Annisa does feel better in the morning! She is sore all over and can dump a lot of mana on Daria.

Naima's definitely way less sore than she was yesterday, which is kind of like not being sore. Her backpack is full of all of the textbooks she has so far, her sewing kit and a sewing project, and lots and lots of blank paper and pencils. She's at the meeting point five minutes early.

Oh, god, time to sound like a human being. "How did everyone sleep last night?" 

"Decent. Dreamt of homework." This was completely intentional, she wanted to review the highlights of the first two weeks of Mal Studies readings.

"I seem not to have been eaten and have repaid one thirtieth of the debt I incurred for the wards on my room."

...If he rips off the bandage now, he'll probably be so miserable by the time they get to the gym. Okay, act casual. "Oh, do you have a good source for wards? I may be in the market." 

Malak is up before six, because she has to be for morning prayers, but it's a good habit to be in anyways. She spends twenty minutes chatting up her new spellbook and working through one of the first spells in it before she goes to join her group for morning exercise.

"I slept well but I may have overdone the horrible wall sitting before bed. I have a decent ward but it hides your room rather than actually warding it, you'll want to layer it with a tripwire at the very least."

"That's fine, I have a tripwire. How long does it last and how much do you want to cast it?" 

Bella chooses this moment to jog up to the stairwell. "I tried horrible wall sitting last night! It's so fast! After the first time I switched to doing it against my headboard so I could at least collapse into bed."

"I would refresh it once a week back home. Uh, if you're in Naima's hall she'll have to be OK with it, I already traded it to her for a discount on healing and I'm trying not to sell it to any two people close together. If you spot me the mana for it - mana-variable, but a quarter hour of horrible wall sitting should do nicely - then I'll do it for homework help."

"Isn't it horrible?" she says cheerfully to Bella. "Doing it on your bed is a good idea, I...ended up overdoing it and fell asleep on my floor, but that just means exercising today will be extra unpleasant since I'm randomly sore!"

"I'm not on the same hall as anyone I know better than a bathroom buddy, so far."

"Hoo-fucking-ray, extra unpleasantness! I'm planning to try to meet up with Bostonians and ill-fated-potion-guy today in the library and play evilly difficult card games, which are reportedly also mana-building if they're evilly difficult enough and will make a change of pace."

"Huh, interesting. I'd be tempted to check that out" she has no idea if she's invited, sounds like it's mostly enclavers "but if I don't spend this whole weekend on French I'm pretty sure the school will make me regret it on Monday. Luckily, I hate that too!"

Malak's offer is good, especially since he's planning on spending most of his time on homework anyway, but he really doesn't want to sound like a pushover right now. He's gotta focus and act like he's never had an altruistic impulse in his whole natural life, since that Julian is the Julian who lives. 

"Sounds good to me, but we should define the scope of homework help. I'm happy to let you copy off me in any of the classes we share but I don't want to commit to anything too open-ended." 

And then, to Bella – "I'm supposed to meet up with Boston and some other people to study German this morning. Maybe they'll let me stick around." 

"Could be different subsets of Boston but maybe."

"I spoke to Marcy, but we're meeting in their reading room." And if there were other Bostonians in his German class Julian's not sure he'd recognize them, he's terrible at telling white people apart. 

"I talked to Marcy too. She's cool."

"I'll help you with French if you make my knife first," she says to Annisa. "I didn't bring a real one."

To Julian, "I'm hoping not to need much help, but - I traded Naima for healing, if Annisa wanted I'd trade her for shop help or a weapon, if you're spotting the mana then what I'm trading is my time and expertise, so some time with your big brain seems a fair trade. I don't want to copy anything, but if you're up for doing a couple passes of suggestions and edits on my composition homework that seems fair. They're both ongoing commitments so we can renegotiate later if something about the specifics isn't working for us."

Marcy's pretty great but probably has the good sense to not want Malak showing up everywhere she goes. Malak will have to be content with a shared shop class and occasional meal invites (inshallah).

"That works for me." Also, empirically, Julian can't seem to stop himself from doing other people's comp homework, and he might as well get something out of it. 

What, Naima didn't bring a knife at all? Even as a senior Annisa might not be able to make knives as good as the one she brought in, and if her father hadn't been able to make it for her they'd have bought it, and carried more letters to pay for it. Maybe if you're a healer you need the weight for healing stuff that's hard to get inside. "Sure thing, I'll make yours first. I can probably have it for you in a week, assuming I can find people to go to the shop during work periods with me, or set up an adequate mini-shop in my room."

