"I Dragon Fairy Elf Witched him and now when I kill a mal I can take all its mana."

"Holy shit!"

"All of the mals in the room were trying to get at me and not him. Him they were scared of. I don't know what the fuck is up with him but if I don't find out anything horrible about the part I got in the next couple of days I'm going to try to find a test subject for passing that, specifically, onto, without having all of my protective everything, and if that doesn't go wrong I'm going to hand it out like candy."

"...some freshman who's hanging on by a thread would go for it, certainly."

"Ideally I would like to get everyone stable enough that my test subject ends up being someone too curious for their own good, but if that doesn't happen then I will take whoever volunteers anyway."

"There might be someone too curious for their own good but at this time of year that population will have been... winnowed somewhat."

"Well, maybe I will figure out the Rescuer in the next couple of days, not that I'm counting on it."

"I have my cousin's slot. I would have gotten a slot, anyway - Americans basically all do - but as it happens I am here specifically on my dead cousin's slot."

Dead kid notebook! "Tell me about them?"

"We never actually met, since I wasn't living in the enclave that young..." But she knows a name and a few other details.

It's better than nothing.

"Even if I manage Rescuer sooner and easier than in my wildest dreams, I'm not planning to bring back anyone who also does not have an assigned room here immediately."

"Oh, yeah, absolutely not. You might be sufficiently gamechanging that you should, come graduation time, put every student besides Orion in your pocket dimension, fight your way to the gates with everybody stowed, and assign him to tell New York to cancel the induction."

"I'm hoping to do something about the graduation hall before then, if only because the place leaks, but it's certainly a good backup plan."

"I am only like... eighty percent sure that cancelling induction is a thing they can do. They really really really ought to be able to, but the window's a bit short and it's the sort of thing someone might not fully process that they really really really ought to be able to do enough to properly install and maintain and check up on a mechanism."

"All I know about induction is that you throw up."

"Induction is when the new crop of students from all over the world are, if they're under the weight limit counting themselves and everything they're wearing and carrying, teleported into their new room in the Scholomance. All their mana gets sucked out in the process, it's a pretty nauseating teleportation, and if somebody's dead or over the weight limit the spell will grab the nearest live not-overweighted fourteen year old in their place."

"Right. That's how Luisa got in."

"If you say so, I wasn't on tragic backstory terms with her."

Shrug. "El was, apparently."

Nod nod.

"I'm planning to ask the other New Yorkers what they know about Orion's deal, unless that would be a terrible idea for some reason."

"Makes sense. They might even tell you."

"They've got to know about the mana thing, at least, because he does have a power-sharer, but I think if they really understood his deal they wouldn't have tried to talk him out of coming downstairs with me."

"If he gets mana from doing this he's certainly carrying his whole enclave. If he gets too cocky, once, they all have to go back to doing pushups."

She could try to explain to Bella what it was she felt and why she doesn't feel like Orion getting too cocky once is a serious concern, but given that she didn't take Two-Way Street she's not sure she understands it in enough detail to explain in a way that does it justice.

However:

"That's fair, but I really didn't get the impression he was pushing himself. He was doing better than me, with my Battle trio of powers, and at the end he wasn't stressed or strained at all."