A PRETTY ENCLAVER IS TALKING TO HIM AND INVITED HIM TO HER ROOM TO STUDY WHAT IS HIS LIFE

Annisa's hands are starting to ache from knife-polishing which is her cue to go do something else, the extra mana from doing it while it hurts isn't worth the repetitive stress injury. Probably the thing to do is French, but she's so incredibly sick of French. Maybe she can find some people going to the library, work ahead on Mal Studies or Romantic poetry or something. 

Daria's not home, but Bella walks down the hallway while she's checking. It is really convenient to be on walking-places terms with enough people that can happen! "Hey! Where're you headed, I might want to tag along."

"HI Annisa! This is Caio, we're going to study in my room, do you want to join us?"

- well she can hardly turn that down even though it's not exactly what she was planning. ....is the boy disappointed. Shoot. 

Boy is going AAAAAAA but not out loud. "Hi Annisa!"

Okay she'll accept. Maybe Bella was hoping for an excuse not to be alone with the boy anyway. "Sounds great! I am tired of knives and was vaguely aspiring to get ahead in Mal Studies; what are you two working on?"

"I'm selling lit homework so I need that to come out nice, and Caio was going to do his math."

"What lit are you in?"

"Cervantes and Victor Hugo. I would consider doing other lit but I would charge a lot more for doing additional assignments versus letting people copy mine."

"Nah, I like my lit class. For my first assignment I tore off an essay in an hour about how the poets were wrong and dead, and I got a B for it, so I'm hoping that the school will continue to accept tangential rants as poetry analysis and it'll be a refreshing break. Who is Cervantes." 

"Spanish dude. If you have heard the phrase 'tilting at windmills' that's a reference to his most famous work but we're actually only covering less famous works in the core syllabus and I'll do the windmills one for extra credit, skip the final." In any non-shop-nor-lab class you can finagle reasonably well you should aim to skip the final. Finals are much harder to sell, because of the time limit, and they don't actually teach you anything new, and they take hours so if you can skive off one you have a huge block of free time.

And they're at the most dangerous time of the year and sometimes in unfamiliar classrooms. Annisa's hoping to skip poetry, drafting, and history. And she hates admitting not knowing words of English but everyone's insisted she's successfully practically-native, so: "I haven't heard the phrase. What is tilting at windmills."

"Making up enemies and then attacking the imaginary enemies. - to be clear, Cervantes was not a wizard, and the act of making them up did not cause them to appear in any way. Protagonist was nuts and charging at literal nonmagical windmills he thought were monsters."

"Huh. Are you in Cervantes, Caio?"

"No, I have a Spanish lit but not that one."

"Is Spanish worth picking up? My initial plan was to dodge all languages so I can do shop, which I'm better at, but the school seems to think I need to be more well-rounded so I might as well be strategic about what it sticks me with." Haha Annisa's going to do her absolute best to make learning French take all four years.

"You're doing French now, right? Spanish is pretty similar and much more phonetic, it'd be a good next."

"Oh, that's a strong argument, my least favorite thing about French so far is the not-at-all-phonetic-ness." At least, it's tied with like six other things.

"Yeah. Just whatever you do don't get Chinese."

"I'll do my best! I wish we could pick, so many things about this school would be way better if we had some ability to set them."

"I mean, you can sort of pick, in the sense that you can definitely tell it now you are studying Spanish if you want, but yeah, there's no drop period." Here is Bella's room! She lets them in and takes up a position on the bed.

...Caio will take the chair and then he's not being presumptuous. It's normal for girls to sit on a bed together.

Yes, that is better than the boy sitting on the bed and Annisa being a third wheel in the chair, which would be awkward. Annisa sits cross-legged and starts in on an essay about lye-flies.

Bella has her references for her essays already and leans off the bed to pluck them from her desk as necessary. At one point she asks the void for a spell to copy writing.

Annisa is jealous of being able to casually ask the Void for spells and not get something in a language you don't speak. ...possibly she should try it. if she does get French then she won't get into that much hot water for ignoring it for a month, and she'll have a bona fide complaint because even kids who are average at languages aren't supposed to be getting spells in them by the second week.

Bella studies her spell for a bit but doesn't use it right away, goes back to writing.

"What language is it?"

"Mandarin."

"Ah, rats."

"I know a Javanese one but I doubt that's any more helpful."

"Thanks anyway. I only have three, languages aren't my strong point."

"Me neither. I was kind of hoping I could dodge them, but evidently no."

"I think sometimes you can avoid language labs as an upperclassman if you're an alchemist or artificer and you rack up enough credits. But at least spell-competence doesn't have to be fluency."

"Yeah. And at least it's not all languages. What classes do you like."

"I like math and lab and chemistry best. The history classes are okay too, they'd be great if they didn't have lectures but the lectures are pretty soporific."

"My and Bella's history study group was discussing a scheme to convince the school to let students design better lectures, as a class of its own."

