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Bella attends her classes with faultless punctuality, every time. She sits in the second or third row on an aisle in the middle section of seats, in the classes that take place in big auditorium lecture halls like the main section of Bio; she's willing to put herself closer to the professors in smaller classes like OS and of course her flute chair (third; she hasn't been quite ridiculously showoffy enough to climb beyond yet) is assigned. But right now, she is in Bio, learning tidbits about auxin and tropisms that the textbook didn't cover fully. She's running at about one and a half speed, just enough that she can trivially listen to and process the lecture against her memory of the text while also permitting some mind-wandering. She liiiiiikes her cognitive speedup power.
There's a new student in the class today. Older, with glasses, dressed for comfort over fashion. She sits two down the row from Bella, with an empty seat between them, and she takes sparse but thoughtful notes.
She doesn't know who this new person is. Maybe she was sick a lot before, or just not very punctual, or she only just added the class? Hm.
A little more than halfway through the class she leans forward, tilts her head, then sits back with a slight frown. Her pen taps against her latest page of notes; she scribbles something down and then quickly returns her attention to the lecture.
Bella's wondering if there's any point to adding some kind of plant-related superpower. It's not really like she plans to take up gardening, but it could be a nice symbolic thing to grow a vegetable to be the size of a house or something, after she's taken over the world sufficiently to make public appearances and wants to roll out programs to end world hunger or something. She notes the other student's behavior with a small fraction of brain.
"Excuse me," she says. "Do you remember what the professor said about sufficient concentrations of auxins?"
"Uh, yes," Bella says, and she repeats back a simplified paraphrase - she's not "out" as having an eidetic memory like Alice is. "It's weird that they generate their own herbicides. Although I guess there's probably stuff in human bodies that would kill us if you dumped a bucket of it on our heads."
"Plenty," she agrees, smiling. "The human body is a complicated and delicate machine. It's possible to have a fatal overdose of anything from chocolate to water. Thanks, by the way. I'm Bridget. I make it a policy to have at least one friend in every class; would you like to be my Biology friend?"
"Sure," says Bella. She likes this person, on the basis of a couple sentences. "What is the fatal dose of chocolate? Approximately? It seems like that might be important to know."
"The LD50 of caffeine in humans is estimated to be between 150 and 200 milligrams per kilogram," she says. "How much chocolate that adds up to depends on what kind of chocolate and who's eating it."
"I suppose it's probably not something that happens from eating cake, or there would be news stories about it," Bella says. "I don't think I've seen you in this class before. Did you just transfer in?"
"It would probably take more chocolate than your stomach could physically hold, unless you went for the really, really dark stuff. I just started auditing," she explains.
"How come?" Bella asks, putting her notebook away into her bag.
"Oh, a long time ago I got half a degree in medicine. I'm thinking of getting the other half."
"Isn't medicine graduate-level?" Bella asks. "Why would you be in first year bio, learning about plants?"
"I got an entire degree in physics in between. I'm thinking I probably forgot a few things."
"Huh." This isn't how Bella would do it, but Bella's already pretty used to remembering everything that's ever happened to her. "Okay. What does being your Bio Friend involve, anyway?"
"Exchanging email addresses, studying together? I'd say 'being go-to assignment partners where applicable', but—auditing."
"Are you even planning to show up to the lab sections?" Bella asks, reaching into her bag to tear out a blank notebook page and write her school-assigned email on it.
Bella tears the paper in half and hands over her address. "What's your email, then?"
Bridget snags the other half of that page and writes her own email address on it—personal, not school-assigned. Apparently her chosen username is 'supersymmetric'.
"Cool. It might be hard to schedule study time with me outside of class, though. I have a lot on my plate," Bella says, tucking the paper away.
"Orchestra, soccer, other classes," Bella says. "Personal projects. Occasionally, I squeeze in leisure time."
"That does sound like a lot. Maybe I'll need a backup friend," she muses.