"Is it super popular where you're from?"

“I can’t say as it’s a question it occurred to me to ask! It’s not one of my favorite dishes, but most of those aren’t soup and I’m trying to have variety.”

"You could have a suggestion box."

Kareen already takes requests but that isn’t what’s going on with the soup so “Good thought.” She pulls out a box with “LARGE SERVING SUGGESTIONS” written on it in English and Chinese and a pad of paper with pens for people to write suggestions on.

"Maybe because you're part school you'll be able to read it without reading it, as though it were a homework assignment."

“Being part notebook lets me read things by touching them! Even if they aren’t in Braille.”

"Does inside the box count?" She scribbles subway sandwich platter and drops it in.

“Well, no. My plan is to read them later.”

"Also works. I thought it might work for school reasons not notebook reasons." She helps herself to more food and scootches along.

"Ooh, gazpacho."

“Gazpacho! I had to label them after someone mistook it for salsa, which is not a failure mode I would have anticipated.”

"Salsa! Ha." He takes gazpacho but also wants other stuff, vegetable soup is not a meal.

Yeah no that’s accurate, the soup is a supplement to her personally handing things out, not a replacement. Have an entree.

"Thank you!"

El takes gazpacho, though she doesn't comment on it.

Maybe it’s just America that is weird about Gazpacho, that would track.

Well, Nia's not American and doesn't seem excited about it compared to other things on offer. She has a lot of suggestions for the box though.

Not happening to be excited about it is not the weird thing! Kareen appreciates the suggestions.

It turns out she can read the suggestions, inside the box where people put them to give them to her, but only when the box is inside her pocket dimension. Well, that makes sense. 

After dinner she finds Nia in the library, to talk about scheduling a study group--she does want to make the invitation generally open, but also not swamp her capacity to host, and also also make sure there's room for her friends. Nia points out she can just have a lot of sections, and let people self-sort according to their schedules. This--is not only true; with Time Enough For Love it is extremely true. 

She takes a nap before curfew, filling up on mana from duplicated crystals beforehand so she can pass it to her parents in her visiting dream. She cannot actually duplicate them physical crystals, which is annoying, but that doesn't mean they ought to have to do mana building the hard way. 

And then the alarm she duplicated and set goes off, and she (slightly crankily) drags herself out of her soft and cozy nest of blankets, pillows, and stuffed toys, dabs on some of Ennis's eye shadow--it doesn't particularly go with her eyes, but it does go with her skin, Ennis is good at what he does--and hauls herself down to the gym before curfew properly starts and the mals start pouring in. 

Orion doesn't show up, which is slightly a pity, because it means she can't take advantage of Time Enough For Love to dispose of even more mals than the night would ordinarily have time for. Maybe she can find someone else crazy enough to help her with this, if she fronts them the mana, or after she shares Orion's mal-slorping around. 

It's a pleasant night despite that; Kareen really really loves Battle Demon. Battlefield omniscience is a far sight better than no omniscience at all. She's still exhausted by the end of it; two naps a day are not going to cut it in the long term. Which...she will handle in the long term. Meanwhile she will conjure herself some coffee to get through breakfast, and then she can take a nap afterwards. 

Breakfast is fine. She makes much of the same stuff from yesterday, plus a handful of additional things she's thought of since then and a thing or two from the suggestion box, which is out again. She mentions to El that whether it's the result of DFEW'ing the school, or Orion, or something else, her mana capacity is definitely bigger than both her parents' put together, and she updates Aadhya about which things on the shopping list showed up to get killed.