Caio has memorized his parents' advice on how to navigate the library, and he has had enough of being awkward for one day and he has eaten dinner and he just wants to go among books and look for nice ones. Where is a stack with Spanish or Portuguese, he's going to get plenty of English in classes...

Oh, a person. Virgil produces a weak smile.

"Hello."

He runs a hand along the spine of a book about- artificing in the Ottoman Empire? Hard to guess just from the title, it's not that explanatory. He's on the right track, though.

The library is inhabited. Ah well. "Hello. I'm Caio."

"Virgil. Uh, Salvatore. Virgil Salvatore. Are you looking for something? I'm trying to memorize the classification system."

His dad told him to introduce himself with their name, even though there's no way anyone outside of Italy would have heard of them, and there's no one born in the past century who would have heard of them even there.

"Trying to find the stacks with Spanish and Portuguese. Not looking for anything in particular yet, I don't know what my classes will be, but I'd like to know my way around."

"Okay, so- the Spanish and Portuguese sections are this way. Looks like the library likes to keep related languages close together. Latin is a little further, not sure if the library sometimes re-arranges books or if there's some method to decide which Romance languages are most closely related- dad didn't know much about the library."

"I'm hoping for another Romance language next. Maybe Italian. It's not my strong point so I'd rather lean on relatedness."

"Totally. What is your strong point?"

It takes a moment to walk there- the library isn't small- but then they're looking at the Portuguese and Spanish sections. Virgil has already memorized the place of that maybe-Ottoman-artificing book for later, so he can afford to take a look at these books instead.

"Alchemy but I'm not sure more specifically than that." Caio starts skimming titles, looking for promising recipes or spells.

He looks for anything on artificing. There's- a lot of it. He looks for something introductory.

"Do you need a tutor? For Italian."

"I will if the school gives me Italian but it might pick something else and then I'd need a tutor for that. I guess if I had a tutor lined up I could find a book in Italian and nudge it harder?"

"It's your decision. Um, I also know German and Latin, if one of those would be better."

Latin probably isn't better? Virgil doesn't think most people learn Latin for fun- he thinks he would've learned it even without the Scholomance to worry about.

"Latin might be better? Really what I should be doing is finding the thing with the most absolutely regular grammar. I can memorize words, it's grammar that trips me up."

"Turkish is the world's most regular language. A lot of," pause to make sure he pronounces it correctly, "agglutinative languages don't have many irregular verbs. The whole family should be easier. Um, maybe there's a book on what different languages have in common?"

"Nothing I speak right now is agglutinative though. There might be a book like that, but I don't know how I'd find it, do you?"

"Not yet. We can look together now? We can probably search faster in our native languages- mine is English."

"Brazilian, but my mother always spoke English growing up so I'd have both to build on."

"Okay. Why don't we split the English section for any books on languages? I don't want to push our luck with curfew."

"Sounds good." English section! Caio wants advice on what languages to learn!

Tonality in Austronesian Languages, What's Ugaritic Got to Do with Anything?: A Survey of Ancient Tongues, The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Learning Many Languages, and Out of the Beaks of Birds: Irregular Verbs Around the World sound the most promising from just their titles.

None of those titles are even sort of like What to Learn Next If You Speak Portuguese, English, and Spanish and are Alchemy Track. "Maybe I will ask the void for recipes until one references something in another Romance language," he mutters.

"Maybe. I'm sorry there wasn't anything better. Maybe the school just needs to learn what we want?"

"Maybe. So the void idea might work well."

"Hope you find something good," Virgil says, but his attention is already drifting away from Caio back to the stacks.