Between Marcy and Kevin, Theun feels substantially less awkward than he feared about using the Philly/Boston reading room. He brought his notes, but while none of the others are there, he's going to focus on history first.

Julian arrives, looking a bit winded, and positions himself by the entrance to the reading room waiting to be let in. 

The muggleborn from the class is a bit late and gets turned around, then sees Julian in something like the right area. She asks, "Oh, hey. I forgot your name, sorry. Is this the right place for that German study group?" In german.

"Julian Chan. And, yes, I think so? I was told this is the Boston reading room." 

Marcy waves them in. "Good morning!" she says in German with, for some reason, a French accent. "German study I. Immersion, yes?"

"I'm Wendy Kholer... Boston is an enclave? Would it be rude-" Oh!

"Good morning! Immersion, yes."

"Good morning. Has anyone found the books for the old German? I was doing yesterday the other things." 

Oh good, Marcy invited them in before he had to.

"I did not look, I worked on other classes, though I think my notes will help much. How should we mix modern German lessons and the older class version?"

 "I the wordbook!" she waves her friend the dictionary, which is Middle High German with commentary on later evolutions.

"The class will later get newer, yes? So maybe now we do the old German, later the modern."  Is Marcy getting any of this? He hopes Marcy is getting this. 

"Yes, good."

"Ah by the way, you would say, 'Has anyone found the books for Old German'? I think, at least. I am afraid of Old German..."

"Old German not be afraid! Words is words."

"Fear is good! Fear builds the mana!" Julian is not remotely this confident, but his whole strategy for staying alive means building up a reputation for being clever, and there's no time like the present. "We should start with the first readings, I think."  

"Are. One word is word. Many words are words. Grammar is important? Okay. First reading, okay. Who has the book?"

Does she? She starts digging through her backpack.

"It is unfriendly that we start with the old and work toward the new. The Scholomance is not being very helpful to students learning German. But yes, we can start with the readings."

He produces his textbook, which he did not take particular precautions with, and flips it open.

Julian has the book! Julian will start rattling off a passage from the Nibelunglied and a metrical English translation! He's trying his best to sound like he's doing this off the cuff and didn't spend several hours working on it last night. 

"One is, two are, many are. Thank you." Marcy also has her textbook and listens carefully to Julian.

-There's the textbook. And a notebook.

Aaaah homework. That will try to kill her if she doesn't do it. She pays close attention and tries to transcribe it into a more modern form as Julian goes, muttering under her breath. She keeps falling behind and skipping lines to catch up, her Mom didn't tell her that many stories in German.

Marcy's spelling is absolutely heinous and a lot of the "glue" words are omitted, but she keeps up and doesn't worry too much. She can go back and fix it later with less trouble than fixing missed lines.

Theun, who is not quite fluent with this era of German, raises an eyebrow at Julian's speed, but no more than that. He has an alternate suggestion for one or two parts of the translation, and attempts to explain why in a mix of modern German and English.

Falk shows up and Theun beckons him in. He's fairly quiet, though, except when someone has a slip-up in their modern German.

Marcy's pretty quiet and focuses on picking up vocabulary. In her experience it's best to be very deliberate in acquiring words but let the grammar come naturally from exposure, building an aesthetic sense rather than memorizing a list of rules.

While he's reading, Julian is mostly paying attention to Theun to see if he's likely to offer corrections. He's gracious about it, of course, since Theun actually knows the language and more importantly is an enclaver, but he also doesn't want to seem incompetent. "The books translations are not so good as poetry, are they?"

"You can not even translate modern English and Shakespeare and keep the meter without changing many words. They are too, er, literal, these translations."

"It is – " agh, this is really stretching Julian's German fluency – "It is the wrong focus for us, yes? We translate for magic, so the meter matters, the sounds matter." 

"It does? How does that work?"

"The translations are . . . learning not spells. For spells, better poetry, less good to learn words."

"For translating the spells – " crap. "If you want a good explanation, I'm sorry, it'll have to be in English." 

Oh, so spells are poetry apparently. The ones in that book were fairly poetical, she admits. It's not just for ease of memorization. Maybe she should have paid more attention in Language Arts.

"This is German time not spells time, sorry to distract."

"It's true, the changes over time make it very hard. Learning which might have been spells will have to look at the old tongue, for rhythm and rhyme."

