"Or he's realized mundies are lucky, or he wants to do things a more prepared girl wouldn't be desperate enough for, or he thinks she's cute and doesn't expect it to be a long-term thing..."

"Trust me, enclavers get warned away from that pretty hard. "Don't think with your dick" is beaten into you - usually not literally. Not to say no one goes for it anyway, but usually it's people who puberty hits like a ton of bricks sophomore or junior year, or it stays overtly transactional. I'm guessing you're your family's first who got a slot? Or just all brothers, but you'd have heard about this if you had an older sister in, I think."

"I mean, I am, but - he's got a pretty reasonable expectation that she's different. Because of the pajamas."

"Eh, maybe. They're rich enough, maybe they don't need to be as hardcore about it. From what I hear about Shanghai, they have a lot of internal dead weight and they're rich enough to carry it off... So maybe you're right."

"Being right is one of my virtues. But you're looking to help people, huh?"

"Despite my best efforts, yes. I'm... easily pissed off by unfairness. And there's a lot of it to go around. Especially for them."

"I know some folks but I think if you don't mind I'll tell you about them after they catch the maleficer."

"Enclaver maleficers are put down quick. Sometimes even by their parents, enclaves are very serious about not starting a malia arms race. Except Pisa, everyone agrees to just not count Pisa. But sure, whoever's hid for a week is scary, you're not wrong. I'm 790B, if you want to send them my way later."

"Thanks! It's not that I don't trust you, it's just that, you know."

"Yeah, it's legit, bad week for trusting anyone. Hopefully they catch them in shop tomorrow and announce it by dinner."

"Yeah. I hope that happens and then absolutely nothing like this happens again."

"By all accounts it's extremely rare. On the other hand, last year was even worse. So, fingers crossed, I guess?"

"What happened last year?"

"There were several maleficers. Some tiny Indian enclave hired a maleficer to hit a rival enclave, they poached for some reason, the targets retaliated, they killed a guy from the first one, his twin went off the deep end and maleficed his way through the entire rival enclave, just entirely wiped out everyone they had in the Scholomance, then someone from a British enclave went maleficer. Somehow this was in response but I didn't follow how; his enclave tried to put him down, but he panicked and jumped off the deep end and killed most of them, then his underclassmen figured out a way to take him out, hit him through the power sharer or something. A huge mess. A bunch of people went a little weird after that - the announcements guy started after that, and I hear he got kicked out of Seattle enclave afterwards too."

"...Wow, okay then. That sure is a thing it would be bad to have happen again."

"Yeah, that's putting it mildly. I heard last weekend there was some talk about war with the Sinosphere because someone thought Shanghai might be sponsoring an indie maleficer, which seemed like an overreaction until I heard about last year."

"Well. Shanghai."

"Yeah, they're... something. My Mandarin still sucks but I knew enough to understand the shouting."

Vague noncommittal nod.

Theun picks at his lunch, partly to keep himself from starting a rant about how they can just afford to pull dead weight and what the hell, but also it's not going to get any tastier if he keeps talking.

Yep, there sure is foodlike substance to consume.

Eventually, Theun finishes a bite and looks up. "So, anything you're good at you want to brag about, or something?"

"My affinity's shields, I think relative to other people I've put more of my prep work into actually fighting mals - for a definition of 'fighting' that includes making an opening to run away, but, you know - and I'm doing pretty well in logic class and I could maybe sell some homework for it, I guess."

"Is that Formal Logic for Spellcraft? I'm in a session of that. Probably not buying, though, I think I'll want to actually understand it for later on."

"Yeah, that's the one. Good to know."