" - OK what happened and who are you planning to kill?"

Naima looks up from her History of Alchemy textbook to find out who the Group may or may not be trying to murder.

"The school. I realize I may as well fight God." She sits down, heavily. "I don't like languages and I'm a weapons-affinity artificer who gets second-language credits from every class I take here,  and I spent all day running into unfamiliar English vocabulary, so you might think language lab would let me study English, but no, it thinks I'd better pick up French at once."

" - oh." And she only has the two, she must not be very good at them - "Well Naima and I have French, we can help you learn."

"Your English is really good, I'm pretty sure, if you're confused about it then you're masking it really well. I guess it probably figures you can puzzle out most English spells and it should give you something else now? - and yeah. Julian has it too, we were talking in it the other day when I was trying to build mana."

"There were three words in the history lecture I didn't know and had down intending to look them up during language lab!"

"What were they?"

Annisa consults her notes. "Concomitantly, heterarchical, univocal."

"...I don't know any of those. Well, not as English words, I can guess from Greek and Latin."

Julian arrives, a bit out of breath. "This stupid school has it in for me, it's making me learn Middle High German – did I miss something?" 

"Okay, 'univocal' obviously means, like, 'one voice', or something, and heterarchical is like, what... different... authority...? Now I wanna see how long it takes Julian to get tho - oh hey, Julian, what's 'concomitantly' mean."

"With something, I think."

"Like – associated with, going along with, following – you could talk about 'the school and its concomitant dangers' or something – does that make sense?" 

"Nevermind, I guess some real English speakers do use the word 'concomitantly'."

"I have the sneaking suspicion I walked in in the middle of something." 

Annisa has simmered down somewhat and now mostly just looks tired. "- I wanted to study more English in language lab but the school thinks it's silly how few languages I know and has put me in French," she tells Julian. "I'm not going to be a liability to the Group about it and I'm sure it's easier than Middle High German but I'm annoyed because I don't really like languages."

"Well, your English sounds perfectly fluent to me. It probably just thought you didn't have anything left to learn." 

"Well, 'concomitant', apparently."

"Look, I read a lot of 19th century literature at a formative time in my life and have a concomitantly large vocabulary. Please don't take me as an example!" 

It's such a good Group and she doesn't belong in it because she sucks at langu - is that a feeling? After she just spent an hour uprooting them? "Well, I'm going to knock this French out so it doesn't hover over me all weekend," she says brightly, and takes out her worksheet, and then watches it swirl sickeningly on the page in front of her until she does the knife trick again to focus herself.

"...are you okay?" 

" - huh?"

???????

surely Annisa knows that knives go bad sometimes.

"Well, you look like you're mildly, uh, stabbing yourself, which is kind of concerning – " 
 

How to tell Annisa she's being stupid without implying Annisa is stupid?

...

Oh, of course.

She puts her hand on Annisa's hand holding the knife and says,

"This is uncharacteristically stupid. If you make a habit of that one day the knife is going to go bad."

"Um – not that you are a bad knife, at all, you're a very good knife, and so useful, and anyone would struggle with the pressure you're under." 

- Annisa looks at Malak. 

Puts the knife away. 

"You're right. Sorry. I wasn't planning to make a habit of it but I'll put something else together this weekend. - when I say I'm bad at languages I mean I have to hurt myself to focus on them. Which I can do! It's not a huge deal! It's just annoying!"

"It kind of seems like stabbing yourself whenever you do language homework might make you learn that language homework means getting stabbed? Which seems maybe not altogether helpful for learning French."

...

...Julian is going to be helpful! 

"Okay, what part of languages is hard for you? Learning languages for spell-casting is way easier than trying to get fluent." 

"I mean, not doing language homework means getting eaten. And weapons I made to a first approximation don't go bad on me, though I wasn't planning to count on it."

And to Julian, "uh, literally all of it that you can't - replace with arbitrary symbols and treat like logic practice?"

"Isn't that... all of... writing...?"

"Okay. We can work with that. Does anyone want to help me find a French syntax textbook?"

This is extremely worrying! She though Annisa was cool and smart and competent but now she's planning to make a weapon to hurt herself with and expects it to understand exactly how much hurting and when is appropriate.

