"Oh, thank you, I know I suggested immersion but on second thought we should really get the assignment done and then we can chat in German about whatever we want. So elements we've found so far that might work in a spell are this section of the third passage, and maybe the alliteration here?"

Falk is annoyed at the shift to English, but trying to cover it, he's at least fluent.

Theun finally notices Julian's much tenser than anyone including the mundie, and puts two and two together. He starts looking mostly at the floor so that he doesn't seem angry at anyone.

"Unless the stress patterns changed from this dialect to later, I think the alliterative part would be pretty awkward as an incantation. I think the third passage is more promising. Though the start of the first passage also has some aspects that suggest a spell, or at least that the writer was familiar with spell incantations."

"Oh, I see it. The lines there have some pretty clear internal parallelism, and the end of the first half of line one rhymes with the end of the second half of line two, and so on? That looks structural to me. You'd probably know better –" gestures to Theun – "but I think that comes up a lot in modern German spellcasting, that kind of internal reinforcement." 

Marcy takes detailed notes on all of this and analogizes some patterns to what she's seen in French spells from the same time period.

Julian loves spell theory. This would be so much fun if he wasn't strategic Julian. 

"I'm not an expert in modern German, but I've definitely seen it there and it's common in modern Dutch, so it probably has a history. Falk's the real expert in modern German spells here, probably."

Falk nods, "Julian's right, that's common in German spells. I've also seen it in more formal poetry, though? So we shouldn't read too much into it."

"Clear as mud, then."

"Probably better to list all the possible ones and the considerations for and against. After all, if we miss one that was used in a spell that's definitely wrong and if we talk about one that wasn't it still could have been."

"That makes sense. We might want to do a structural comparison first, that should help get us thinking clearly about the differences and we can work out which are plausible spells from there. I see the intro, the two sections, and how they are bridged - or how they aren't, from the second passage."

Marcy will draw a diagram and annotate it! Look, she has relatively abundant paper and will spend it in a good cause and is good at drawing diagrams. Is Julian still looking bothered? She doesn't want him to be bothered; he's contributing a lot and she wants him to want to come back.

Riley does not get to Boston and Philadelphia's reading room early. He's having a bad morning.

He knocks on the door, hoping it's not about to get worse.

"It's Riley Finn. From Minnesang to Goethe?"

"Hey, Riley, come in. We started without you, we're analyzing the three passages."

"Here's what we have so far," she says, holding out the notes. Hopefully he is better at German poetry analysis than he is at punctuality. Or maybe he had an emergency come up; that happens more than enough in here.

"Oh, hello again Riley!" A fellow nonclaver. She's somewhat cheered. "I will help you write these notes again. Repetition is good for remembering."

"Thank you," he says quietly, though he smiles at Wendy. Riley will need to get all their names again without making it obvious he only remembers Marcy's and Wendy's.

Among his languages, German stands out as one of the stronger ones. He's much better at discussing language change than he is at how to translate the poetic elements. He considers the three passages they have to examine, while taking some time to look at the rest of his study group. Hmm. It looks like Marcy is a hard worker. Hard to read the kid from Philadelphia, but he's got the strongest German skills. Curious, intelligent? He's not sure about Wendy or the Asian kid yet- Wendy is an indie, too, but that doesn't give him much insight into her personality, and the Asian kid seems quiet.

Riley looks up from Marcy's notes, brows furrowed.

"Look at the last lines. There's some kind of pattern, there, they're longer than the first three- if they are spells, the last line of each stanza should tell us what they were for."

Julian has recovered a bit now that everyone is talking about the technical details of spell composition. At this point he has a pretty good idea what his own paper is going to look like and has started on outlining it while occasionally contributing to the discussion. 

Wendy is pretty lost but trying not look like it and copying down what everyone else is saying even though it hardly makes any sense.

"Looks like this one means 'forces' or 'following', this one is 'king', and this one is 'mien' or 'demeanor', so it could be something related to leadership or charisma? Again, assuming it's a spell."

Marcy has a sketch of her own essay but is focusing on accumulating enough content before she assembles it into a reasonable structure.

"I mean, it's going to be very hard to figure out what they might have done without the full context. I do hope we get some real spells soon." 

Theun's still looking mostly at the floor, but you can probably hear the scowl in his voice. "I like the logic. The second one seems to have picked words with a tighter spread of meaning, first one a broader one. I guess that's taking the third one as a base, which we don't know..." 

He flips a couple pages back, looking for dates for the passages.

Probably better not pick at the guy with a bad mood. There's lots of reasons to have a bad mood.

"Is this even a spell-giving class, or more of a history class?"

Oh, right, she wouldn't know.

"Generally, all classes are spell-giving classes. Or something-giving, some classes will give you alchemy recipes or artificing designs."

"Right. Thank you. Fast question, how often should I ask for another spell book? I am having trouble with my first because of vocabulary."

Okay, something is clearly off with Philadelphia kid. He seems to have a handle on the assignment, so that's not it. Maybe there's some Boston/Philadelphia power struggle over the room? But Marcy doesn't seem bothered. Did Julian offend him? He has been focusing more on Marcy, since Malak and Annisa spoke so highly of her. Or maybe he's just unhappy about being trapped in the horrible death school for doomed children, that might do it. 

He has no idea what's up with the redhead. "Did your parents not go to the Scholomance?" It's not impossible, especially in the places that don't have enough spots – but this girl sounds American. Weird. 

"If you're having trouble with your spellbook, you need help translating it sooner rather than later. German?"

"If you're stuck on one you can maybe try one more time but if you get a second German one you'll need to work through them. I can help in exchange for a look at the spells? I'm going to be drilling vocabulary a lot anyway."

Also, what's bothering Theun? They're making decent progress on the assignment and she can't recall anyone saying anything rude, and he invited everyone here as much as she did so if he's acquired beef with one of them it was yesterday evening or early this morning.