She's in a long corridor of stone and metal, dotted with sturdy metal doors in the same style, each with a little numbered plaque hanging next to it, and no windows whatsoever. 

About ten paces from her, a pair of teenage boys are trying to fight off three creatures, each the size of a coyote, with twelve legs apiece and needle-like teeth. The boys are armed with knives, and using them reasonably competently, but even so the fight seems to be going poorly; the shorter one's off-hand arm is visibly injured.

The abberations, or whatever they are, ping Evil and the humans don't, and that's enough to be picking a side off for the moment. She draws her sword and joins in.

Whatever they are, she's having better luck with her sword than the teenagers are with their knives. One of the abberations whirls around to face her, snapping at her legs.

Stab slash stab. She has some spells left but she doesn't know where the Teleport sent her so she wants to save them as much as possible.

The aberrations, or whatever they are, aren't a particularly challenging foe by the standards of a fifth-circle adventurer; one by one, they fall to the floor.

Both teenagers blink at her in confusion. The one without the injured arm makes some kind of gesture involving touching his forehead and torso.

"Who are you?" says the other one, in a language that is definitely not any variant on Taldane. 

(She almost looks like a senior, except he'd have noticed if one of the seniors were walking around in metal armor they'd been assigned as a Shop project. He's confused, and anything confusing is inherently suspicious.)

"Samora, and I just caught a hostile Conjuration. Can you tell me where I am? And would you like a Cure Light for that?" She points at the other young man's slashed arm.

He tries to piece that together. She was attacked by a mal, that part makes sense. Given that she doesn't recognize the Scholomance, the mal somehow... inducted her mid-year? He didn't know mals could do that! She looks to be around senior-age, which means she's one of the handful of people who didn't get a spot but managed to survive anyway, in which case it was sure a stroke of bad luck to get pulled in here. Or else she's a very detailed psychic mal, but if that's what's going on there's not much he can do about it.

"You're in the Scholomance," he says in an apologetic tone. "What are you going to want in exchange?" 

(If she's not a mal, the obvious thing for her to want is a lead on a room to poach, but he's got a void ceiling, he'll be safe either way.)

(The uninjured one is muttering an incantation. It's in a different language from the one they've been speaking to Samora in, but from the sound of it it's some kind of spell to detect poison, albeit one more complicated than the orison for it.)

"How about an explanation of what the Scholomance is, and where it is, and how to get to Absalom from here?"

"The Scholomance is... the school for wizard kids? Uh, I know what it's called in Spanish and Romanian, if you've got either of those, but it's not like there's a second one. It's in the void, you know, the place that enclaves and anything else that's bigger on the inside are connected to. I dunno where Absalom is, but I guess you'd wait until graduation, and assuming none of the mals got you you'd walk out through the front gates and then buy a plane ticket?"

 "But if you're not a student you're going to have problems way before graduation, 'cause the mals go after anyone who's out after curfew. So there's that."

"Yeah. There's that."

It makes a messed-up sort of sense to have a bunch of monsters in your wizard school so the students will circle up, but if you have enough that the students run out of spells and start fighting the monsters with knives that's just going to make them better at knife fighting. It's not even a clever terrible idea.

"So it's a demiplane? A separate piece of space that you can only get in and out of with magic? Sounds like I should Plane Shift out tomorrow morning, which means I'm going to need to deal with the curfew the once."

"If you have a way to leave you should definitely do that, yeah. Uh, but I don't think it's a good idea to wait until tomorrow, I've never heard of anyone surviving being out past curfew — Gabriel, have you—"

 "I heard a rumor that Aurora from Lisbon was out after the bell and managed to last long enough to make it back to her room? —You wouldn't know her, she caught the flu the week before finals." He looks back at Samora. "If you're going to try it, you could trade everything you can for as much mana as people will give you?"

Well, shit. "I don't have a Plane Shift prepared today. It's got to be tomorrow. At least everything I own is already optimized for fighting off monsters with and I don't get sleepy. What is mana?"

