"My only worry is that if Orion's not done blasting them all when the gate's about to close he'll refuse to come on through," says Julia, who is arguing in order to distract herself from her lasagna, which is very sad lasagna. 

"If the gate was closing I wouldn't be able to save any stragglers at that point anyway," Orion objects around a mouthful of sad lasagna.

"And you promise you won't stay just 'cause there's so many shiny mals to blast?"

"I can find mals outside!"

"Then we've got nothing to worry about," she says cheerily to the table as a whole. The sophomores are rather glaring at her. - probably she shouldn't be too smug about it. 

Chloe comes over just then, conveniently, with two Oakland enclavers in tow. "Pass me your spices?"

"They don't help as much as I'd hope," Julia says, passing them.

"Oh wow, thanks! That's great!" Destiny tucks her kukri away into its sheath so she can take the offered spices. "I'm Destiny, by the way. This is the love of my life, Morty." 

Wow, she really just likes getting people's reactions to that line. Morty rolls his eyes. 

Well, that sounds like a terrible idea, but you can't blame people for wanting to be normal teenagers instead of Dickens street urchins with knives. "Julia. The love of my life is a Buddhist prayer rug that the seniors wrote off as a failed experiment even though she's really wonderfully well-behaved if you just respect her."

"Awwww! That sounds lovely. Does your rug have a name?" 

"No! I should give her a Buddhist name but I don't actually know much about Buddhism, looking it up is on my to-do list. I was hoping I'd get a class on it but noooo, maybe 'cause the school heard me saying I was going to cheat in history. I wouldn't have if I'd got a class that was actually interesting!!! And in a language I have!"

"Awww. That's a sweet idea. I don't think I've got that - I just have European history plus some English poet stuff - I think Milton was English? Maybe he wasn't? Or she, I guess I'm just assuming old-timey poets were men because, you know, sexism and stuff. Morty, you got anything Buddhism-related?" 

"Tragically, no. My other literature-y class is Bible translations, for some reason." 

"Well, Buddhism is from...India, right? I'm sure there must be at least one person in this school who knows stuff about it. Have you tried asking the void for books on Buddhist spells or whatever?" 

"I could flag down the Indian kids but I don't them to, like, think I'm appropriating their culture? A boy did Buddhist inscriptions on my walls, but he said he wasn't Buddhist himself. I should totally ask for a spellbook, I have spell-adequate Hindi, and then I bet it's less weird to grab the Indian kids and invite them to help me figure out the spellbook."

"You kind of are appropriating their culture," says Chloe. "Right? Isn't that what appropriation is?"

"Well, not if I don't tell them, you can't secretly be appropriating someone's culture."

"I mean, if the rug's already Buddhist then trying to keep it happy by naming it right seems fine? I feel like 'cultural appropriation' is just way less of a real problem than 'now you've got an evil rug after you'." 

...Is that offensive? Morty isn't sure, but he is, again, frustrated by the extent to which Destiny doesn't ever even bother with tact. 

"She's not evil! If she were after me it'd be because she was justifiably annoyed about ill-treatment! But yeah, I'm not going to, like, stop doing Buddhism, I just might stop telling actual Buddhist kids about it if they're going to be mad about it."

"- No, of course she's not evil now, that's not what I meant to say! But, you know, if you want her to keep liking you..." Whatever, nevermind. "I think it's fine to try to get a spellbook that has Buddhist references." 

Change. The. Subject. 

"Anyway," Morty says brightly, "how was everyone's first morning of classes? I had intro to lab, and no one got jumped so I guess that's off to a good start." 

"I had geometry and Ovid. I need a Latin dictionary, the school thinks I should know Latin, but Zeke taught me a song for the declensions. The weird mal-spotter kid is in my geometry and also a giant girl who reminded me how to do long division."

"I have a Latin dictionary you can borrow, Rebecca. I had Greek poetry, and I thought it'd be, like, the Odyssey, which I've read, but today it was all stuff I haven't read and not as good as the Odyssey?"

