Jean doesn't take notes, because he checked with the older Parisians at lunch, and they already have a full set of notes for this class. Instead, he fills sheets of paper with sketches, so he'll have something to put on his walls: intricate geometric designs, a landscape, a portrait of his sister.

Ah, to be an enclaver. Not that she'd do that if she were an enclaver.

Julian thinks it's a little bit weird that one of the earliest magical artifices was found at Dunhuang of all places, why would that be, he thought they were all just monks, maybe it's a silk road thing except that would be way too early – but he needs to snap out of it and focus. So he can take good notes. For his group!! 

The class could be worse. It has fairly clear and writeable-down facts to it and there's lots of proper nouns that will be easy to look up later, relatively speaking, and these are important virtues in a history class.

Annisa, it turns out, mostly likes the part of artificing where you build things and is as bored as anyone in a class where you mostly just write things down about them. But it should be an easy enough class to pass. ...and if she turns out to be competent to turn out good artifice already maybe she can trade people extra time in the shop on Friday afternoons when it's safe for their notes on Friday history of artificing. 

Oh man this is actually really interesting? But she's gonna try to take very good notes again and not get super distracted by wondering about other questions about the earliest magical items. She wonders how many ancient things there are that aren't still functional and that the evidence hasn't survived for, though - wouldn't you expect magical clothing to be fairly early and for the textiles to have rotted away - nope, wait, taking notes.

The lecture eventually mentions this! Some spellbooks tentatively are dated to older than the oldest artifice, and they reference some spells for other artifice we no longer know about. Later important dates in artifice can be more confidently placed: there are hundreds of shield-holders attested from within a couple decades of when they were first invented, for instance. Once the idea spread other people figured out how to copy it, and then you couldn't do without. (At that time, wizards mostly didn't live in enclaves, and raids and moderate-scale violence were much more common; forensic evidence suggests that the teens and twenties were deadly for boys but not girls, which suggests violence rather than predation.)

Julian wonders why wizard violence is as sex-differentiated as mundane violence when obviously wizard women are just as capable of slinging spells. Were ancient wizards less culturally distinct from their local mundies? But of course we were able to identify their remains as wizard skeletons in the first place, which suggests at least some separation – 

So there weren't so many mal problems back then, just wizards killing each other. Why are there so many mals now? It's probably something people have studied, but it's not the sort of thing that you can look up EdX lectures on.

This is all deeply boring. Jean moves on to folding some of his geometric-patterned paper into origami. He can decorate his room with swans and stars and squirrels and lotus flowers, and if he folds it using only his left hand then it's tricky enough to build mana.

Bella wishes it had told them what assignment it would be giving them so she could take notes with that in mind. She'll be more efficient with her paper once she knows what sorts of things it's going to throw at them.

You can radiocarbon-date but for mana! It's not in the lecture but it's in the textbook. The lecture has swiftly moved on to describing the fantastical artifice of an ancient palace in Samarkand.

Wizards must have been much more integrated with mundanes before, which makes sense of course mundanes hadn't learned not to believe in magic so casting around them wasn't a problem...

Bella mostly does not consult the textbook except for the index to know how to spell things, though "Samarkand" she can work out on her own. The textbook she can walk out with and the lecture she cannot.

Julian is still on the question of ancient wizard sexism (and what can be gleaned from archeological evidence thereof).  

Well, when the lecture wraps up (homework: read a (translated from Middle Egyptian) ancient account of a battle and list out the probable uses of artifice by both sides, and then check on these reference pages how widespread artifice of that type was at that time and how rare or valuable it would have been) he can discuss it! With his group!!!

"Do you guys wanna meet up again after last class, do the homework together?"

"I hear that's what groups are for. What've you got next, I have language lab."

"Mystical German verse." 

"History of Alchemy. Guess the school is making me do breadth before depth. Healing could really go either way, of course."

"Incantations" She is glad everyone is going along with her 'we are a group' assertion.

"Room for another?" So far practically nobody she'd met already has been in any of her classes and it's easier to stay on task with company.

Paris has old homework assignments but they might not have this specific one, and anyway they're usually only B and C papers and he'd like to have more slack than that for later in the semester.

