One of them is apparently taking classes in this building, because when Pete exits the classroom, Tom Riddle bumps into him, dropping an armful of textbooks.

"Shit!"

At some point in the middle of class while no one was looking Pete decided he wanted to be 3D again, so now he is.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" he says, body automatically moving to help pick up the dropped books before he's even consciously processed that it's Tom who bumped into him. He pauses for a fraction of a second but decides to not let that stop him; he's meant to seduce Tom into becoming a good person, and that won't happen if he is constantly marinating in contempt for Tom. He should make an effort towards finding the good in him and that means that even when Tom is obviously angling for something Pete should play along. After all, he only has Peter's and Edmund's word that Tom Riddle is a horrible person and the bubbly newcomer he is would almost certainly give Tom a chance. "Are you alright?" he looks up from book collection to ask.

"Yeah, the books are hardcover, and none of them landed wrong... and, you know, nothing landed on my toes, either." Gather gather gather. "Should've looked where I was going, but."

Tintin exits the classroom. "Pete, where - oh! Hello, Tom... do you two need help?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I should really be going, my next is halfway across the campus. I will see you later?"

"Later!" he says, grinning.

"...'but'?" he directs to Tom, straightening up but not immediately giving the books back. It's an opening for him to walk with Tom wherever he's going, if he can offer to carry them.

"...I might've stayed up too late last night," Tom confesses with a convincing approximation of an embarrassed smile. "Did some reading."

"What about?" he asks, genuinely curious. Also, can he make a face that suggests he feels unimpressed by how Tom is acting friendly right now after trying to be a dick this morning? He's gonna try it. It's a face that has a kind of lifted eyebrow and an amused curl to his lips.

"...well, since you ask, about Travelers." Tom's voice lowers as they pass by a knot of fellow students. "People try not to talk about it, but... There's a thousand worlds running along the same track, and we're the one that gets all the tourists, and we try not to talk about it. Doesn't that seem a bit stupid?"

Ah huh.

"I understand the reasoning for not doing it; what I find really surprising is that it works," he says, lowering his voice too to match Tom's. "People do, actually, not talk about it. Is there anything else in the world that's been so successfully suppressed?"

"Nothing very notable, I'm given to understand. Detroit, I suppose, but there's plenty of reasons not to talk about that."

"I don't know that I'd count Detroit as a separate topic from this one."

"Nor would I, really. A lot of people do, though - we've got our Visitors, our Honored Guests, and then there's that horrible thing that happened when there was an Intruder. No relation, really."

"Well, it's all on the same Wikipedia page. ...I guess the list of known Travelers is a separate page, but I'm pretty sure that one specifically is on the main page, isn't it? Notable incidents, or some such?"

"But my personal theory is that we're not the only place that gets them, and furthermore that probably some people from here also go somewhere later. Maybe a weirder place than the places we tend to get people from?"

Tom's eyes light up, though they sharpen too. "I didn't realize you had theories. I agree that there's no reason to think that we have anything close to the whole picture - and it's especially suspicious, isn't it, that so many of them were so very human, along this same Earth-standard timeline... except for Invictus. Except for the sorceress-consort of Ogedei Khan. Except for the White Horse of Jeanne D'arc. I want to know what else there is."

"Well, the immediate answer that comes to mind is everything. The only numbers that exist are zero, one, and infinity. But that's just kind of pushing the question up a level, or down a level, I don't know I lost track. If there isn't a specific finite discrete set of worlds that there are, what principle guides them to have people sent over to us? Are there alternate versions of our world, too, that get sent different subsets of possible people? Is there a neighborhood system, where worlds that are closer to each other in some sense are more likely to send each other people? Is there a person, or something sufficiently personlike, that's making a choice somewhere? I would guess yes to that question, actually."

Now that he thinks of it this is probably the closest he'll get to talking about the bullshit metaphysics he's a part of before the denouement of the other plots, actually.

"It seems like there has to be a person somewhere! To set up a system, if nothing else - to say, when someone is dropped into this place, they should get the tools and the resources to do what they've always wanted. Whether that's helping conquer Eurasia or, I don't know, hanging around lots of sexually available young men."

(This, unlike the rest of what he's been saying, has a tone of the bitterness he was exhibiting at breakfast.)

Oh he is not taking that bait.

"That last one can't be that common, though, I can't imagine. I mean, I'm sure it happens at all, we get some weird folks coming here, but they don't get articles written about them on the—it's the Times, right, that's the big one here? Anyway."

"We do have statistics, though. Travelers are all over the place - I'm not going to say the statistics don't lie, of course they lie, but you can correct for it. Assuming that the bureaucrats administering every participating country's Traveler stipends are at most twice as corrupt as the average bureaucrat, only one in ten Travelers does anything of such note that Google or Wikipedia or anyone else notices. They're just as low a common denominator as any other man on the street. Just from farther away."

Pete looks at Tom sideways. "You did some reading last night, huh. Just how late did you stay up?"

...wait, shit, is he being charmed by Tom Riddle? Abort abort abort—

...or... don't abort, actually?

"It's not the first time I've looked it up! ...but, yes, I went to sleep at two in the morning. I barely sleep anyway, though, I'm one of those insufferable bastards who doesn't need more than six hours. So I got four, instead, and I get to regret that."