...well, that sounds kind of like a pain, but that means it'll generate mana, so - 

"Sure. Do we know if the library adheres to any sort of, uh, organizational structure besides tending to stack books with other books of the same language?"

Oh, right, this is going to suck.

"Probably, but I've got no idea what. We should probably figure that out soon, actually – but maybe get our actual homework done, first." 

Malak has decided Annisa is insane. Understandable; Annisa would decide Annisa was insane, on this evidence. "My sister and I had sparring daggers, before we came here," she says to Malak quietly. "With an enchantment so they'd leave a red line, but not cut. The dagger I came in with has a similar enchantment, so I can't cut myself on it, though unlike the sparring daggers it'll absolutely hurt someone else I cut it with. You can be a lot freer with a weapon that knows how to be selective, that's what I put into them, a vision of - a room full of mals and students, and knives that can whir through it destroying the mals and not touching the students -"

"If you make something with the intention that it will hurt you -" she hisses back

" - okay, fair, even if it's the exact same design as the sparring daggers I'd better only do it when I want sparring daggers." Sigh. "I don't suppose you want some sparring daggers?"

"...Yes, actually, but - I don't know if you're safe to make them right now. Magic's not stupid and it probably knows what you're really after. Let's just - see if the Group can help you learn French without doing anything unusually dangerous? We could try talking in it, I need the practice too - "

"Feels like a lot to expect of the Group before I've even - made us all some knives -"

""Hi, I have a stupid language disability, you still want to be a Group, right?"" 

"I wouldn't say 'yes' to that!"

" - I think 'let's practice speaking in a language you all have and some of you want to practice anyways' is in fact a pretty small ask but if you want to give us knives for just that I think we'd all be delighted to start paying you in advance. Especially if it means you spend less time struggling on French homework and more time working on our knives."

"Everyone speaking in French - won't actually teach me French. Because of the stupid language disability. I was in an immersion school for English obviously and until we added eight hours a day of practice on top I spoke it very poorly. If we hadn't discovered the affinity by then and if I wasn't great at everything else I think my father would've given up on me as just clearly not bright enough."

"Well, you don't need to speak French, do you? You just need to be able to cast spells in it. That's a different thing. And you're an artificer, it's not like you need a million languages anyway." 

"Yeah, speaking's barely necessary for spells anyway. We'll find a book on syntax later. Just owe us all magic knives and don't die before you make them."

"I don't need a million languages! My plan was to hopefully not acquire any, or not until junior year or something when buying my language homework for knives doesn't suggest 'has a weakness', just 'has priorities'. And I considered walking out of lab as soon as it gave me the worksheet and asking one of you to cover it in exchange for a prospective knife but even if you'd have gone for that, and I don't actually know that you should, if it's trying to get me into French on the first day then running from that for four years sounds incredibly doomed. So - yeah. I'll owe you knives." Knives aren't hard. Kids without the affinity make them in the first couple weeks in shop. Annisa's are better but nonetheless, they're a manageable commitment, for getting to stay in the Group, which she - thinks is good for her survival. 

"Oh, I don't think we should do it for you. It's going to give you spells in French, and I assume you're going to want to be able to read them?"

"I have a knife already but it's not even remotely safe for practicing with and I'd really like to be able to practice in situations that aren't live combat. We'll help you get enough French that you aren't spell-choked, you'll pay us back, some day I'll have a problem and I'll pay you for your help. Stop freaking out about having one weakness, we've all got areas that aren't our best."

There is one part of that sentence Annisa feels competent to interact with. "Sparring knives are really good. It's actually kind of hard, to train the impulse to use a knife effectively against a person - mals are easier - and it's differently hard to train ways of killing things without them killing you back, and it builds mana.

Why don't we do other homework and then we can come back to the - French syntax thing."

"I really wanna do the History of Artificing homework, because I can read the Middle Egyptian text, and I bet I can leverage this to get us all an A right out the gate. If we're looking for places to start."

"Yeah, all right, let's do that."

"Oooh, I like that plan. How do you want to divide it up?"

Annisa is still behaving uncharacteristically stupidly. Enough so that Malak is starting to worry it might not actually be uncharacteristic. She likes Annisa and wants to keep working with her, but if she gets spellchoked because she keeps turning down people offering to help her French for cheap, Malak is going to have to cut her loose.