"I'd also like to spend some work periods on shop time."

"Cool, then I bet we can round up enough of a group."

"I'm fine with at least coming down with you guys at least for the first week, if that helps. There's some bulky stuff I want to grab if the restock hasn't been entirely ransacked."

"Does anyone wanna help me build agglo terraria at some point? I have most of the stuff from my supply run but need brackets and hinges, and someone with more building-stuff practice to make sure my agglos will not all escape."

"Uh, maybe? Can I ask... why?"

"I want to see if I can poison them, starve them, or give them birth control, and if I can do any of those things it might replicate in other mal populations."

" ...huh. The idea is that something changed in the mal ecosystem and maybe it's time we tried changing it on purpose?" It's a very enclaver project but as enclaver projects go it's a very good one.

"I mean, I wasn't specifically inspired by the mal ecosystem having changed - if it had somehow always been like this and we still managed to be here today it would still be worth changing - but yeah. It probably won't work, but agglos are easy to find and harmless, so I want to give it a try. People handle infestations of rodents or bugs or deer or bears or whatever very differently from 'run away, kill them in single combat as you encounter them, or maybe feed them things you can afford to lose'."

"Mal birth control is a great idea if they reproduce sexually. I'd worry about analogizing too much from, uh, biology, though."  

"An agglo terrarium sounds tricky, you'd have to design it so that there's no way they can just take it apart. Maybe if it was mostly one big piece??"

"Well, we'll see if we can find anything, I guess."

"Oh, I don't think hardly any of them reproduce sexually, but magic runs on expectation and symbolism as much as anything else. I wouldn't bet very much on handing an agglo a condom or a blister pack of pills, but I'd bet a trip to the nurse to see if she can get me some. Sort of the opposite of putting out a dish of milk so they can feed on the intent, you know?"

"It'd be really cool if there turns out to be an angle on it. I will help out on the terrariums if you have a plan for people not thinking they're incredibly sketchy."

"Mostly telling everyone that I'm planning to keep agglos. Anyone who wants to see my agglos may to make sure I'm not hiding mice in with them and I will trade small things for agglos to populate them with."

"There's probably a version of mend-and-make that can turn a terrarium into one big piece of glass, but I don't happen to know it. ...You know, speaking of milk, I wonder what would happen if you found a way to breed more small mals. Give the big ones something to eat that isn't us." 

"Whether I want to do that depends a lot on whether mals can starve. If they can starve I absolutely don't want to feed them!"

"I haven't given this a ton of thought but it has always seemed to me like there must've been an extinction of some - critical ecosystem element - that led to the weird present situation where there are lots of mals around who mostly only eat wizards. We're not soft targets and that's not how you would expect an ecosystem to work and I think something must've happened."

"Does anyone know what it was? When the deaths picked up so much? I know in the history of artificing homework it was talking like wizards mostly prepared for fighting other wizards, so it must have been different at some point."

"The diversity of possibilities both for the past and the future is why I need four compartments, control group and birth control and poison and starvation. If a kid dies on my hall I may try to claim the room for more arms of the experiment but that's getting ahead of myself."

"I've always sort of assumed it started when mundanes really stopped believing in magic, or started believing in science, or mostly being literate, or something like that. Which would also fit with when the Scholomance was constructed, I think.  If you assume this is all happening around 1800, and then things get worse, and the school is built a few decades later – the thing to do would be to look up mundane literacy rates or education levels and compare it with mal deaths in a given area but I have no idea if those statistics even exist." 

"Huh. Sounds like a senior project if they do."

"It's gotten worse since then, too. Indonesia had - naturally occurring enclave religious orders, until the 1990s, and their death rates just got steadily worse and worse until they were overrun entirely..."

"Seems like a post-graduation project, since it probably won't help that much with surviving - except of course you won't have the library once you're out..."

"Lots of things happened in 1800, but I guess that's probably a major contender. You think they - what actually is the mechanism, there, did a lot of the smaller ones just stop existing when people stopped believing in them? And the bigger ones could hold on without belief? And people believe in magic less and less over time?"

"...if that it's then it would've happened later, in Indonesia..."

"Maybe the food chain used to rely a lot on disease deaths and stuff?"

"Do we know that it happened the same time in Indonesia as everywhere else? Or at the same rate?"

"I think 1800 is a good candidate for when it started but any theory also has to explain why things are getting worse and why they're getting worse uniformly, not just in places that are less literate, or more superstitious, or still believe in demons or something." 

