"My mom goes for an hourlong run every morning and her job is magic weaving so that does for an irritating hobby for her, she just gets incredibly persnickety about it all, and my dad has a rowing machine and weights and crosswords."

"I embroider, it's good for doing runes. It doesn't irritate me, though."

"Yeah, if I loved it it would work less well. It did actually start working less well, after a while, just not to the point where I switched to lace."

"Runes in lace would look really cool, I bet, maybe I should look into it. Or mention it offhand to Melody and see if she goes on a research binge about it."

"Melody's a friend of yours?"

"That room is hers," she says, pointing to the one on the right hand side farther from the door into the suite. "And that one's Lisao's," the closer right-hand one, "and that one's mine, so one of you will be using it," farther left-hand, "and that one's Johann's." Closer left-hand. 

"Luxurious. We've been living in roughly a shipping container apiece. With a lethal curfew."

"That sounds...better than a, what was it, five percent chance of survival? If you don't go to school?"

"I think the ones who make it without having to go to the Scholomance might be better adjusted, but there are certainly fewer of them."

"It wasn't as bad a few generations ago, or we'd probably've died out at some point."

"That makes sense. I wonder what changed. ...I wonder if there's a non-infohazard answer to that question."

"Is 'it's a research interest of mine' an answer?"

"It's more of an answer than I was expecting, honestly."

"Well, it is. I don't think we'd better go into much more detail till we know more about the relationship between our worlds whenever your... planar expert... gets back to us."

"I won't argue." 

The door opens again. 

"I have cheese, ice cream, and pomegranates!" Melody chirps. "Also some other stuff we were running low on."

"Thanks so much! There's no decent perishables in the Scholomance at all." She falls upon the cheese.

Melody got a variety of cheeses, including cheddar, swiss, pepper jack, asiago, and the really nice fresh mozzarella where you can practically drink the whey out of the packaging. 

"How come?"

"The food there consists of what people bring in on a pretty sharp weight limit, a transmuted nutrient slurry that is just barely convincing enough as a facsimile of bad cafeteria food that one can choke it down, and a weird vending machine that dispenses a variety of dubious vending machine type foods but only the kind you can store at room temperature for kind of a while." Ice cream?

Ice cream! There's Vanilla Bean, Death by Chocolate, Strawberry Cheesecake, Red Bean, Pomegranate, Panda Paws, and Maple Walnut. 

"Sorry about your horrible nutrient slurry."

"Some decades back they didn't even transmute it and kids were dying of malnutrition! It gets better! Sorta! So are you blue on account of being one of the panoply of witch species?" She is going to spoon some of - that and some of th- yeah she's going to put a scoop of everything in the bowl she graduated she deserves it.

"I'm a Vana! Some people use the plural Vanir as the singular form but those people are wrong."

"I don't recognize the word.. I mostly stuck to Chinese and the Romance languages."

"It's a bad idea in the Scholomance to pick up bits of languages you don't plan to get spell-competent in. Confuses the school."

"And to be clear basically anything we say is a bad idea is so because it can kill you, though that one is typically indirect."