"We're a group! You can give us group projects! It's in the name!" ....probably at a higher level of English fluency than hers that's not a hilarious joke it's just a dumb one.

Bella snickers a little.

"An illusion affinity would be terribly bad luck, obviously, but you'd have so much fun while you lasted. Just think about it! We could have movies." 

There is no "fashionably late" in the Scholomance, but if you're going to linger over lunch to meet the enclave seniors and then rush through the hallways alone, the first week is the time to do it.

Jean arrives, a little breathless, and surveys his classmates. No other Parisians, tragic.

"Afternoon."

"You're fine, the lecture's still figuring out how to get itself started." 

"Excellent, then I haven't missed anything."

He has a distinct French accent and a newscaster's enunciation. It's a little ridiculous, in someone as small as he is.

"May I sit here?"

Julian does not have a problem with this but, see, he has a group. What if the group objects? What if there's some kind of group negotiating tactic around seat assignments?? What if he fucks this up??

"I won't stop you."

There. That's suitably noncommittal. 

"Thanks much," and he gives the chair a suitably cautious thump with his bookbag to startle any stray inhabitants before settling himself into it.

- Neither enclaver has kicked them out of what seem like the objectively best seats. Malak starts inspecting the ceiling more closely in case there's an air vent right above them that she hasn't spotted yet. She checks under their seats, but there's no concealed drain there either.

She is Concerned.

Oh man that kid is French. Well, maybe. He sounds French. She's going to, uh, not talk to him or do anything that makes her stand out and also remember specifically not to offend that kid, at least insofar as it's possible for her to deliberately avoid offending people.

And a speaker that's somewhere but not really anywhere in particular drags to life. 

"The history of artifice," it begins in a soft-spoken BBC announcer voice, "is better attested than the history of other forms of magic, because much of the evidence remains to this day. Three different enclaves claim the oldest known instance of a persistent, still-functional magical artifice..."

Bella drops into Notetaking Mode before she can introduce herself to the new kid. She will find out his name at some point.

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.