"Oh, boy. You really need to all not die, I don't want to take this class alone."

Bella arrives in a kind of aggrieved mood - the soneta is a great soneta and she's glad to have it but that was her entire work period she could have used to do her math homework spent repeating the soneta on borrowed mana most of which she did not get to keep, and now it's getting shoved off to the afternoon. She does her check of the room in a remarkably aggrieved manner, in case that will let her build up a little more.

"Well at least there's room to move when something shows up - I don't see any drains." Which means probably the drain is in the corner under the crates?

Annisa will go check the state of the drains, somewhat unhappily, and make the acquaintance of the other girl who looks somewhat unhappy, hopefully just about the room and not in a way where she's touchy generally. "I'm Annie, those're Naima and Julian and Malik," who I'm friendly enough with to introduce them too, ha. "Want to help me move the crates and check for a drain?"

"The floor slopes that way," Bella volunteers, pointing, "which isn't a guarantee, but it's where I'd look for a drain." She is inspecting the lockers right now. They could conceivably even be useful! If they don't have any mals in them! "I kind of don't even want to touch those crates, have any of you had lab today and made off with gloves?"

"Just comp and then this, and they got, uh, history of conflict?" I ALSO know them well enough to know their schedules.

Annisa remembered the right way to mispronounce Malak's name for Americans! How thoughtful of her.

Malak has a knife, which is not like gloves for most purposes but can at least do some basic checks on the crates.

"I'm Bella," Bella volunteers, after she's done frowning at a stain on the floor in front of locker the third. It looks probably old.

...lifehack, if Annisa sits near the front and center she doesn't need to worry what's in the lockers? She puts her bookbag down there after checking the desk and raises her eyes at the other kids to see if they are supportive of this lifehack.

"Pleased to meet you. Malik, I think Annisa introduced me already?"

Annisa's lifehack is good and Malak was already thinking about it (it's also reasonably distant from the door), though if the class has enclavers in it they probably cannot always get the objectively best seats. Still, Malak can put her stuff next to Annisa's until someone comes to kick them out of those seats.

"I have gloves!" Which he brought from home, thank you very much. "Malak, spot me if I check on the crates?"  

"Presumably she did introduce you but she listed several names and I wasn't looking." Bella is satisfied with the locker situation and picks a seat, though not one right next to them, that would just be asking for it.

"Sure." Malak can poke the crates with her knife to see if they take offense and then stand by to stab anything that tries to come out while Julian checks on them (Unless the anything is at least moderately large in which case she is also ready to run the other way)

"Julian Chan, Hong Kong." Nothing moderately large emerges! in fact, nothing at all emerges. If everyone's satisfied with the crates, he'll sit by Annisa and Malak. 

"New Orleans. You guys are a -? I'm not sure what word I'm looking for. A group, I suppose."

A group!!! Are they a group. What does it mean to be a group. She introduced them all, she was saying they were - something. A group. Oh no! Now it's not in the realm of plausible deniability!!!

"Yeah, we're a group."

A group!!!

A group!! Julian has a group!! 

Annisa and Julian seem weirdly pleased at such a noncommittal description. Maybe she should clarify more?

"We did some homework together after lunch and then noticed we all had this class so we declared ourselves a study group."

"If it's a good history class it'll be useful to have a study group and if it's a bad history class it'll be nice to only have to take notes once in a while." She is desperately trying to remember where New Orleans is. She thinks all the News are American other than New Zealand and New South Wales, but an enclaver will be very offended, if you get it wrong -

"I'm hoping it's good. I'm creative writing, personally, so if it's awful it's going to be awful and also pointless."

"Well if it's both awful and pointless, it's only history, you can probably pay someone to do the work for you?"

"I wonder how the school decides history classes, anyway. My schedule suggests there's some rhyme or reason to it but it's not at all clear what." 

"Oh, that reminds me, I'm looking for someone Russian if any of you have met some Russians and would be willing to introduce me for a small favor. School tried to give me some classes in Russian and I want to check some theories about why."

"I've been wanting you to meet Daria anyway, she's Kiev."

"Alright, introduce us and I will owe you a small favor." though 'I've been wanting you to meet her anyway' does suggest a very small favor is more in line.

"For history I have this and then the history of magical education right after - in the same room, even, so that's cool."

"Oh, that does sound interesting – I've got the enclave from ancient India to the present." 

"Huh. I wish there were, uh, somewhat fewer pressures on course selection, that sounds neat."

"Marcy was saying at breakfast that if there were some way to coordinate schedules across the whole school - you'd basically need the internet, and there's an obvious reason no one has tried to build the internet - you could probably get lots of cool classes that, right now, anyone would swap out of because they'll obviously be tiny, or wouldn't know to want in the first place."

Curses, Malak was about to bring up exactly that thing.

To Bella – "I'm very excited and a little bit terrified I'm going to end up stuck with Pali or something." 

And to Annisa – "They might at least put out a course handbook. If things are relatively consistent over the years we could at least try to coordinate." 

"I think they don't want us to be able to coordinate classes like that. Maybe because they're worried about competition for the best classes if everyone knows about them? But the way homeroom works right now is really bad for being able to coordinate and that's probably for a reason."

