"Books are safe to read. We are in the school library of the Scholomance, it's the top floor, any random classroom or hallway or stairwell will probably suffice but if you don't care literally at all where you overnight I'd recommend the gym, it's best for holding up to heavy duty combat and its residues. There are many thousands of kinds of mals and we study them for years but in general if you see something in here and it is not a human being and it moves, or if it doesn't move because it is instead a mimic waiting for you to get near it, kill it real dead."

"Can you make food? Like. Real food."

"- oh holy shit can you make real food!"

“I can absolutely make food!” She pulls a large canvas sack out of her apron pocket, and begins pulling food out of it. No two things exact duplicates, she’s showing off a bit. Pizza, ice cream, Chinese takeout, ham sandwiches, curry, kebabs…

"None of this looks magic to me!" Bella reports to the room, and everybody does some combination of falling like they're starving on the real food, or running off to tell their friends. Bella grabs a slice of pizza and runs off to tell her friends.

Sean takes a curry and sends a freshman to go get the rest of his enclave and their minions.

“Is there a better place to do this? A cafeteria, maybe?”

"Cafeteria's not open yet," Suze says between bites of crab rangoons. "Fuck this is so good I could cry."

“Okay. Is this space big enough to hold everyone in the school, because if not people should start taking food and leaving to make room.”

"It's not a great place to do this especially if you don't want everything to seem like it's presents from enclavers but there's not a bigger place besides the caf or the gym."

“Does the gym not work, then?”

"Harder to convince people to show up."

“Dangerous, or just inconvenient?”

"Dangerous. It's lower in the school, it's full of mals. Seniors will start going soon to do practice graduation runs but nobody's down there otherwise most of the time, apart from Field Day."

“When does the cafeteria open?”

"In twenty minutes. So maybe just wait for that to feed anybody besides people who're welcome in this corner of the reading room."

Bella comes back,

with friends!

“Wow, you really weren’t targeted by a mal that causes hallucinations.”

“Sorry, why would anyone not be welcome?”

"Well, hundreds and hundreds of kids go here and we don't, like, all know each other?"

“And there’s some concern that a stranger might be a disguised mal?”

"Not a mal, but like, a thief maybe? A maleficer? A moocher? An asshole who'll start yelling in Amharic? And not everybody'd fit anyway."

“Please explain ‘maleficer’ and also whatever’s wrong with Amharic.”

"Not Amharic specifically, any language people aren't expecting. A maleficer's someone who takes mana from other creatures, including in advanced cases other wizards. Very dangerous, they get stronger while their opponents get weaker."