"Maybe a lot of disease deaths weren't."

"Are things getting worse uniformly? I think it started later on my island. And - America had a dozen mundies for the spell to scoop up when Chicago was destroyed, and I don't think Indonesia - which has as many people - would have half a dozen who made it to fourteen."

"Indonesia has as many people as America? I didn't know that, probably just because it's not usually in the news, which is probably a virtue in a country."

"Probably hard to tell how many wizards there are who think they're mundanes? Even if almost all of them die, if there are actually lots..."

"Oh, that's a good question. It has to be getting worse everywhere, right, or else the American enclaves wouldn't need to send kids here, but you're right that it doesn't have to be at the same rate. I don't know about Hong Kong, but anecdotally, my parents both have living siblings and their parents didn't go nuts, they just had six or seven each." 

"It would specifically look like they were dying of animal attacks, though, which I think is rare. People do not tend to show up on CNN having been eaten by sharks or attacked by dogs that can't be identified as belonging to some actual dog owner or anything."

"Wouldn't a lot of them show up as disappearances? I guess I don't know how many of those there are."

"Some but not tons."

Indonesia doesn't make international news because it is poor and so no one in it matters to anyone else, but if Annisa says more things about Indonesia she'll be Indonesia girl, which she doesn't want, she wants to be American, so she just nods along.

Here's the gym. This early nobody has it for a practice run, so it's just empty. In they go. Very carefully.

"I was hoping there'd be some seniors in here. I guess we're not less safe running around than we are standing still, though."

"As long as it's empty, we should stay near the middle – lots of space to see if anything's creeping up on us. One lookout while the others run, trade off?" 

"Sounds right. I'll lookout first." She'd rather run but someone's got to do lookout first and this way there's no debate.

Then the rest of them can run! Annisa is very sore and everything hurts, which is great.

Bella hates running! She keeps expecting to fall! This is going to wear off in a few weeks when she's more used to her shoes, so it's good for mana now and getting into condition for later. Run run run run.

Julian hates himself and hasn't been able to exercise some of these muscle groups in two and a half years! This was such a good idea. 

"Hey Malak do you wanna test the feasibility of combining this with reading aloud," Bella pants.

" - I think it doesn't, actually, this is a pretty wide area to check for mals and that doesn't leave a ton of time for reading. I'll try, though."

She gets some sentences out, but is spending more time looking out and finding her place on the page than she is reading.

"Oh well. Uh, probably in case we all get tired at similar rates we should rotate out before one of us is ready to drop? Who wants the next turn in the middle?"

They can peel off the front of the line to be lookout and lookout can join at the back, that involves relatively little negotiation and should give everyone a fair shot. Annisa appreciates and is slightly confused about the enclaver not demanding the best spot the whole time. Maybe the power of a Group is that they can clearly take or leave Bella? Though she seems good to have.

Run run run Bella is starting to hate this for reasons other than just being scared of falling as she gets more worn out.

Malak will join the jogging. She starts out already hating it because she did not treat her legs and core nicely last night, no she did not. Suffering is half the point, though.

Bella thinks for what must be the seven thousandth time that it's stupid that mana runs on things sucking.

Julian is starting to feel like he's going to die for reasons completely unrelated to his own stupid decisions, which is at least an improvement. When it's his turn to be lookout, he does his best not to collapse into an embarrassing heap. 

In addition to being mana-building, suffering with people also promotes feelings of intimacy! Then if you crush the feelings of intimacy and other people forget to do that you'll have an advantage.

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."

This is precisely what Annisa requested and she hates it passionately.

She goes through the cards and reads the words. She's mispronouncing the French, presumably.

Doesn't matter, right now, not what this test is about.

"Now shuffle them, put them back in the box, and one by one, read the French aloud and try to guess what the English word on the other side is. Anything you get right goes in the second box."

Naima manages to make being helpful look like an act of absolute cold self-interest. She's so cool. 

Annisa will do this. She actually gets most of them, it hasn't really had time to slip out of her memory.

Oh good, she's not going to need to do a test involving three cards.

"Okay. Now go through the ones that are still in your box until you guess right, and then put them with the others."

Sure, she can get the ones she didn't get the first time, there's only ten of them and only three left.

"Now we wait five or so minutes. Anyone have additional plans for today?"

"I've got German study group after this, and then I was going to get a jump on math and metallurgy for next week." 

"How do you get a jump on - oh, have you already had those?"