"Well, who's 'they', how closely do 'they' micromanage the school, and what does the school want?"

"The designers? I'm not really sure how much to expect, when things are really inconvenient, whether the reason is - basically a sane design tradeoff or whether it's 'it was made by British people two centuries ago and they didn't have very reasonable priorities' - like curfew -"

"I think the school must be pretty autonomous. If anyone was controlling the curriculum, I have to imagine it'd be a lot more – survival-focused." 

"I guess by 'they' I meant 'the school and also Manchester and London and New York who have all modified the school at various times'."

"What I want to know is how the school acquires information – which it has to, right, since it's got classes in things that have happened since the last time it was modified. Can it just pull curricula from the void, like spellbooks? Does it learn?" 

Impressing enclavers involves so much metaphysical speculation! Annisa was not drilled on metaphysical speculation and it's starting to seem like a glaring omission!

"Pulling curricula out of the void seems like the obvious guess. Or - pulling it from somewhere, anyway. - we don't think it's writing any of this itself, do we?"

"I don't think so? It can't give you spellbooks that don't exist and I don't see why history lectures would be different."

"The spells do have to be written down but I suppose it could be stitching together Wikipedia and random graduate students' essays - maybe random Scholomance students' essays, from past years."

"You know, it should just straight-up be a senior illusion assignment, make a better history lecture. I bet kids would love it and you'd get something higher quality than -" Gesture. 

"Huh! Yeah, that's a good idea. Maybe if we talk about it enough it'll manifest as an independent study."

The projector has flickered to life and is displaying the first slide of a PowerPoint, though it's not yet talking. The first slide of the PowerPoint is 'Ancient Artifice'.

Enclaver thinks it's a good ideaaaa enclaver thinks it's a good ideaaaaa - it's possible Annisa's misremembering and New Orleans isn't even an enclave, like New Mexico isn't. "Did you hear that," she says anyway, jokingly, to the school. "Give us assignments to improve the lectures! We'll work really hard at them!"

"Maybe not specifically us?" puts in Naima, in case the school catches things addressed to it but not other things, "At least not until we've experienced a few more lectures to compare to."

"I feel like it'd be really good for morale, if some of our work went into making the school better," Annisa says. She's still worried she's doing metaphysical speculation wrong - note to future Annisa, look for a textbook on it? 

"Please don't encourage it to give us independent studies. Make it a seminar project! We'll be good!" 

"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.

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.

"Metamagic isn't not carrel-coaxing but I don't have a carrel-coaxing spell or anything. Though that's an idea for things to ask the void, object-coaxing." She flips to a different bit of notebook and writes that in.

" - We could also just save this conversation for dinner, dinner tables are bigger than study carrels."

Oh that works and is much less complicated.

"Sure, my clavemate's been passing me her table when she's done with it, it's generally by the food counter with the big gouge in it."

Days in the scholomance: 1
Meals at enclave tables: 2

"Sounds great, we'll see you there!"

Great! That worked out great! No one was horribly offended!!!! ...maybe Paris enclaver is horribly offended? Shit! She completely forgot what Paris enclaver wanted because she was busy having a breakdown.

Maaaaan she really wants to offer to do that Paris kid's homework but she also kind of actively doesn't want to sit with Paris in the library right now? Also wait that offer is actually only helpful to make the thing that you're doing for Paris less inconvenient, it doesn't actually have any inherent benefits on its own. If this were a normal indie kid she would be like "not interested in that, do you have any other offers", but that sounds maybe offensive and she really needs to avoid offending Paris. Like, it's kind of fine if they don't know that she exists until junior year, and it's really bad if she offends them in particular, so she should really just not engage.

This is very annoying. She knows ancient Egyptian and would be so good at this homework.

Julian has the vague sense that something just happened here, like a whale passing in the depths too far down to see but just close enough to the surface to feel a slight swell. 

Right, Paris asked for - homework help! Annisa - has a way to handle that gracefully! "Elizabeth - over there - was doing the homework for Julia from New York in exchange for sitting with them Saturdays, I bet she'd do yours too. Though New York was advertising tea."

- Wait, oh no, she got the table invitation and just accepted right away without even thinking about what Boston will think - no, this is fine, actually, being seen to get table invitations reliably shows that she has value and also Marcy knows she's not just sucking up to enclaves because she was rude to that New Yorker -

Paris kid does not appear to be terribly offended. Paris kid is packing up his stuff, not particularly looking around for a response, as if he'd simply been informing everyone that tonight was taco night at the cafeteria and if they got there early they could grab two.

He looks up at Annisa's comment. "--ah. She's certainly welcome. Any friend of New York."

Is. Is Annisa supposed to go convey this to Elizabeth herself now.

He certainly doesn't appear to be going out of his way to do it.

Man, Paris sucks.

" - I need to run off to incantations, see you all later!"

 - well, okay, fine, she's going to be late to language lab but she'll go flag down Elizabeth  no point in making enemies on the first day. 

(Last time she tries to say something vaguely helpful to Paris enclaver!!) (...no, no, it isn't.)