- Annisa's tripwire pings her from fast asleep and she's on her feet with a dagger in her hand springing at the thing before she has time to think, because it's best to head these things off at the pass.

(The room is entirely dark; it has wards up, of an unfamiliar kind; it has a box in the corner practically glowing with mana, internally complex, looking to mage-sight like nothing so much as a very very tiny Heartstone). The dagger is very magic. The girl wielding it is not Gifted.

- all right, this is not what Leareth was expecting at all, but this Gate-method is still in the experimental phase and so the unexpected is not actually all that surprising. 

Leareth is wearing several shield-talismans, and within a fraction of a second he has them at full power and is throwing more mage-energy into his native personal shields as well. 

He casts a mage-light too, because that just seems useful, and he extends Thoughtsensing and tries to read the un-Gifted girl's mind. 

What the fuck that's a person which makes no sense but she rolls for her box, because even if it's a person and even if the person's not hostile (exceedingly unlikely) she's about to need it - is he trying to poach? A senior then probably who isn't ready to graduate fuckfuckfuckfuck because this fight is going to kill her too even if she wins it.

She touches the box and tugs all the mana in it into the best shield she can muster - it's a LOT, three years' worth, hot and bright and actively painful to handle like this even aside from the thing where doing it is, you know, condemning oneself to certain death - but not here not like this one more year the horse can learn to sing -

What. 

Leareth can sense the magic, but it's not at all like anything he's seen before. He tries to reach out with the communication spell, and it - doesn't work. Not because the distance is too great. It feels like it's failing earlier than that, in a way he can't quite parse. 

...In fact, his Othersenses are - mostly failing to pick up on anything at all more distant than a few feet? There's...another mind, maybe, outside of this room...but even that is hard to reach for. He has the deeply uncanny sense that he's suspended in nothingness. 

Focus. Orient. Which, first of all, means trying to open communications with - whoever this is, whose...bedroom? he's apparently landed in. 

:I am not going to hurt you: Leareth sends, or tries to. :...Where is this?: 

You have already killed me, you moron. 

She stands up, holds the shield - are they doing introductions now - what -

- where are her stimulants. They're in a neat case attached to the wall above her desk. She very swiftly opens it and takes a tab of cocaine and snorts it just in time for the first mal to ooze under the door. Oozes. Fucking oozes. She has a shaker of enchanted salt, much too small for this task; she throws it and shouts the spell in English that intensifies it, shrivels the ooze where it lies. The next thing is clawing at the door. She sets the shield in her shield-holder and reaches for her shortsword.

Apparently Leareth has a problem. 

...Several problems, actually, given that his first reaction is to try to Gate out and this doesn't work. The search-spell just - fails, in the same baffling way that the communication-spell did. 

He flings up a shield over both of them instead, and then attempts to put some additional shielding over the door–  ...what IS that on the other side, it's shredding the magic of his shield with really remarkable effectiveness. 

:Are we under attack?: he tries to ask the local girl.   

You really are a genius, aren't you. No, they just thought it sounded like we were having fun and they wanted to join. What time even is it - 3:23am. Okay. Two hours and forty minutes, that's not - categorically unsurvivable, especially not if lost moron is helping -

He is apparently stuck in here for the foreseeable future, so Leareth is obviously going to help! Efficiently. He's not sure why she has such a precise timeline in mind, for the attack, but he needs to pace himself for that. 

There's enough magic going on with her door that it's somewhat hard to reach past it without a better anchor. Leareth reaches into a pocket for his scrying-artifact - it's not far, but it'll still cost him less in reserves if he uses it - and tries to scry what's on the other side of the door. 

At least six different highly magical things none of which would be out of place in the Pelagirs and all of which look out of place in this - sort of institutional looking hallway. One is mostly fiercely clawed bony hands, scraping away at the spells on the door; one is mostly teeth, writhing and reforming and biting; two are flying, and battering the door with - acidic spit? And there's something vaguely like a vicious, twisted dog, and something swinging from its anchor in the hallway, hitting the door with a resounding bang every few swings. 

Casting through an apparently-warded door using a scry to aim isn't trivial, but Leareth has a lot of practice. He'll try levinbolts on them first, less risk of damaging the local infrastructure, then go to setting them on fire if that doesn't work, and if neither works he can try something subtler. 

This takes up most of his concentration, but he can still manage Mindspeech, even to someone without the Gift. 

:- I think I am missing context. Are we in the Pelagirs? What is this place?: 

Most of them are fryable; swinging one doesn't seem to mind at all. Some more are approaching the door, too, though they shy off slightly when they see the ones at the door getting fried, forming a horde a short distance down the hall so they can dash in all at once.

Annisa resents adult wizard immensely about her now-empty mana store and the fact they're in this situation in the first place, even though he's doing very impressive magic and the critters haven't even touched her shield yet. We're at school. You know, the Scholomance, the Sekolahir, it's got fifty other names but I'm not languages track...

Can the swinging one be trapped in a force-net instead? 

:- I do not recognize that name: Leareth sends, while he's attempting this. :Though possibly we should deal with the attack first and discuss this later: 

The horde charges the door. 

There's not gonna be a later, buddy, unless you can handle two hours and forty minutes of that. - Two hours thirty five.

The massed charge actually makes it much easier to hit them all at once; Leareth just needs to bring up a sheet of frozen mage-lightning, a yard short of the door, so they all run into it head-on. He can separately attack any that are tough enough to make it past. 

:- So far they are not that difficult to take down, but I am going to eventually be tired. Are there any nodes here to draw on?: He can't sense any. Just the - whatever it was that she drew on for her shield, the power now shimmering painfully-bright around her. 

The concept comes across as 'giant lakes of mana that no one lays claim to'. She hates this guy. 

No. No, there are not. 

Well, when he's too tired to fight she can slit his throat and will then no longer be breaking curfew so the mals will probably lay off, except the ones who're already here and have nothing better to do.

She is not going to like it if he asks her whether he can pull some mage-energy from that ridiculously overpowered shield she's still holding, is she. 

Oh well. Leareth will just try to be very very efficient here. This - probably isn't the worst fight he's ever been in? (Just the most unexpected and confusing.) He wraps the sheet-lightning into a half-cylinder around the door, and then checks back on whether his force-net is working at all to pin down the swinging monster-thing. 

:- At worst, I have redundancy on my personal shield-talismans and can give some to you: he offers. 

The force net is working fine. The only things braving the lightning so far are some ooze-things and some incorporeal things, visible to Thoughtsensing and mage-sight but not to ordinary vision except as a thin cloud. 

Why, though. 

I see, she thinks back, though probably if it's mind-reading it's not selective and that means probably he's reading all her opinions, oops, though they cannot possibly be surprising. She won't kill him if it looks like they have a realistic prospect of winning?

Leareth would not normally think that a random teenager had any chance whatsoever of killing him (even temporarily), except that this particular teenager, despite her apparent lack of any Gifts, seems to be able to wield an absurd quantity of mage-energy? 

He tries setting the ooze-things on fire. 

They don't seem to mind this! Now they are moving across the ground like moving flaming puddles of petroleum, slipping under the door.

"Dust of the sea, in you the tongue receives a kiss from ocean night." Very rapidly; the meaning is barely in her mind at all. They shrivel. 

- what. She - that was definitely magic - but Leareth can't tell how she did it at all. 

Also there are still the incorporeal things. Which do show up to Thoughtsensing, apparently, so - maybe Leareth can try throwing some compulsions at them to STOP and STAY OUTSIDE? 

(That works). 

