"Your plan is to leave the Scholomance and then come back?"

“It’s possible! There’s a real entrance. That’s how most of the mals get in.”

"It's not very appealing but I will give it 'possible'."

“…I wasn’t thinking of going farther in than the graduation hall? We won’t have spent loads of time there to get sick of it?”

"I don't know about you but I became sick of it in here immediately, I just usually try not to think about it."

“Oh. Huh. Because…the air is bad? Because you can’t leave? —I, uh, haven’t got sick of it even now. There are loads of mals to kill and apparently the maw-mouth hindbrain is stronger than the human hindbrain.”

"You should possibly not be in the habit of referring to yourself that way in casual conversation."

"For those of us with human hindbrains there's really nothing to recommend the place. I guess the library's fairly good. Other than that though."

“I mean, there’s a difference between ‘nothing to recommend it’ and ‘going back in would be hard’—I think? I wouldn’t say most of this in public but I wasn’t normal even before I dug up my own deep dark secrets and I like not pretending to be normal.”

"I mean, the idea that you're a mal in human form is less bad to slip in the wrong company? If you were like a quattria or something that'd be, you know. Different."

"I don't ever want to come back. I want to supervolcano the place into smithereens so no one ever has to go here again. But I acknowledge that coming back is, in fact, possible."

“You can supervolcano the scholomance later after we’ve killed all the maw-mouths without incidentally doing some genocide.”

"That's probably the sensible thing to do, on a scale where any of these ideas qualify as sensible."

“I’ve been aggressively failing to be sensible my whole life and I’m fine!”

Snort.

“Anyway, the status quo is worse.”

"The Scholomance is safer than the rest of the world. Is the plan that between lots of you personally killing things and you personally putting up Golden Enclaves it will no longer be necessary?"

"If we can't pull it off Shanghai will build another one. With, you know, another maw-mouth, but."

"Probably spellbooks get mad if you try to scan them and put them on the internet, or photocopy them or whatever, but we probably should spend some time copying out the spells so they don't get lost again." 

"I'm still working my way through the book, but, yeah, that's on the to-do list."

"Yeah, I don't mean now--I'm still not spell-competent at Sanskrit yet at all--"

"I hope to have a copy of the essentials made before we graduate and then I can give it to whoever seems like they'd be a good custodian."

"That's a good plan." 

She exhales slowly. 

"This is incredibly stressful but it is not objectively worse than not knowing things and not having any kind of plan." 

"I fucking guess."

"I was telling myself as much as anyone. This fucking sucks!"