"Yeah, that sounds like a good thing to do first."

Annisa has resigned herself to needing to trade for French help until she's spell-competent, but she wants to spend a pleasant hour doing enjoyable homework on some other subject first; she doesn't think she's just pointlessly procrastinating on the French, she suspects working together on other homework will be useful for establishing a group dynamic that can then carry over. 

"Maybe Naima can read out the descriptions of the battle and we can all list of possible ways off generating those effects, and then split the work of tracking down where those effects are attested in the textbook, and then if we want some extra buffer in case the homework gets harder later we can look through some other books for corroboration, famous battles usually have several different historians writing about them."

"Sounds good to me." Definitely better than her idea, which was going to be just doing the whole assignment, which left her stuck on what the others could trade her for it.

"I think multiple accounts is a more modern thing, the really ancient stuff usually just gets one official account by the royal scribe or whatever. And if there are others they probably didn't survive to get translated. And they might be in Sumerian." Malak has been WARNED about this. This is how Azat got stuck with Sumerian.

She is kind of tempted to say that that's cool, it just means she'll learn Sumerian the next time the school insists on sticking her with a language lab, but that sounds maybe insensitive.

"Oh, Sumerian, I've been wanting to pick up Sumerian," says Annisa dryly. "Well, read it out, Naima, and we can think about opportunities for extra credit once we've gotten the basic assignment out of the way."

Naima can read the English translation, offering alternative translations for any parts that strike her as ambiguous or where the full meaning maybe isn't coming across in the textbook one.

"Okay, where it says the division of Ptah brought down the narrow passes upon the Hutti – well, it's most likely to be incantation but anything is this early, how else could you do it, you could make something that generates vibrations in rocks, something that causes earthquakes – or it could be figurative, it could mean something like heavy rain – " 

It's the contrast that got Annisa, she thinks. All of her other classes are such fun. "Who picked that pass to have the battle at, if they had advance notice you could do it with artifice by burying some rods in the ground that transmute their surroundings when it's triggered - they had rods back then, right -"

"That's clever – Naima, does it say?" 

"Uh - here. It sounds like the Hittites arrived first, and the Egyptians came up pretty close without realizing that the Hittite forces were there, and ended up being surprised. There's more detail than that if you want it, though, it sounds like a kind of complicated situation with truthful spies and lying spies and some double agent spies."

"Oh – maybe the Hittite wizards had some kind of obfuscatory charms. Does limit the options for what the Egyptians could have been doing, though, if they didn't prepare the site – "  

"To be clear, the Egyptians did make camp and get surprised while at camp? I don't know what sorts of things you'd do when making camp as a matter of course, though, presumably not the same things you'd do when preparing for battle."

"We could separate out artifice the Egyptians might've had for defending a camp though that's really something where I'd expect mostly incantations."

She flips a page. "....okay, this says that the Egyptians failed to capture Kadesh, which I think is the nearby city, which suggests that the Egyptians did select the site in that they were deliberately attacking it, they just hadn't expected it to be defended. - I promise I'm very practiced at reading this language and am merely not practiced at reading accounts of military strategy."

"Another thought: chariots. Both sides are using chariots, and the Hittites are crossing a river with them that is later said to be deep enough that a bunch of the people trying to swim across it unaided just drown. Do we think that the chariots are magical, because that seems like it would obviously be artifice."

"I don't know – they're probably wooden, and wood floats, right? But magic would definitely help. We should also be thinking about the obvious stuff – enchanted spears, enchanted bows – they have bows, I think? They must have, if they have chariots. I miss the internet so much." 

"The chariots seem like a good candidate - I wouldn't count out the camp defenses, though, I think some of the Roman legions used self-assembling camps..."

"Shield-holders, obviously, that's some of the earliest artifice. Amplified horns and drums."

"Can't you use chariots with spears? - I am not at all an expert in what kinds of combat maneuvers you can do with a chariot."

Her mind conjures up the image of someone gliding through the graduation hall on some kind of magical chariot, but presumably there are many, many reasons why no one does this.

