Annisa startles but does not have the startle-to-dagger ratio honed enough to be more than halfway to its holster before she recognizes Malak. 

" - oh, hey!" That was friendly, right? That seemed friendly. "I'm glad girls, rather than mals, come in 'stealth affinity'. Shall we go line up?" Which assumes they're going to line up together, but that can't be presumptuous, Malak came and found her and everything.

"Yes, let's. It's easier to hide when you're not the thing being looked for, I think even if I were a very sneaky mal you would have noticed the screaming when I started munching on those kids - " She gestures at some of the ones she passed on her way.

" - And I don't imagine you've done anything to merit being worried about human assassins this early in the year."

"If I were to accidentally stumble into such a thing," she's thinking of the girl who has announced her intent to commit suicide and leave Annisa all her supplies, and probably she wasn't serious and probably even if she tries it won't work but Annisa's sure going to be in an awkward spot if an enclaver has vanished and Annisa is in possession of all her stuff, "I think I'd have you keep imagining that unless you seemed very likely to be useful."

"Why of course, you're not going to tell me about how you slipped lead into Shanghai's plumbing and I'm not going to tell you about how I set a maw-mouth loose on Chicago. Our partnership is nowhere near serious enough for that yet."

Malak is watching to see how Annisa responds to that 'yet'. Not that she's expecting a graduation alliance for sure, let alone a grand conspiracy to topple the hegemony of the big enclaves, she's just trying to feel out how open Annisa is to closer association, maybe even eventually something that for lack of a better word Malak would be forced to call 'Friendship'.

"Well, someone slipped lead into Shanghai's plumbing." She doesn't have Mandarin and has only heard most of the stories secondhand - one of their freshmen is somehow dead already? But the grief-meltdown in the middle of the cafeteria was hard to miss. "And one can imagine the circumstances under which they'd want to confess their crimes to the person who set a maw-mouth loose on Chicago. But I think they'd be at least sophomores, and have tested each other on some less life-or-death secrets first. And probably they'd have a secret code, or maybe a stealthy spell that made their conversation impossible to overhear."

 - Wait did someone actually happen to Shanghai, she had just made up that example out of whole cloth. Or is Annisa just playing along? No, she's couching everything else in hypotheticals. So... something did happen? She should ask someone who might know anything about Shanghai.

"Well as it happens, I am in possession of an only very mildly life-or-death secret. And some secret codes. And I miiiight just know someone who would be good at privacy spells."

"What a funny coincidence! I am possessed with a very mildly life-or-death secret too! I guess those are really a dime a dozen, in here, what with all the death."

"Oh, have we had a death already? I must have missed it while I was getting paper earlier."

"Apparently one of the Shanghai freshmen didn't even make it to the cafeteria." She was delivering letters for Seoul and they all thought this was mildly hilarious, though they were trying hard not to be obvious about that.

"Ah. That's unusually quick. For school or for lead."

"Oh, I think I must've done the lead when I was, like, five years old, they seem to have issues that go well beyond that. Uh, this is all from Seoul, and I get the sense they cheerfully despise Shanghai, so take it with a grain of salt, but reportedly the dead freshman was a surprise mostly because it wasn't one of the "two completely useless freshmen who only got in because it'll be less embarrassing to their families when they die in the Scholomance". I don't know which those two are but presumably one of them is the one who had an extremely loud screaming emotional breakdown as soon as he got into the cafeteria. Screaming! In Mandarin! If I'd picked it up off him I'd have ample justification for my time-travelling poisoning escapades."

" - I am very glad I missed that then. I would not have put 'Enclaver finds orientation too stressful and gets me stuck with Mandarin spellbooks for the next four years' very high on my list of ways to expect to die in here. I suppose if that'd happened my best bet would be to focus on artificing and pray I get assigned to make an invisibility cloak."

"My parents decided I should learn English because American enclaves are so much less competitive and I've been appreciating that call of theirs, so far. Not that I've even met any American enclavers." 

They're at the front of the line and she drops the conversation entirely to focus on getting out with an intact plate and no missing limbs.

Each tray that she looks over that she's pretty sure is safe she gives a thorough stabbing for good measure. (The ones where she's less sure she just skips entirely.)

Now, where to sit. If Annisa isn't steering anywhere in particular she'll pick... that one, not too crowded but not completely empty, not under any air vents, seats are built in and therefore not mimics.

Seems reasonable. Who else is at this reasonably good table and explains why it still has open seats?

This person! She looks moderately unfriendly and menacing, if not actually much more than circumstance warrant.

”Hello,” she says, in a monotone. 

Annisa is not going to be distracted by the fact she really likes both Daria and Malak from avoiding all the hard work of building working relationships with the other 797 or so English speaking students in her grade. She's not. "Hi," she says, trying not to overmatch this person's emotional intensity by too much. "I'm Annie, Surabaya, artificing. We should just have nametags."

“They would turn into paper airplanes and start killing us, I’m sure. Jaime, Canada, creative writing. What do you artifice.”

"Weapons."  Has she used the cute anecdote about how they thought it was just knives but it turned out her swords were too big for her, which establishes that she's been training for a very long time and is also memorable and funny, in front of Malak yet? Better not risk it, she can't remember what she has said to who today. 

“I dance. Magically. Who are you,” Jaime asks Malak.

