The first person he sees is a Japanese girl with a Kyoto power-sharer clearly visible on her wrist, and what she thinks of this is: ...wow, that's a bold move.

"Sure, okay," she says, even though if you're an enclaver and you say yes to things like that it's filtering for people who have few enough social skills that that seems like a good idea to them, because fuck it, she hates studying alone and also she's curious. "Are you busy after class today, I'm free for the first two hours after our last class of the day but after that I have a different study group for one of my other lit classes."

...Success...?

(Also: holy shit, he's talking to someone. He's talking to someone who isn't Clay and isn't Clay's friends and she hasn't even made fun of him yet for being a fucking loser.)

"I'm free. I just gotta let Clay know where I am, but it's just, like, a study group, right? And I lost my last one so it makes sense for me to get another one instead of bothering him all the time. It'll be fine."

Is Clay one of his upperclassmen? No, he doesn't have a power-sharer, maybe a sibling or ally or friend. "Cool! I don't actually know your name, I'm Ayako Mochizuki-- Kyoto-- and we can meet in the library?" 

"Tommy. Tommy Ingram. I'm indie but Clay's from Manchester." He says this like it is the coolest possible thing. "Library works, yeah."

Aw. That's kind of cute. "I'll see you there, then."

The rest of the day's classes go fairly quickly-- or like, they don't, her math class and history of alchemy move like molasses, but it's fine she's used to it-- and at the end of them she's there in the library, near the door, waiting for Tommy.

And here's Tommy. "HELLO," he says, in a voice that is not really suited to libraries.

"Hey! Reading room is this way. What did you think of the reading today, I have pretty strong opinions about Romeo and Juliet in general but the Mab monologue isn't doing much for me and I'm not totally sure why—"

(The Kyoto reading room is mostly empty; there are two older students, one of whom has draped her legs across the other's lap. There is also a small but beautifully maintained Shinto-looking shrine with its doors closed.)

"Uhhhhhhh." Oh shit she's actually, like, super smart. "You are definitely saying words, and Shakespeare also said words, and I am saying words right now. In orders. They have syllables!"

...ah, it's going to be one of those study sessions. Which is not a bad thing, she needs to practice teaching before she hits upperclassman and also explaining things does help her learn them, but they're harder to predict.

"Fair enough, those are certainly facts about words and people who say them. Okay so do you know the plot of the play, I never have any idea how much people in the Anglosphere actually pick up from cultural osmosis as opposed to how much my tutors liked to claim they do."

"Romeo and Juliet are in looooooooove" --he punctuates this with a fake gag-- "but their families hate each other, right, so they run around for a while being in love in secret but then someone tells Romeo that Juliet's dead so he thinks he has nothing to live for, but he-- he does. But by the time he realizes that it's too late and he's already dying. Does Juliet die? I feel like Juliet dies. In the version I watched she doesn't die and everyone just stops fighting but that's not really how it all works, is it, people aren't like that."

"Juliet also dies," she confirms. She's visibly holding back laughter, which is a little fake — if she actually didn't want to be laughing she just wouldn't be — but not very fake. 

Fist pump. "Knew it."

"You did! You definitely did know it!" 

"I am like a Shakespeare god. I am a genius who is only at this study session to bless you with some of my wisdom."

Ayako, you make such choices, Rin does not say from her place on the couch. 

"I bow to your mighty wisdom, O Scholar. Do you want a more detailed summary of what we're supposed to have read so far, I can do that, fair warning I might get sidetracked talking about different kinds of sonnets but I promise I'll keep it relevant." 

Uncomfortable shifting-in-seat. “Yeah, okay.” 

"So the play starts with a street fight, the Capulet and Montague servants get into a brawl in the middle of town, and we find out that this feud has already ended with three people dead and the prince of the city comes out and announces that they're finally cracking down on all of the street fights and anyone who starts it up again gets the death penalty which is, I think we can agree, not the most auspicious way to start your day. 