"The artillery would be artifice, if they meant to sack a city - does it say anything about the city's walls -"

"Not in this excerpt, I don't think the Egyptians ever got close enough to the city to use whatever they'd brought for that. That sounds like the sort of thing there might be an account of elsewhere, though, if we did want to look for one."

"I will make a list of things we can do if we want extra credit. I've heard it's sometimes worth doing well enough in history classes to skip the final, both because it's a dangerous time of the year and because it's extra study time finals week for finals in other classes."

"Oh, I didn't know that. Do you know if you can get extra on top of that for actually taking the final?" 

" - I mean, what would you want it for?"

"Um." 

...

OH THANK GOD

" - I was really worried I was an idiot who was going to fail all my classes but if you think you have a shot at valedictorian maybe I'm not that bad."

wait did she just say that out loud?

It's better than the thing Annisa was tempted to say which was 'well with your affinity that's probably the way to go', there's nothing else people'd want him on a graduation team for.

"Well, you're good at everything so far, so I guess it makes sense to try."

She's not looking at any of these people. She's trying to sketch the Hittite approach towards the Egyptian forces, in case this reveals anything interesting.

Oh thank god they don't think he's insane. "Well, I don't want to rule it out freshman year. I mean – with my affinity, it's really the best way to go."

And, because it's important to them that they understand that he's not just full of it, he can be a real asset to the Group – "I got a perfect score on the entrance exams. That's – it's rare, and it suggests I'm well positioned relative to the Sino kids, and the Anglo kids are barely selected at all – and I don't actually need to make it, right." Because he'll have his choice of enclaves anyway, if he lives. "I just need to hit top ten, to get an alliance, and mainly I don't want to undershoot. And if I can't make top ten – " 

If Julian can't make top ten, he never had a real chance to begin with. But he doesn't need to say that. 

Malak has no idea if he's insane or not, she'll have a better sense after she knows if she fails all her first-term classes.

"In-" wait that would be rude to Annisa - "God willing."

When they have mapped out the battle and generated a reasonably long list of things that might be artifice in it, Annisa stops them. "All right, I think we should pause here, because we have another appointment for a study group for this class.  And at dinner, Bella will be incredibly impressed with how well we understand the text and how rapidly we generate ideas, and less impressed if we just wrote out our answers already. So, leave off here?"

"Seems like a good place to stop."

"And I at least should do French next, though I probably don't need all three of you helping."

"Like I said, I should brush up anyways before I have to start exploring centuries-old French poetry."

"I actually do want to see whether I can make head or tail of this library. - although probably when I'm annoyed with my homework and need a break, I'm gonna see how much history of alchemy work I can plow through first."

Malak is being generous, really. Future Annisa: figure that out. "Okay." Deep breath. "The assignment is just translating these thirty simple sentences, and they build on each other, so it shouldn't be hard, except for the verb rules, which were on the worksheet in class."

Malak will try to help her with verb conjugations.

It takes an awful lot of self-discipline but Annisa can keep herself focused on the worksheet without self-harming. She is fully aware it'll all fly out of her head the second it's finished, but one thing at a time.

Julian is going to try and plow through his math homework so he can spend most of the weekend retranslating all his German reading for extra credit. And speaking of this weekend – 

"Does anyone want to go down to the gym on Saturday? I don't know about the rest of you, but before I got to the Scholomance I hadn't left my apartment in two years and I'm not exactly in peak running-from-mals condition." 

"I was taught to come in in poor condition on purpose, there's more mana to be had in training up. And you can dehydrate yourself farther."

"Same." and let that be all that is said on the topic of dehydration.

"Which is to say, yeah, I'll come work out on Saturday. I owe Daria a lot of mana for the wards on my room."

Malak owes her future self a lot of mana due to Crimes, but she can't just say that.

"Yeah, I'd love to. I can handle strength training alone, but I was honestly kind of worried about how to practice running enough without causing myself any problems. ...I wonder if we could trade off one person reading homework out loud and the other three exercising, or something, make double use of the time."

"Does everybody already know how to do horrible wall sitting instead of normal sitting while you do your homework, it's painful enough I can do languages."

"...that doesn't really sound beneficial? To me, I mean, I acknowledge that it must be doing something for you. - oh wait, is it like an exercise thing that makes you stronger and not just something that causes pain for no reason."