"Oh, I like that idea. Though it'd wind up being a very small class, it's not the sort of thing you'd be able to straightforwardly cheat on without wrecking the lectures for the next bunch of students, it'd all be valedictorian track kids."

"Yeah, true. And presumably if the curriculum were editable then it'd be more survival-focused and so there's some reason it's stuck the way it is."

"It does update, my lab recipe had a brand name it wanted for the chalk that I'm pretty sure was not around a hundred years ago. Though I guess maybe the brand was and it's just the packaging is more neon now."

"Your lab assignment wanted chalk? I just had to stir some soap."

"Mine was more complicated than soap but it wasn't that complicated and most of the complication was the incanting not the mixture. Was the chalk an ingredient?"

"No, it was for the array..."

"You got an alchemical array in week one?"

"I assume it's in-affinity somehow but I don't actually know my affinity - the potion was an antitoxin, I don't think my affinity is antitoxins -"

"Huh!! Do you have even, like, a ballpark sense of your affinity -"

"I'm pretty sure it's in alchemy somewhere, and this supports that? But I don't know exactly."

"What do you get when you ask the Void for standard stuff - ward for your room, tripwire, poison detection -"

"I had room wards already that my dad taught me so I didn't ask for those. I asked for a danger divination, when I heard about the murders, because I would really rather not be murdered, all things considered, and it didn't seem exceptional? It's in Portuguese and it's two verses and it's kind of expensive but it's good for if I hear a weird noise when I'm about to leave a room or something. My poison detection's a recipe and I'm going to make it next week since I finished my assignment this week, it wants apple seeds and butterfly pea flowers arranged in a mandala around the burner but the ingredients are actually just saltwater and vinegar."

"So, another array."

"I think array is a technical term and the apple seed thing isn't."

"Okay, but your affinity might not care what sets of things do and don't have technical terms."

Annisa has no idea what makes something technically an array. "Or you might have one like mine that gets less useful the farther you get from its core, but is still reasonably useful on things that are kind of edge cases."

"What's yours?"

"Weapons. Most strongly favors sharp things I hold and actively use to stab or shoot enemies, but it was moderately cooperative with, like, sticks, if I used them for sparring, and I find tripwires that deliver a bit of a bite cheaper than ones that just warn me."

"Oh, that's a good one. I guess mine could be arrays and stuff like arrays."

"What...is an array." Probably it's not embarrassing to not know things that obviously aren't your specialty.

"Arrays are the kind where you draw a path for the mana to take toward your alchemical reaction from the outside. The thing with the apple seeds doesn't need a drawn path, everything being placed correctly is all you need."

"Huh." Annisa can't think of anything else to put in an essay on lye-flies but this isn't a 'you have enough extra credit to skip the final' kind of essay. "Do either of you have a mal studies textbook in English?"

"Portuguese, sorry."

Bella pulls hers from her desk and hands it over.

"Thank you. If, as I've heard speculation of, there's some slight variation and you can get extra credit for mentioning anything that's from a version other than yours, I will tell you any interesting divergences between the Javanese and the English."

The divergences turn out to be mostly incredibly slight aside from the section about recommended spells for handling them, but it's good for a couple of additional paragraphs.

"I know, I've wanted to swap with someone for that reason but I can't find any of the Chinese people I've met in a crowd reliably and people who've natively got French or Spanish you can't really tell by looking."

"I think Julian's got a Chinese one and would swap you. ...Cantonese, though."

"The writing's actually identical, modulo traditional versus simplified characters! Or if there are written dialect differences they probably don't make it into academic writing. I should ask him about it."

"I thought it'd be kind of pointless being in a study group with someone going for valedictorian but actually conveniently 'I'm trying to skip the final' and 'I'm trying to have ridiculously good grades' dovetail fine."

"My mom said I'm not allowed to try to be valedictorian."

Why would one's mother have to tell one that they're not allowed to do something rather than that it isn't the best way to stay alive. "Do you like getting good grades? Doing that and then skipping finals is a perfectly legitimate strategy."

"Yeah, that's what I'm going to do instead. I was supposed to try for C's in school to get used to it since I cared too much about getting good grades when I was little except then I kept getting them by not doing any homework and they didn't think that was a good habit and they hadn't picked another strategy by the time I inducted."

"What does - caring too much about getting good grades - feel like, like, do you just inherently feel more pleased about having an A written on your paper? Would you even if the score for the best work was a C? If grades were explicitly assigned for quality given time investment would you feel just as pleased about having the highest score at quality given time investment?"

"Uh, if the letters changed I would have wanted whichever one meant it was the best work, I liked my teachers being impressed with me and they were mundies and so when I got Cs they gave me sad looks and told me I had so much potential. But if they graded you on being fast for homework as well as some tests I guess I would have treated it all like a timed test? That's sort of what I'm trying to do now, I have a schedule and I just do algebra for half an hour as fast as I can."

"Oh, clever." Annisa's motivation system is shaped extremely differently than that!

"It seems to be working so far!" He has been intermittently been doing steps in algebra problems through this conversation.