"Yeah, yesterday morning. And – " oh, this is an opening, isn't it. "it looks like I'll have plenty of time to get ahead, since Shanghai no longer requires my services." 

Julian thought about this last night. He needs to tell the group something, but it sounds a lot better if Shanghai rejected him than if he rejected Shanghai. He's obviously not specced to be a bodyguard. Everyone involved in this scenario acted rationally. He doesn't even need to start impressing people until junior year. And then – there's the other thing. 

"Well that sucks. Condolences?"

"I'll be fine." He'll probably be eaten by something that crawls into his room by December and it serves him right. "They don't need me anymore now that they've adopted their pet maleficer, so maybe it's for the best." 

what.

"what."

"Now that what?"

"The creepy African kid. They're going all-in on him, everything short of a formal alliance. I heard from Wen Ning, the kid I was guarding, and then I asked his sister who's a junior and she says it's true. The line they're feeding everyone is that he only maleficed because he didn't know any better and of course they'll stop him if he does it in here, but – " 

Julian is trying to sound like this is casual and he's not some ungodly combination of guilty and self-righteous and piss-your-pants terrified, but deception isn't exactly his strong suit. "I don't know. They're Shanghai, so they have to know how it looks, they – they just have to think they can get away with it."  

"So he really is a maleficer? What - do they know how much he's done? What exactly he's done?"

"...And here I thought this year was starting well. God damn them, this'll start a war there's no way it won't."

"He really is – or at least he was. That's what the Shanghai junior told me. It has to be at least mammals, right, or they'd just deny it – honestly, I don't understand why they're not just denying it. They really seem to believe that everyone is going to buy their story, that he only did it because he's a poor tragic orphan or something, and I keep thinking, they're the second most powerful enclave in the world and I've been here for 48 hours so maybe there's something I'm missing....

...But there isn't, is there? There's no way out of this for them."  

"Okay, if you really think there's going to be an out and out - conflict - inside the Scholomance this year, do we - do the middle eastern enclaves know, should we be telling them - ?"

This is mostly addressed at Malak, since, well.

"I mean I assume Shanghai knows something we don't because we don't know anything but - but right now the maleficer's just a freshman and doesn't change the balance of power and by senior year he would so you - have to kill him? Maybe Shanghai's just arranging to make the western enclaves kill him and then they'll, I don't know - we should just stay well clear of it -"

"I have no idea if they know, this is the first I've heard of it and - it sounds like Julian heard this earlier than most people - If we tell the enclaves that's - not taking a side, but it's getting involved. Which might be bad for us."

"They're not trying to hide it. At least not from the Sino kids, I don't know how much people know if they don't speak Mandarin." 

"I don't think you tell anybody anything. I think you - thank God that Shanghai fired you, honestly -"

"I guess it'll come out on its own eventually. If they're being open about it."

And suddenly the weight is gone. It's okay. He is back among sane people, and they agree that Shanghai must be planning to burn the world down. Maybe it even is a good thing that he's out of it. Maybe he made the right choice. Maybe he can afford to be a little bit honest.

"I – I'm kind of relieved, yeah. This looks like it's going to get really ugly, and I want to be far away when it does. And when I think about working for them and knowing what they were willing to do – " too far. He'll just trail off, and breathe, and breathe, and breathe. 

"Yeah, this seems like - say nothing, don't get involved, make preparations to hide out for a week if the seniors start killing each other. Which, maybe they won't, Shanghai's got to know that the Americans won't just let them get away with it so maybe there's some complicated maneuvering going on - "

"Okay, now flip the boxes, and guess what English words are on the back of them again. Correct cards go in the empty box."

- wow. 

You know? Annisa respects that. 

She's going to miserably blunder her way through trying to remember all the French words she forgot in the last five minutes. In her defense they were an eventful five minutes.

"And again, until you've gotten all of them correct."

Annisa is not going to break down crying about French, she's not, she's not, that would be pathetic and then she would die, she is not pathetic and she is not going to die, even if it takes her half an hour to get through all the words. It doesn't take half an hour but it takes a lot longer than it did the first time.

- OK wow, Naima gets some more points in her book. She's not sure what kind of points yet but that was definitely exhibiting some positive trait.

"Now we wait ten." Actually she was going to wait thirty but there's no reason you can't add a ten-minute repetition when learning all your words, nobody has to know what her original plan was. "Do you have plans after breakfast besides working on French, Annisa? I think I'm probably gonna head to the library and work ahead on homework, if anybody wants to come with. Maybe alternate homework and sewing, I guess."