"Anyone who wants to write mine can sit with Paris in the library to do it," Jean announces to the room at large.

Well, you can't say no to an enclaver who wants to join your study group, but you also can't just say yes to anyone who asks - and she's not sure if Bella is an enclaver or not - and anyways to invite someone to your study group you need the rest of the group to agree and there's not really a good way to check with everyone else -

- And of course she has to take into account that New Orleans is probably not as cool as Marcy Boston and she looks better to Marcy Boston if she's not clinging to every enclaver that crosses her path like a sad lonely lamprey -

So, the thing is, a group of five is for most purposes better than a group of four, especially once it's hazardous enough that you want to have someone keeping an eye out so that everyone else can work without trying to also be keeping their mind on the mals. But the other thing is that once you have a group, then your group starts to feel special, exclusive, and it is kind of exclusive, like, not very exclusive, but Malak's one of the two most promising people Annisa met on the first day and she's pretty sure Malak made the corresponding assessment and that the other person Malak thought highly of was Naima, and that Naima etcetera etcetera and found Julian, and that's enough exclusivity to make it feel like distinctly a 'competent smart people group', and they haven't assessed Bella for competence or smartness especially, beyond that she checked the lockers. So that would suggest a response of "tell us about yourself?" which establishes the Group even further, as a Group which can assess other people for suitability for membership, which people want to join and which has to decide which are the best ones for it, not as good as an enclave but - not far short of it, as a thing to have on the first day, and regardless of who else they let in they'll have it as a fact about the four of them, that they're the people who decide who's in the group, at least assuming Annisa handles things with a modicum of social competence which she's pretty sure she has, and she's pretty sure Malak is on the same wavelength as her most of the time? But then there's the massive complication that New Orleans has an enclave. An American enclave, the kind of place Annisa and presumably also some of the others dream about getting an invite from when they graduate, the kind of place that'd guarantee their own children a safe school experience where you have a Group from the very start, and a mana-sharer. Bella doesn't have a mana-sharer. Some of the smaller enclaves don't. But if Bella's an enclaver, then 'tell us about yourself' is an insult, a really blatant one that makes Annisa look like an idiot who hasn't managed to figure out who the enclavers in her year are, and the only correct thing to say is "yes, absolutely!" But if Bella's not an enclaver and Annisa says "yes, absolutely!" without checking with the rest of the Group then she looks like a pushover and moreover like someone who isn't taking the Group seriously, someone who thinks its entry criteria are just asking nicely, and that is the sort of thing that makes itself true, not in a magical way but just as a fact about humans. But Annisa cannot actually think offhand of a single strategy that splits the difference, that conveys 'we matter and we selected our members and we would like to work with you if you're competent and have something to add but we are, for real, in a position to filter, no matter how much you might not assume that of four indie kids from four different countries who obviously met less than twenty-four hours ago' while not being super offensive if Bella is an enclaver and her value-add incredibly glaringly intended-to-be-obvious from the moment she said "New Orleans", which Annisa is not 100% sure is even in America but is definitely 100% sure is an enclave - and also, there's a group dynamic, and what if it got WORSE, and also what if she's being a COMPLETE IDIOT and turning away potential allies on the VERY FIRST DAY OF CLASSES because she happens to like the social dynamic with the first three not-very-selected-stop-kidding-yourself-Annisa people she HAPPENED TO EAT LUNCH WITH because of FEELINGS which she was definitely warned against -

- no, no, this is fine, there's a strategy. The strategy is an INITIATION. "Our study carrel is pretty well-located - if it stays - but it's tiny, we're rather squeezed around it. If you wanted to help us grow it we'd have room for more. - I'm imagining by finding another one that's willing to sit nearby, unless you've got an extremely convenient affinity for, uh, carrel-coaxing." Smile? To make it clear it's a friendly offer? And if you happen to have a cozy spot in the reading room with your enclave that you're offering us then hopefully I haven't just torpedoed the offer.

Annisa's heart is trying to MAKE SURE ANNISA'S CHEST IS RATED FOR HEART CONTAINMENT.