Oh, god, someone is talking to him. That's probably a good thing? Maybe he looks like a useful potential ally. Or maybe he just seems really pathetic and unthreatening. Either way, her accent is terrible, which stupidly helps him feel a little more confident. 

"Julian." And then, with just a hint of a British accent – "We can speak English if you prefer." 

"Oh good, we'll be able to actually talk later," she says, also in English.

"I thought we were talking right now." 

And then back to Mandarin. "I'm - trying to build mana right now. And also talk. I can read fine, it's just - I need more practice talking. I'm from Cairo, what - uh, what about you?"

"Oh, I see! I'm from Hong Kong." He speaks slowly, exaggerating the tones. "City, not enclave. Reading's the hard part, if you've got the characters down you're already in great shape." 

"Yeah, that's what I hear. It's just that to practice talking you have to talk to people, and talking to people is - uh - horrible. - not you specifically. In general." God this is awful. "Also nobody in Cairo speaks Mandarin anyway."

"What made you decide to pick it up?" 

"Half the classes are in it." Does that come off as sounding like she thinks it's a stupid question. She can barely keep track of that in Arabic, she's gonna be totally lost on that front in Mandarin.

"Right, that's a dumb question." Okay okay okay how can he salvage this – "I mean, I think the content is probably substantially similar. I'm going to try and take half my classes in each if I can so I can learn if there are any systemic differences." 

"I just thought something might be full at some point. And - there are probably a lot of spells in Mandarin, I don't want to be unable to read all of them."

"I guess there are some? Like, modern ones. Mostly we get stuff in Classical Chinese." 

She blinks.

She is an idiot. She could have learned that before and now it's too late.

"I guess that makes sense."

"The writing system is the same, of course, so it's not so bad if you want to learn – are you languages track?" 

"I don't know yet. I have eight, but I'm - interested in alchemy and I'm good at clothing, too. My affinity is healing. Do you know what yours is?"

Ughhhhhh this conversation. "Extra-dimension spaces. So, enclave magic." 

" - wow, really?" Why would it not be really, that's an idiotic thing to say.

"Yep! My parents had to take me to a diviner to figure it out, since we're independent." 

"That's amazing. I don't know - what it's good for in here, though, exactly, you probably have to be pretty powerful to make use of that."

"I probably won't be able to do anything with it until after I graduate. So – I just have to be really good at everything else. So I can graduate." He shrugs, like it's simple as that. 

"Makes sense. Do you know what track you're doing yet?"

"Artificing or spell-writing, probably. But I do like learning languages – what are yours?" 

She counts off on her fingers. "Arabic, English, Mandarin, French, Persian, Latin, Coptic, Middle Egyptian." Doesn't actually know how to say all of those in Mandarin but that's fine, probably.

"Wow, Middle Egyptian! That's a good one. I don't think anyone else will have that and they probably wrote down lots of spells. Do you know anything about their magic? I only have Cantonese and English and Classical Chinese and Mandarin and German and French and Sanskrit, myself." 

"Ooh, Sanskrit probably has good stuff. Yeah, I picked it up because - a lot of the kids who are interested in ancient spells aren't going to have thought of it early enough, half of them are probably as clueless about Egypt as I am about China. Apparently. But the wizard community there is ancient, I'm sure they must have written some powerful spells. I know a long time ago they had a good protection system for young wizards - probably not as good as here, but better than what most enclaves have otherwise, I think - except eventually it broke down. Of course. But maybe I'll find something out about it and can try translating any relevant spells into something you speak."

Oh, he likes her. "I would love that! That's sort of why I picked up Sanskrit, actually. The oldest enclaves are in India, and I figured they must have something – that's what I want to do when I can actually use my affinity. Figure out how to make enclaves bigger and cheaper and safer."