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. 

Ghassan doesn't find this topic of conversation particularly sad; the fact that most of the people in this school will die is the background radiation of all of their lives, and speculating about the habits of the big enclaves and how they might be cheating them is a fine way to spend dinner.

Eventually, though: "Did you mention your affinity, Lysander? -Ghassan Al-Maroun, I don't think I've said. Mine is- sometimes inconvenient; poisons."

"Oh, poisons, what fun," he says, before he remembers that actually this is terrible because this is real life and not a video game or a training exercise and the vast majority of the easy practical applications of poisons in the Scholomance are, you know, murder.

"...I'm sure you'll be able to find lots of ways to use it usefully, that's what we're here for, right." he adds, mildly apologetically. I am not accusing you of being a murderer, promise. "Mine's hard to immediately summarize," because he's not actually entirely sure of this, they spent too much money bribing medical professionals to pay a real diviner, "but basically, it's like, little fiddly things? I can cast mend-and-make on things too small to see properly with the unaided eye, I'm good at fixing modern electronics, I don't lose track of even large numbers of very small things until they actually leave my line of sight, that sort of thing." 

This perhaps explains why the scythe-like blade of the sharp side of the hammer on his to-be-filled tool belt has a series of variously sized holes punched in it, fitted with magnifying lenses. Daria might be the only one in this conversation who has a good view of it right now that's not blocked by the surface of the table, although it's not like he hasn't been carrying it around all day. 

"That's an interesting one! It sometimes feel like mine's a little like that, my wards turn out better the more details I work into the anchor." She gestures at her elaborately embroidered sleeves.

"That does sound useful," he says, managing to sound mildly impressed rather than insanely envious.

"I wonder if you could design traps- I have a paralytic that works on mals. We should collaborate on something."

"Trip-wards with poison sound very useful, I'm in. You'd just need to modify a detection ward..." She's not going to mention in public that it'd be her first ward with any kind of offensive capabilities.

"Ooooh," he says, delightedly admiring the embroidery. It shows off a degree of fine motor control and attention to detail that he has great respect for, and also it's very pretty, which doesn't not matter even if it matters less than not dying.

He's not going to volunteer to be involved in crafting projects, not yet. He's for fixing things after they start working and then, inevitably, subsequently stop. It seems good to have such collaborations maybe happening here, though; a little tiny bit of the social credit perhaps accrues to Berlin, that way. 

"One of my problems historically has been testing my poisons, but if you could set up ward traps that could be triggered without us being in danger, we could expand my portfolio of targets."

"I don't have a huge surplus of materials for experimenting, but I'm definitely interested in theory. - oh, I wonder if my affinity will take the poison as an anchor, or at least part of it."

"We should test it out. I didn't bring any with me to dinner, obviously, but we should talk shop after we have our schedules."

"Let's talk after dinner, I'm down that way in 263A. Unless Dubai has a library room?" Kiev traditionally shares with St. Petersburg and Novgorod, but while she's on her own she doesn't want to push her luck bringing in new people.

"Ah. We," he only glances at the other freshmen before focusing back on Daria, "don't. Dubai has...acquired more slots than it knows what to do with. We're up-and-coming, you see," he says sardonically.

Oh no, they were talking about experimenting with wards and now they're talking about politics(??). Come on, Dasha, you can handle this. "I'm sure you'll establish yourself soon." Was that insulting? She has no idea if that was insulting. He was the one being sarcastic about their abilities, probably he won't be insulted?

Ghassan takes it in stride.

"That is the hope. I'll stop by your room after dinner, then, and we'll work on testing after I decide how much lab work I want to personally put in."

And then that's probably enough talk about poisons for dinnertime. Ghassan will make some small talk which doesn't mean anything- mostly about the food and gossip about Shanghai (a safe topic, as opposed to whatever might be the case with Chicago, though he's wondering about that too).

Small talk! This is a skill he has. He will help.