Meanwhile, the prince's cousin Paris talks to Juliet's father about wanting to marry her; her father isn't really sure about it, because Juliet is our age, and wants him to wait another two years so at least she'll be sixteen and not fourteen, but he invites Paris to a party the Capulets are throwing that night. Juliet's mother and her nurse try to get her to accept and marry Paris but she's not having it." 

(This is turning out to be really good practice for colloquial English, honestly, and if Hitomi raises an eyebrow at her from across the room one more time she's going to make that argument out loud in words.)

“…What’s auspicious mean.”

"Sorry, uh, lucky? Good omen?" 

“Oh.” Pause for contemplation. “It’s kind of fucking weird that people got married that young. Like, I’m fucking, I’m fourteen, mate, I wouldn’t marry Paris either.”

"Well, that's part of the point, right? That her parents are being unreasonable and the whole thing is absurd and shouldn't be happening." 

“I guess. …It must suck to be Juliet. Because, like, that’s her parents, and it’s the past so everyone’s all sexist or whatever. She can’t just go, what the fuck, that’s illegal. Unless they are also street fighting. Maybe they should get in a street fight and then Juliet can execute them and take their money. That would be a pretty girlboss thing to do.”

She can... sort of work out from context clues what it means for a thing to be girlboss, even if she has no idea why those words together mean that thing. "They're mostly not street fighting, because they're the heads of noble houses, their servants are the ones doing the street fighting. And also she's... fourteen? Most fourteen year olds do not kill their parents even if their parents are terrible, I'm pretty sure, her life just is horrible in this way she can't fix really at all.

So instead of Juliet killing her parents the next thing that happens is that over with the Montagues, Romeo's friend Benvolio tries to get him to talk about why he's been so miserable lately, and it turns out that Romeo is in love with this girl named Rosaline but Rosaline doesn't love him back— this is the part where I go off on a tangent about different types of sonnets except I am not doing that, behold my restraint— anyway, his other friend Mercutio says 'Romeo this is stupid and you're being stupid and the whole idea of love is stupid, stop it, get hobbies that aren't sighing over girls, like sneaking into Capulet parties,' and Romeo tries to give reasons he doesn't want to do that but they're all kind of dumb reasons and Mercutio is making fun of him for them, and that's the Queen Mab monologue which is where we're at right now." 

“Who’s Mab and why’s she in all of this, you didn’t mention a Queen or a Mab.”

"Gooood question. --She's not a character, one of the bad reasons Romeo comes up with to not sneak into Capulet parties is that he had a dream it would be a bad idea, and Mercutio is making fun of him by going on and on about how you know dreams come from the fairy queen who goes around in her carriage made of a hazelnut shell and makes lovers dream of their partners and soldiers dream of war and lawyers dream about their work. It's a beautiful piece of writing but it's bizarrely long for how little it actually says about the characters or plot and it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with anything else and I don't know what it's doing here." 

"Maybe Shakespeare just liked hazelnut shells."

"Maybe? But usually if something's there it's there for a reason, especially if it's a monologue that's well-known on its own. Also our homework for next week is an essay on it and I can't write an essay about how maybe Shakespeare just really liked hazelnut shells."

Pause.

"...hey, Rin?"

"Mm?" says one of the older girls on the couch.

"Rin, beloved senpai mine, who taught me everything I know--"

"--who taught me everything I know about poetry in Shakespeare--"

Tommy tenses automatically. Who...is this. Her older sister, maybe? Something like that? He's vaguely aware of "senpai" as being some sort of weeb shit but maybe that's racist and it's just a normal Japan thing and anyway it doesn't matter, he doesn't know what it means. He had realized there were other people in the room but not that they were here to supervise, which in retrospect was maybe stupid of him.

...He stays quiet, just in case Rin's more like Clay than she is Wil.

"Yes, Ayako, I would love to take a break from doing math homework and explain the Queen Mab monologue to you, how do you know me so well."