"It was the Iliad," says Silas.

"The mal-spotter kid - wait, is that the creepy maleficer guy who smells like garbage and went around at breakfast with a drawerful of baby mals for no reason?" 

"Oh, that guy!!!! Frank told him to stay away from New York, he followed us down the stairs on our supply run for some reason and then just lurked outside Frank's door."

"I didn't see the part with the drawer of baby mals, ew, but he did smell kind of bad."

"He said his affinity was sensing mals but Frank says he thinks it might be - controlling them somehow, a bunch of them burst through the ceiling at Frank the instant he stepped outside to deal with the kid and the kid didn't even look surprised. And where would he get a drawer full of baby mals this early in the year? Also he's a maleficer, which is a bigger problem than being weird and creepy, really."

"The maleficing is probably the reason he's weird and creepy," says Silas.

"He organized another supply run later, I think?" Destiny offers. "He went with Raleigh - he's Sacramento, dunno if you met yet, Morty and I trained with their enclave sometimes since they're close to us - plus Shannon, the little girl with the healing affinity who was a mule for Sacramento. And this girl who was in my homeroom," and has NO SENSE OF HUMOUR, "from...ugh, I don't remember, somewhere in the US, maybe the South? And also that enormous beast girl," (Destiny says this with fondness and admiration), "you know, the one who came in naked? If it hadn't been for her I'd've assumed he meant to murder the mundie kid but no way he could take Miss Beast in a fight. So I have no idea what he was up to." 

Destiny feels vaguely like she saw someone else with that party but cannot remember any identifying features whatsoever. Eh, must have been an exceptionally uninteresting person. 

"...Anyway, they did all come back." 

"What... is maleficing exactly."

" - so you know how you need mana to do stuff? You can make the mana yourself, or you can just kind of - shake down the air around you for it, which pulls it from nearby germs and mold and bugs and stuff, which is called 'cheating', and it's not a great habit but in the scholomance whatever, we're all just trying to get out of here and go home, you can learn good habits later. Or you can try to pull mana from another living thing with enough of a mind to oppose you. Mice, usually. And you get a lot of mana from that, it's much easier than making it yourself, but it's bad for you. It fucks with your soul, makes it harder to do magic normally, and it's addictive, like heroin or whatever. And eventually you run outta mice, and what else is around that you can get life force from? Pretty much just the students. So New York doesn't abide maleficing."

"Yikes! Okay. How do you tell he's doing that?"

"There's, like, a vibe? And I wasn't sure if I was picking up on that or just on him smelling like garbage but Frank was pretty sure that yeah, he's maleficing. Probably hasn't actually killed someone for mana yet, or he'd have more of a vibe, but if someone's an addict and the only fix around is kids, they can get pretty bad pretty fast - and if a kid already has any vibe at age 14 they're not in control, even if they think they are."

"Just stay away from him, don't accept anything from him and don't offer him anything, and if he seems to be trying to get you alone let us know," Silas says.

Shiver. "Yeah. You've got to be careful." 

"Okay. He tried to explain me division but it didn't make sense anyway."

"A maleficer needs consent to get anything off a wizard, usually. But it doesn't have to be- like, if he does you a favor and then says 'pay me back in mana' and you try to give him a little, that's enough..."

"Oh, you know what, he was in my homeroom too, and then he told me something about the shop class Monday? After Silas already told me, but both of them told me it wasn't a good idea since I'm not artificing."

" - that's weird," says Silas. "He should've swapped out of Monday shop - unless he was looking for a situation where his classmates' deaths wouldn't even be surprising, I guess -"

"Well, sucks to be a creepy maleficer trying to murder people!" Julia says brightly. And then, at Destiny and Morty's expressions which are probably very confused, "New York's taking shop Monday morning. Orion can handle it. Whatever he wanted to do, it won't happen."

"Unless that's what he wanted to do," says Silas.

Why is Silas such a buzzkill. 