"Haniyah - " Canada means english as a first language? " Malik. Istanbul, not Constantinople." Not that anyone seems to care about Anatolian enclave inside baseball, it's just habit.

"I hide things. Your affinity is dance? All dance? What sorts of things can you do with that?"

“My affinity is for incantations which use dance as a component part. Spells that do this aren’t inherently limited in subject matter, but I dislike the existing selection, hence creative writing.”

"That's relatable. Except, my affinity could be useful in artificing too, so I'm considering that in addition to creative writing."

These people have seats free and look like freshmen but not hopeless ones. That's good enough for day one.

Basira glances under the table then puts her tray down. "Hi."

...oh no she's interrupting.

“I would be in the market for hidden or hiding objects.”

She turns to the new person.

”Hello.”

"Welcome. You're not interrupting we were just introducing ourselves. Haniyah Malik, creative writing and/or artificing, affinity for concealment. You?"

Hiding things, not finding hidden things—doesn't matter, she couldn't bring someone else in on that regardless.

Announcing your greatest strength and implicit weakness as introductory boilerplate means you're... advertising, right? Offering your skills because you're looking for the static resources and outside connections that, technically, Basira does have. Just, not as much as she was supposed to.

Not thinking about that. The reciprocal of her introduction is, what—"Sounds useful. Basira Hussain, Oxford. And I'll be in incantations, probably writing." In some other situation she'd round down the uncertainty, but if Haniyah's saying she's undecided it won't sound unprepared.

No mention of her affinity, so it's probably a weak one. Or maybe just one that's not very compatible with trade and she's being more secretive about it than Jaime. Either way, she's signaling pretty strongly that she doesn't want to talk about it.

"Pleased to meet you." Turning back to Jaime, "How much dance is required for a spell to work with your affinity? Can you do something with just three steps or are you stuck with really long incantations?"

“It cares about the ratio between incantation and dance, not about the strict quantity of dance; a long incantation with three dance steps wouldn’t work, a short incantation with three dance steps would.”

"Does music help?"

“No.”

This sounds very like the continuation of a conversation she interrupted. About, of all things, a complete stranger's exact limitations. How do you contribute to this without sounding like a murderer.

"Can you dance while traveling forward?" she asks, which hopefully conveys 'will you definitely die and not graduate?' and not anything before that.

“Obviously.”

What, more obviously than "music doesn't help"? ...maybe. And maybe she should be poking for strengths and not weaknesses.

"And obviously there are dances you can do with just your arms or just your legs, if something grabs you." If there aren't then this girl is going to die and it doesn't matter if she's unimpressed.

How did they even get on this subject.

“I will have to invent a new tradition of magical vogueing. What do you do, exactly.”

Does that mean she doesn't have dance for that situation? That - doesn't guarantee she's going to die, but. How do they get off this subject.

"I adapt to the circumstances."

She looks over at the table where John and Daisy - is watching her right now. Basira tries to force a smile and can't quite manage it, so she waves a little instead.

Malak watches the conversation in silence.

Obviously you can't dance much while restrained and Jaime will just have to cast off-affinity. Which everyone does, every day. Most people spend all of graduation day casting off-affinity!

Basira is being incredibly cryptic here, which is her right of course, but does not seem like a good strategy for building positive relations.

“Showstopping, never been done before, put it on a T-shirt.”

Basira planned to spend the entire graduation casting within her affinity, because nothing was predictable year on year except the locations of Patience and Fortitude so "improvisation" was very much the theme of the day.

But what she wanted to do right now wasn't adapt to the circumstances.  She wanted to get up and walk over to where Daisy was still looking out for her and eat with her and John and the people they knew and trust them to help her and understand her and introduce her to people she could work with for years—but she can't do that, because that would be leaning on something that she did not have, to pretend that she had all the resources and the arcane energy and the allies she was supposed to have here, everyone she had lost here before she even knew. She couldn't ask for their help.

She could say that, no, she wasn't just being snarky, that's literally her affinity, unlike everyone else doing that, but she doesn't owe it to this girl just because she thinks she deserves to know. Maybe that is standard here, for everyone,

She wants to say something stupidly pedantic about "put that on a t-shirt" not being a brand new phrase either, but that's pathetic and maybe the dancer is a lost cause but the other two here might not be. She wants to say something awful like "sure, I'll get them printed after I graduate", but that isn't even rude, it's a lie, and if she thinks what her odds are now (what, 1 in 2? at best?) then she wants to cry and she cannot do that.

So eventually she just says "OK." as flatly as she can, then turns to the other girl who wasn't Haniyah, who'd spoken one sentence in an accent Basira might've misidentified, and asks "so are you from Australia?"

"I spent a couple of years there. But I'm from Surabaya originally." 

She chews some arguably-potatoes. (Where... is Surabaya. 'Not Australia'. Another country? ...enclave? But wouldn't you be more specific if..? Does that sound like she moved back or..?)

"Hard to imagine moving countries with a wizard kid. I guess the part where you're in an airtight metal tube crammed with mundanes is pretty safe."

"It was when I was pretty young but it was a massive endeavor, to be sure. I wouldn't say the travel was itself very challenging but at home we had lots of people to call and in Canberra we didn't. But I had formed a determination to emigrate when I grew up and my father thought I'd be served by having stronger English, in here, and it's hard to beat living somewhere where they speak it."