The explanation she gives is long and complicated and very fast, and she keeps going into parenthetical asides about Elizabethan slang for prostitution; Ayako seems to understand it?

Yeah Tommy is not capable of paying attention to that. His eyes glaze over after the first sentence. 

"--all that make sense?" she finally says.

"Yep, all that made sense, thank you!"

"No problem," and she goes right back to doing her other homework, legs still entangled with the other upperclassman's.

"Right," Ayako says to Tommy, "sorry, I could get her to explain it slower but she's used to me and I need the practice teaching things anyway, did you catch... any of that." 

“…Well, yes and no. Mostly no.”

"Right, of course.

So what Rin says is that-- so first, this is the establishing character moment for Mercutio, and the thing it establishes about him is that he mocks Romeo mercilessly and doesn't believe in ideals and he's very funny and quick-witted and prone to going off on wild flights of fancy, which is important even if the specific content of the speech weren't.

But it's also doing a couple of other things, like how it starts off being about a character out of a fairy tale but quean and mab are both slang from the period for prostitute, it's mixing this grand idealistic fantasy image with a prostitution joke, and how-- you see how as the speech goes on the dreams get darker and darker? From people dreaming about love to people dreaming about money to people dreaming about slitting throats, until Mab has gone from being the fairy queen in a spiderweb carriage to being a hag who teaches maidens how to have sex? So it's Mercutio making fun of Romeo by talking about how his sense that maybe the thing they're about to do is a bad idea comes from this figure who looks like she's grand and beautiful and out of a fairy tale but is actually dark and cynical and Romeo's ideals aren't what they look like they are.

And of course we the audience know that Romeo's right, that going to this party will lead him to his doom, because we know he dies at the end of the play even if he doesn't, and that Mercutio is wrong both about the party and about the ideals. Which I think is what my essay's going to be on. Did that make more sense."

Not really. "So, wait, Romeo's wrong because he's not cynical enough, but also he's the one who thinks he's doomed? Isn't that, like, that doesn't really make sense, mate, I'm gonna be honest, is it--supposed to not make sense or am I just being stupid."

"No, it's that-- Romeo isn't cynical at all, he believes in things like true love conquering all and trusting your weird dreams that tell you that things are bad ideas, and he's right because this is a story where the ideals Romeo believes in are important? Mercutio thinks love and weird gut feelings are stupid and pointless and don't amount to anything, and that Romeo is being an idiot for thinking that they do, but in fact Romeo's prophetic dream is telling him the truth, and it's Juliet and Romeo's love that eventually stops the feud at the end."

"...But... he dies. So he can't have been right about everything."

"Yeah. Usually nobody is right about everything, if the story's any good, and being an idealist is not a strategy without downsides because they live in a city where people keep murdering each other for no reason on the streets. But, yknow, it's not like Mercutio lives to the end of the play either."

"And he doesn't get to have dreams about a spiderweb fairy teaching him how to have sex, which, like, seriously, man, that's pretty cool."

"It's true! He does not even a little get to have that." 

"Moral of the story, don't live in cities where people murder each other on the streets. But that's all of the cities, so it's kind of a useless moral."

She'd summarize the moral of the story as something more like 'being an idealist in a world ruled by violence is not very good for the life expectancy, but dismissing love as worthless is ultimately counterproductive and compassion for other people is the only thing that can change that world.' Which is of course not very helpful as an attitude to have in the Scholomance, but it's aspirational.

"Places with lots of murder and death around are bad, it is a fact," is all she says. "I think I've got enough material for my paper, want to do this again on Friday?"

“Okay.”

"Cool! I'll see you then." 

“Okay. Um. Goodbye.” 

"Bye."

After he leaves the reading room she turns. Rin is not laughing at her, but she's very conspicuously not laughing at her, and Hitomi has that incredibly specific look that means she agrees with whatever Rin is doing but doesn't want to say so or admit to it because that would be undignified.