Zeke is not going to offer to punch the probably-a-maleficer guy in the face if he hurts Rebecca, because that would be a really dumb way to deal with a maleficer, and also because the probably-a-maleficer guy might just be really foreign and weird, in which case offering to punch him would just be being mean to him behind his back for no reason. He continues shoveling food into his face like he’s trying to dig a hole through the table.

"Oh right, Orion's, like, some kind of combat prodigy, right?" She fiddles with the handle of her kukri. "Any idea if he's up for sparring with people for practice? I'm always looking for more sparring partners." 

"I'm mostly used to fighting mals since I can just, you know, kill them," Orion says.

"I guess that makes sense." Destiny tries very hard not to roll her eyes. 

"So you were reading the Iliad? Does that have spells?" says Chloe, to cover for Orion, who New York does not intend to let outsiders notice is a bit weird.

"Not the bit we read today, at least! Which is all for the best, as they'd have to be...spells for equitable division of sex slaves? I liked the Odyssey a lot better."

"Do I hear correctly that someone outside New York has deliberately taken Monday morning shop?" says a weirdly unobtrusive London-accented guy who looks exactly like Tony Stark, approaching the New York table with a tray.

"Who the fuck - oh is it the smelly kid?" says Tony Stark, following after him. "I told you about the smelly kid who says he can sense mals, right? No I didn't because I'm an idiot."

"We know about him! Regrettably. He followed us down to Frank's yesterday even after we told him not to, and then Frank told him not to more forcefully and he finally stalked off, but apparently now he's put himself in Monday morning shop with us - well, not with us, he had no way to know we were in it, but he's a maleficer and I think maybe he was hoping to have some kids whose deaths won't be suspicious, so now we have to thwart him -"

"Shit. That's awkward." 

"I did not know any of this so when he bolted into my homeroom asking if anyone had Monday morning shop I said don't do that you'll die and when he said he can spot mals and then Silas said we'd got Orion in the slot I said he can show up and spot mals if he doesn't mind that Monday morning shop is a bad idea that kills you. Like, I'd already told him I have Monday morning shop and that it's a bad idea that kills you but I was kind of waffling about it due to who I am as a person, I didn't specifically tell him all of New York was gonna show up, I just reiterated that Monday morning shop is a bad idea that kills you but said he could show up and spot mals if he wanted. In conclusion, I guess I should keep up with the gossip better but also I'm wondering if this is all some kind of insane miscommunication? He didn't, like... you know, he smelled like garbage and he wanted to take Monday morning shop and I am wondering if this is the type of situation where he just has no idea how anything works and he figured it's okay to be in somebody's shop section if you ask them and they say yes? I might be being too nice."

"You're generally too nice," his mysterious duplicate contributes. "If he does show up to Monday morning shop I can keep half an eye on him, we'll have Orion to look out for mals and me to look out for maleficers. Or well-intentioned insane smelly children, either one."

"He does seem like he doesn't know how anything works. Like maybe he's additionally a murderer but murderer or not I think he's definitely an insane smelly kid."

"He wasn't even in your homeroom, though?" says Silas, frowning. "Like he came to your homeroom to ask about shop sections? Do you know why he came to you in particular?"

"I do nnnot actually remember but I think he said it was the closest homeroom he could find? He didn't look like he was looking for me specifically, he just sorta stuck his head in. Like he could've been lying but I dunno, didn't seem like it."

"Well, that could be worse." 

" - can we check. If it was actually the nearest homeroom." says Silas.

"Iiiiii'm not sure it's worth doing, like, hardcore detective work here. We can just keep an eye on him Monday?"

"I'll look into it. Hardcore detective work is my favourite hobby."

"It's not that hardcore, he was in my homeroom to start out with. I had room 1."

"Does that make it softcore detective work?"

"Tony."

Snort. "Sorry."

"But yes, from that room to Tony's is an entirely reasonable venture of 'first other homeroom I could find'."

"Well, I'll tell Frank and I bet he'll be all 'you're not paranoid enough!' but probably we'll just have to wait and see what he gets up to in Monday morning shop."