 What kind of bizarre magical tradition is she even from? "Mana is the thing you need to cast spells. If you had enough of it, you might be able to keep your shields going all night."

"You can trade spell duration around between people? Can you . . . try giving me a little bit and then taking it back so I can see how it works?" If it does work, what should she use it on? Probably Blessing of Fervor. Is that worth selling any of her gear for, Blessing of Fervor all night? Maybe the wand of Summon Monster 1 or the Legend Lore incense, if anyone wants those.

"How much do you need for your healing spell? I could trade you that much and a little extra if you fix my arm."

"It's a first-circle conjuration? It doesn't have a duration, it's the kind that happens all at once. Will seeing it go off tell you?"

He doesn't think she's saying that it's powerful enough or finnicky enough to require a circle of wizards just to power it, but he's not sure what she's saying instead of that. "It depends on how exactly the spell works, but probably not."

 "Maybe a better way to compare is, how long would you have to spend building the mana to be able to cast it?" Mateo's a freshman, so it'd take a lot longer for him either way, but it should still be good enough for a rough sense.

This is the weirdest kind of wizard she's ever heard of. Are they even prepared casters, or are they some kind of cunning-sorcerer that translated as 'wizard'? "The way my magic works is I spend an hour in prayer every morning and assemble all the spell structures I can use that day during that hour. All the power comes from the Inheritor" gesture at her holy symbol "and I pick a certain number of spells at each circle from the set She makes available. Putting together any given one takes less than a minute, the limit is how many I can fit in my mindspace*."

*Translator's note: Taldane, naturally, has a word (borrowed from Azlanti which borrowed it from Draconic) for the abstract space in the synaesthetic "back" of one's awareness where one can perceive one's prepared spells, class features, supernatural abilities, etc. As many wizards have said to many apprentices over the years, "Don't worry, you'll know where it is once you've got something in it."

 That sounds incredibly inconvenient! What if she picks out specific spells, and then it turns out she needs different ones, and she gets killed because she didn't pick the right spell for a psychic mal? If she gets to pick sixty of them she'd probably be okay on any given day — no one shows up to school knowing sixty spells, and some of them survive — but it's hard to imagine surviving like that for four years outside the school. 

 "I've never heard of that magical tradition. It sounds... fascinating." He's aiming for a neutral tone and really not succeeding.

"How about I trade the mana from fifteen minutes of push-ups for your healing spell," says the injured one. "And then you can tell me if it was more or less than you needed." 

They must be spontaneous casters, because that's the "spontaneous casters think they have it better" voice. If these ones can get extra spell slots by doing pushups, maybe they do have it better. "Fine by me."

He takes her hand and lets mana trickle into her. It's not difficult to recognize magical energy for what it is, even in this form, and the sensation of mana flowing in is rather like the last instant of a spell in reverse. But the mana she's receiving now lacks even the most basic structure, and it's not clear how one would even start rearranging it into a usable spellform. If magical energy caught within a spellform is like water flowing through a system of pipes, this is more like a puddle of water gathering in the dirt, and trying to form it into a spellform is like trying to make a water pipe out of nothing but more water.

Oh, this doesn't work at all—wait a moment, this feels a lot like a pearl of power refilling a used spell slot except she can't make it go into the expended structure. If she touches her second-circle pearl can she shove it in there?

She can! It's not enough magical energy to fully recharge the pearl, but it flows smoothly into it.

"That worked! But only when I started putting it in an item I have, so I don't think I can buy up a whole pile of it. Would anyone be willing to let me stay in a room overnight, in exchange for healing or something?"

The two teenagers exchange an uncomfortable glance.

"The mals go after people who share rooms too," says Mateo. "Or people who try to move into a dead kid's room — unless they poach, the school has no issue with that—"

 "—you shouldn't kill someone just to have a room!" 

"Of course not," says Mateo, in the tone of someone who would totally kill someone for their room if they somehow wound up roomless.