(Theun is more analytical than Marcy, particularly for the differences between the ancestor language and its descendants, and so every ten minutes or so there's a sidetrack from the assignment to explain a grammatical shift or sound change. It occurs to him that this is probably much harder to use for people who are still learning modern German but (a) he actually really likes this part and (b) he doesn't have a good idea of how much harder, nor a better approach in mind.)

Marcy doesn't mind the grammatical digressions; they still have new words in them and she does recognize the virtues of not sounding like she's on drugs sooner rather than later.

Now Julian is going to watch Marcy to see if she's interested in the digressions or not. One the one hand, it's pretty fascinating, but he doesn't want to come across as too easily distractible – unless it's worse to seem incurious. Spending time with enclavers is so exhausting. 

The actual assignment here is "Read the following three passages from different versions of the Nibelungleid, and write a 2-page essay comparing them and analyzing if any of them might have been used in spells."

So when the three readings are done, she comments, "The last one was the most - was the best sound. If any is a spell, it is that one? But I am missing a lot of words in it."

Marcy knows she ought to be tracking everyone's opinion of her and what she's signalling about her opinion of them but it's really hard to do in a new language so all she knows is that Julian is paying attention to her. She sounds out some of the lines in the second passage. "That part maybe good for a spell not be. Very--" she gropes for the word and gives up "slant rhyme, before vowel shift."

Theun is so far oblivious to Julian's predicament, and so his good mood is remaining intact.

"A 'loose rhyme', yes. I know some spells with loose rhyming, but it makes it less likely. Especially for a freshman assignment. Which words are you missing, Wendy?"

She lists them out slowly, then asks, "What is a vowel shift?"

"Tomayto, tomahto, but all people speaking a language."

"...Cool! That would damage poetry, yes."

Normally he'd  launch into a lecture about the relationship between vowel quantity and mana efficiency, but this morning the world gets to meet the new and improved strategic Julian. That means not sounding like he's giving valuable information away for free (and thus a pushover), while also seeming smart and helpful (and thus a good prospect), but not like he's too much of a suck-up. This early in the year, it's probably fine to lean into his strengths, since everyone is establishing their reputations – unless that makes him look condescending? Because he knows he has a problem with sounding condescending sometimes, on the outside. But on the outside the fact that he's just statistically pretty likely to be the smartest person in any given class isn't a valuable survival asset which can be traded for goods and services – 

...Julian may be bluescreening just a little bit. 

Marcy has a question for Julian but he seems to be concentrating hard on something so she'll ask Theun instead and Julian can jump in if he wants. "These lines and these lines can reinforce in a spell, yes?"

Theun goes through Wendy's list of missing words and fills in most of them. One or two he's uncertain of and makes a guess. "I think I know what that means, but I should look it up. May I borrow the dictionary for a moment?"

After he's confirmed those words, he gets back to Marcy.

"That looks right to me. The parallelism is in a lot of spells. That part should still be visible in translation..."

She tells the dictionary that it's so lovely she just has to show it off to her friends, who will be so impressed, and loans it to Theun.

Oh good a concrete problem, he is saved. 

"This depends, I think? I – I'm sorry, okay, structural parallelism is usually good for reinforcing specific effects, right, so you'd expect to see it in sections that talk about what the spell is supposed to accomplish, instead of as a bridge between two sections like it is here. Not that it couldn't be a spell – " not that he's correcting anyone, heaven forfend – "but I don't think it's very efficient? Of course, not all spells are...." 

"Hm, yeah, good point. Does the assignment say there's definitely a whole spell in here somewhere or just elements that could be used in one?"

"It just says to think if they MIGHT be used in spells. That is how I read it at least..."

"So maybe this parallelism would be inefficient used this way but it's still an element that could be used in a different way in a spell."

Julian would prefer to have a high-level discussion about this which would really be much easier for everyone in English but that means he has to decide if he's more likely to offend Marcy by implying her German isn't good enough or impress her by showing he's thoughtful about the fact that she hasn't been studying it for as long. Julian is a pathetic remora who hates his life. 

Oh dear, Julian looks stressed. "Are you annoyed about us lapsing into English? I can try to switch back to exclusively German if you don't mind me slowing us all down." She cannot wait for language lab on Monday, just her and a disembodied voice and sweet sweet vocab.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah note to strategic Julian: look like you're trying less hard. 

"Oh, no, of course not, English is fine! Especially if we want to have a real discussion." 

"It's a good point," Theun says with a nod to Julian when he mentions the bridge, "If this was part of a spell, the bridge would probably be meant to tie two effects together, one from each section, but that seems unlikely."

