“—Okay, anything else that’s going to be unusually dangerous to you compared to a non-magical human I need to know right now. One of my book powers is that I speak all the languages.”

"Okay, well, don't do that, we need to keep it extremely clear between us and the school which languages we are studying. Everyone in the school takes instruction in at least one of English or Mandarin, but don't just walk up to anyone who looks Asian and start speaking Mandarin," she gestures at Suze, who is half-Asian, "some of them are transplants brought up in the West. Misleading situations the other direction are not impossible but rarer. That's school-specific, adult wizards you can speak whatever. Uh, it's dangerous for us to not believe in magic, or in any particular spell we might want cast. Dangerous to have our mana taken. Bad to be eaten by a mal but that can affect mundies, we're just tastier. Those are wizards generally. More school-specific ones include that we can't have, like, sleepovers - I mentioned that, but to reiterate - we have to do our homework and class projects, there are no adults so don't rely on anything that would call for bring in adults..."

“Otherwise trivial injuries can kill us if they make us look weaker to the mals, or mean we can’t fight them off.”

“I can probably help some with schoolwork, I have book powers for learning and teaching things particularly effectively.”

Maybe he should revisit the hallucination mal hypothesis, things this nice don’t happen in real life.

"Most of what we need to learn as opposed to plagiarize is magic, which you presumably don't know."

“That’s why I said ‘learn and,’” she says, shooting a brief delighted grin into the stacks.

"...but you aren't a wizard, or so I am given to understand," says Caio around a kebab.

“Oh! Right.”

And then something in her complicated tangle of magic shifts, and she starts accumulating a trickle of mana. “Okay, fixed that.”

"WHOA what the fuck. - she's a wizard now."

"What are you going to do, shadow a freshman to all their classes? The school doesn't know you..."

“No, I was planning to read every book in the library.”

"...the library does not have a defined size."

"Oooooooooooooh."

"But you can probably make at least some progress that way, I guess, outside your designated monster fighting hours all night long."

"Well, like I said, I'm supernaturally good at learning things. I'm sure I'll figure something out. And I can give other people magic I have, too, but I'm not going to start handing out the stuff I've managed to retroactively copy from back home until I've got a better handle on what that is."

"You mean stuff besides the notebook that wasn't magic for me?"

"Well, you see, I had a handle on what that was. The notebook was thoroughly benign. A lot of the magical people back home that I've met to copy weren't. Also, that was just a notebook, I absolutely cannot copy the notebook's entire deal, I was just hoping it would decide to show up."

"So you can give people magic you have except for the good shit," mutters Bella.

"Harsh, she gave you pizza," Caio murmurs.

"I cannot give out the really amazing stuff, no. There wasn't an option to be able to do that that I chose not to take; I took all the giving other people neat stuff powers on offer. I can understand how the threat of death might make you tetchy."

"We're enclavers, we're probably going to live. - sorry," Sean adds to Caio.

"Okay somebody needs to actually explain enclaves to me."

"When wizards are not attending the Scholomance some of us live in normal places and some of us live in other, non-Scholomance pocket dimensions. The second thing is safer but more expensive and requires considerable coordination to establish, so it's sort of a de facto nobility - and you're not seeing any kids who didn't even get a seat in the Scholomance. If someone here says they are from a city, or that they are a city, like, 'I'm New Orleans', like they think that's significant, they are referring to an enclave they belong to."