"Look," she says, "it's practice teaching things for when my underclassmen get here as freshmen, and it's practice in colloquial English, and it's genuinely helpful for getting my thoughts together to work on my essays and it doesn't even take that long." 

"We're not judging you."

"I don't know, I feel like you kind of are."

"I'm not judging you, but it is extremely funny to watch."

And Ayako does, kind of, have to agree that that's fair.

(Elsewhere, Clay holds out his hand, and Tommy gives him all his mana for the day. In return, Clay hangs out with him for two hours, even though he could be hanging out with Nick and George rather than some annoying freshman. Tommy spends the time sewing and talking Clay's ear off, and Clay spends it nominally studying but mostly laughing and joking with Tommy. It's easier, when Tommy thinks of it as a trade.)

For the rest of the day and on Thursday she's not looking for Tommy, exactly, and she's not really even keeping an eye out— she has meals at a variety of enclave tables, spends her work periods in reading rooms and alchemy labs— but, you know, she has a name and a connection to put to the face now and she notices when Tommy comes up. 

Tommy's generally tagging along with an older boy. The older boy is wearing a prominent power-sharer and seems to regard Tommy with a sort of fond annoyance; he saves food for Tommy at lunch. (Tommy takes the food gratefully rather than go through the lunch line himself.) Whenever the older boy isn't around, Tommy spends his time alone; he cold-approaches people on occasion, like he did Ayako, but most people aren't as receptive (or curious) as she was.

That's... weird. Like actually really weird. If Tommy were from the same enclave as the senior— presumably Clay from Manchester — it would be an interaction she would recognize but would still think was moderately unusual for Anglo enclaves; as it is she has no idea what that is. 

But Friday comes without further incident, and she nods to Tommy in class and meets him in the library again. 

"HELLO."

"Hi!" This week Rin is not there but the other upperclassman from last week is, along with a couple of juniors and a sophomore none of whom Tommy recognizes.

Tommy is going to get out his sewing kit and start fixing a hole in his jeans while they talk. "Dude, I fucking hate class. I'm--I know you're all smart and shit, but seriously, how are you supposed to think for that long."

"Honestly for me it's relaxing. For forty-five minutes my primary concern is theatre and poetry, both of which I like and am good at and know I can do." 

"Yeah, I should've thought you'd say that, you fuckin', 5000 IQ bitch."

"I also have a related affinity and have been specializing in this in particular since I was about five, there's a reason I'm the one doing all of my yearmates' lit homework and it's not that I'm smarter across the board. But yeah, fair enough."

He is going to sew more aggressively. (He pricks himself with the needle, enough to draw blood, and doesn’t react aside from a sharp intake of breath.) “Guess you were a good person to ask for homework help from, then.”

Bleeding's not great but as a group they're hardly easy targets and by the time Tommy leaves the reading room it'll have scabbed over. And furthermore it won't be their problem, she reminds herself slightly more aggressively than she has to. "Guess I was! So, this week's the balcony scene, I'm thinking of doing something about how their dialogue forms a sonnet but I don't think I can get a whole essay out of that--" 

And they can discuss Shakespeare! Well. Mostly Ayako explains it to Tommy, who alternates between kinda-sorta getting it and his eyes glazing over. He understands the balcony scene better than he did the Queen Mab monologue, at least, and his thumb scabs over pretty quickly.

That's good! Ayako is getting somewhat better at explaining things, and she's definitely getting better at calibrating what level of understanding Tommy's at and where she can realistically get him. And she doesn't wind up needing to ask her upperclassmen for help this time; she barely seems to register their presence at all. 

That's also good! Tommy is definitely very much registering their presence, but if Ayako isn't going to talk to them then neither is he. And he successfully gets through the rest of the study session without stabbing his thumb again.

"BYE."

"Bye," she says cheerily, "see you Monday."

By this point she has already made her case to all of the people who might be inclined to raise an eyebrow about her choices here so she's not going to do it again unprompted but she sure is ready to.