Annisa is glaring suspiciously at the non-rattling door. She's not going to check her watch every five minutes, that won't help. She's not going to contemplate how best to kill the guy, he can hear her and even if it's not remotely surprising it's probably somewhat distracting. She's not going to think about how the horse can learn to sing, that's a problem for morning Annisa. She does at least feel very awake, yay cocaine.

Oh, right, he should probably keep her up to date on what he's doing. 

:I have a stationary lightning sheet around the door because this stops most of them: Leareth informs her. :I can hold it for a couple of candlemarks on reserves alone, but less if I need to also attack other creatures that get past it. ...I am not sure what you cast to take out the puddle-shaped one, but - how many times can you recast it?: 

Salt? I can cast Salt all night. How long is a - how long in candlemarks since you arrived?

It really hasn't been very long. :...A little less than one-tenth of a candlemark, probably? I can rework the defenses to be more efficient, I hope: 

Okay, we've got, uh, maybe three candlemarks to go. If you let some stuff through I can stab it, that doesn't burn mana.

He's not going to be able to hold this for three candlemarks, not without an outside energy source. (Her shield is right there and she's not even using it - but she might have to, if something else shows up that he can't hold off, and besides Leareth doesn't want to antagonize her...) 

The lightning-sheet is simple; it'll stay up as long as he keeps feeding it power, and he can direct most of his attention towards trying to piece together a physical mage-barrier, woven through with very fine threads of stationary-lightning that can draw extra power and flare up if anything actually touches them. It's not something he's done before but it's made up of components he understands well, at least, and he can probably figure it out in five or ten minutes. 

(During which time he's not able to zap anything else that slips past, though if any more of the insubstantial ones show up, he'll risk pausing the casting at the next stable point and attempting to compulsion them into stillness.) 

That's fine, it's only a couple of mals and her shortsword, which is very very enchanted, makes short work of them. She's watching him and grudgingly, very much against her will, feeling awed. (She wants to be an adult. She'd be so cool if she were going to get to be an adult.)

A couple of minor mals that are dissuaded by the shield go for Lee across the hall's room, and she hears shrieks from in there, but she doesn't have feelings about that, he might be fine and if not that's his concern.

Leareth also hears this, from a long way off, but he doesn't have nearly enough focus to spare for dealing with that as well. 

He gets the more-efficient barrier up. 

:- There. I can - I ought be able to hold this for half a day. Though I hope I will not need to. Are you all right?: He was vaguely aware that some of the creatures got past him and through the door but he wasn't really focused on that. 

You know, I've had better days, now that you ask. The end of the shortsword is gooey; she's not injured. But maybe there'll be pancakes at breakfast, so, you know, you win some, you lose some.

:All right. I can hold my barrier and also handle the insubstantial attackers. ...What are those, by the way? I thought at first they were some kind of elemental spirit but they feel unfamiliar: 

I can tell you what I stabbed but if you turned it away on the other side of the door I haven't the faintest idea, I haven't exactly been running divinations on the stuff that's not yet in stabbing range.

:They look like this?: and he pushes the vague memory across to her, the thin-cloud visible on the scry and the way it looked and felt to mage-sight and the sense of brushing against a bizarre, alien mind - not at all human, and no actual thoughts he could decipher, but not an animal, either, animals don't show up to Thoughtsensing like that... 

Slikelet. Insubstantial but not actually incorporeal, airtight barriers block 'em, give you unending nightmares though in practice they end pretty fast, something else eats you. - maybe that's what had Lee screaming.

:I can make the shield airtight - is the door not already?:

Lee. He must be the other mind that Leareth was able to sense— oh, that’s not good.

Can Leareth still hear the kid screaming, or sense his mind at all?

Nope!

Annisa is completely unconcerned with Lee! His friends might be pissed at her if they figure out why there was a party on this corridor but that is a problem for future Annisa. Door's not airtight because we're surrounded by Void otherwise and we need to, you know, breathe. She has no idea if there's enough air for two people in here if he does make it airtight? It's probably one of those things that works better if you don't think too hard about it.

Leareth can have feelings about the kid across the hall later. 

He does some very quick mental estimates. :I think we should be fine for several candlemarks: And he can make the shield airtight, although it's going to need re-patching every time one of the corporeal creatures bullies its way past the lightning-flares - which also drain extra power from him, whether or not the things make it across. He might be able to hold this shield all day if it were left unmolested, but at this rate of attack he's going to be exhausted by the time they hit whatever deadline the girl is thinking about. 

He sighs, and scans the hallway with his scrying-spell for signs of more incoming monsters. 

There's a bunch more of them! A few are scared off by the shield but most are undeterred except tactically; they'll rush as a group or try to sneak around or start trying to break through the wall.

Lee being dead, if Lee's dead, might be an opportunity, actually; she can break down his door right at six and steal his stuff, and assuming he's been preparing for graduation she won't be fucked even though her own preparations are now in tatters. 

Feelings later. 

(The hallway also has other doors, though Leareth's Othersenses are discombobulated enough that he can't sense what's inside those doors. They look the same though, so - more children in this mysterious 'school'? ...He can't worry about it now.) 

Rather than trying to shield the wall as well, he individually levinbolt-zaps the monsters going after it, and tries to keep his shield reinforced, and if he has any attention left over he'll see whether compulsions work on any of the embodied ones as well. If he's lucky maybe he can even convince some of them to attack each other instead of the door... 

Some of them seem to have enough of a mind to compulsion. Some of them will eat each other, and all of them will eat the corpses of the dead ones; they're not slowing down even as the corpses rather pile up, though.

Annisa watches him, trying to assess how close to getting tired he is and not get distracted by how cool his spells are. She can probably hold for a little while herself, but not even for an hour, she thinks, not this time of year.

Leareth is not yet that magically exhausted - he did the Gate from one of his permanent thresholds, it wasn't especially draining, and none of these beasts individually call for high-power spells - but he's definitely getting somewhat frazzled. There's just...a lot to track, and he has to worry about the attacking monsters damaging the girl's door or wall or the wards. Which he can't redo for her later because the magic for them is completely unfamiliar. 

He's going to switch to compulsioning anything with enough of a mind for that to work, into attacking the other monsters. It takes more concentration but less energy. 

:...To check whether I understand what is happening here: he sends, eventually, :we - are specifically under attack because we are 'breaking curfew' due to my accidental presence here? And curfew will be over in several candlemarks?: 

Yep! No guests in the room between 11 and 6 and at 6 they'll lay off. They'll also lay off me if you leave the room but they'll go after you even harder, being in the hallways during curfew is also not allowed. That's a less defensible position for him even with Annisa contemplating his murder in here so she doesn't expect him to go for it, and she doesn't very strongly want him to because if they survive this maybe she can trade for some of those beautiful beautiful spells he's casting. ...probably not, she bets they aren't English.

Leareth is considering whether he should actually relocate to the hallway! It would in some sense be harder to shield, but also he would have less to shield, and he would have mobility - some of those creatures are fast but a lot of them aren't as fast as him, and he could Gate-hop around - 

- no, that's not a feasible defense plan for multiple candlemarks. 

Also, this is where the girl is, with her absurdly overpowered shield, and if - when - he's visibly getting exhausted, she might be more willing to let him siphon some mage-energies from it. 

:Noted. I think I can keep them from damaging your door or wards. ...Need to focus now: 

And he does, directing nearly all of his attention to tracking the attacking monsters through his scry, letting the stationary lightning-shield handling small ones but trying to nab the bigger and more powerful ones before they can shove their way through and make him have to patch it. The hallway is starting to become seriously obstructed by dead and scorched bodies. The beasts do not seem to care. 

I can fix my door and wards! Just don't let them come in here faster than we can kill them.

