After a while she is done, done, done and cannot run any more.

"...Oh no, we've got to go up a bunch of stairs to get to breakfast, don't we?" she asks from the floor.

"Yeah, but I think we can take a bit of a rest, and take the stairs slowly."

Flop. 

Bella sits rather than flop, so she can jump up and run for her life if she's gotta, but yeah, not standing up for anything less than that right now.

Breakfast sounds so good right now. 

"Did anyone clock if the cafeteria has coffee? Not good, just – caffeinated." 

"Didn't see."

"I believe it does, though I'd avoid it if you possibly can. Better to take a nap and safe coffee for when you're more crunched for time so it'll have more of an effect."

"It doesn't. There's some, but it's just illusioned water I hear, so neither good nor caffeinated."

"Goddammit. I came in here with a bit of a caffeine dependency. My parents wanted me to stay off the harder stimulants until I started so I wouldn't build up a tolerance." 

"If you want to build and maintain a planter, in two years my brother could bring in some seeds and we could grow some. Sell off any extra."

"That would be great, but it sounds like a junior year project. How long do coffee plants take to grow?"

"In the wild? No idea. In a magic planter? Still no idea but probably less. We'd be juniors by the time we could get the seeds anyways, unless someone New Yorker brought in coffee beans for personal consumption and Naima can resuscitate them back into viability."

"I think there are some things you can make in the alch lab that are safe enough and function as coffee. They'll taste worse, but hey, no one's here for the food."

"Eh, my best bet is to ride it out, I think. I'll have a headache for a couple days, but better to deal with that now than any other time of year, and certainly better than being dependent on anything I need to go down to the lab for." 

Julian's legs are feeling a bit less gelatinous, so he's going to head breakfast-ward. 

Malak can go up to breakfast and get food from the safe line and check it anyways and sit down at a table with her group.

"Seems like that went well," Annisa says. "Julian, I have a terribly important languages question, is this a good time for it?"

Julian has grabbed some of the non-coffee and is feeling a bit more alive, even if it's totally psychological. 

"Go ahead." 

"So I spent last night doing horrible wall sits and mapping out strategy under various assumptions about how bad, exactly, I am at learning French. Because my approach looks pretty different if I'm, say, tenth percentile at learning French, versus if I am a one-in-a-thousand incompetent at French. If I'm just bad at it I'm going to treat it like the school gave me, I don't know, accelerated honors calculus or something else that'd eat my entire schedule but not be a problem beyond the added course time. If I'm astoundingly bad at it, I'm going to get spells exclusively by trading knives for 'em and not even try to learn any in French, trading out as much homework as needed...I figure having to get spells from trades is a pretty significant disadvantage but it's nowhere near as bad as being spellblocked and if I give up on French I'll have lots of time for the shop."

Annisa wants his advice! That means she thinks he has good judgement or is unusually knowledgeable about languages for some reason. Or that she thinks he's naturally inclined to be helpful, which, unfortunately, he has to admit is true. 

"I'd be surprised if you were one-in-a-thousand bad? You're smart and that helps with learning languages. Plus, you're obviously fluent in English even though it's not your native language, and if you were really that naturally awful I don't think you'd have been able to do that no matter how hard you tried." 

"It took eight years of trying. It took my brothers four. But - I guess that probably doesn't suggest one-in-a-thousand bad. Do you have any ideas for a quick test of how bad at learning French I am."

"I do!"

Oh good. He didn't. 

"Sure, if you or Malak have ideas that'd also be great."

Fourteen minus eight is six. That's not as early as you're supposed to start kids on languages, but it's not so late - Annisa is probably actually bad at languages and not just focusing on other things - But also the second language is the hardest, especially if it has no common ancestors with your first - And Annisa's English is actually really good.

"I don't have any ideas for testing besides just... learning French for a few weeks and seeing how slow it is."

Without any preparation whatsoever, she opens her backpack up and takes out two origami boxes, plus maybe fifty flash cards. She puts the boxes in front of Annisa and drops ten of the cards French-side-up in one of them.

"Okay. Go through all the cards twice in a row, reading both sides out loud."