"Yeah, I'm fine. You guys are really good."

"Thanks. I've spent more time practicing than is entirely reasonable for most students. I could go another round?"

"I'm game if you two are." Just because she didn't focus on martial arts doesn't mean she didn't do tons of cardio.

She is game! She will fight less aggressively this time around and keep an eye out for Destiny's insane high kicks, mostly relying on maneuver to avoid being outflanked.

Marcy will try harder to get some of her own attacks in instead of just being a distraction; it's likely to get her hit but she needs the practice.

She lands half a dozen hits on Marcy for every one Marcy gets on her, and manages a slightly in-her-favor ratio on Destiny at the same time, but all of them are light enough there's no need to pause and check if anyone's hurt. Eventually Bobbie catches Marcy's arm and physically interposes her to block a flurry of attacks from Destiny, and that seems to mark a good stopping point.

"Thanks for the match. We should make this a regular thing, at least until the gym gets too dangerous."

"We should, it was fantastic exercise. And educational, too. So, how about that trip to the showers?"

"Let's go, then." A shower run after sparring is good for more than just repaying their mal-watcher.

"So, I never actually got around to US Geography, is Oakland near Boston?"

“Not especially! They’re on opposite coasts. The US is big.”

Oh, so Oakland is in California or something, good to know.

"The enclave Oakland is really near is Sacramento, they're practically our neighbors," Destiny offers cheerfully. "S'why we used to train together sometimes as kids." 

"Oh, neat. Sacramento's cool."

"I think Raleigh might be too much of a gentleman to survive here, but Sacramento can get away with that if anyone can. ...Apparently they had some sort of drama last year though?" 

"From what I heard they didn't, like, cause the drama, they were just adjacent to it." Any more than that would be Not Hers To Tell.

"Raleigh seems really stressed out about it? He's, like, avoiding ever sitting at the table with his own enclave, that seems kind of bad to me." 

"Sacramento is not one of the enclaves I had heard was involved, but Winston was not the most forthcoming with details."

"Huh. What did you hear?" 

"Some indie poached an enclaver in his year, the enclave assumed another enclave'd put him up to it, they started fighting about it. The indie and someone from the poached enclave both went maleficer, tried to outdo each other's body counts, it was a giant mess and when the smoke cleared some desperate idiot from Oxford had gone and murdered his own enclave because the other disaster had gone and messed up his graduation plans. He told me the names of the first two enclaves but I'd never heard of either and have forgotten them now."

"Murdered his own enclave?" If that was in the first telling she heard it was overshadowed by the Vanya mess but now she's actually processing it and what the fuck.

"How the heck would that possibly help with his graduation plans????"

"I don't fucking know, I'm not a retrospective necro-mindreader. Probably he was already a little cracked? Maybe he wanted the whole mana store for himself. Everyone involved is dead now, of course, including everyone he was close to."

Well, it sounds like he deserved it even if nobody else involved did. Not that what anyone deserves matters when they're dead and nobody can give it to them.

"I really hope this year is normal," she says, not sounding especially hopeful.

"It won't be." sigh

"- Do you have, um, intel on that or something?" Destiny says, suspiciously. "...I'll trade favors for information."

"Double or nothing on that offer if it's anything I don't already know."