"Beats me, English is my third."

She puts her chair down next to Julian so she can also look at Annisa's comp homework.

"Native for me and I'm not sure. Revenged upon?"

"Ooh, thanks."

She is confused. Isn't Hong Kong part of China? She would have thought Mandarin was his native language.

- huh. Oh, right, Hong Kong something something Britain? "I am revenged upon," she says, slightly Britishly.

Is Annisa making fun of his accent?? Oh god does he sound all British and pompous. 

Oh no, he looks annoyed, she must have done it wrong!

"Huh, I was gonna say that 'venged' sounded better, but somehow in a sentence they both sound fine," says Naima, without looking up from her textbook. " - hey Malak, do you want to split the comprehension questions for magical conflicts down the middle and each do half, they're probably not important."

"Yeah, sounds great. We should review each other's answers though, probably some obscure bit of it's going to be on the final for ridiculous points, it's how the school likes to do history classes. How sure are you on your spellings of all those names from the lecture?"

"Not very, names are spelled weird a lot of the time. Maybe they're also somewhere in the textbook?"

"Yeah, but I couldn't find them in the index - could just be that the spelling is really weird - I guess we'll just have to go through the chapter carefully and hunt for them."

Annisa should probably work on her comp homework before she reads ahead in metallurgy, a class she is not in fact taking, but she offered it to Julian, so her hands are tied, she'll just have to read about metallurgy. She does this, pinching her fingers so they'll hurt too much for her to get fully engrossed.

Naima hunts through the text looking for things that are capitalized. She can go back and read the full text later, if it turns out she has time for that and doesn't need her weekend for something else, which she'd better not count on. Whenever she finds a name she jots it down and checks whether it matches any of the spellings in her lecture notes.

Julian feels no such compunctions about getting engrossed in Annisa's comp assignment. There's nothing in the world as satisfying as correcting bad prosody, it's like scratching an itch. 

After a while he looks up and says, a bit sheepishly – "I'm sorry, I seem to be, ah, doing your homework." 

" - OK I think I found one but I am very upset about how it's spelled, here, look - " the name is 'Clausewitz' " - I think the lecture said he was Russian, so I guess Russian transliterates into English kind of absurdly?"

"Isn't it a fun assignment? I got it and then I almost forgot to watch my back for two hours, it just - wants to be set right, and - I shouldn't be declaring my favorite classes after I've had two of them but I think I'm going to find comp really enjoyable." She neatly avoids specifying what she will pay him for doing her homework. He looks too straight-laced and sheepish to accept pay in kisses and anyway Malak will think less of her - no, that'd be stupid of Malak. Malak will think something of her, though. Is there something else in the category 'costless to give, appealing' -

Julian understands that this is an inherently awkward situation and he doesn't want to leave the debt hanging over Annisa's head. "I'd rather, uh, hang onto this, in case we have the same assignment in my section." There. Not perfectly graceful, but it gets the job done.  

"Ah, yep, okay, that's this guy - and I think 'Durkheim' must be this one?"

"Yeah, all right. I had some notes in progress and I'll want those back, but you can finish it first, if you're on a roll." 

"Oh, yeah, of course. I'll just copy over what I've got, I'm almost done." 

"I got 'Sharp' right, anyway - oh, can I see the comp sheet? I don't have the class, but I'm curious what you did with it."

"Here you go!" 

She takes it and looks it over, then reads it over again, chewing her lip. " - oh huh! You're right, that's much better."

Julian knows what he's good at, but it does feel nice to hear Naima say it. 

Malak should do her own comp homework, especially since she might be tracking in it. She will not look.

"Now I'm curious." And she cranes her head, but only a little, so he can easily enough pull it away and tell her that'd still be doing her homework, if he wants to be a stickler about it, but her read is that actually he wants to show off.