:All right: 

The ones that can get past him are mostly the ooze kind that can totally ignore levinbolts or fire and slip right under the door. And compulsions are slow, especially as he starts to tire; he prioritizes the insubstantial creatures, those seem pretty hard to stab. There are some monsters that look almost as though they're made of molten metal, or maybe just liquid mercury, shifting and reforming into amorphous limbs and eyestalks; the shield doesn't stop those either.

It's getting harder to tell what's going on outside the door, even with scrying; there's a pall of smoke over everything, from the burned bodies of creatures he had to set on fire because they ignored lightning, and there's also just a lot going on, as new arrivals fight over the dead before flinging themselves at the shielded door. 

Eventually - gods, how long has it been, a candlemark? a day? five minutes? he can't tell anymore - something very big shows up, with too many jointed limbs and teeth in places that should really not have teeth and a mind too simple to compulsion. It takes down his entire shield. The snapped threads of magic rebound on him, ouch - and he has to frantically try to pin it in a force-net while he pummels it with enough levinbolts to stun it. And then frantically weave together the shield again. He throws up a thin wall of flame in front of the door, in the interim, but he's way too busy to try to stop the half a dozen smaller monsters that make it through that and claw their way under the door, most of them slightly on fire but apparently unperturbed. 

Well, she has a shield too, bright and incredibly powerful and it's mostly to protect her from him but she is well aware that won't do her any good if these things eat her, and she holds it between her bed and desk and the door where the monsters are coming through - the shieldholder holding it mostly steady - while she stabs things with the shortsword and the dagger, and she takes a nasty cut on one hand and a bite through her pants and has to retreat to slap a bandage on it and take some antitoxin but by then none of them are moving and he's doing things again. 

Leareth is breathing hard from the effort and his head hurts, but he seems to be uninjured so far. 

:I hope there are not too many like that: and he sends her a mental image of the enormous teeth-creature. :That was - tiring. I am all right for the moment - outer shield is back up - how much longer now -?: 

It's 4:52. Do you want some stimulants, you can swap me a good look at some of your protective artifice.

If he uses stimulants to push through magical exhaustion, he's going to crash so hard after this. 

:Yes: Leareth decides. :You can look - later, when we are less busy? ...And I would very much appreciate if you did not try to murder me once curfew is over and I am very tired: 

A whole crowd of the insubstantial cloud things are showing up again. Leareth tries compulsioning them to turn around and bother the more embodied creatures arriving behind them. 

He can have his pick of her cocaine tabs ("you snort these ones, acts faster and the high is stronger") and her Adderall ("this one's, like, safe"). Once curfew's over it's not to my advantage to kill you, assuming you have a plan to not be here again tonight? She could try it just to steal his stuff but even if he's exhausted, probably the outcome of trying to kill an adult wizard is getting killed herself and that's not worth it if she's not definitely screwed anyway.

He will accept the second one. Casting while experiencing a strong unfamiliar stimulant high sounds risky. 

:Are you going to get in trouble from the teachers about the enormous pile of dead bodies outside your room?: he asks her. 

Is that a joke. She's not really in a joking mood. 

:- No? I am - I think I am missing a lot of context about - this entire situation: 

School doesn't have teachers. My neighbors might ask what happened but I'll tell 'em I slept normally and they'll have to ask Lee. The bodies'll be gone by midmorning anyway, there are lots of mals that eat mals.

A school without teachers seems like...not really a school in the most relevant sense? 

Leareth decides that he can resolve that confusion LATER. For now, he's going to focus on holding his shield, and trying to take down anything really big before it reaches the barrier and damages it again, and on compulsioning whichever monsters he can and trying to get them to cause chaos for the others, and also on warning the girl about the oozier or just more resilient creatures that can wriggle through his shield intact. 

That's a lot of things to track and he's getting a headache just from the sheer mental effort, to say nothing of the growing magical exhaustion. He's still unhurt, though, and there can't be more than a candlemark to go now... 

If Lee's dead, she says during a relative lull, and you've got ten feet of range on whatever spell you used to step right under my wards and into the middle of my room, you could try going to his? Then we won't be breaking curfew and the mals might leave off and it'll make it easier to arrange robbing Lee's body first thing in the morning, if the mals have already cleared out and she has an accomplice in the room. Of course, he might take Lee's stuff for himself? No, he's an adult, what'd it be worth to him - except the mana, which is what she really wants - well, too late, she already suggested it -

....Oh. That's a good thought. 

Of course, if the kid isn't dead, then he's in a significantly worse position; in a room with presumably weaker and already-damaged warding, without anyone else to shield or cover him, and tired from a Gate. And he can't check, not for sure; he could feel the kid with Thoughtsensing before and can't now, but that could just mean he's unconscious or weakened, there's a LOT of interference in the way of his Othersenses. 

:- It seems worth a try: he sends, after fifteen seconds of considering it. :If he is injured but not dead, though, I - would be inclined to Gate both of us back here, since I imagine his wards would be more damaged than yours: 

(Feelings about this are for having LATER when the emergency is over.) 

Are you offering to pay for healing him or are you thinking that once he's bleeding on my floor I'll fork out for free, 'cause I won't.

:...I am not sure what people here use for money? I am not Healing-Gifted but I do know basic field first aid, and I would not expect you to - cover anything you cannot afford. ...He has possessions that he would presumably endorse trading for healing, if it meant he survived?: 

I don't know him, I don't know if he'd be good for it. You offered me your spare artifice, that'll probably pay for whatever you want. If you're not paying for it, that's fine, no one else is either, I just didn't want you thinking I would.

That - makes sense, in a general way, but also seems incredibly bizarre in the context of this, apparently, being a school? 

:I suppose we will know soon enough: Leareth tells her. :- If this goes badly for some reason I am going to come right back here. If not, I ought to be able to reach you with Mindspeech from across the hall: 

- actually, pause. He can get more information before going in, at the cost of briefly losing situational awareness of the hallway, by seeing if he can move his scry-point into the room. Very briefly, and after he throws a spinning wind-spell infused with lightning and force-daggers. It's higher power than the rest of what he's doing, enough that the power-drain makes him sway on his feet, but it should buy them a few seconds of breathing room. 

Can he get his scrying spell through the other student's wards and into the room? 

The wards are pretty shredded. There is half of a student (the lower half) on some bloody sheets.

Leareth relays this to the girl, tersely and with no emotion at all. 

(He should have tried to guard the other door - except that he's already pushing up against the edge of his abilities, it's not, actually, realistically that he could have oriented any faster or done any more.) 

:- It seems worth checking if the creatures do leave us alone: he concedes. :I will need to focus on shielding myself, though, since the wards on the room are no longer functional: 

And he starts building a Gate-threshold - in midair, just in case that makes it harder for any of the incorporeal creatures to notice and try to wriggle through, he's pretty sure they sense magic and go after it. 

They do sense magic and go after it!

She can put her shield in the way while he's in the middle of - what is that - the coolest - no, focus.

Leareth does it as fast as he can, for an unscaffolded Gate, which is just under five seconds from the first flicker of magic to the threshold snapping down with him on the other side. It's considerably less power-efficient this way, unfortunately, and now he's very dizzy. 

Focus. He flings more power from his dwindling reserves into personal shields, then a basic barrier across the damaged door. Vaguely wonders if it's possible to get any blood-power out of killing those monsters - maybe at least the smarter ones - though it'd take concentration to test the idea, and he has precious little of that to spare - 

Lee's room, like Annisa's, has a box in the corner that is just - full of mana. 

...Well, it's not like the dead kid is using that. 

