- she takes the kid in and figures it out at once. They didn't know. What a monstrous thing to do to your child - probably done nearly fifteen years ago and forgotten by the next morning - there's also, supposedly, some mundane kids it just pops up in, bad luck -

- she tucks her remaining letters under her arm. "- yeah. I'm Annie, from Surabaya. You?"

"Wendy, Chicago. The bad part of Chicago."

Being gentle with people isn't a favor to them. "And you didn't know you were a wizard, and you just woke up here in - it'd be the middle of the night in America?"

"Uh-huh. Is this related to how rats hate me lately?"

"They're not rats. They're called mals. They're hundreds of different kinds of mana-eating creatures, and they are drawn to wizards when we hit puberty and start to be brimming with magic we don't know how to defend. Not - believing in them, not knowing about them - is a partial defense, because it's mana-intensive to do something in the presence of someone who firmly believes you can't do it, but it's not much of a defense, because at some point you sleep, and then you can't disbelieve them eating you. It's very rare, for wizards out on their own to make it to twenty. Even with people defending them - there's a lot of kinds of mals, and some of them are very sneaky, or they come in huge swarms and tire out whoever's shielding you... I've heard it's one in twenty, who makes it, but that might be too high, because if you died, I don't think that would've made it into any statistics. So people who know anything send their kids here. It's called the Scholomance. It's almost completely cut off from the world, so there are only a few places mals can enter through. Some still do, though, and to leave you have to fight past everything downstairs.

You're not gonna make it. Most kids don't, and most kids have been training since we were old enough to walk."

"...Dystopian novel, called it. Sure as fuck gonna try not dying, I'll tell you that. How's magic work, do I need a wand?"

"No. Spells are spoken. You can ask your room for spells and it'll give them to you in any language you know, including languages you only know a little bit. If it gives you spells, you'd better learn them, or it'll get mad at you and start giving you worse spells, or just books that're all blank, so only ask when you've got time to actually start working through them. You can invent your own spells if you're any good at poetry. The thing you need to cast spells is mana. You've got some, innately - that's why you're tasty to mals - but to do anything big you also need external storage. You want to make it out come graduation, you're going to want tons of mana stored, so you have to spend all four years trying to run a surplus and store it.

You can build mana through effort. Exercise, embroidery, studying, the harder it is, the more mana you can get out of it. You can share with others, but no one's gonna share with you unless they're getting something for it, and you can try to trick people into letting you steal theirs but mana you took unwillingly is harder to handle, causes serious physical damage to the holder, and pretty often kills the person you're going after.

People are definitely going to try to kill you; you are independent, don't know what you're doing, haven't got anyone to avenge you, and might be easy to trick since you don't know anything. You can't be too hair-trigger about killing them first because they do have allies who'll avenge them."

"I know how gangs work and even if this place has school cops I bet they're useless but jumping straight to murder's a bit much, christ."

"There's no adults. Well, as of the adjustment in the fifties there's a school nurse, who is a random mundane and really just more snack for the mals, but there's no teachers and there's no security and there's just you who cares if you live or die. And every fight is life or death, because mals go after the softest target, and a kid who just got beaten up and needs to lie in bed healing? Soft target. And the school itself'll go after you if you're not doing your homework. Lotsa kids here think they'd never murder anyone but that's cause lots of kids are lying to themselves a little bit, about how likely it is someone they knock down will ever get back up."

"Well, knocking someone down so they can't hurt you and them dying afterward to something else is kinda different than thinking 'that guy, I'm going to cut his throat out'. Emotionally speaking, anyway. I guess if you murder someone in self defense people will be less likely to fuck with you later. Fuck. And this murderpit is still better than getting munched in your sleep?"

"Well, depends how you feel about being munched in your sleep."

"Mmhm. Last thing 'fore I end up owing you too much a favor, what goes into getting a spell right? Knowing the words, saying them carefully enough...?"

"Knowing the words - meaning and pronunciation - some stuff has gestures or has to be sung, speaking precisely, and having enough mana stored. Mostly you're going to be constrained on mana or on reaction time."

"-Oh right, mana, I get it by doing hard things, is that something you just - feel?"

"You should be able to, yeah. And if you want to store it in an external sink you have to be focusing on the external sink while you produce the mana, and if you're trying to turn something that's never been a mana sink into one you might also have to hold it and try hundreds of times before you convince it to take. The kids that know what they're doing come in with something that can hold a lot of mana - crystals, ivory, beads - but you haven't got anything worth trading for that. Maybe the hair."

She sighs. "Arright, thanks. I'll get out of your face, looks like you're making friends with those letters. I'll help you out with something minor sometime, being a favor-payer's obviously better than not that, but I'm not stupid, so."

"Good job! Keep not being stupid. If you look like you have a chance of not dying we can be friends." 

Off she goes to look around for anyone else it might be useful to talk to.