She nods. "I'm planning to let her know you're my apprentices this evening. I'm unsure when she'll be free to meet, though."

"It sounds like we'll be busy, anyway."

"That's my plan, at least to start. Still, we'll have at least one full break a week, and possibly some other field trips in there - it's good to mix these things up."

She nods.

"Do you two have any questions before I let you go for the night?"

"Are there any books we shouldn't read?"

"None in the library. Don't copy experiments or arrays out of books without asking me first, since some of them are poorly documented or dangerous. My private notes are kept in my room, which is kept locked."

"All right."

"You have a lot of really sensible rules," she says, sounding kind of like she's pouting.

"Good. If any of them seem like they aren't sensible, feel free to tell me."

"Sure."

"Bellona's not used to adults being this reasonable."

"Usually they only have dumb rules."

"Most people don't have very good memories, so they don't remember being young," she says. "And I generally try to be more sensible than typical."

"You're doing a good job with it."

"Thank you."

And after dinner they can look at books! What's the organizational scheme like?

By subject, and by author within subject. Nonfiction books are separated clearly from the few fiction books, which are organized similarly. Subjects are grouped into higher level subjects like 'science' or 'history', with the ones Akira uses more often (Science, Applied Science, and Language Reference) closest to the door. Science is divided into formal (math, logic), natural (chemistry, biology, physics, earth science, astronomy and cosmology), and social (sociology and psychology; she seems to have stuck anthropology and such elsewhere). Applied Science consists mostly of medical and alchemical texts, with a few engineering and forensic texts crammed in there. Language Reference is mostly dictionaries and grammars of a tremendous variety of languages. There's also cultural studies, history, philosophy, art, law, politics, and a very small number of literature books over by the fiction.

Not all of the titles - in fact, many of them aren't - are in a language they can read.

The same foreign language or different ones?

An assortment of different ones - though the vast, vast majority of foreign texts are in one of five languages, and the bulk of the foreign language ones are in two other languages.

She spends the rest of the evening cataloging the language resources available.

There are actually a good number of language learning resources, though they're separate from the references, presumably because Akira uses them less. These include careful and meticulous notes from when Akira herself was learning the languages; she seems to know quite a lot.

Bellona, meanwhile, discovers cool facts about the composition and nature of stars! She does not disrupt El with these cool facts during library time but does chatter about them as the two are getting ready for bed.

Those are some pretty cool facts. Galactic domination is one step closer.

Yes! They need to learn more before they're using entire suns as ingredients in or parts of an array, of course. Probably conquer this world as a home base to operate from...

They'll need, at minimum, a big enough place to draw the array.