It takes some doing, but not much, to convince the Dubai freshmen to split from the enclave for dinner. Since none of them, unfortunately, have Mandarin, Ghassan ends up leading the three other Dubai freshmen over to...this table.

"Mind if we join you?"

A couple of the folks at the table glance over at Dubai's table to make sure that they didn't just get kicked out for some reason and are just here to socialize, and then by silent agreement several of the sophomores nod. They then immediately ignore the frosh to resume their quiet conversation about class schedules ahead of choosing them in the morning, with a small and rapt audience. Lysander's need-to-know on the subject of class schedules is adjacent to zero, since he's just going to end up with whatever makes it most convenient for Berlin to write his essays while he does their maintenance shifts, so he's the one who says brightly, "Good evening! Lysander Vedelev," and gestures vaguely around him giving names for the rest of the people at the table. 

The best table that isn't full and will give her the time of day seems to be... the one poison guy is going for, ugh. Come on, Dasha, 'ugh' is not a good reason to spurn useful people. She approaches, catching the end of the round of introductions.

"I'm Daria Chernova, Kiev. Do you have room for another?"

A sophomore distractedly says "oh hey - Kiev - yeah, sure," looking more at the ceiling vent Daria just passed very responsibly not-quite-under than actually at her. 

"Ouch, sucks to be you," says the freshman who was paying the most attention in politics lessons.  

"Sucks to be everyone," Lysander agrees cheerfully. Things suck, obviously, but moping will just make it worse. 

"Excuse me?" she says to the freshman, who clearly did not pay attention to lessons about tact.

"Rest've your people are a year behind! That super sucks!" says the undersocialized politics nerd, undaunted. "I'd be a wreck, I can hardly imagine."  

Lysander smirks, leaning onto the table with a friendly body language toward Daria that says you are invited to this joke and are not the target of it. "Ah, but unlike the daughter of Kiev you are tragically undersupplied with harsh winters to learn emotional resilience from." The faint tinge of a wistful Russian accent suggests a certain degree of personal fondness for the snow. 

The alchemist on his other side elbows him, rolling her eyes fondly. "Vedelev, it is like two degrees colder in Kiev than at home." 

"Hush, you." 

"I'm glad it's me and not you, then." She turns pointedly towards Lysander. "It sounds like you might be from Russia, though?"

Ghassan listens to all of this quietly. The goal here is for the other Dubai freshmen to make a good impression, since they haven't done any socializing of their own. Idiots, who need him to babysit them- and he knows he's not nearly suspicious enough. He's met at least five people who are doing a better job than him at watching for threats. Ghassan takes the opportunity to practice looking out for mals.

"My dad was, yeah," he nods, as the others tune back in to the class schedules discussion a little further down the table. "My mom's German, though, if we'd met speaking Russian I expect you'd have guessed that instead." He has an accent in every language he speaks, and this is the exact opposite of an accident; just-barely-imperfect fluency, a detectable accent to someone smart and observant but not one so obvious it sounds like you were completely slacking off in language lessons, strikes a careful balance of competence with the appearance of trying too hard. 

He glances at the babysit-ees. If they sit there in awkward teenage silence for too long he'll try to chivvy them gently into a conversation with his beloved sheltered nerds, perhaps, but he'll give the lot of them a little longer first to maybe manage to talk to each other without prompting. 

The babysit-ees do look like they'll sit in awkward teenage silence without intervention!

"What other languages have you picked up?"

"I have Ukrainian and Russian native, and then Mandarin and Old Church Slavonic."

Oh no, the tiny awkward children. (He thinks, totally undeterred by the fact that they're mostly bigger than him in several dimensions.) 

"I also speak Mandarin and Turkish and Romanian and French," he answers, cheerfully and with a decorous amount of mild pride. Seven languages is still cool even if he can't write in any of them because he is stupid because writing is the devil. "That's a neat last one, how much did already speaking Ukrainian and Russian help?" 

"I could mostly figure out what prayers and spells meant even before I started formal lessons. The hardest part was learning all the variants, if you pronounce a spell in the Preslav variant the way you would one in the Bulgarian the best result is that it just fails to work."

"Neat!" Fascinated nod. "I imagine that'd be great practice for those comparative language seminars I hear people get sometimes. I wonder if anyone keeps statistics on - "

(there's a briefly detectable pause in this sentence as he remembers that he cannot just ask his mom random trivia questions about stuff she's into. it's fine he's fine he's a mature grownup teenager who does not have separation anxiety, no sir)

" - on how many languages on average freshmen come in with and how many they leave with?" 

"Huh! Some enclaves might, sounds like the sort of thing Boston or some of the Chinese enclaves might do. I know we don't. It depends a lot on track, though, averaging across everyone won't get you anything useful if you graduate with six new ones language track and one otherwise."

"We don't keep statistics," Ghassan confirms. He suspects Daria is right; the Chinese enclaves work harder than the Western ones. Like the people from even smaller enclaves work harder, one might say. Something about outperforming the competition. Ghassan is already thinking about exercises to build mana after this. He just wishes he could make the process of eating a bit more effortful.

"Maybe the school itself does," he muses idly, as he starts trying to prod one of his fellow freshmen to socialize more. Nothing. Useless lumps.

"The school does know all the languages we know and which language lessons to give us, but I have no idea how you'd get it to report statistics. Wouldn't be my first priority if I could improve the place." Wow, Dubai is a mess this year. She wouldn't trade Ghassan even if it did gain her some enclavemates in her year.

"Truth. Roughly eight thousand two hundred and fifty-seven higher priorities, and all that. Be kinda cool, though, if it was cheap. Give people a good idea of how many you realistically need." He gazes thoughtfully into the middle distance for a moment, which doubles for buttressing the usual glancing around in search of hazards with a careful focused check. "It must already have some ability to do calculations and spit out results, right, it grades things." 

"If it could report statistics to people outside, we might get somewhere. Maybe New York already gets those numbers from it, and they're holding out."

There we go. His enclavemates are socializing with Berlin's freshmen.

"Manchester's bitter enough about losing the school they'd probably complain if that was the case. I guess New York could be sharing."

"Ha! They could, you're right! Imagine the fallout of it turning out that Manchester is actually way more mad at New York than they let on but had been bribed to pretend otherwise. It'd be so funny, if it managed not to be a disaster." He makes to nudge his politics nerd for input, finds to his delight that she and the others are totally socializing with the Dubai kids, and instead does not do that. 

"Poor Shanghai.

We're not living in a world where good data will save the day, but I guess it's not a bad thing to wish for."

"Even New Yorkers die sometimes." And that's depressing and she doesn't want to think about it, so she pretends to be immersed in her brussel sprouts.

Daria is incredibly valid.

Lysander will just be over here watching for mals and intermittently gazing fondly at his people, trying to confidently believe that small-enclave resources will be enough. They are, of course, his ticket out, but also they're adorable and he wants them to live.