His response to Marcy is, "The assignment says 'if any of them might have been used in spells', I don't think that it's suggesting that a spell would have used bits and pieces of it. If it's not useful as-is, it's probably not from a spell at all."

"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.

"Yeah, no. I'm not going to bother hiding it, I'm - people are saying 'mundie'. Muggleborn from the Chicago slums. I think I'm paranoid enough to have a shot at not dying anyway but you be the judge. Yes, German. It's the vocabulary mostly, I can sort of guess what words mean and I speak it well enough but not reading, and not so many words. I've got about half the spells though."

She's kind of incredibly stressed about putting all that in the open but candid is her default state and if they're going to fuss about it better now than later.

Julian observes that a) this girl is doomed, and b) that Marcy is being fairly generous with her anyway, which suggests that c) any advice he offers won't make him look totally pathetic, so d) he can go ahead and be helpful, because e) he is the absolute worst kind of grasping hagfish but dammit he's going to live. 

"If the school thinks you need to learn a language, it'll generally keep offering you books in that language. If you can't keep up, you might get spellblocked – you'll only get spells you won't be able to use. If you're planning on keeping the spellbook, you should at least make an effort to read through all the spells. It's more respectful, and spellbooks tend to get very opinionated." 

"It's fuzzy, but yeah, pretty much like they said. If you get through this semester, you'll be roughly up to an indie level on languages, but it's going to be painful until then. Sorry, on behalf of this whole f-  On behalf of the whole stupid system."

"It is what it is. And- yes, definitely. It's a very helpful spellbook! I like it! I have metal spells, it's fun! I am just not good enough to learn what it has so fast. I need to be fast."

She pulls out the book, a black-fronted journal titled in German, practical incantations of manipulation and defense, M. Madsen. "Everyone here is welcome to copy a few when we study. So you are not angry for being less good at the homework probably."

"If you show us spells we should show you some too." Knowledge doesn't cost anything and if Wendy's going to have any chance whatsoever she should learn to charge for stuff. Besides, if people had to pay for being less good than the room average at German she'd be in trouble.

Julian doesn't see what there is to apologize for. This girl practically fell headfirst into a Scholomance slot. Of course she's still going to die, but it's the principle of the thing. 

"You're very lucky, you know. You have a better chance in here than you did out there." 

And then, to the spellbook – "Oh, you look so useful! You know, I was just thinking about how badly I needed new defense spells. I'm so glad to have met you!" 

"Hum. Spell for spell unless it's a spectacular spell seems generally fair and generally a good idea, yes?" She pats the spellbook gently and dusts it off. "I'm going to make good book covers for all my spellbooks, they deserve that much."

"You have no way of knowing this, but it's more polite to offer specific, individual spells. We can get – stuck – if we learn even a few words of a spell and don't get the rest, and learning spells takes time" 

"You're not wrong about the book covers, though. Spell books like this one deserve a little love and care."

"Do you know what's in there that's good yet or have you not been able to figure out what most of them do? Also, do already have a basic ward and something cheap for attacking smaller mals? Because those are the first two you want."

"I gave her decent basics day one, actually."

Why would you do that, Julian does not say. 

"I have English spells for those, yeah, thank you. And I have a - it's meant to pick smallmetals out of bodies but I made it work for moving screws out of furniture too, and a - I'm calling it a nail gun, and one I'm pretty sure is for invisible-dead-person mals, and one for making your hand as tough as iron. Specifically the left hand, and only the hand, though."

"I'm glad you've got the basics, and I'd love a spell for dealing with incorporeal mals. Do you want one for stabilizing a thrown object in flight, or one for making your hands steadier, or one for making quiet sounds nearby a bit louder?"

"Ooh, second one!"

"Cool. Also we should make sure not to get too distracted from the homework assignment; if we get first drafts or at least outlines done while we're in here we can swap papers and give revision advice."

"-Good point. I'll stay when everyone leaves and we copy spells then?" She's done working on half of Julian's extra copy, anyway.

"Sounds good!" Marcy goes head down on her outline for a while.

"I'll have to sit out the trade, the prep I came in with for this year is mostly artifice recipes and spells I'll be able to learn later in the year. Though I do have a privacy ward I can work on a book with an hour, a little input from the owner, and a dusting of powdered silver, and I should have the materials for my don't-run-off ward by next weekend."

