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Manchester has its own reading room. There are twenty-one Manchester students in the Scholomance right now - four seniors, five juniors, six sophomores, six freshmen. The seniors are splitting a maintenance minion with London, the juniors and sophomores are sharing between them, and the freshmen brought in their own, Vernon, who can also take some of the load off the slightly overstretched junior-and-sophomore one, since it's generally understood a maintenance kid can handle ten. But the reason the seniors are sharing with London is that their maintenance kid died as a sophomore. It's important to have backup plans lest you be flung, inches from graduation, into ward maintenance or byzantine ventilation systems that you haven't practiced on the last several years or else starve. This is why Ennis invited Riley; maybe Riley will click with them and be available as backup if Vernon gets killed, maybe he'll have some other value, he seems willing to make himself decent company and it's the sort of standard, expected interaction Ennis knows how to manage.
Various Manchester kids lounge around the reading room. Not all twenty-one of them, some are in the shop or lab (Ennis would like to be in the lab but has been warned not to; her slot on Monday will come soon enough and she can pick up ingredients then, and brew during work period), or studying in their allies' corners of the library or taking naps. One is hitting the snack bar with some friends. Ennis has a chair, not one of the cushy armchairs but still a chair, at a desk someone built in shop and dragged in here years ago. The desk has a built-in light and a built-in shelf hutch and if you hit a panic button on the side of it its whole surface will skitter with electricity, shocking anything that was lurking on it so it will be distracted from leaping for your throat, though it's not enough of a current to actually kill anything bigger than a grub. She's revising for history of alchemy, which is fairly perennial, so there are notes for it available. It's the sort of class she wants to do herself, though she's probably going to farm out the Siberia class and quite possibly also the electrical thing, neither of which she's had yet. Maybe Riley will be up for taking homework tasks, instead of maintenance, while Vernon's around.