"... Horrible wall sitting?"

" - yeah, it's a core exercise. It's incredibly simple. You just put your back to a wall and then lower yourself to a sitting position, but with nothing to sit on. For about ten seconds you will wonder what all the fuss is and then if you hold it five minutes you'll have enough mana for anything you know how to cast. You won't hold it five minutes, though, the first time, because it'll hurt too much."

"Huh! That seems like a good one, if it's some of the same muscles as crunches, it's kind of hard to do anything else while you're doing crunches. I'd worry about doing it against the stacks, though."

"Yeah, I wouldn't do it in here, I do it in my room at night. Maybe once I'm in better shape I'll toss my desk chair and position my desk such that I can work at my desk while doing it, but I'll have to be in lots better shape, I can only manage a couple minutes at a time right now."

"I wonder if there's an optimal level of shape to be in. Like, you don't want to be too fit until senior year, right, since you get diminishing returns on mana. Maybe the thing to do is focus a lot on one muscle group at a time and then let it atrophy while you cycle through the others." 

"Well, only if you can't get comparable mana from stuff that isn't exercise. There've got to be some other things in the same class, right?"

"I used to be able to get lots from copying characters, when I was a kid. They make you do the same ones over and over and over again and it's just completely awful. Unfortunately, I am now fully literate." 

"I think exercise is recommended mostly because it's so universally good, everyone's got things they struggle with enough to get mana from them but exercise works well for most kids our age."

"Did anyone else read Scholomance Confidential even though your parents told you not to. Or specifically because your parents told you not to."

"Mother told me to."

"There was a thread titled 'which sex acts do you get the most mana from, assuming you don't like your partner' and I took a lot of notes but am minding the possibility that everyone was bullshitting us."

"...that has got to come down to individual preference." 

" - uh, is this, like - an internet forum?"

"I mean, some things are objectively more effortful than other things, independent of how much you like or dislike them! Though certainly everyone did not give the same answer. - yeah, it's an internet forum. You can only post if you send the mods proof you graduated but you still aren't supposed to, like, trust the stuff there, it's not actually meant as advice for incoming students."

Malak did not read that thread. She saw it and rolled her eyes at the degeneracy of westerners and wasn't even a little tempted to click it, because, ew, gross.

It seems really useful to know if you can double up on earning a favor from some enclaver boy and building mana!!

"Man, I kinda wish I'd read it. - not that specifically, but in general. My internet was pretty bad, though, probably wouldn't have been worth it to load that many pages."

"A lot of it's - I think better not to read, really - there was a lot of stuff about, uh, trouble reintegrating, and feelings - I think people have lots of feelings once they're out because you can't have them while you're in, but it's not in fact at all helpful to know about those feelings - but there were useful threads about, like, is it true that you get better things from the vending machines if you hold a coin for a long time, what's the best exercise, what's the best history class you ever took, who's someone who died who you really thought was going to make it and what happened..."

"Huh. Well I guess I'm glad I didn't read it if it would've been harmful. - that thing about the coins is fake, right, that sounds fake."

"Tentative consensus was that if you have treated the coins as having more significance than usual - traded them for something of great value, or stolen them from a dead kid's room, or something - they're more likely to get you either something really good or something really bad. But again, I don't know how much to trust it - I always asked my parents if the thing I'd read on there was true, except about the sex acts stuff, I did not ask them about that."

"I used to read it, but, the thing is, it's just the ones who lived. So you can't actually learn anything about what it's really like, for most people." 

"Huh," she says, and then realizes that she's gotten distracted from the history of alchemy homework, so she goes back to that without any further comment or transition.

Annisa has ground through her French, unpleasant as it was, and there's still a little time before dinner so she'll dash together an essay on amphisbaena, Mal Studies is worth trying hard in when it's a common and dangerous mal and barely worth doing at all when it's not. 

Eventually she's mostly gotten this history of alchemy homework how she wants it. "Okay, did anyone want to spend a while looking for French syntax books? Or anything else interesting?"

It would probably be in Annisa's best interests to do her French homework again, instead of mal studies homework. Malak considers whether to encourage her to do this. That would be the friendly thing to do, but... they are not friends. It's a bit too proactive for someone she's just in a study group with.