A privacy ward sounds like the interesting kind of expense he can't justify until he makes it out. Riley tries to focus on writing a draft; if he cobbles together something impressive enough, he could bank some points with Boston and Philly. It's interesting enough material for the first day, too. He'll need to work hard to keep up on the language front, though; no matter how hard he's tried, he's only gotten up to par (according to Dr. Walsh; it's not like he's ever met another wizard kid).

"Let's swap clockwise first, then counter-clockwise," he thinks to say when he's reaching the end of a page. "I'd like everyone to get two eyes on their paper, until we know more about each other's strengths."

Wendy swaps. She is kind of messy with her annotations.

"Not that I'm getting lazy on the first day and this is actually interesting but if times get tough, how good does the homework have to be so it doesn't eat you?"

"No one really understands how the grading works. You want to stay 'passing', like a C on the usual American scale, but what counts... there are all kinds of superstitions. I've heard that enclavers get better grades for free, that if you cheat and don't make mistakes you'll get better grades than the person you copied from, that you get better grades on anything you finish during curfew... or even that grades are random. Some of that's probably even true."

"The grades being random--or depending on what you expect to get--would explain the rest of it. If anyone cares to all turn in identical assignments at some point and see what we all get it could be interesting." It had better not turn out that enclavers get better grades for free, that would be incredibly dumb. Probably enclavers just specialize and copy each other more; her squad is certainly expecting to get the same grades for less effort together than any of them could alone.

(She lightly marks several grammatical errors on the paper she was passed to review. The structure and content of the arguments she feels less qualified to critique.)

"Maybe enclavers get better grades because they have more friends and because of lower stress, more... Thinking size? What is the thing you do thinking with - what is the word for the English 'capacity' does anyone know-"

"Probably you want 'Fähigkeit', it's closer to 'capability' literally but fits better here. That's probably a thing, there are lots of reasons for enclavers to be in better shape. But it's still weird, right, because the very top are all people who aimed for valedictorian, but most of the top fifty are usually enclavers. And almost none of them are even trying, enclave kids are taught better than to try to do better than the C+, B- range, because that's effort you're not spending on the tools and spell repertoire that will get you through graduation. And in the what, four hundred enclavers a year who make it to senior Field Day, there are some geniuses with the slack to half-ass their way to B+ work, but not thirty of them. So, it's weird."

"Ugh, I hope there's some kind of reasonable explanation; the only possible point to having grades is to incentivize work and to make it easy to tell whether you've learned everything you needed to. If they're not the same for everyone they're less useful."

Also important: showing off your desirability as an ally, which also benefits from objectivity. Unless the school is trying to use grades to directly indicate desirability as an ally and giving enclavers bonuses for having lots of mana and cool spells and good gear?? No, that's insane.

"Enclavers specialize, they train longer and better, and they have allies from when they're born. That's a big help. My mom trained us as well as she could- two of my older siblings graduated. I have a good chance, as long as I don't waste it."

Essays are kind of easy; the hard part is going to be when he has to solve math problems. Riley makes a few notes about how to tighten the paragraphs- some kids don't know how to rein themselves in, he thinks, which is hopefully a problem he never runs into. Slow and steady.

"It's not surprising to me. I don't think there can be more than 20 or so seniors left who are seriously trying for valedictorian. It's not just a bad tradeoff if you're an enclaver, it's a bad tradeoff if you're not a genius and you have any other option – a useful affinity or a maintenance track agreement or anything at all. So assume twenty smart kids who actually care, it doesn't seem strange that the rest of the top fifty would be the ones with more resources and slack." 

"I'd expect more than that, at least in people who try it early on before realizing they can't manage it, or before finding a better strategy that wasn't immediately obvious, but hopefully you're right and that's all it is."

"I bet people who can't manage it notice and change tracks pretty quickly, and then they have three years of focusing on the other thing going into the average." Write write edit edit essays are easy once you have a solid idea of what to say.

And when they all finish in time, they can swap their essays back in the other direction. Two extra peers to review your work; Riley feels pretty confident about the value he's adding to this particular study group. Grammatical corrections, vocabulary substitutions, notes about flow, and commentary on the argument itself- he's got this.  He just needs to show up on time going forward.

"That's why you shouldn't go off the reservation- it's not worth doing something different for most of us. Safer to stay on the rails."

"No matter how cruel those rails are to the ones at the bottom," she mutters, hopefully too quietly for anyone to overhear.

Theun doesn't make out the words... but he can guess, since he's thinking something similar.

He just shrugs and does his own editing pass on the essays passed to him.