Marcy checks in with the other Bostonians in the cafeteria. They do a little trading around of gear, enough to make it clear that they're working together but not enough to reveal too much of what they've got. They can sort out the really valuable stuff in someone's room later. Then they spread out, looking for anyone who seems interested in demonstrating a high competence to antisocial behavior ratio.
He looks evaluatingly at Marcy, leans a little closer. "French, Greek, Latin, German, and I've been working on Japanese; we'll see if I can manage fluency or if I have to take it out before the school hands me something I can't handle. My affinity's memory. So - it's safer for me than it should be."
"Okay, so suppose there's a powerful alien that can predict what people will do with perfect accuracy, like it's never been wrong. And it likes to play a game of showing people two boxes. One box is clear plastic and has, like, three full mana crystals in it. And the other box is black, but the alien says it put twenty full mana crystals in it, but only if it predicted that you weren't going touch the clear box. If it predicted you were going to take the clear box then the black box is empty. And it puts the boxes down on the ground and disappears. Do you take the black box and ignore the clear box, or do you take both boxes? Assume the alien has played this game with a hundred people and never been wrong or lied or played any weird tricks, everything is exactly as it appears for once. What do you do."
"Yeah, it'd have to be a really weird alien. My second cousin Kevin's really near you; I'll tell him--" something tries to fall on her head and instead falls on her dagger--"that he should talk to you about going to meals." She flicks mal gunk off the dagger onto the floor. "The more the merrier, or at least that's what these sacs à merde seem to think."