Amphisbaena are venomous, but the venom is deadly only from the adults, and you'll probably survive a single bite, assuming you're not insane and carry antitoxin; they usually only kill people if you somehow step into a whole cluster of adult ones, which is hard to do by accident, because they like damp warm places and what are you doing in a damp warm place. The most annoying thing about them is that they breed in the shower pipes; you can expend mana killing them up in there, but it's a waste of mana, the ones small enough to wiggle through the faucet are small enough their bites merely sting. In the outside world, they're common in these regions (including Indonesia); mana-efficient ways to handle them include net spells that hold them back and cold spells, which will probably make them decide to be elsewhere. They can't bite through thick clothing and can safely be handled with gloves. They're bred by alchemists for their eggs, which are good ingredients for vitality, periodicity and viciousness. "All right, this isn't brilliant but it's done and those of you not going for valedictorian are welcome to copy it, if I can have the same off you some future week when I'm busier."

"Sure. I can check if any of my siblings made copies of their essays on safe mals, they were supposed to if they had time."

"I wish my parents had clustered more closely." She hands the essay over.

"I sort of wish my parents had spaced us out more. I'm the oldest, but it's sort of a toss-up right now if they'll be able to get testing spots for the next two." 

"Testing spots? Wow, the Sinosphere is brutal - in Indonesia anyone can test and honestly if you don't make it you wouldn't have done well here anyway, it's just a medical evaluation and some interviews and a fluency test and killing a couple of dogs."

"I think my family is more tightly spaced than usual. I would've had four older siblings here if none of them had died and I'll have four younger siblings here when I'm a senior."

"Halfway to an enclave, that."

"Hong Kong's weird. The enclave had historical ties to Britain – not enough to get British slots, but enough that they don't get along well at all with the rest of China. So we always get shafted, and since the enclave proctors the tests, they want to stack the deck as much as possible. The tests are bad everywhere, though, and for pretty much the same reason." 

Not talking about tests. Not talking about siblings. Not sure how to do this without looking like she's asking for sympathy. It's very unfortunate how she doesn't have any unfinished homework out in front of her and can't just be appearing to work on that.

"Halfway to a small one, maybe. They're mostly focused on their own classes, and we don't have that many shared resources. Mostly just reusing pointless essays, and that's only really good for mal studies because all the other classes vary so much." And a mouse collection for graduation or other dire circumstances.

"And as we all know, Naima sprang fully formed from the void," Annisa says. I have noticed your avoidance of this subject and am going to turn it into a Group in-joke so that it's a shared thing not a you thing. 

"... That she did."

- is that - is this the sort of thing where it means she has to explain now or is it permission not to explain, what does that mean?

She looks at Malak in case Malak has any additional information on what this might mean.

It's permission not to explain, obviously, but Naima seems confused about that. She doesn't know how to communicate this to Naima with just body language. Softly, (as a courtesy to Annisa) in Arabic, (as a courtesy to Naima)

"You don't have to say anything."

- she nods, then.

"Uh, so, does anyone know how much time we have left before dinner?"

Okay, something definitely just happened there. And we are – not talking about it? Cool. Not talking. Not talking about it is the thing we are doing. 

(Julian wants to know real bad). 

"Looks like maybe twenty minutes."

"That's probably enough time to at least see if we can get a sense of how the library likes to organize itself. If anyone wants to try."

"Finding the language reference section is going to be important for all of us pretty soon. I say we go for it."  Also, it has the advantage of being less awkward than this non-conversation. 

"I am the one whose life depends on learning French this weekend but we might want to strategize before enclaver dinner about how adding people to the Group works."

" - oh, right. Um, I think that being an enclaver is a bonus but we really don't want anyone who's going to slow us down when studying or make the rest of us really uncomfortable, because it seems really valuable, actually, having a place where we don't have to think about all of the complicated enclaver rules as much? And it seems hard to un-add someone to the Group, you know, once you've added them? Maybe we could... invite her to some things and not other things, if we like her, and see if we want to end up inviting her to everything the Group does later? - like, we could invite her to the gym thing. Maybe."

