"The nearest chuch is one block down and two to your left."

...she is not going to a church. Maybe this place is nicer about it (see: the lack of Santas) but still. There are so many, many reasons that she is not doing that. "Do you mind if I follow you guys a bit, before I do that?"

"Sure, we're having hot chocolate and cookies after."

And so the group is herded to the elevator. (The elevator is full of graffiti. No one seems to have noticed.)

... yeah, she'll do arbitrary things for cookies. She's very bribable, that way.

On a scale of one to ten,  how blasphemous is the graffiti?

It looks less artistic and like someone got very angry at the concept of elevators. 

The group exits the elevator and heads to the first apartment door and knocks, at which point it is revealed that the activity happening is caroling. Everyone seems mysteriously to know all the lyrics of the song already.

The upshot of the lyrics, insofar as Marena can catch them, is that the Teacher may or may not have actually existed and pretty much all the stories we tell about him are made up, but even if he didn't exist we can treat him as sort of a personification of all of the hundreds of people whose thoughts contributed to the Teaching coming into being. 

??? IS THIS JESUS? ...ATHEIST JESUS?

HAS SHE BEEN BETRAYED.

She may not know the lyrics, but she is fully capable of doing her best on any repeated chorus. Isn't the Teacher cool if probably fake, tra la la la.

The group progresses to the next few apartments and sings to a variety of delighted people. There's a song about how listening to the Teacher listened to the logos inside his heart and so should you, and one about all the pagan gods bowing to the baby Teacher, and one about whether the Teacher's mother knew that the baby grabbing her finger was the most important person in history, and one instructing various inanimate objects to rejoice because the Teacher has brought us the love of the logos, and one about how nice it is to be cozy and warm under a blanket with a cup of tea and the person you love that almost manages to be nonreligious before it slips in thanks to the logos in the last verse.

Everyone is very good at singing-- they've clearly received a lot of training. 

One of the people answering the door is fully naked, like, you can see his penis, and no one seems to find this remarkable. 

Listening to your heart and babies, yaaaaaaaay. How did she fall into a goddamned youth group?

... though the little voice around here seems more pro-nudity? It's startling,  but... cool. Even if she now feels incredibly overdressed, covering her ~sinful collarbones~.

(The cozy blanket song is cute).

For the next song they form into a semicircle. Everyone sings "here and now!" then, communicated by some system Marena doesn't understand, a person sings a line about a good thing. The lines scan and form couplets. The list of things that exist here and now includes desserts, makeup, the singer having a boyfriend (this results in widespread groaning), a new movie coming out, the end of malaria, treatments for sleep apnea, and stars. 

One person sings about their favorite celebrity's love of cats and another person objects. 

"Okay, but Lanna is a shithead."

"Lanna is not a shithead, you take that back--"

"Did you see the interview about her ex-boyfriend--"

The woman in the brown robes snaps, "we're singing."

The person being sung to laughs. "Teenagers."

Yep, toe to tip, this is a youth group. (Apart from someone just admitting to having a boyfriend???) But she has witnessed incredibly similar conversations about celebrity.

Sorry not sorry for being a fellow teen.

She hasn't worked out quite how people are signalling who's going to sing next, which that makes sense seeing as she's new. But it helps her plan. There's no way she's going to be able to come up with a rhyme under time pressure, but she won't have to if she 'misreads' who's meant to go next and jumps in at the beginning of a couplet.

It's a fool proof plan--

-- except for the fact that the first chance she has to jump in,  she hasn't thought of what to sing. What comes out is warbly nonsense about nudity and not having to wear clothes if you don't want to.

The person who was supposed to sing awkwardly sings a note but stops when she starts singing. 

No one comments on this and the song carries on, although there is a vague air that they are all being Tolerant Of People With Different Abilities. 

She will take Gentle Tolerance and run with it.

No one is going to expect her to sing again! She has Won This.

After a while of more singing, everyone heads back to the teenagers' club and there is hot chocolate and tea and cookies and brownies and cake. 

Brownies: proof of a kind and loving God/Logos/Moon/civilisation/delete-as-applicable.

"So, you long have you been going here?" She asks the stars-are-good person.

"I've been going to this one since I turned eleven, I like Sister Equality. You're new, did you move or are you just checking out new places?"

"I literally just moved today!"

"Oooh, where did you live before? I've never lived anywhere but Sankrena."

She needs to go slap the her of thirty seconds ago. 'I'll just say I moved here.  That doesn't sound crazy like the truth, and it's not like anyone would ask any follow up questions!' She can't even make up a plausible place name!

"I like to be an international woman of mystery.  --hey, what's your favourite place is Sankrena?" Smooth as butter.

"Oh! I like the science fiction mural. Have you been yet?"

"This is pretty much the first place I've been."

"Yeah, I feel you. You gotta get to know people. --You should go see the science fiction mural! I know everyone says that, but it really is as cool as it sounds."

She smiles. "I'll definitely go check it out!"

"Am I going to see you at fourthschool?"

Ideally, no! "There's a chance."

"Haven't made up your mind yet? That's cool."

The woman in brown robes interrupts. "Excuse me, may I speak with you in private?" she says to Marena.