Leareth pauses to get his scrying spell up again and centered on the hallway, to get a sense of what he's up against, before he distracts himself by experimenting with pulling from it. 

It feels - sort of like tapping a node, there's as much mana here, but it's - different in flavor, sort of more like directly getting power from another person through a link -

Outside the monsters seem to have mostly switched to devouring each other.

That's...not actually as hard as he expected. 

The other girl used all of her stored power and seemed very panicked about it, though. And her reaction when he asked about nodes... He has to assume that this is an incredibly limited resource at this school, for some reason? 

He takes only a small trickle, enough that his vision clears and the room stops spinning, and then he settles in to shield the door against any monsters that feel like attacking it instead of all the nice tasty dead bodies piled up right there. 

There are only a couple, over the course of the next hour. Mostly now that the rules aren't being broken the most delicious mess around is the mess of corpses on the floor. 

Leareth stays standing, because there isn't anywhere that reasonable to sit except the bloody bed and because it helps him stay alert. 

The stimulant eventually takes full effect and...is pretty great, actually? His mage-gift is still kind of resenting the workload he's given it, but he doesn't feel the least bit sleepy or physically fatigued. He scries the hallway, paces and stretches occasionally, and at ten-minute intervals reaches out with Thoughtsensing to check on the girl in the other room. 

She is bitterly regretting not telling him not to use all Lee's mana. There would have been no point in telling him, she has zero leverage on this front, but it's the only really obvious way to survive at this point. (She bets it's less than she had. She worked so goddamned hard for it...)

Hypothesis confirmed. Leareth doesn't actually need much more energy, now, he's barely having to do anything. He vaguely wishes he'd thought of this plan sooner, except that he really didn't have the context to do that... 

He doesn't interrupt the girl again, just occasionally peeks at her thoughts to get a sense of the time remaining before he can leave this room and get some more answers. 

At six o clock sharp some bells ring and she's out of her door and trying magic to open Lee's, instantly. It'd be hard to open if he were alive but since he's dead it shouldn't - ha. 

She dives for his mana storage and starts trying to lug it across the hallway to her room. It's fifty pounds or so, so this is awkward.

Leareth, unlike her, is a fully-grown adult. He startles slightly when she shoves the door open, but was expecting it enough that he doesn't actually reflexively attack.

:Would you like some help?: 

What do you want for it I want to be done before the hall's full of people.

:- We can agree on a sensible trade later: If they’re in a hurry the Leareth is just going to pick the box up and haul it. His shoulders have some complaints about this but it’s really not far, and then the box is in her room. Leareth sets it down, carefully, slightly out of breath.

:Right. Now what:

- I probably want to pick over the rest of his stuff too but I can answer questions while I do it? You probably want to stay here unless you want the whole school to know there's an adult here.

:All right. I have a number of questions: With both doors open, it's very easy to park himself out of sight in the girl's room. :Although, to start - I am not sure I managed to introduce myself. My name is Leareth. I - lead a large organization in the far north of Velgarth. I was experimenting with Gate-transport and that appears to be how I ended up here: 

There's another kid up investigating Lee's room. "I heard him scream in the middle of the night and checked at six and took his storage," she tells him bluntly. "I checked and whatever did it's gone. You can have your pick of the spellbooks, I'm art track, and the clothes, they won't fit me, but I want his care packages."

I haven't heard of Velgarth, she tells Leareth. Is it in Russia? It'd fit with 'far north' and with her not having heard of it; there's a lot of Russia and she hasn't paid very much attention to it. 

:...Russia is a country? I highly doubt it. Velgarth refers to the whole world - but I suppose the word is different in different languages. Is Russia anywhere close to - Valdemar, Rethwellan, Karse, Iftel, Hardorn, the Eastern Empire...?: 

Nope nope nope nope and nope. 

She comes back, clutching a beautiful sandalwood box and a backpack, dumps them on her bed and starts combing through them. Religious inscription of some kind, a couple particularly treasured spellbooks, in Korean but she can trade those at breakfast, a tube of salve which goes straight into her lockbox of treasured possessions, spell notes, bandages...

Leareth sits down on her bed. He's VERY AWAKE thanks to her stimulant, but his head aches and he wants to conserve his strength anyway.

:I am starting to wonder if I somehow ended up literally on another planet. ...Your world is a planet, yes?: 

Earth is a planet. The school is an extradimensional space as segregated from it as a hundred magical engineering genuises could manage. Headache? I have ibuprofen and you can have it in exchange for having lugged the mana storage. She's feeling generous now that she is not incredibly doomed. 

:What is 'ibuprofen'? Is it strong enough to make me foggy?: 

Huh? No. Why would anyone have a painkiller that made you foggy. At that point you can just slit your own throat. It just eases headaches and cramps and so on. The backpack has Lee's coursebooks and a couple small jars of alchemy supplies and a water bottle she can sell a freshman and a bunch of lumps of metal she'll have to identify later but can probably use, and it's in better shape than her own backpack so once she's emptied it she starts moving her stuff over, not like she's going to be pretending she didn't loot Lee's room. 

:Then I would be very grateful for it: Though if it's equivalent to willowbark, it's not going to help that much with a reaction-headache. Oh well. If he can manage not to need to throw around any more magic until he's had a nap, he'll be fine. 

:- Why is the school in extradimensional space?: Also HOW, but he's guessing the teenager doesn't know, if it took a hundred elite mages - wizards? - working together. 

She fishes out an ibuprofen tablet for him, hands it over. Pulls out a comb and brushes her hair and drinks some water and splashes a little on her face, she doesn't feel like crap right now but she bets she will once the high wears off. It's to keep us all safe from the mals. How do they do it where you're from?

:We have much much less of a monster problem where I am from! Even the Pelagirs - the most dangerous regions in Velgarth - are not as bad as this! And you are saying this school is safer than outside? ....How is anyone in your world still alive?:

The school's not that bad if you don't break curfew, it has, like, a 25% survival rate for four years and that includes all the kids who had no business being here and have emotional breakdowns or something. And if you make it, then you're an adult, you're not a soft target, you'll probably make it to a hundred, a hundred fifty, have twelve kids if you're the kind of person who wants to do that, or spend fifty years earning your way into an enclave - the enclaves have alliances, in here, and much higher survival rates, I think lots of them only have three or four kids and can reasonably expect two to make it. 

The world used to be less dangerous but mals've been getting worse. If there are other worlds that might actually be helpful for figuring out - why they got worse, if there's a way to reverse it - except interworld travel will introduce our mals to your world and then you'll probably be in our boat, so it might be better not to do it.

This is way too much to absorb, too quickly. Leareth is going to have to do his processing later.

:I...see. Yes, that situation does sound very bad. I - would like to figure out what I can do to help, but first I need to be much more oriented than I am currently: 

Well, you're welcome to be my guest until evening curfew, and then we can set you up in Lee's room for the next two weeks at least - at end of term the school will merge his room with one of his neighbors, but in the meantime it evidently thinks you being there is fine. I need to go to breakfast in ten minutes, especially if I'm trying to grab enough food to feed two, but I can answer questions until then.

:...Where does the food come from, if the school is outside of normal space?: 

It's nutrient paste with really sophisticated persistent illusions and partial transmutations on top. The school is very, very mana-intensive, but we all feed it with our homework and our horrible protracted deaths.

Was it something she said. 

....cheer up? Death is the fate of all men anyway? Or if that's not your preferred style of coping there's Edna St. Vincent Millay, right. I know, but I do not approve, and I am not resigned, which is why I'm gonna go sell all Lee's spellbooks and coursework to Koreans at breakfast in exchange for steel and alchemical silver.

Leareth is still holding very still. 