"I figured French will eat the whole weekend unless we determine I shouldn't try at it. So I guess I'm with you."

"Cool. I'd go down to the artificing shop to see if there's anything I want to grab for personal projects, but I don't think there's any way to be sure that anyone's been down there today, so I'll probably just have to wait until at least - Monday work period, maybe? And getting ahead on homework is a perfectly good way to spend some time early in the year before things are additionally dangerous, I guess."

Or desperately struggling to just keep up with homework because of your stupid disability. 

She nods.

"You got plans, Malak?"

She was not paying attention because she was busy trying to figure out how not to die if the school erupts into open war.

"No specific ones, yet, happy to do a shop run with you guys and then get ahead on homework."

"I guess probably nothing that dangerous has moved in down there yet? I dunno, it'd be a dumb way to die if something had."

"Can we do French first? If I end up deciding I can't learn French then I'll be willing to take point on the shop run since at that point I'm going for high variance strategies, and if it goes well then maybe by later in the day it'll be easier to round up other people for a run."

"Yeah, works for me. It's early yet."

"Once more unto the breach?" 

It occurs to Julian a moment after he says this that it might be interpreted as an overture of friendship. Whatever. He is at peace with the world. 

Oh no that sounds like a reference and she doesn't get it.

How much American pop culture is there, she spent two years studying it and she doesn't recognize that one at all!! Is it Shakespeare? 

"I'm in!"

"...by which I mean, um, the library. Once more unto the library." 

"Ohhhhhh."

What is even going on here.

"Yeah, let's go to the library."

Proceed like on top of all the pop culture references!!!

"Well, it'll probably take about ten minutes to get there, so that should work out fine."

She puts on her backpack and picks up her boxes.

Naima is the person Annisa wants preparing her children for the Scholomance. 

- and she thought jetpacks were getting ahead of herself!!

The carrel seems to have vanished. Oh well. They can find another perfectly serviceable one and see if this one stays. 

Out come the boxes. "Okay, I think between talking and transit and the carrel that was probably a bit longer than we wanted? But try them again anyway. Same rules, make sure you say all the words out loud as you go."

Okaaaay.

She does terribly. 

She does better the second time around and gets them all on the third. 

"I told you it was unlikely that you were one-in-a-thousand bad." 

"Is this not one in a thousand bad? There are ten words! And I've looked at them eight times by now!"

"It's worse than me, but I think we need to adjust the scale until we can accurately measure where you're at. This time we're going to wait two minutes and see what happens." And she gets out a little clock. "Do you have any other homework you need to get done? Languages are really an intermittent thing, most people can't just work at them for hours on end and have it help as much as half the time more spread out."

"History of artificing we were going to do with Bella. Maybe I could alternate this and the syntax?"

"Right. I guess for that we need a book. Uh - I'm going to stay with Annisa and keep time, does anyone else want to - wait, no. Julian, you stay and keep time, and - wait, no. Hmm. - let's get the book after we've tried the really short time periods, okay?"

"...do you know how to make an origami box?"

"...no?"

"Well, it'll help you think about something else for two minutes. Here." She pulls out a blank piece of paper. "You start by cutting or tearing that into a square, like this."

"Okay."

She keeps an eye on the clock; they don't finish a whole box before it's been two minutes. "Okay, now the words again."

She does about as well as the last time.

"Huh.

"Whole set again with no lag time."

Huh? What does huh mean? Is she some kind of extremely mysterious language disabled that Naima recognizes? Is there a diagnosis? Is there a cure? What does 'huh' mean? Maybe Naima's just decided she's hopeless?

She does even worse, this time.

Julian would love to know what Naima's game plan is, but he senses that saying anything right now would interfere with her process. 

"Huh.

"So there was this guy," she says, and grabs another piece of paper and starts making another origami box, just because she's in a doing-things mood and when she gets like this she sort of doesn't know how not to do things. "I forget his name. One of the early people studying memory. And I remember that one of the things he found out was that if he learned a word, and then left it alone until he had totally forgotten it, and then learned it again the second time, it would take fewer repetitions to learn it the second time than it had the first time. I want to see whether that's true for you. But to find that out we're going to have to wait until you've forgotten all of the words, okay?"

" - okay." What else is she going to say.

Hmm.

She gets out some blank flash cards and a pencil and starts drawing pictures on them, without explaining what she's doing to anyone.