And the next day, the upperclassman that Tommy follows around approaches Ayako in the library when she's looking for a book. "Hello."

"...hello," she says.

As far as anyone who might hypothetically be observing can tell, she's got her attention half on him and half on this shelf, which is on 20th century cultural exchange between Japan and the West.

"I'm Clay. From Manchester. You've, uh. You've been hanging out with Tommy recently, right?"

"Ayako, from Kyoto. We've been studying together, we're in the same Shakespeare class." 

(If she's paying attention, she'll notice that Clay's got a bit of a maleficer's aura. Not a strong one, but it's there.)

"Alright." Pause. "I don't know that--I don't know that that's a good idea. Tommy's been acting... He's been strange recently? I just wanted to... warn you, I guess. That I'm not, I won't take responsibility for him. If I were you I'd probably stop hanging out with him, he's--kind of attached himself to me, there was some politics stuff that happened, long story, you know how it is. But it's not really, I thought I'd warn you."

The thinly veiled threat, combined with the maleficer's aura, screams GET AWAY RIGHT NOW.

But she cannot actually do that, if she runs that causes its own set of problems, and besides if she has seniors with maleficer auras coming up to her and giving her thinly veiled threats she needs to know what the hell is going on.

Which leaves the question of how exactly she-- doesn't call him on it never calls him on it that's how you die, but tries to get more information out of that extremely vague and information-free statement, without making it sound like her own upperclassmen didn't tell her anything, and without picking a fight.

"Sorry, I... am not actually sure what you're warning me of? --and I wouldn't expect you to take responsibility for him, you're not his clavemate or anything."

"Sure, he's just--been hanging out with me a lot, that's all." Shrug. "And maybe it'll be fine! But he's been--like I said, he's been weird. Kind of... violent? He, he hasn't hurt me or anything, but I'm, um, I'm a lot stronger than you, no offense. So I thought I'd warn you."

"No offense taken," she says, only partly to stall for time while she thinks of what to say. "And, um, we've been having study sessions in the reading room, and I kind of doubt he'd win a fight with Rin or Hitomi much less both of them? But thank you for the warning anyway."

"You're welcome. And that's, that's good to know. --That was all, I can, um, I can go now."

"Or I can, I found my book." She didn't but that one looks not terrible, she'll take it. "I'll see you around, I guess?" 

"Sure. See you around." Wave.

"Bye."

She leaves, at a perfectly calm and unhurried pace that is not even a little freaked out. She goes back to the Kyoto reading room and sits down next to Hitomi and tells her, in quiet but not quite whispered Japanese, everything that just happened in that conversation, and then she's not alone even in public spaces for the rest of the day.

That's fine.

Can he perhaps talk to Rin or Hitomi in the next couple days?

Sure, he can do that. In between alchemy lab shifts, tutoring her underclassmen, and graduation prep, she can be found in the reading room or in her own room, which doubles as an office.

Reading room works. "Hello. Are you Hitomi? I'm Clay. Manchester."

She sees what Ayako means about the aura.

"Yes, I am. Hello." 

"Well, it's good to meet you. I'm, uh, I'm sorry if it's a bad time, but Ayako mentioned you and I thought I'd, y'know, stop by, see if you wanted to talk."

"It's a fine time. Come in?"

He comes in!

The reading room is well-cared-for; there's a Shinto-style shrine in one corner, kept in meticulously good condition, with its doors closed. Hitomi sits down. "What did you want to talk about?" 

"Tommy, mostly."

Nod.

"He seems like he's doing... as well as can be expected, considering the situation with his friend a few months ago." 

This is not true precisely but it's as true as she feels like saying.

"Hm, maybe. He stole from George--George is also Manchester, he's my friend--just a couple weeks ago, I don't know if you heard. I've been keeping an eye on him some, but he's--" Clay hums. "Well. You've met him. He's not the best at, at thinking before he acts."

