Rebecca is not sure how this applies to her! Is anything she knows enclave business? Wow last year was scary but it seems like everyone thinks that wasn't normal.

"If you're travelling with us then you're going to pick up a lot of things outsiders might love to hear about, and you shouldn't tell them," Annaka says. "There are some maleficers targeting the freshmen; even harmless-seeming information, like who is friends with who or who had a fight or who hates casserole, can be used to isolate a target."

Most years aren't like last year and they are working VERY HARD to make sure this year isn't like last year.

"- okay, but is it still okay to hang out with that one Sacramento sophomore and trade spells with him and talk about music?"

"Yeah, that's fine. - frankly, it's not the US enclaves we're worried about. But don't spread that around either, sometimes the fact we're worried about someone itself causes them to anticipate a fight and kill people preparing for it..."

"...okay. Can I tell people if I like casserole."

"Yes, go ahead." Annaka does not specify this is partially only because she doesn't particularly care if Rebecca dies. 

Okay, big conversation, rough on morale, so now they're going to break out some treats to make up for it! It's close enough to Atul's birthday, everyone have a slice of chocolate cake! And they can drop the sound barrier and sing to him!

"Isn't his birthday in the middle of August?" asks Julia. 

     "Shut up," her sister says.

Singing! Happy birthday Atul!! Rebecca can HARMONIZE.

A wild Holden approaches.

"Hey! Happy birthday Atul! Been quite a year, hasn't it?"

" - Oh, I'm not here for your cake or anything, I just want to make sure the freshmen are settling in well and have everything they need."

Two dozen people stare at him silently. Twenty three of them just got a lecture on not telling people things and one of them just gave a lecture on not telling people things. Most of the sophomores and juniors suspect Annaka arranged this deliberately to make a point of some kind.

"...Did someone just die?"

...unfortunate that "the casserole here is terrible" would be a complete non-sequitur.

... Zeke hasn’t been paying attention to anything that’s been happening, except for the bit where everyone was singing and it would’ve been weird if he didn’t sing along, and now he... still doesn’t know what’s happening. Probably he can just continue eating? He continues eating.

"Well, great catching up with you, Holden," Annaka says with satisfaction after another solid minute. "We'll have to do this again sometime! Bye!"

OK that was weird. He'll go, though.

"I'm very proud of you all," Annaka says once he was gone. "That was the easiest test in the world, but still, getting twenty-four kids to pass the easiest test in the world is no small thing! We already had cake, though -"

"If you and Claire co-cast with me and we're willing to blow a lot of mana on it I could probably do a movie on the wall in the reading room," says Julia. "It'd have to be one I've seen a million times. ...it'd have to be Legally Blonde. That's it, that's the only one I can do, and the soundtrack's on the mp3 player, so -"

"Ooh, did you know there's a musical of Legally Blonde? - it leans kind of hard on the Greek chorus, though."

" - yeah," says Annaka. "All right. Movie night in the New York reading room, thirty minutes, invite your friends. - I didn't know you could do that even co-casting," she adds to Julia, "that's really cool -"

"It was the only way I could get Mom to let me watch movies for the entire last year, if I told her I was practicing. Did you go see the musical on Broadway," she asks Rebecca, "I have been to one show in the last three years because of mals and it's been killing me..."

"Yeah! It was for my birthday, we went to New York and I saw two musicals a day for a whole long weekend, that one and Phantom and Les Mis and Lion King and Wicked and Hamilton, it was the best."

"Oh man, that sounds incredible - this is going to be a really shitty rendition, I can do 'these two people, saying these lines of dialogue' but I can't do, like, zooms and camera cuts and stuff except when I'm watching it on one wall and projecting it onto another. But the only way I'll ever get that good is if I practice."

"Well, next time we need entertainment I can sing?"

"That sounds great! We could do a dance party, people like dancing, and you can do the singing and one of the older kids can amplify the mp3 player."

(Would talking about musical theater make him look gay? Talking about musical theater would definitely make him look gay. He saw The Lion King one time and has opinions on it and No One Must Know, probably.)

”- that would be awesome!” he says, instead of having opinions on The Lion King.

"Yeah! Maybe I can get Vanya from Sacramento to come, he seemed to really come out of his shell when we were talking about music."

"Cool!"

The New York reading room gets set up. People use vending machine tokens to acquire snacks for the movie, and complain about what they got. "Woo!!! A can of Monster and it's only a year expired!!" "Cashews don't go bad, right?" "Funyuns!"  Julia tracks down Annaka and Claire to give instructions, very bossily.


Among the many advantages of being one of the world's leading centers of magical invention and discovery, New York has one of the world's most highly regarded departments of magical forensics. It's mostly divination work, of course, but not entirely: there's a lot of value in truth and memory clarifying potions, in spells for getting animate constructs to communicate with you, and illusion spells that recreate a scene from memory. They're very confidential; Julia's not allowed to teach them outside New York. They're very hard; it'll be two seniors co-casting with her and they'll be doing nearly all the heavy lifting. And they're, well, not good for movies at all; they're meant to recreate the investigation-critical elements of a conversation or a glance at a room, not tell the story of Legally Blonde. 

Frankly, it's not very good. The frame rate is approximately three frames per second. The backgrounds are all flat, level, crisp, evenly lit. It gets completely confused on cutscenes and establishing shots and just blurs for a while.

Julia is DELIGHTED with herself. 

It's more movie than Rebecca had been led to expect in here! She snuggles with Zeke and hums bits of the musical as the movie reminds her of them.

Zeke saw a real movie, like, three days ago, and is not very moved by this version of Legally Blonde, but snuggling Rebecca is very new and he is very moved by it! She is snuggly and warm and soft and he quietly informs her of these important facts during especially slow scenes.

Zeke is so good for snuggling up to. She is so lucky to have met him. She informs him of those important facts right back, so there.