I know, but I do not approve, and I am not resigned

A...quote, or something, from a song maybe? It's very evocative. 

Vanyel would appreciate it, he thinks quietly to himself.

(And wonders if the dream is possible, here, and if not, how long it will take him to find his way back to Velgarth. Which he can only do after he's solved their local problem with awful magical monsters. It might take a very, very long time. He wonders if he'll ever speak to Vanyel again.) 

:I know: he says, quietly. :Your world has - even worse problems than mine, which is really saying something. I am going to find a way to fix it. I am not sure how long it will take: 

Well, he's an adult. Maybe you can dream like that, once you're an adult. 

Probably it'll take you a while, she says. Usually when people try to fix the school they get eaten by maw-mouths, or more of them would try it. But, like, by all means have a go, I've never seen magic like yours and that's a place to start if you're trying to do something no one else can. 

He's spent two thousand years trying to do things that no one else can. This is hardly new. 

:So - do you have classes in this school?: 

Yep! I'll be out all day - there's an afternoon work period but I need to spend it in the shop. Last class of the day ends at 4 for juniors - uh, the Americans count hours as six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve one two three four, so that's ten hours from now when I get out of class. I think an hour is approximately a candlemark. 

:Is there - anything I can usefully do in the meantime to learn more about this school and your world more broadly?: 

I don't know, you presumably can't read any of our languages? If you've got mana to burn and something for being uninteresting to people around you you could follow me at least to Mal Studies, which offers textbooks in one's native language and might do that for you too. I am now significantly behind on the mana I need for graduation and won't do it for you without compensation.

:I do not have a spell for literal invisibility, but I have a fairly low-powered illusion spell that can make me very difficult to see, like this -: 

And he's suddenly - mostly not visible, except as a slight shimmer-distortion in the air in front of her wall, if Annisa moves her head. 

:- and then if someone is suspicious I can use subtle mind control to redirect their attention away from it. ...I can pay you in mage-energies, if you want?: This translates approximately just as 'mana'. :But I am very drained right now - I did not take anything from the dead student's box except for the minimum I needed to avoid passing out. So it would have to be an I-owe-you for later: 

If you do that you'll look like a mal. I mean - not invisibility, but boringness, a general mind-control spell that makes you the least interesting thing around, and then you can supplement it by knocking off anyone who still notices you. I - she's eyeing his artifice. I might do that for an I-owe-you. What do those do, they're not shield-holders, are they -

:I - can do that and also illusion myself to look like a teenager? Like this: And he randomly picks the mental image of one of his researchers' fifteen-year-old son, and pulls the magic over himself. 

Probably works. There's more than 4,000 of us so no one knows everyone. I guess you can then come with me to breakfast. Can you do the telepathy all day?

:I can do it over a range of a few miles as long as there are no shields in the way. ...I cannot reach any of the other rooms if I am in your room or Lee's, though, it does not feel like shielding it feels like...something else: 

There's Void between dorms, yeah. Keeps the mals out.

:Between lecture rooms too? …Are there in fact classrooms. This is a noncentral case of a school in many ways!:

There are lecture rooms. Sometimes there's Void between them, sometimes they back each other, you can look at the blueprints to get a good idea how it all fits together. Mal Studies is in a big lecture hall; the rest of my classes are shop, this term.

:...Right. In that case, I will be able to stay in touch with you by Mindspeech sometimes, but not if you are on the other side of some void: He's suddenly desperately curious to have a look at those blueprints. The topology of the school must be bizarre. :Oh, and - I did not think to ask. How do students actually get between the school and Earth which is a planet? By something like Gating?: 

The freshman class gets inducted all at once when we're fourteen. I don't know if it's like Gating - I think not exactly? It doesn't bring the surrounding air along, that'd let more mals through. The senior class graduates by fighting their way through the graduation hall to the gates and then if they make it magic takes them back to wherever they were inducted from.

:Ah. And they have to fight their way past because of all the monsters?: 

Yes. The school's set up to keep most mals out, and most of the ones it can't keep out trapped in the graduation hall, but there's a lot of 'em in there. It's why I need the mana - gesture at Lee's box. I've been saving it up for three years. I won't get out without it.

:And there is no source of magical energy in here except for what the students can individually produce and store?: That...does sound incredibly limiting. No wonder she's upset about burning all of hers on defending herself against him and the mals his presence summoned. 

Well, they could also kill each other. She doesn't specify this, though she suspects his mind reading gets more than what she's sending. Yes. You build mana through effort. Exercise and embroidery and homework and so on. Adults who don't have extremely magic-intensive careers can often build enough mana to use magic when they want to just by living normal lives, but in school you have to work at it every waking moment or you won't have enough come graduation.

:- Wait, so even the planet Earth does not have pools of ambient magic generated by other plant and animal life?: 

Pools, no. You can pull from plants and bugs and stuff - kills them, but works fine. Pulling from animals smart enough to not want to die fucks you up.

:Hmm. ...In our world, you can kill animals and people for magic, and it is - messy and damaging to the mage if one is unskilled, but there are techniques for doing it safely: 

Well, Pisa does something so they don't all go insane and rot from the inside. 

If someone knew how to kill people and not be damaged by it, that'd make them very dangerous to everyone else in here, because they'd have less to lose by going for it, so probably people'd kill them. So if you want to explore that maybe do it on Earth.

:- I mean, I am not going to do it here because I disprefer people dying. ...If the oldest students here are eighteen, I - do think it would be difficult for them to kill me even in a group. But I will explore all the other options first, and - there may be ways of getting myself and all of you out of here alive that are not energy-costly: He's not all that optimistic about it, though.

People die anyway; if she were going to be a maleficer she'd pick particularly doomed ones. But she has Lee's mana storage so that's not her best route from here. I mean, graduation alliances will take you, if you end up wanting to be public about being here, and they have their mana that they've stored up which their allies can use to get them out. If you actually had a plan to get all 800 seniors out and it was really good you could convince lots of them to feed you mana for it. Getting the younger students out wouldn't even be worth it because we're safer here than on the outside.

He's thinking. He doesn't have an answer, not yet, but he has the earliest embryonic form of one. 

:All right. - Breakfast would be good, I need to eat after doing magic: 

Yep. Watch my back. And she heads out into the hallway, which is now fairly full of students, and starts walking. 

Leareth, illusioned to look like a nondescript, forgettable teenager of fifteen or sixteen, ducks out after her - and reaches out to lay hasty temporary compulsions on everyone in range, to make himself even less noticeable, because he doesn't want it to be remarked on that he's leaving the room with her. 

He follows, Othersenses extended to their full range; he should be able to sense mals or any kind of other magical attack that way. 

There are plenty of mals within range, even with his range warped by the school cutting off into Void in various places; some in the ducts, some in the drains, some in the bathrooms that Annisa ignores to go up six flights of stairs, some in the classrooms that they pass going up those flights of stairs. They mostly seem to be lying in wait, looking for soft targets, which he and Annisa evidently aren't.

The cafeteria is enormous, set up to fit several thousand students at a time; there are lines against the walls for food, which Annisa joins. There are students sitting and eating at long wooden tables with attached long wooden benches. There's a normal sort of cafeteria babble of students chattering. 

Annisa looks around for Koreans she knows and can sell Lee's textbooks to. Spots them, eventually, and then redirects her attention to looking out for mals in the food line.

...Leareth is going to take this opportunity to try skimming the surface thoughts of everyone he can, and then focus more in depth on anyone whose thoughts seem especially interesting or informative, particularly about the local - geopolitics doesn't seem like quite the right word for an extradimensional school - the local political currents? 

