"If this isn't a good time I can come back later. I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm Ribo."

Oh, phew, not an emergency. That's way better. 

"Hi Ribo! I'm Marian, the new school nurse. This is Wen Qing. She's a student here and she's apprenticing with me." 

"It's good to meet you both." She repeats herself in Mandarin.

"I speak the English."

Oops, it was interrupted as patronizing not polite. "I'll stick to that then, unless Marian speaks both. What led you to seek out this apprenticeship?"

"I have a healing affinity. I want to learn to use it better."

"That sounds useful. Do you happen to know Lojban?"

"Is that... an indigenous language?"

"It's a constructed language. Some mundanes made it up from scratch. My mother composes most of her spells in it."

"...Oh, right, it's that one! I have heard of that, I think. It's - not Esperanto, that's a language people made up specifically to be really really easy to learn, except it didn't catch on because - I don't know, just turns out it's more complicated than that I guess. Lojban is...the one based on logic, like, programming style? Sorry, I don't actually know very much programming. Although now I'm wondering if you could theoretically get spells in, like, Python." 

Aaaaand oops now she's rambling again and probably making no sense whatsoever to Wen Qing. 

"Yep, you remembered correctly. Most programming languages are basically English with different grammar. I don't think that would work for spells but someone might be able to make it work. The reason I was asking, and part of the reason I came to talk with you is that Mother taught me a class of diagnostic spells and also some minor biomancy and I thought that might be helpful. You don't exactly have an MRI machine or a full lab for blood tests."

"That's a lot to know for someone as young as you."

"Is it? I don't have a good sense for how much it's normal to know."

"- I think you can end up knowing a lot of random stuff if you're the sort of kid who reads Wikipedia and random physics textbooks for fun? ...Uh, Ribo, I'm guessing your education was more specific than that, though. Probably elementary school stuff is way less, uh, bullshit for wizards than it is for mundanes." 

"I wouldn't really know, this is the first school I've been to."

"Were you, like, homeschooled?" Marian glances at Wen Qing. "...Come to think of it, I have no idea what your schooling was like either. What do wizard kids normally do, before they arrive at the Scholomance?" 

"I was, Mother taught me most of what I know, the rest is things I picked up from the internet in my spare time."

"The adult wizards in our enclave taught us what we'd need to know."

This is probably an incredibly awkward question, but - 

"Did they, uh, miss anything important? I mean, was there anything you ended up wishing that you'd learned as a kid, that you found out once you were in here?"

"The biology?"

"...Oh, right - like, all the medical related biology? Uh, do you think they should've taught everyone more of that, or is it just specifically useful for you?" 

"I think my education was well-rounded otherwise? I learned the poetry, the Chinese classics, the languages, the math, the history, the magical theory, the qin playing, the Go, the calligraphy, the painting..."

....Marian feels like she kind of lost the plot somewhere in the middle of all that. 

"Uh, have you - ever actually used your...painting or calligraphy or - whatever 'qin playing' is - in here?" 

"There aren't any qin in here, but I've used the painting and the calligraphy to keep the spellbooks happy. If you don't keep them happy they'll wander off. They're also the good ways of building the mana."

"...Huh. They come alive too, I guess? - Uh, what does 'building mana' mean?"