"Maybe. Oooh, you know what I should do once I have enough reputation for it, I should go to hospitals and try to diagnose people."

"Like Dr. House?"

"I haven't seen that show but my understanding is that yes, quite a bit like Dr. House."

"That would be cool."

"Yeah, I like that idea. Thanks for helping me speculate!" The gel is steadily doing its thing; they seem to have gotten a Sample 1 and a Sample 3 that match, and a Sample 2 and a Sample 5 that match. She writes this in her lab notebook.

Her labmate copies off her pretty blatantly.

That is between him and his own interest or lack thereof in learning the material. Especially since he's still catching up from being absent. She'll leave her notebook open as long as he needs it, and offer to answer questions if he doesn't understand some bit of what he's copying.

"Oh - yeah, what's this abbreviation stand for -"

"It's the thing where you replicate the DNA a bunch, let me check . . . " flip flip flip "polymerase chain reaction, because the polymerase is what replicates it and then chain reaction because the replicas get replicated a bunch."

"...okay."

If he's about done, she'll pack up her notebook and head to the next class.

He's not about to stop her.

Class happens. Lunch approaches rapidly. She sits in the same place she did yesterday.

Sumiko sits with her. Larissa arrives a little later and doesn't say hi but does nod at her.

"Hi Sumiko! How've you been?" Margaret nods back at Larissa when she arrives.

"I've been good but American History's kicking my butt," says Sumiko.

"I had that last year, those reading assignments were endless. Interesting, but endless."

"And there's so many dates and so many people named John."

"Dates are always the hardest for me, there's no way to rederive them from partial information if you forget. Like in math you can sometimes jog your memory by working off some related thing, but dates there's no hope."

"...I can't do that in math," says Larissa.

Larissa said something in response to something she said, help.

"You sort of have to know the trick to it? Like, take note of what things are related to what other things, so if you're blanking on something you know where in your memory to look? I'd offer to give an example but you're a year ahead of me, I don't know what stuff you're learning."

Larissa shrugs.

"I guess you're good at math, huh," says Sumiko.

"It's one of my better subjects, yeah. I wanted to be an engineer before I got magic, I might still go for that instead of anything magic-centered."

"Lots of girls do," nods Sumiko.

"I did have an idea earlier; if I get better control of my precognition I could maybe use it for medial diagnosis. But that's more of a hospital volunteering thing than a real career path, I don't think I'm cut out for medicine."