She hadn't. This is not, she notes but doesn't say, the thing he'd warned Ayako about.

"Indeed I have," she says. "He hasn't been in the reading room without an upperclassman here, same as any other freshman who wanted to study with one of ours, for what it's worth, and there hasn't been any trouble." 

"That's probably for the best. He's been acting strange recently, I warned Ayako, but she got freaked out--which is fair, I totally get it, y'know, I'm a random senior pushing her about her study partners--but I thought you might want to know a bit more of, of his history causing problems. I'm--honestly, I'm worried for if he turns violent, but it sounds like you have that much handled. Um. Probably best if you keep an eye out so he doesn't steal anything, now you know. As long as someone's watching him, right, as long as there are people making sure he doesn't get up to trouble, that's fine. Just, he's not great to have around, I thought I'd give you all a warning."

"Yes, we'll continue to keep an eye on him." And they're going to be keeping a closer eye on Manchester, now; Hitomi does not personally have enough time in the day to do that but at least one of the juniors will. "Ayako says she's getting good teaching experience and since there haven't been problems I'm inclined to let them continue with that, since it seems to be helping them both," and since you cannot actually bully us into dropping people on your say-so and I want to make sure you know it, "but I do appreciate your warning us." 

"Alright. It's good to know there hasn't been any problems with him. Who knows, maybe this will be good for him! I don't have anything else, really, just the heads-up. I hope this has been, um, mutually beneficial."

"Same to you as well. Have a good day."

This is maybe a bit overly curt but it is, after all, her reading room.

Clay knows when he’s not wanted. He leaves. 

"You did great, you did everything right, and I'm proud of you," she tells Ayako later that day, "and so that in three years you'll know what you're doing if one of your freshmen tells you what you told me," and then Hitomi explains to Ayako, who (here in her own bedroom on the freshman level, with nobody there to see except Hitomi) looks small and nervous and profoundly fourteen, what she told Clay from Manchester and why.

((She's a little bit torn between 'do not escalate this further' and 'Clay Tatum will not go near my freshmen and I'll escalate as hard as I have to to make that happen,' but she doesn't let Ayako, who needs the stability more than she needs the information, see that.))

And after the next class on Shakespeare, Tommy meets Ayako at the library with bruises peeking out the edges of his clothes. “Hey.”

"......hey," she says, and..... doesn't ask, or at least doesn't ask here.

(Hitomi and Rin and Haruto are all in the reading room, and if they've all three independently decided to work on homework that can be done without really paying attention or easily put down or outsourced if needed, respectively, then that's their business.)

He’s… Quieter than usual, and even more prone to zoning out than he already was. That said, he isn’t yelling crude jokes in a library, so… maybe this is an improvement?

Maybe but combined with everything else it's also really concerning! 

"...so, um," she says, when it seems like they've reached a reasonable stopping point, "what... happened?" 

“Huh? What d’you mean?”

"With the, um," and she gestures vaguely at where one of the bruises is visible at the edge of his sleeve.

“Oh, that’s— that’s just Clay, I, we’ve got this little ritual and I was being annoying about it, so.” 

".......what do you mean."

“I’m s’posed to give him my mana every day, right, but I was all oh fuck you bastard you are just a big fuckin bully so he had to take it.”

"........................um."

They're going to have to kill him, aren't they. 

"Hey man, I just do as I'm told. ...Weeeeell. Most of the time."

"How long has this been going on."

"...A couple weeks? I think?"

"Is that a couple weeks you've been giving him your mana, or a couple weeks for something else."

“Couple weeks I’ve been giving him my mana, I dunno what you mean everything else. …Don’t be mad at him for maleficing, he’s my friend and he only does it when I make him.”

"Unless you somehow got a gun into the Scholomance I really don't think you made him." 

“I told you, I’m s’posed to just give him my mana. So if I don’t then he takes it. It’s—it’s not a big deal.” 

There's a longish silence that follows that, until,

              "Who the hell takes mana from a freshman," says one of the sophomores.