This is terrifying but if Annisa is terrified everyone will decide not to ally with her and then she'll die. She'll just...do sit-ups.

"You know," he says to Annisa, "I think you're psyching yourself out. There's no actual reason you'd do worse on the shorter sets, unless you're making yourself panic and throwing yourself off. We can still try the syntax thing, but if I were you I'd just try to – not think of it as learning a language. As much as you can. It's not like you're ever going to need to produce spoken French, you just need to be able to decipher it. So you can treat it like code-breaking or something."  

"Seems like that might interfere with Naima's extremely mysterious data collection?"

"We can try multiple approaches."

Julian has completely forgotten he's not supposed to be helpful. 

"I think it's fine," she says, not looking up from her drawings.

"Okay. I will treat the French as a coded message that someone sent me. Can I try again, or am I still supposed to be forgetting the words?"

"You can try, I suppose it probably won't set our forgetting time back by much if you do it now."

"Can I study them all in the first place, to memorize them -"

"Yep."

It's a code. It's a random series of letters assigned to the English words. She can make up some associations to help her remember the letter-word correspondance. There's only ten of them. She can use mneumonics. 

This time she gets them all on the first try. Memorizing ten code words isn't very hard.

"Well! Does anyone want to go with me to find the syntax textbook?"  

"I think it has to be me, due to the godlessness."

"Oh, we can all go, I want to look around the library more."

Annisa prefers being alive to being dead but why does it have to be so INTENSELY HUMILIATING.

"I should probably find more languages references, too. I need to finish translating all this medieval German poetry so I can look like I'm just doing it spontaneously in about an hour and impress some enclavers– thanks for that idea, Annisa." 

" - sure thing," she says automatically.

"I think it's a Pavlovian thing," she says, looking at the shelves and not particularly at Annisa. "Your memory is fine. But every time you try to learn a language it goes badly, right, so you involuntarily flinch away from it and stop being in a - mental posture that allows you to use your memory, you know? Is the hypothesis, anyway."

Annisa does NOT PREFER TO DIE to having this conversation. REALLY. She DOESN'T. "What solution does that imply?"

"Well, I guess the ideal is Julian's idea, if you can totally dump the idea that you're learning a language and not a puzzle or a code. If that's not possible on a larger scale, I dunno, I - might have a book on it, actually, I should check."

She's going to owe these people such a mountain of favors. 

Suck it up. 

"That'd be cool. I'll see how far Julian's idea gets me."

"Cool. Uh, tell me if you see anything in the stacks about psychology, I guess. Or, you know, about spells to make it through an enemy army or the graduation hall in one piece."

"You know, a couple rows back I saw a book titled 'one easy spell to vaporize all mals for miles around' and I thought 'well, that's not what we're looking for at all, we're looking for French' and kept walking but if I see it again I'll point it out."

"I'd appreciate it."

"...I do expect to get a perfect grade on Baby's First Knife," Julian eventually remembers to say. Because he's such a hard-nosed realist. 

"If you manage to teach me French, I'll gild the handle, and make the gold carry an eight-part inscription for precise aiming. I bet none of the other valedictorian candidates have gold this early in the year.  - I'll want the gold back once it's graded."

And here is a shelf on French syntax! 

"Oh! Here we are. We've got Syntaxe générale ....Syntaxe comparée du français et de l'anglais: problèmes de traduction ...probably you don't want French Syntax of the Seventeenth Century ...." 

"I think I've just got modern French for now."

"And here's one in English! Okay, I think we're set." 

He is so smart and has such good ideas. 

Wow, Julian's good at the library.

They can go sit down and she can see if she's good at French syntax. It's just logic. Like a math class.

Then Julian will openThe Syntax of French!

The Syntax of French tells him to "note that the position of neither the definite article nor the head noun itself is relevant to the grammaticality judgements: the definite article is merged within functional structure above NP*, while the head noun undergoes N movement out of NP* (see §3 for details)." 

....probably if he admits to Annisa that he has no idea what is going on this will just freak her out even more. 

Annisa is doing her flashcards with Naima again so Julian has a bit of time to try to figure out the French syntax book.

Okay, let's try one of the French ones! 

.....it's just as confusing, but in French. At least it has diagrams? 

"Hey, Annisa? How does this look?"

"What even is that."

"...It's a sentence. I'm almost completely sure that it's a sentence." 

"Does the text say what the labels mean? - I guess it must, but like, does it say in this part of the book."

It does not make any sense. Calm down, it's math, math often doesn't make any sense until you've seen how it's done. "Can you, uh, show me one of the exercises?"

