kill him before he can finish coming up with horrible things to say to the void.

He needs a new plan, but damned if he can come up with one now. He absently wonders if he'll even be able to fall asl-

Day one of classes went okay. She's spotted a few interesting people, secured a good deal for familiars that's made her older cousins notice she's competent, started sounding out a few little pockets to feel better oriented to the social environment...

The whole mess last year was sure something. Niccolo said it moved too fast for Pisa to get involved, by the time there was a posse assembling there were seniors with a grudge and they didn't want freelancers. And then in the end Oxford finished it internally, and no one's sure how their younger kids pulled that off, but there's an obvious guess. A bunch of people got fucked up in its wake, like the weirdo town crier who got kicked out of Seattle, and Mr. Lump from Sacramento - he was dating one of the crazy ones, and probably it wasn't just losing his boyfriend but they're pretty sure even his team from Sacramento doesn't really know what happened. So, visiting their table was a bad choice, but oh well, she'll do better later, she's more oriented to the American inter-enclave social balance already. Chicago's disappearance has everyone on edge, so she's really coming in at an excellent time, the status quo just got upset and so if she's quick she'll learn where it's stabilizing faster than the people themselves do - though it's going to be back in chaos in a year when the Scholomance finally hears what the hell happened. She thinks she can be established enough to hear the news quickly, by then.

Oria is good at reading New York and thinks something is up with them, though what could be enough to freak out New York by day two, she has no idea. This is abstractly concerning but only abstractly, because the Pisans will be fine even if everyone goes wild. War in the Scholomance makes the whole student body weaker relative to the mals, and that's more likely than they'd prefer given the mess last year and Chicago, plus right at the start of the year is the worst time for that - but Pisa will come out fine. If they need to go harder on malia, they will, and the school will go easier on them, and they'll get through school and deal with the consequences of "their trick not working as well this generation" later. Pisa doesn't play games which contain a losing outcome.

Or at least, that's how they think of themselves. Teresa is Uncle's prize pupil, which means she knows many strategies to keep that true... one of which is to not let on, even to family, that it's never as true as they pretend. ("Never let them see you bleed. But even the best will bleed.")

She's in the deep end already.

She ought to be scared.

She isn't.

She feels alive.

She can't shake the feeling that she was born for this. Born for high stakes and social chaos and everyone dependent on making deals. Everyone who will be anyone is here, it's the center of the world, and she's in the middle with leverage on her side. All she has to do is survive and capitalize. So she's in a death trap only a quarter of students survive - so what? She's better than them. She's going to win.

But if she lets herself get full of pride, even if it's justified, she'll end up like Marino, there are limits. She needs to stay grounded. And, preferably, full of mana.

So: She nabbed a big pointing stick from one of her later classrooms, big enough to be a cane or even a staff. It is elegant, and could be better; she takes a knife to it, carving little patterns in the surface. She's never tried whittling before, but her knife won't dull, and the confusion makes it give her decent mana, which she puts in her storage. She natters to both the stick and the knife a bit while she does - You are a lovely stick and you will help Teresa find mals without touching them, and mals won't even want to eat you, plus soon you will be very stylish, won't you, won't that be nice? Don't worry, knife, she still appreciates you, the stick will help her check for mals but if she finds them the knife is going to get to stab things, the carving it is doing now is helpful but it is still so very good at violence and is very well-made and she is very fond of it, plus it reminds her of Father, who made it for her, and she appreciates that, too. She mixes that in with talking about her understanding of the politics so far, because talking about it like with a person is helpful and treating her valued possessions like people helps a little, too.

After a while she switches to exercise, and she reviews specific people, names and faces and impressions of them. She wants to get closer to some of them, maybe Madam Upstager or Miss Naked Giant, who clearly doesn't mind associating with maleficers given who she picked to trade for clothes. (Clothes-trader seems worth investigating, but not trying to make an asset. You don't get that kind of aura and stay sane long.) Eventually she transitions from 'blood pumping' to 'tired', so she redoes her evening spells, and heads to sleep.

Theun doesn't hate everything at the moment. He made a deal that went bad, but he wasn't out anything in the end, and he met some decent people in the bargain. He's met some clever indies and a couple enclavers he isn't bitter at, and he has a study group including some Boston, which will help him not actually have to argue with Philly every time he's in the reading room. This is... above par.

He asks the void for something that will be useful in the library. The book he gets is relatively recent, and is titled in both English and Mandarin - the introduction is in English but, as he flips through, the spells are both English and Mandarin, with most commentary in the same language as the spells. The focus seems to be on building a library that is usable, but there's a spell for getting back to a spot you've seen once in chapter one, and even knowing that spell, not even using it, might help a lot. Gah, he really ought to get up to speed in Mandarin, his grammar is nearly competent but his vocab is still crap. Well, he has plenty of language lab. And at least one Chinese person in the German study group he can ask.

Despite rubbing his face in his weakest language, he gets to curfew time fairly calm, so meditation is not the mana source it usually is. He switches to exercise, trying to run through Mandarin drills in his head as he does, which starts hard and gets harder as he gets tired. But eventually he puts up his ward and heads to sleep.