      "Is-- can he not build mana himself at all somehow," says a junior, "that's the only reason I can think of--"

              "Okay but that still doesn't make getting it from a freshman make any sense, freshmen barely even have any--"

"Regardless," Hitomi says, her voice like ice, "that isn't what 'making him' means." 

“Hey! He can—he can too build mana himself, he’s got so much mana. He’s the, the mana-est. And he, like, he’s cool and he hangs out with me and protects me.”

       "Okay but then why is--"

                "Protects you from--"

"Everyone be quiet," Hitomi snaps.

        Everyone obeys, instantly.

"Thank you. So, if he can build mana himself, why is he taking it from you." 

“I dunno man, it’s all, it’s all fuckin’ confusing, innit. It’s all part of the fuckin’… Whatever, you know?”

"........can you elaborate on that," she finally says, so Hitomi doesn't have to.

“I mean, I didn’t really keep track. But I gotta, like, do what he says or whatever.”

The problem here is... well, there are a lot of problems here, that's part of the problem here.

The first part of the problem here is that it is very quickly becoming clear that any plan which relies on 1) Tommy having, and being able to provide, detailed or accurate information about anything, 2) Clay being willing to provide accurate information about anything, or 3) Tommy being willing or able to conceal from Clay that this conversation happened, is not a plan, it is a pipe dream.

From there it seems like the next move should be to talk to the rest of Manchester and demand to know why they're harboring a maleficer who's threatened one of Kyoto's freshmen, except that the second part of the problem is that from everything that's come up so far it really, really seems like that's just going to get the answer that none of them know what she's talking about and how sure is she that Ayako wasn't just spooked.

From there, the next move would be to go to the rest of the Anglosphere at large and make it publicly known that Manchester is harboring a maleficer who threatens freshmen etc, which just about every enclave is going to want to do something about-- it's really bad if one enclave suddenly gains from a war rather than losing everything-- except that the third part of the problem is that, well, Manchester has a maleficer, which means that they gain rather than losing everything if there is a war.

If it came down to a war between Manchester and Kyoto-- well, Hitomi is pretty sure Kyoto would win. Nobody wants to be in the version of the world where Manchester gets to do whatever they want because they have a maleficer senior. Nobody wants to be in the version of the world where enclaves, in general, get to harbor maleficers who in turn get to threaten everyone else.

Pretty sure is not, in fact, sure enough. Graduation is in seven months and if there's a war none of the Kyoto seniors graduate and probably most of the juniors don't either, they need to be focusing on graduation and not using enormous amounts of mana on fighting Manchester over an indie freshman who's not even allied with them, that's part of keeping her people safe. Graduation is in seven months which is not, if you think about it, that long to wait before Clay graduates and the problem solves itself.

Except it doesn't, actually, because if one enclave gets to go around threatening the others because they have a maleficer and nobody will confront them about it that's not in fact the kind of situation that just goes away, and another part of keeping her people safe is that she needs to not leave the juniors an unsolveable problem because she couldn't be bothered to figure it out herself.

And whatever she decides she has to decide it right now, because Tommy is not going to be able or most likely willing to keep from Clay that this happened and if they try to keep him away from Clay entirely that'll also be parsed as escalation.

Graduation is in seven months and she's so tired.

"Is there anyone who would have been keeping track." 

"Clay? And, uh, Toby."

Right. Okay. Not getting involved is not at this point an option. It would be wonderful if it was, but it isn't. This conversation happened, and it will be known to Manchester that this conversation happened, and so not responding to the information is approval; furthermore Clay threatened Ayako which she can't just do nothing about.

(If Clay hadn't threatened Ayako, Hitomi would have cut off this entire conversation with an announcement that this was ridiculous, obviously Manchester wasn't harboring a maleficer and obviously nobody would make a freshman give them mana, that would be an absurd thing for a person to do. If Clay hadn't threatened Ayako and contacted Hitomi himself she might even have believed it. They would have stayed out of it, and she wouldn't be considering whether or not to escalate to the point of war. But he did, and so she is.)