"Uh ....Draw a labelled tree diagram for each sentence below. You will find it easier if you break down the sentences by using the phrase structure rules set out at the end of Part One."

There do seem to be instructions at the end of part one but at no point do any of them explain what an AuxP is. 

Annisa is going to learn French or die, and she doesn't want to die, so she WILL understand this. Somehow.

"Okay, does the first page of the book make sense without context."

"The first page of the book is mainly about what syntax is? I thought I knew what syntax was!"

"Well, if Annisa doesn't, you can't start her in the middle of the book, that's like starting - I don't know, calculus without algebra, or something." She doesn't know calculus but she's pretty sure you need algebra for it, probably. "So - I think we have to start there and see if that makes sense, or if we need a... book on whatever the algebra is to this book's calculus."

They need a book on adding. But the French equivalent. She does not say that.

"Gimme one of those," she says, and grabs one of the English ones. "Fundamentals of French Syntax, by Christopher Gledhill, published in 2003."

"This is a study group, not an academic journal, we don't need a full citation."

"Well, if it changes its mind about what it is, we won't be accused of plagiarism. Okay - 

Syntax is the study of how words and phrases combine to form meaningful units in a language. Even in languages which do not have rigid word orders (such as Latin and American Indian languages), syntax is important because it examines the relations which emerge between sequences of words. Syntax is essential to our understanding of French, because it teaches us a great deal about the ‘grammar’ of the language (the correct and incorrect uses of particular words). But syntax also provides a scientific way to analyse language. This is an important point, because the syntactician’s job is not only to spot patterns, but also to understand and explain the complexities of language.

"So - syntax is a branch of science, apparently, that studies how words in sequences are related to each other?"

"Is that a science? I feel like people just - go with what sounds right."

"Yeah, that's the next paragraph. Okay - 

One of the simplest ways of exploring syntax is to observe what happens when the normal rules of the language break down. For example, most speakers of French would reject such a sentence as * Je toujours bois café, although its literal translation would be fine in English: I always drink coffee (an asterisk * indicates an ungrammatical construction). The sentence obviously means something in French, but a native speaker would reject it, and prefer Je bois toujours du café. French speakers intuitively know that grammatical adverbs (such as toujours) cannot separate the subject of the verb (je) from the verb (bois), and that a common noun (café) cannot be used without an article (du). So, in any explanation about what makes a valid sentence in French, we are obliged to refer to syntax, our implicit knowledge about how words are ordered into meaningful sequences.

"So - syntax is also the implicit knowledge of how words are combined into sentences make sense? Is it - the study of that implicit knowledge - ?"

She reads ahead for a few seconds.

Annisa needs her to go back and read the coffee example five more times!!! She does not say this.

Then she remembers that she is going to die if she doesn't learn French and she does say it.

She rereads the coffee example once.

"I think it's, like, an introductory example for explaining the concept, not something that's trying to actually teach you a rule about French that it wants you to learn right now? Like, an English example would be something like - if you said 'Drink always I coffee', that's wrong, and it's saying that the reason it's wrong is that it breaks from our implicit knowledge of how English syntax works? I think."

"...okay."

"Let's just see if the basic explanation of what the book is about makes any sense, whether it's even the right book for you.

To understand syntax is to understand one of the most fundamental characteristics of language. Many linguists consider syntax to be a central area in linguistics. They claim syntax constitutes the highest level of structure in the mechanisms of language (over and above sounds, morphemes and words discussed in other areas of linguistics). They also argue that syntax reveals the way the human mind works, especially the way we express thoughts or propositions. In the 1950s, the American linguist, Noam Chomsky, claimed that these properties could be found in all languages in one form or another. This idea was first proposed by the rationalist Port Royal grammarians in France and is known as universal grammar. This is not a ‘grammar for all languages’, but an attempt to find the underlying properties shared by all human languages. For instance, all languages appear to express ideas through transitivity, that is through a perspective of Subject - Verb - Object, although the order of these elements and their functions vary greatly from one language to the next. For example, Latin prefers the order Subject – Object – Verb, whereas Japanese tends to express a general ‘Topic’ instead of an explicit subject. In addition, all languages appear to be able to paraphrase, that is they express the same idea in a variety of ways for stylistic effect. For example -

"- okay those examples don't look helpful to you yet. So - syntax is also a science related to... psychology? Is what I'm getting here? And the idea that all languages share certain basic grammar comes from France, so if there are in fact oddballs in this area we can expect French not to be one of them."