This kid is talking with his friends in low voices about possibly changing which room they start from for graduation; the plan was to start from Aki's, which is closest to a hallway, but they've been approached by another group of kids about a loose no-promises partnership of the 'fight our way out of the dorms and to the hall itself' variety and that'd only work if they start from Pedro's.

These kids are going over today's disastrous obstacle course run and debugging what went wrong and how they can make sure it doesn't happen again; they're trying to do this nonjudgmentally but it was a real shitshow and nerves are a bit frayed so they're sort of bitterly sniping at each other whenever their self-control isn't quite up to the task.

This group is having a serious heart-to-heart with the girl who's supposed to have learned the time spear spell; she doesn't have it down yet and there's only a month to go and she insists she'll have it any day now but she said that a week ago.

These kids are in the final planning stages of an auction they're running this weekend to sell off four years' worth of stuff for mana. 

These kids are a study group for Akkadian Divinations and are desperately trying to finish up an essay due later today.

This girl is upset because her little sister got eaten yesterday and is trying not to let her throw her off because she has gym in half an hour. 

Annisa's busy finding Seoul. "Hi," she says, not at all sure they'll remember her but expecting they'll have a vague sense that they ought to, which is good enough. "Kid across the hall from me screamed in the middle of the night, so I checked in on him in the morning, and landed five Korean spellbooks, I'm going to shop 'em around unless you're offering something really good but I thought I'd come here first."

"Let's see 'em."

She lays them out on the table. "I'm in the market for steel, aluminum, and concentrated hydrogen peroxide."

A negotiation ensues, more comprehensible from reading the participants' minds than from listening to them talk; Seoul figures that Annisa doesn't know how much the spellbooks are worth, which is true, but Annisa is good at reading people and inclined to walk away if Seoul thinks they're getting a great deal, and that's almost like knowing what the spellbooks are worth. Eventually she trades them two of the books and goes to sit at a different table.

Leareth follows the flow of kids to collect food, even though the stimulant Annisa gave him seems to have completely destroyed any appetite he might otherwise have had. Half of the food is infested with mals but mage-sight makes it very easy to pick out which - and rather than risking disrupting Annisa's negotiation, he finds a spot to hover inconspicuously and wait for her to be done. 

One month. So that's his timeline, then. He takes down some other mental notes. Time spear spell. The students train using some kind of obstacle course. They need to fight their way out of their bedrooms to reach the graduation hall, but apparently not while the curfew is in effect? 

...He can have feelings about dead little sisters later. 

:May I sit at this table or should I look for somewhere else?: he asks Annisa once she's finished her trading and moved along. 

You can sit here, just act like you're looking at the Korean spellbooks. That'll help with getting Seoul to pay more for them anyway. Annisa sits with four other kids; they take turns keeping a lookout, this time of the year, and the others tend to be working on homework. She gives a perfunctory explanation of the dead neighbor and the Korean spellbooks to discharge "before they wander off" and then pulls out some homework herself; her plan for today was to get her Middle English Lost Poetry essay written during Maleficaria Studies but she suspect she's going to spend that distracted by questions for the adult, so maybe she can dash it off now. 

Leareth is not actually inclined to cause Annisa to fall behind on her homework, since apparently that can kill you here! 

He will pretend to look at inscrutable text. ...Very neat text, they clearly have printing presses in this world, good for them. :If you prefer, I can learn as much as possible via mindreading on my own, and take down a list of questions to ask you later when it is a better time?: 

Mal Studies isn't an awful time for it and there's not really going to be a better one, end of term is coming up and it's always the worst time of the year. More monsters, exams to study for, seniors frantically selling all their stuff and you can't miss out on the stuff you desperately need or you'll be dead come senior year. She is shoveling cafeteria food into her mouth while she tries to think of more things to pad out this essay with; maybe she has affordance for a digression into how mores of the time would have shaped interpretation of the flirtation scene, you can get a lot out of literary analysis that's actually just history in a funny hat...

Leareth would offer to help, but he doesn't know anything about this world's poetry or their literary analysis traditions, and really has no particular advantage to writing school essays at all, so he settles for not distracting her. 

Some questions to resolve later, which he uses mnemonic techniques to remember since he still doesn't have notetaking supplies: 

- Lee's room should remain usable for the rest of the term, so if he intends to make his move at the end of this month, he can use it as a base in the meantime? 

- What sort of stuff will the seniors be selling? Can any of it be used by Leareth, who clearly has a different kind of magic than the local kind? 

- Why are there more monsters in the last month of the term? 

- What are the exact logistics of the graduation event? Students have to fight there way from their rooms to the hall, but what does that look like? 

- If room-sharing is okay, then can anyone graduate just by being in a senior student's room at the right time? 

- What does the 'time spear' spell do? 

- ....Not actually an important question, but what in all hells do essays on literary analysis of poetry have to do with learning magic and surviving the mals? 

Leareth methodically eats his food while he thinks. It's pretty unimpressive but honestly he's had worse. 

Flirtation, Annisa is busy writing, is a common theme of poetry in this time period and close to a human universal as a theme in storytelling, see for example themes of flirtation in a dozen other poems she can list off from her notes on previous poetry classes, but unusually resistant to analysis focused only on the language within the poem itself, because of how flirtation generally relies on - and is in fact a way of establishing mutual knowledge of - the society's norms for romantic pursuit and affection; therefore to evaluate this scene in the poem one ought to look to external sources on relationship dynamics and conceptions of romance in the time period. Some of that can be identified in contemporaneous French literature, and some in comparison across the many poems the course has covered, and some in looking to surviving Middle English literature, which is of course to a first approximation just Chaucer, and with less reliability by looking at Early Modern English conceptions of flirtation and romance, of which Shakespeare is the obvious abundant source of examples....

She's definitely going to get marked down for how little this essay engages with the actual works it's supposed to be about, it's at least half comparisons to other stuff by volume, but she doesn't think she'll get marked down past a C, which is all that matters. She has it more or less finished by the time the juniors start standing up to go to Maleficaria Studies. 

Leareth feels like he's learned nonzero things about flirting in this culture just from skimming Annisa's surface thoughts while she was in the process of writing her essay, which is...really something, honestly. 

He stands up when she does, scooping the remaining Korean textbooks into his arms. 

:- Is there any school supplies room or something where I could find pen and paper?: he asks Annisa. :If not I can trade you - something - for it, but it would be simplest if I did not need to take any of your possessions that you clearly need: 

We can make a supply run if you're up for defending us for it, otherwise I'll have to call in some favors to get a large enough group for it and it'd be cheaper just to give you a pen and some paper. Be nice to those spellbooks, I don't want them to run off before I can sell them.

:...Do you think that I would actually need defending on a supply run? Since I assume I am more powerful and more experienced than you or your classmates: Pause. :- Also what do you mean by 'be nice', for the spellbooks? I - are they sentient? I am not going to damage or deface them but I am unsure how to be nice on top of that: 

Spellbooks are powerful and valuable and magical enough they tend to have minds of their own - not, like, as much as people, but as much as dogs, surely, and a dog will run off if you neglect it. If you drop a book you should apologize to it and give it a kiss and dust it off, you want to keep them somewhere pretty, during a confusing transition like this you want to speak to them soothingly.... the supply cabinets are going to have lots of mals this time of year and maybe none of them will want a piece of you but some might.

Leareth has so many questions about the instructions given for how to be nice to spellbooks, but - probably not urgent? Since he's mostly confused about how the underlying ontology there makes any sense, and that doesn't sound quick or easy to resolve. 

