Well, right now he's distracted by the reminder that he might well not figure out how to do anything useful before graduation, which would seriously limit his ability to do anything useful after it. Keeps your mind off the little things. 

"I, uh, – did you know the Shanghai enclave has a monorail inside it?" 

" - wow, no, I did not, how many people do you need to have before having a monorail makes sense?"

"I don't think it needs to make sense, it just needs to show they can – the Shanghai Dominus, his affinity is large-scale constructs." Like me, I fervently hope. "It was really nothing before he came back home. I'd give anything to know how it works."

And, oh, the paper on his desk looks different.  

Oh hey is hers different too?

" - aw, nuts, it gave me exactly what I wanted and then replaced the death shop with Intro to Economics, in Mandarin. Probably getting back at me for trying to get out of language lab. Oh well. I can probably follow along."

"Why were you trying to get out of language lab - I have a lot of it, is it bad -"

He's not going to offer to give her Mandarin coaching because that's just a bridge too far. Even if it wouldn't cost him anything, really. He needs to concentrate on his own schoolwork every minute he can so he can make valedictorian and impress everyone and get a good alliance and live – 

"It won't be so bad," he says in Mandarin. "We can speak it and you'll get better." 

"Well, I'll probably train up quickly then," she tells him, in Mandarin.

Then she turns to Rebecca. "No, no, any normal person should take it, it's just I already have eight languages, and I should get language credit for every class because my native language is Arabic. I just want to load up on things that might have more spells. You're doing the right thing."

"Is that our schedules set, then? Because I'm starving." 

"Yeah, I think we're set! Do you have anyone to eat breakfast with? I was gonna see if I could find the girl from Istanbul I met yesterday, she seemed really cool."

He should really try to leverage his in with Shanghai, but he's done about 15 minutes of bodyguard duty and he'd be stupid to assume that comes with an automatic invitation to sit at the grown-ups' table. 

"I don't have a better plan." 

"Cool! If we hurry they should still have at least something resembling actual food," she says, and then it occurs to her that this isn't that clever of a thing to say because actually all of the food only resembles food.

Whatever. She's out.

Okay time to go then apparently!

Bobbie finalizes her schedule and jogs back to 222.