“I don’t really care if I have to fight a worksheet or not but I am very tempted even just to find out what classes it would think I ought to be in. But actually between Anything You Can Do and Time Enough For Love I think probably a class designed for normal people would be too slow for me.”

"I actually think it might assign you a heap of independent studies, for exactly that reason."

“Oh, that would be wonderful. We’ll see how my attempt to commune with the school goes when I get around to making it.”

"Maybe it'll run out of mals to steer toward you in the gym by four in the morning and you can just have a nice chat after that." Sigh. "I got assigned an independent study once, sophomore year, and I was so tempted, to the point I wrote a little apology on my schedule when I crossed it out, but it's really taking your life into your hands to go to any class that's going to have only a handful of kids in it, safety in numbers applies very much to mals."

“That’s not objectively worse than the pocket mals but but it is more viscerally upsetting. Everyone should be free at all times to pursue knowledge recklessly, not that that’s ever actually a good idea to take to its most desirable extremes.”

"We can do it when we're grownups, just... without the school, and most of the time in most ways we all hate this place but it's very good at many aspects of the school part."

“The mortality rate is very upsetting. First the graduation hall, then I figure out a more generalizable solution for everyone outside.”

"One guy has killed a maw mouth one time, so it's possible in principle!"

“Even if it wasn’t, I could figure something out like shunting them all into a pocket dimension they can’t get out of. Just as an example, the real solution would probably take more than five seconds to think of.”

"Bit rough for all the people they've absorbed."

“I would be very surprised if The Rescuer is very strict about requiring people to actually be dead qua dead.”

"That's based on... vibes from your notebook?"

“Right! It’s—not a system of rules for lawyering. It’s a system of there being a specific shape within the infinite plane of people getting to have nice things. Femininely.”

"Why femininely."

“Fuck if I know! But it’s an emissary of something called ‘The Spirit of Femininity Unleashed.’ I don’t know what its definition of femininity is, it didn’t object to my not taking any of the options for being prettier and it didn’t object to my Signature Style being an eye motif instead of pink or lace or frills. But I get the impression that it’s not a coincidence that it was purple and sparkly.”

Anyways, if it were just that I had The Rescuer, I would be less confident that I could do something for the maw-mouth victims. But I have The Rescuer and It Gets Better and Cotton Candy and Ever Onward, and I feel like together those describe a space where I can rescue people who have been taken by things like maw-mouths or an evil coffin of burying people alive forever.”

"I don't think we have an evil coffin of burying people alive forever but if it turns out there's one somewhere I'm glad you can fix it."

Across the cafeteria, a boy who didn't say much when he came by and took four cheeseburgers - if Kareen's inclined to remember, he had to be prompted by his clavemate to say "thank you" - spots something moving in the hallway through the door and charges after it with a sword.

Everyone acts like that's a very normal thing for him to do. This girl (whose response to her various gifts was "a thousand times am I grateful to you!" in an unplaceable-but-learned-from-Brits accent) sidles up to the table. "Is it true you mean to be up all the night long?"

“I don’t have a room so I expect to spend the night killing mals, yeah.”

To Bella: “No, the coffin is a thing we have back home.”

"I have the affinity of sleep! If you need to not do any of it, or do it real fast before curfew, the right place has come to the you."

“Oh! Brilliant! Did you get one of the pamphlets about my powers—”

"Did indeed from the beautiest crown jewel of Manchester."

“If you were willing to babysit my sleeping body a bit I bet we could work in some extra time/sleep efficiency with Time Enough For Love. And I would really like to use Dream Together to let my parents know I’m alright sooner rather than later.”

"Where do you mean to sleep?"

“Liiiiiibrary? Probably? Unless someone has a better idea.”