:- How many mals in the supply cabinets?: he asks instead. :I can easily detect them - well, most of them that I know of so far - at a distance, and last night I did not have any difficulties fighting up to half a dozen at a time: 

I don't think there'll be more than that, just, most people can't afford to burn mana fighting off an ambush every day even if every one individually is no big deal. If you're all right on mana then this way.

:- I am definitely limited on energy, but using my Othersenses takes minimal effort or - mana, I suppose, in your terminology. And if I have the option of running away then I will almost never need to fall back on mana-intensive fighting magic. So I think that I might as well go have a look: 

The supply cabinet is at one end of the cafeteria; there are mals lurking under some books on one shelf, and in that dark corner over there, and in that dark corner here, but none of them imminently about to pounce. Annisa sticks near the door, pokes the pens with her dagger, then takes five.

How many of them are the kind of mals with enough mind that Leareth can make compulsions work on them, and then compulsion them to HOLD STILL? 

Most of them; not all, though.

...Well, they might in fact be more scared of him and Annisa than Leareth is scared of them. He'll leave them alone for now, anyway, and just go open the cabinet, prepared to throw a levinbolt and force-net and fireball and ice-dagger all in rapid succession, as needed, if anything actually comes at him.

The shelves have - a fairly marvelous assortment of supplies, actually; aside from the fact the students seem hesitant to get them they'd be stunningly wealthy. There are stacks of hundreds of fabric-bound empty notebooks, and thousands of sheets of loose-leaf, high quality paper, drawing paper and lined paper and graph paper; there's notecards and pens and pencils and erasers and highlighters and markers and colored pencils and file folders and poster paper and glossy photo paper and construction paper in three dozen colors.

Nothing jumps them. On observing this Annisa additionally takes all the highlighters and colored pencils and as many erasers as fit in her backpack, those being the best trade goods by volume.

....Leareth stares at the supplies in awe for almost five entire seconds. 

:....Will anything terrible happen if I float all of this out of the cabinets and bring it back to the cafeteria?: he eventually manages to ask Annisa. :There is - just - so much - I do not need all of this myself but I am sure others in the school could make use of it...?: 

Well it'd be hella conspicuous! If you want to go 'hey, there's an adult here now, come to him with your best sob story and there'll be occasional supply drops' you can totally do that, but I'd think it through a bit? Especially if you want to filter the sob stories at all in any way. Also the art shop needs it more, there's nothing that valuable in here, just school supplies.

:- What does the art shop have? I - in the world where I come from, just - this - would be very valuable!: 

....In the meantime he will at least grab a stack of notebooks and a bundle of pens and - all right there really isn't any good reason why he needs the shiny paper or the coloured paper or the colorful paintbrush-pens but it....is definitely taking nonzero willpower not to grab them anyway. 

Just paper and school supplies? In - poor countries - most people couldn't afford this much but in rich countries like America practically everyone can. The artificing supply room has steel and gold and gemstones and ball bearings and machining tools and - useful stuff.

:In my world, making paper of this quality is moderately costly: 

(Leareth is trying to think whether even in the Eastern Empire it would be the case that practically everyone could afford a cloth-bound notebook and pens in multiple colors. He's...not sure. It might depend on the exact state of the economy. Honestly it's probably just been too long since he personally checked on the Eastern Empire and so he should downgrade his confidence in any of his guesses...) 

....He floats out the entire stack of graph paper as well. 

She is slightly judging him for using mana on anything you could in principle do by hand even though for adults that's probably a reasonable tradeoff. Okay, now let's get to class, I can't finish my essay if we end up in the front few rows.

Maintaining his teenage-student illusion, and the associated loose network of compulsions to make him look boring, also takes extra energy whenever he moves, and from this angle he can appear to stand perfectly still and not do anything while grabbing items and then concealing those behind illusions as well. 

Leareth nods and follows her, carrying his (incredible, amazing, remarkable) haul of note-taking supplies. 

The classroom is an enormous circle with more than a thousand seats, centered around a very large stage, which is - crawling with monsters, so dense with them that it'd be hard to even move through iut. The types he fought last night are on display, along with buzzing swarms of fanged things, enormous snakes, octopodal sorts of things with a thousand tentacles crawling along the edges of the ceiling, and, on either side of the door, two utterly enormous sacks of goo with tormented human faces on all their visible surface. 

They do, to Annisa's annoyance, end up in the front few rows; she makes clear in her thoughts that the reason this is annoying is because the lecture mals sometimes eat the kids in the first few rows so you have to pay attention and not do your other homework. She seems otherwise unfazed by the lecture hall, and sits down and takes out a notebook with a sigh.

The 'lecture' mals....which implies not the usual kind...and they only 'sometimes' eat the students -? Interesting. Also confusing. 

:- I can probably shield both of us while you finish your homework: Leareth offers, and then extends his mage-sight and Thoughtsensing to check how powerful and/or intelligent-seeming the mals on the center stage actually are. At the very least he should be able to get some warning if any of them are headed for him and Annisa specifically. 

To hia Othersenses they are totally - inanimate? Not alive at all, illusions or sort of constructs, rather than living beings. 

One of them animates, suddenly - it's still just an illusion-or-a-construct, though, but now instead of writhing in the crowded hall it wanders the perimeter, showing off.

Annisa knows how to fight llendevers, there was one picking off students out of their dorms her sophomore year so she looked it up. She will accept the promise of adult shielding and finish the poetry essay, which only takes about ten minutes, and then -

- no, it'd be dumb to start studying for her math final. One of the things you need to be trying to accumulate, in the Scholomance, is slack, and the thing you need slack for is responding to unexpected changes in circumstances; having the resources to weather a sudden setback or take advantage of a sudden opportunity. She has a sudden opportunity; she has an adult, who didn't know about the Scholomance and who wants to help, and who might be willing to trade her adult-made protective artifice for very basic orientation stuff. And she might not have this opportunity for very long because even adults can get themselves killed in the Scholomance and one who doesn't know what he's doing is more likely to. Plus they don't have a plan for him to have a room past graduation so probably he'll have to go out with the graduating seniors.

Okay. Reassess. The plan should be to get as much out of the next month as she possibly can. That means trading away resources for favors on her finals, so she's not studying for them, and working with the adult on whatever he wants to do about the situation now that he's aware of it, assuming he'll pay her in adult-made artifice. It means - maybe contemplating graduating early, if his graduation plan is sufficiently good that she thinks she stands a better chance this year without an alliance than next year with one; that's a terrifying thought but should be considered further, terrifying or not. It means - if he's altruistic, then maybe he'd actually want a junior to graduate early, free up their room for him, and stay behind, to protect the younger kids? She doesn't know how to think about what priorities adults have. They can have whatever priorities they want; it's a space far too big to contemplate. 

.....Whatever else might or might not be the case, Leareth has to admit that this school seems to provide intensive training in strategic thinking. 

(Or maybe that's just Annisa and her own specific, personal traits? Leareth isn't sure, and he doesn't have good avenues to check the hypothesis, yet - he can read other nearby minds but that's not comparable, right, since the other students don't know about this sudden change in their circumstances and resources, and Annisa does...)

He leaves her alone to finish her current line of thought, both because he's still keeping an eye on the animate illusion-or-construct-or-whatever prowling the edge of the stage, and because he's very curious where she's eventually going to end up. His questions aren't time-sensitive on the level of minutes. 

