The girl who is staring at Luna obviously speaks English and Mandarin both, judging by the way her eyes had lingered on everyone nearby when she was looking around for someone to talk to, instead of passing quickly over groups speaking the wrong language. Luna speaks both, but she chooses her native language to start in. Your first conversation with someone should always be in one of your native languages, so that your native language knows you're still fond of it, even though you've been flattering all your other languages so they'll let you learn them faster.

"The dance is to calm the wallwockles," Luna informs the girl. "It's a good way to build mana, too."

British accent, native-sounding but that doesn't say much. That might be a local name? If it's something obscure there's no point in dancing in the cafeteria about it on the first day of school. "I don't think I've heard of them."

"They live in the walls in buildings built into the void. And the ceilings, I think," she adds, glancing up as if to check. "When they get overexcited they like to change the building a bit. And I'd expect that right now is a very exciting time, since there are all these new people who the wallwockles here haven't met before."

That sounds a little like a voyda but if one of those is nearby right after the school cleansing she doesn't think it's going to be kept away by one freshman girl dancing. Probably nothing new showed up between the last Kiev cluster and now? No one else she can see is dancing like the colorful girl, or visibly casting, so she doesn't think she's missed something important. "Well, looks like it's working," with a half-laugh in case the girl's having her on somehow.

Luna smiles back. "So far, at least! And I've filled a couple of beads." Her beaded belt indeed has a few particularly shiny beads. "My belt likes it when I dance. It's a good mana belt and it's doing a very good job at holding my pants up while I work on growing into them," she says, petting her belt fondly.

She blinks. You usually need to sweet-talk books like that, or sometimes something enchanted you don't want to risk going bad, but anything that can hold mana likes you fine already. "That's good," she says, entirely on reflex.

"It is! It's a good friend," she says cheerfully. "I'm not very good at being friends with people but I'm good at being friends with things."

Why would you say that. What possible purpose does this serve. "That's good," she say again, and then fights the urge to bury her face in her hands at the inanity.

"It's all right," Luna shrugs. "How about you?"

"Oh. Uh, Daria Chernova, Kiev," and then she wants to hide again because that was not an invitation to introduce herself, was it. "I'm pretty good at wards, I guess that's kind of like making things like me." There, good, she took the conversational hook even though this girl is thoroughly throwing all of her scripts off.

"I'm Luna Lovegood, from Devon. And, I'd never thought about it that way before! Maybe I should make friends with the wards I know. Especially the ones I put on my room, those seem extra important."

"It helps to reinforce the perimeter, if you go over them carefully each night." Oh no, that's incredibly inane too, can this conversation please go back to normal so that she isn't regurgitating the concept of her first lesson on wards on her.

"Hmm, periodic reinforcement does seem like something wards would like!" Her eyes brighten. "I wonder what other sorts of things wards like. Everything likes to be complimented, of course, and languages like when you speak them, but incantations don't like to be repeated too often... I guess reinforcing a ward isn't quite the same as repetition, sort of like how adding more clouds to a painting isn't the same as painting a new sky."

Luna either knows way more about magic than her or is just straight up making things up out of whole cloth. 'Incantations don't like to be repeated too often' just doesn't make sense, she's never heard of that before. Maybe she's testing if she's gullible enough to fall for it??? "I've never heard of incantations that get worse if you use them a lot."

"Oh, they don't get worse, they would just rather you didn't," Luna explains seriously. "They usually don't like to feel overused. Of course it depends on the incantation, some of them are more shy than others."

Blink. "I know we talk like they are sometimes, but I don't think my wards are sentient."

"Well, I guess they might not think the same as people, but that doesn't mean they don't think at all."

"I guess it's clearly responding to something, but that's not the same thing as thinking." What is up with this girl.

"How do you know it doesn't?" Luna responds, unperturbed. "You just might not have noticed. People often don't notice things that don't fit with how they think the world must be. Like with mundanes, and magic."

"Well, the spells I do don't seem to be reacting in complicated ways. If I do my ward right it works, if I don't it doesn't, there isn't really a lot of freedom for it to be deciding how it's going to respond to things."

"It could just be that you didn't notice it having more complicated reactions because you weren't expecting it to."

"I mean, if my wards make mals whisper in Sanskrit if they decide they don't like my shirt that isn't something I would necessarily know to watch out for, but it also doesn't really seem likely? Mostly wards do about what you expect and when they do weird things it's usually consistently weird, same reaction when you mess up in the same way."

"Well, I haven't heard of a ward making mals whisper in Sanskrit because it doesn't like your shirt. But I wouldn't be so quick to say it doesn't happen. Once I was casting a freshening spell on some cut flowers and the incantation wouldn't work because it thought I wasn't fresh enough myself, so I went and showered and after that it worked."

"Spells have all sorts of arbitrary-seeming criteria, that's not the thing I meant. It's - so if you respond the exact same way to the same inputs, each time, you're basically just a fancy computer? Something that's thinking will maybe not work if you haven't had a shower if it's had whatever the spell equivalent of a bad day is and wants to express that it's annoyed at you, and spells don't do that. And it's not like there's nothing that works like that, right, if you want to say that spellbooks are sentient that seems about right, honestly."

"If something is like a computer that doesn't mean it doesn't think, how do you know that computers don't think? And spells do do that, sometimes, you just might not have noticed. Lots of people don't. But just because humans aren't very good at seeing something doesn't mean it's not there."

"I guess if you want to say a spell thinks the same amount a computer thinks that seems fair, but I don't think computers are complicated enough to think." That's a dumb argument, wow. "Theoretically my spells could be doing something weird out of sight of me and also everyone else, but that seems less likely than them just not, because that would mean that everyone has been missing all of that weird stuff that spells are doing for thousands of years" That's maybe a slightly less dumb argument?

"Oh, not everyone, just most people. Some of the people who write for my daddy's paper have noticed things that their incantations like or dislike. That's how I learned they usually don't like to be repeated too much, there was one lady who overused a heating spell and the spell got upset and set fire to her bed."

"- well, that sure seems like getting worse!"

"Hmm, I guess so? It did still work as a heating spell, it's not that it stopped working at all."

Theory 'one of us is fatally underinformed' is rapidly losing ground to 'this girl is only loosely in contact with other people's reality'. "That seems, uh, worse at accomplishing your goals. Which usually do not include arson as a solution to bad weather."

She chuckles. "That would be an unusual goal! But overusing a heating spell would work well if that were your goal. So I suppose everything really depends on what you consider better or worse."

"Usually your goals include consistency, though."

"Well, it is more convenient and predictable if spells work very consistently, I suppose. But it's more interesting when they don't. And I'm sure there are some situations where it's useful for them not to."

More interesting - okay, Dasha's done figuring out what's up with Luna, she should be talking to people who seem more, not less, likely to help her make it to sophomore year if she spends time around them. "I suppose there might be."

Luna gazes vaguely into the distance. "I wonder if our spells miss us when we die."

Nope. Nope nope nope she's done trying not to be rude. "It was good to meet you," she says, turning away.

"You too!" Luna says pleasantly, and resumes her dance.