"Yep, that sounds good to me. The thing I said to her at first, about how she could find another carrell - I was thinking that a thing we can do, that's less likely to anger enclavers or offend anyone than just directly turning them down, is give them - tasks that if they succeed at the tasks, would suggest they're in fact quite valuable as allies, and then we sort of have an initiation procedure, and it makes groups more real, if they have an initiation procedure. But we probably don't want to only add people who have carrell-coaxing spells and are willing to spend them on studying with us, that might be too high a bar before we've even had the chance to develop a reputation as impressive."

"I think Bella only wanted to study for history of artificing together. Which is less of a big deal than joining the Group, obviously. We should have Standards and not just let any enclaver who asks join, because - if we do just let in every enclaver then that gives us a reputation as suck-ups and not as impressive cool people who can handle themselves."

"That makes sense. We could have, uh, a specific after-dinner time a couple times a week where we specifically do history of artificing homework, maybe in the carrel or maybe somewhere else, and we can invite Bella and other history of artificing people to the specific-class study time? If it turns out that Bella wants to make studying a regular thing at all, she could also end up not liking us. - probably it shouldn't be in the carrel because the carrel would get cramped with very many more people."

"New Orleans might have reading room space. I'm not expecting 'lots of enclavers want to join our study group' to be a problem we have but if it is I think - Boston's probably just in if they want to be, other US enclaves that aren't insane like Toronto and Sacramento we probably want to hang out with at least sometimes to see if we get along with them...I'm fine with snubbing enclaves elsewhere to establish we're not suck-ups, but it seems like the rest of you might be less set on America than I am?"

"I think I'm more concerned with whether the individual people are good for studying with than about where they're from, if we're talking about people we want to invite every time the Group gathers to do anything. For individual class study sessions - I think I'm fine at least trying sessions with most enclavers as long as we don't know of any specific reason to avoid them? I dunno, we should maybe refine any future plans based on how things go with Bella."

"I don't think we have to go out of our way to snub enclaves to establish our reputation as not suck-ups, just being selective on academic merits and not sucking up should do it. Also, I have already snubbed New York so I think my reputation is established enough."

"You have what now? That - seems bad!"

"I mean, I did not do anything serious enough that they'd want revenge or anything like that, I just sat somewhere else in homeroom and made it clear why. I think it helped us get the invite to breakfast with Boston."

"Huh. Fair enough. ...does anyone know any things about New Orleans?"

"It's in America."

"It's in Louisiana. Towards the southern edge."

Is Louisiana part of America? Probably, America has a lot of weirdly-named states and it doesn't sound spanish so it's probably not in south America.

"My German class has one of the Boston enclavers – Marcy, I think? – and I'll be studying with them tomorrow afternoon, actually. Do we have reason to believe that Boston's especially good?"

"Marcy seemed - I was taught to expect that some enclavers are running circles around you at complicated social games, and some enclavers are just very, very competent and noticing whether you are, and apparently there's a third kind of enclaver who is just a blundering mess who shouldn't even be here being carried along by their truly excessive resources, but anyway she's the second kind."

Julian has certainly encountered some blundering messes today but thinks it's more politic to keep that to himself. Unless telling the Group would make it clear that he's not a pathetic suck-up? Except he kind of is a pathetic suck-up, is the problem – unless sucking up pathetically to Shanghai makes him look smart and strategic, because he's in the position to be sucking up to a powerful enclave at all. It's all very confusing and he would really rather just talk about German poetry. 

"I should brush up on my Middle High German, then, so it looks like I know what I'm talking about. At least I'm not going to be the most clueless person in the class, apparently half of them don't even speak modern German." 

"What makes some German High German. Is there High French. Is there Low German."

"Yes Low German, no High French. I think it has to do with where they speak it and literally how high up it is, like if it has mountains or not." 

"Did German dialects just... naturally segregate by elevation?"

"Well, some parts of Germany are very flat and some are very tall and different people lived there? Probably? I'm terrified that all the medieval poets we're going to read are from different places that spoke different Germans and I'm going to have to learn all of them." 

"What you should do is learn the vocabulary for metaphysical speculation in German, Marcy likes metaphysical speculation."

"Oh, that's perfect, Germans love metaphysically speculating, it's just about the first thing you learn." 

Annisa can't tell if he's serious but she laughs; it works either way.