What does she know that's valuable to an adult. - who is bullshitting him. If he sets up shop and offers to take charity cases he will immediately be flooded with four thousand petitions; Annisa knows who is a good investment of resources and who isn't. What things trade for fairly, if he's impressed by the printer paper he's not going to have any idea whether mercury or iridium is worth more by weight. Things like how to treat spellbooks, where the supply rooms and bathrooms are, that he can learn from anyone but that's lowest friction and lowest exposure risk while he still cares about that to learn from her. Mana, which she shouldn't trade away without a damn good reason but which he does want and she does have - and it sounds like he's used to places where it just pools on the ground like water, so he might not even know how deliberately generating it works? And might not be in physical condition to be very good at it, though he'll still be better than her at it, because he's an adult. Might want various creature comforts once he's over the novelty of being here - sex? That sounds stressful to navigate but worth it if it ends up being available to navigate, adults are probably more likely than teenagers to indulge the known human tendency to not want people you're sleeping with to die. (She's not attracted to him; she is not thinking of him as a person with traits beyond adulthood at all.)

So probably the thing in her interests is to offer to skip her next classes to give him an orientation, trade favors to get the rest of her homework dealt with for the term, and then encourage him to announce himself or whatever, with her help to figure out the flurry of attention that'll attract. ...does she need to be worrying about physical security, hers or his - his no, you'd have to be a moron to try to kill an adult who isn't coming in with a preexisting reason to do you harm or track record of harming anyone, plus only a senior could and it'd be suicide for them. Hers probably also no, as long as it's ambiguous if it'd piss him off. 

Leaving aside whether Annisa's impressive strategic thinking is an inevitable result of having trained for years in the Scholomance: is it impressive as measured against the smartest and best-educated children of her age in Velgarth? Yes. Absolutely.

So - either he's gotten very lucky, by finding her specifically, or else he's even luckier and actually everyone who's lived to her age - of, what, fifteen or sixteen? (he can have feelings about that later) - is just as careful and strategic and paranoid as her. 

The illusion-construct is still leaving them alone. Leareth maintains his discreet shield over both of them, and reaches out to Annisa with a mindtouch. :Is now a good time to ask you some questions: 

Telepathy isn't common here and she startles slightly. Yes, now's fine, I'm done with my homework - and planning to arrange to trade off the rest of it.

:- Sorry, it just looked like you were finished your essay, and the demonstration construct seems to be leaving us alone. ...You can trade to have other people do your homework for you? I am confused how that works if the school itself is grading it - can it not tell that you are having someone else do the work -?:

It can probably tell but it doesn't mind. I'm not sure if it's confused, or if it's just only enforcing the rules it was created with which didn't happen to prohibit that, or if its goals are to reap mana from the homework and are served just as well regardless of who does it. But cheating is fine, it's just that you have to call in a whole lot of favors to cheat on a month of all your classes around finals. I'll end up spending most of the mana on it, probably. I am willing to do this if you have a plan that seems likelier to get me out alive than my existing plan, which has probably a 50-50 shot.

Leareth....is somehow unsure if she is overrating or underrating his planning abilities. 

:- I do not have much of a plan yet, I am still trying to orient to all of the constraints here. I - am fairly confident that given a month, I can come up with something that will give you much better than 50-50 chances?: 

Really he wants to try to do that for as many additional people as possible, but Leareth doesn't think that repeating that will increase Annisa's confidence in him, right now. 

I don't graduate in a month, only the seniors do that. But I can avoid spending down irreplaceable resources for the next week while you figure out prospects of a plan, and then if I like your plan I can trade everything away and spend all my time on it. She gestures at the graduation hall. Here's the main constraint: seniors have to get through this and out the door, and there's eight hundred of them, and they have half an hour.

Nod. :Many of my questions for you are about the graduation logistics, actually. I picked up that seniors need to fight out from their rooms, but - presumably their rooms are not connected to the graduation hall most of the time, so how does that work? And why is there a time limit on it?: 

School's shaped like a giant corkscrew. The rooms descend, and the senior ones come level with the graduation hall, and the junior ones turn into senior ones, and the school creates new freshman dorms up at the top. - the top of the school is safer so it's generally set up so the older students are between the places where monsters get in and the younger students who can't defend themselves yet. The longer the gates are open, the more mals can get in, so it's half an hour - long enough for everyone to make it out who is going to make it out - realistically most successful exits are in the first ten, fifteen minutes - and then they close again. There's a lot of mals in here but it could be much worse. Prepared kids generally survive to graduation and that's not at all true on the outside.

Nod. :What a fascinating design. Where do the gates open to, when they are open?: 

They just reverse the induction spell that brought us all here. Drop us where we were pulled in from. The gates must anchor to Earth somewhere but it's very secret and it's probably deep underground in the middle of nowhere.

:It must not be an exact reversal, since I am guessing the newly arriving students do not come in that way?: If eighteen-year-olds die half the time, fourteen-year-olds wouldn't have a chance. 

They come in in their dorms, top of the school. Annisa should have a little sister among the new batch of inductees, though she's not given that very much thought; you only get to care about one thing.

Leareth has so much respect for her way of thinking, and he hates the school - and the whole world - that must have produced it. That squeezed her down into such a narrow shape, just in order to survive existing in it... 

:I have gathered that the graduating seniors usually form alliances, and coordinate on what magic to use?: he adds. :What are the common strategies for that?: 

Yeah, you more or less can't fight your way out on your own. Four or five is typical, adults do workings in larger groups but they have longer to train and more mana to use. There are mana-intensive approaches that are known to work pretty close to reliably - a timespear speeds you up, a kettler is a bit like a rocket - I'm good at weapons, so I am probably going to try something a little fightier than those -

Nod. :And students practice on an obstacle course? What is the obstacle course like - is it meant to imitate the graduation hall, like this display?: He gestures to the front of the room. 

Yes. It's in the gym, it changes every week and you run it every day with your alliance. It's a complicated working so you only use a thousandth of the mana to cast spells. You can get a bit of a sense, from how you're doing in the obstacle course, if your alliance is good enough, but of course there's luck.And only so much you can do if your alliance isn't good enough.

:Fascinating. That must be a very clever working: 

Leareth falls silent for thirty seconds or so, putting his thoughts in order again. 

:- Also I have gathered that the graduating seniors will be trading away various possessions that they are not bringing with them. What kinds of items are usually available?: 

They'll be trading basically everything they own for mana and critical materials. Clothes, spellbooks, homework, supplies, snack tokens, drugs, knives, maybe their hair if anyone has good scissors. I want steel and aluminum but I don't want it bad enough to trade much mana for it so I probably won't get it. Some seniors also want to get laid before they probably die! This is another avenue by which Annisa might get steel and aluminum.

Leareth catches that thought and doesn't find it very notable; it seems like a sensible enough strategy, if it would work. 

:What are the main critical materials limitations? If most of the difficulty is because the supply rooms are dangerous, I may be able to help clear them first. ...Also, what is hair useful for? And is there no way to cut it with your kind of spells? I ought to be able to cut hair just fine with magic, and it would not be mana-costly: 

Everything’s mana costly. Or - not individually but if you are in the habit of using mana for life things you will have half as much saved for graduation as people who did it all by hand. Hair is a decently powerful spell ingredient, better if it’s long. Supply rooms are unsafe but also the good supplies are just scarce, there’s not enough aluminum or gold for everyone who wants some. I guess you could give it out evenly and let people trade from there.

Leareth nods. :I suppose. I do suspect that in some cases, my magic may be much cheaper than your variety? For example, I seem to be able to use mind-controlling magic on most mals above a certain level of intelligence, and that requires minimal power input - it is certainly difficult, but mostly on skill and concentration: 

Mal-targeting mind magic is a thing but yeah, not a particularly efficient thing if you're trying to target specific mals rather than trying to lure some and you don't care which. I guess I assumed magic would...only work one way, like your electricity can't really be different from ours because there's only one way for electricity to work.