"Despite my prospective career as a teacher."

"Languages, right? Huh, you're probably pre-Stark standardization."

"...Stark like Howard Stark?"

"Huh? No, it's a language. Also called IF Common or just Common, Stark is Star Common or something like that and fewer syllables so it sticks. It's like a cross between English and Esperanto with all the life sucked out of it. Easy to learn, very regular, pretty easy to understand even through an accent, international standard."

"Ah. Yep, definitely before that."

"Ostensibly we all speak Stark in space but there's a lot of space-specific slang from every which where more or less mangled, and they also don't bother to translate all our reading assignments when they start out in English. Lucky me I was born in America."

"Lucky you."

"Then again, means I'm not proper bilingual, I just have snips of this and that. Point of Stark is so we don't have to also learn Russian and whatnot."

"Russian actually is one of the languages I know, but I definitely wouldn't have wanted to learn it the hard way."

"I can have a real simple conversation in Russian, Dutch, Chinese, and Arabic, but I mean real simple, listening to my launch group talk to people they shared languages with and picking up words simple."

"Sure. I could swear in Russian before I downloaded the whole thing."

"Oh, I can swear in everything. Battle School kids swear a lot."

"I had an uncle who delighted in teaching me swear words behind Dad's back."

Hee hee.

"I wonder if he's in here..." flip flip. Any mention of Azazel?

He's in the index with a further reading suggestion but doesn't have an actual paragraph.

She's not sure she really wants to know, anyway, considering which side he would have been on. She does not request the book.

"Do you even know anyone who isn't a mutant?"

"Most of the people I go to college with aren't. Growing up...not so much. Well, there was Ms. MacTaggert."

"Mm?"

"Oh, she's a friend of the Professor's. Moira MacTaggert. Used to work at the CIA with Dr. McCoy, that's the resident genius, left not long after the fight I mentioned."

"Ah. Must be interesting having so many mutants around in one place. I don't think I'd met any besides the telepaths I shrugged off when I was yea high," she gestures, "till I went to space."

"Well, I grew up in a boarding school for them. For us. It seems strange not to but I'm well aware I'm biased."

"Renée - my mom - wouldn't hear of putting me anywhere but in her own kindergarten class. I think there are still mutant schools, but I wouldn't have fit in especially well in one anyway, I don't do anything."

"True. Not everyone does something that has an active effect at the Xavier Institute, though. And--sometimes when I mention I went to boarding school people are surprised that someone like I tend to describe my dad would send me away and I have to explain, no, he teaches there."