Okay, come on, stop panicking, and stop catastrophizing, she tells herself in a voice that sounds suspiciously like her own seniors. There's a process here, Michi would have said, and escalating directly to war declarations is not it.

"Right. I'll handle Manchester, Haruto I'm going to need you to find-- what's Toby's surname?" 

"Underwood."

"Got it," says a junior boy who'd claimed one of the chairs, and goes.

Hitomi doesn't need to say that Rin is keeping an eye on the reading room until she gets back. Everyone knows. Where's Manchester.

Rin, meanwhile, waits approximately ten seconds before she very visibly and deliberately stops watching everyone else and goes back to her own homework.

Tommy is just going to... Sink into his seat as much as possible, which is hard given that he's almost six feet tall and already kind of too big for it. "I didn't mean to--start shit."

Meanwhile: Manchester's reading room! Clay's not there; there are some older Manchester boys, though.

She knocks. 

"Hello, I'm Hitomi Inoue. Kyoto. Is this a good time?" 

"Yeah, come on in."

She does. 

"Are you aware that your clavemate has been maleficing from and threatening freshmen." 

"What? No. C'mon, that's ridiculous."

She is so incredibly not in the mood for this.

"Clay Tatum has a maleficer's aura. This weekend, he approached one of my freshmen to tell her that she should stop studying with the independent who's been hanging around with you, or else he was concerned that something violent might happen to her, and after all he was stronger than she was. And today Tommy Ingram showed up to their study session covered in bruises and, when asked about why, told me that Clay has been taking his mana from him for the last several weeks.

If it weren't for what he said to Ayako, and if I hadn't seen him for myself, I would have thought it was ridiculous too, since obviously Manchester wouldn't be harbouring a maleficer. However." 

"That doesn't--come on. I know Clay. I know he's been--maybe more than cheating, recently, but like, there has got to have been some sort of a miscommunication. I know Tommy, I've seen him and Clay. He's not maleficing from him. Clay's not always--look, I'm sorry about your freshman, Clay's stupid, you can let us know how to make it up to you and I'll make sure he's kept away, but he's not hurting Tommy. George wanted Tommy to be punished more and Clay talked him down 'cause he likes the kid, it doesn't make sense."

"I don't know how much of a miscommunication you're imagining can happen in, quote, 'that's just Clay, we've got this little ritual and I was being annoying about it, I'm supposed to give him my mana every day, but I said oh fuck you bastard you are just a big fucking bully so he had to take it, but don't be mad at him for maleficing he's my friend and only does it when I make him,' end quote." 

"To be fair, he is kind of a nuisance."

"Shut up George, this is serious. I don't--I can't believe Clay would do that, that's messed up."

"Fine. How do we know Tommy's not just lying?"

Who let this idiot make decisions about anything.

"He," and she nods to Nick, "just said that Clay has been doing more than cheating, which would be bad enough regardless of what is or isn't happening with Tommy." Does she need to spell out for them what it means when a maleficer is working closely with an enclave.

“I mean. It was just—recently, that he started seeming kind of, y’know, weird, we were trying to figure out what to do about it but we didn’t actually have—he hadn’t threatened anyone before or we would’ve done something, George is just being an idiot. We don’t want war any more than you do, we don’t want him involved with us if he’s going to pull this kind of thing, just, he only got an aura at all recently. This is the first I’m hearing that him maleficing from humans or threatening anyone is even in question.”

If she believes him -- which she's inclined to, even though there's part of her that's still catastrophizing and paranoid -- then that's. Actually really good, that they didn't know, that it's not a case of Manchester thinking they can get away with anything.

"That's a relief to hear," she says.

“Yeah, I—I guess it would be for you. Fuck. What was he thinking, pulling this shit before graduation—I’m really sorry.”