"I won't! I might want to spend the night in a dead person's room, if there's one available and it looks more defensible than anywhere else I can go. Why does the school only let you take a dead person's room if you personally kill them, that seems terrible."

Shrug. "No clue."

 "I heard the builders were trying to stop people from murdering people for their rooms, and just didn't manage to close all the loopholes."

"You'd think they could've fixed it when they realized. I guess poaching's not that common, maybe they were busy fixing something else."

"What's the intended purpose of this place, anyway? Just that you'll get stronger if you have to fight for your lives a lot? Do I need to be on the lookout for the teachers, too, or just the monsters?"

 "—no, the point is to keep the monsters out. It's a lot safer to be a teenager here than outside. And there aren't any teachers, all the lessons are on recordings."

"You know how nearly all the wizards you knew when you were a kid got killed by mals as teenagers? In the Scholomance you've got about even odds of living to graduation, and better than even odds of surviving graduation if you have a good alliance."

"I didn't know any wizards when I was a kid." Unless you count Old Man Carter from up the hill, but he only might've been one, he never said. "I know a lot of wizards get killed by monsters, but if they didn't want to circle up they could just stay home and not go looking for trouble. And plenty of them don't start until they're more like my age. You have enough monsters around here that they kill half of everyone? How's there anyone left?"

"—More than half overall." That did not actually answer her question. "Wizards have a lot more children than mundies do, so it balances out. And I've heard mundie women stop being able to have kids weirdly young, they might not be able to have ten even if they wanted to."

 "And a wizard's kid will usually be a wizard, even if their other parents is a mundie. I've heard of wizard men who get dozens of mundie women pregnant, and pick the most promising to raise." It's not a good idea to come across as judgmental of other people's lifestyle choices, you never know what sort of person is listening, but Gabriel can't keep some contempt from leaking into his voice anyway.

"Did your family live in a 'demiplane'? The enclaves are a lot safer, even for teenagers, and that might be true even if it was only one family."

"No, I lived in a regular village and the monsters mostly stayed in the woods and the swamp and stuff. It sounds like you have a lot more than we do. And they only go after people with magical bloodlines? Maybe they'll just ignore me if I hide in an empty room, I don't have a magical bloodline." Unless the planar rift thing or being a cleric counts, which they might. She has to assume she'll be targeted until proven otherwise.

“Outside the Scholomance they hardly ever go after mundies, mundies basically don’t have any mana for them to eat. But I doubt that would keep a mundie safe inside the Scholomance, and you, uh, have magic.”

 “And it does happen sometimes, especially if they’ve got a wizard kid.”

(Why would mals stay in a swamp, anyway? Were there a lot of people living in the swamp or something??)

"I should definitely assume they'll come after me, yeah. Is there anyone else who'd like to buy one of the same healing spell I did for you, for the same amount of mana? If I got that amount again I could recharge the spell to make my sword hit harder and I'm going to want that."

“Probably, yeah. It depends on the day, but if you set up in the cafeteria I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find anyone.”

 What Gabriel should be saying here is that the enclaves have the most mana out of anyone, and might theoretically be willing to trade mana for services outside if she’s got good enough prospects of living through the night, and, by the way, would she like an introduction to Santiago?

 It’s just… Santiago doesn’t care whether Mateo’s arm gets healed. They might care if it were Gabriel’s arm, but even then, there are always more kids who want to do maintenance-track than enclaves to recruit them. No one expects him to share every new spell with Santiago, and there’s a sense in which this is more like that than like anything else, it’s just that they obviously wouldn’t see it that way.

 If he didn’t want to work with Santiago, he didn’t have to volunteer for maintenance.

 “If you can’t find anyone who needs healing right away, you might have better luck with the enclaves. They’ve got the most mana stored up of anyone, and they can sometimes take chances on ideas that won’t pay off right away. I can introduce you to Santiago at sophomore lunch, if you want.”