Okay. Okay. Focus. Naima does not appear to be confused. Therefore, he cannot appear to be confused, because then Naima will think he's an idiot and the group will kick him out and probably he'll get eaten by a grogler. It's so simple when you put it that way! 

"So, it looks like this book is about ...finding rules for what's happening in our brains when we generate language. That at least sounds potentially useful for Annisa's thing. Look at this – 

As a mathematical linguist, Noam Chomsky was interested in finding the patterns which appeared to link these universal properties of language. He argued that if two sentences were related in some way, they were related by a series of abstract rules.Instead of seeing language as hugely complex and idiosyncratic, he suggested that we are in fact dealing with a small number of rules which can be combined in different ways to produce an almost infinite variety of expressions.

"Yeah! So - maybe if Annisa can't currently learn languages the normal implicit knowledge way, she can still learn how the small number of rules work and then apply them with... whatever mathematical linguists do."

" - yeah, I guess that makes sense. This looks - really complicated? But - not in a way I'd be worse at than other people, just, uh, it looks kind of complicated in general."

"Yeah I think this is, like, a legitimate academic work about some kind of scientific discipline I know nothing about? But - it does say 'fundamentals' on the cover, even if it's not meant to be a teaching tool. So - maybe this is okay, actually, if you've never met a teaching tool that worked for you. And hey, it does start out with rules that look basic, it's just that the abbreviations make them look opaque.

Most basic sentences in French share the same pattern, and this is reflected by our first rule: S -> NP VP. This states that all Sentences in French (S) consist of a Noun Phrase (NP) which serves as a subject (the topic or starting point of the sentence). All sentences also have a Verb Phrase (VP) which serves as a comment about the subject (what the subject is or what the subject is doing).

"So every sentence in French has a subject and a verb. - do we need to go over what subjects and verbs are or has everybody encountered those before."

Julian is feeling like he got the Group in way over their collective heads but Annisa does not seem to be actively having a panic attack. So. Progress?

"It's a code. You're learning to break a code." That idea seemed to get some traction last time so he's decided to run with it. "This is the – whatsit. Decoder? Key? – Maybe we should see how this applies to your actual French homework." 

"I'd rather understand it first before I try to do French with it. I know what a subject and a verb are."

"Okay.

" - is everyone clear on the idea that subjects and verbs can be multiple words, because I was not, but that's what it says here, that they're both - kinds of phrases."

"Hm. I'm having trouble thinking of examples for verbs but subjects it makes sense? Like in English you can say 'The man in the hat fell over dead' and that's - Oh, that's an example of both, the subject is 'The man in the hat' and the verb is 'fell over dead' or maybe just 'fell over' because if you say just 'fell' it's not the same thing, exactly?"

"Yeah, I think that's what it's saying? I just would have thought of 'man' as the subject there and the rest of it as describing the man, but this is saying that it's all the subject and that the rest of it is all the verb, I think. Here, it's dividing the sentences into trees like this, I don't know how to read that aloud. The example is in French but I think you see the same thing in English, here, I'll write up another example - "

She hands the book to Annisa and starts working on an English sentence and a tree for it.

Annisa is definitely competent to learn English syntax, her English is genuinely perfectly solid even if there are some words she doesn't know and even if it took eight years and shouldn't have.

She stares at the book and tries to only think about how things work in English. The French can come once she understands the concept.

The rule S-> NP VP reflects the fact that subjects and verbs are the only obligatory parts of a sentence. You can see in the sentence above that the verb vouloir agrees with the singular Noun monsieur, and this demonstrates that the main subject Noun is monsieur while the phrase qui porte des lunettes is simply part of the overall subject NP. At the same time, the NP un café is the object of the verb. Since some verbs do not require an object at all (as in Il arrive, Elle travaille), object NPs do not need to be represented in the rule S -> NP VP. It is for this reason that in tree diagrams, the NP directly below S is always conventionally understood as the ‘subject’, while the NP below VP is conventionally the ‘object’.

Our first rule of syntax reflects the fact that phrases combine to form sentences. A phrase is a sequence of words which belong together and function as a unit. All phrases orbit around one central element. For example, in Noun Phrases (NP), the noun represents the single most essential piece of information in the phrase. But NPs may also contain other information.

Naima hands her a couple English sentence trees that represent what she thinks the book is getting at, hopefully before Annisa can get too tripped up by the French.

" - hey, would it actually help more if we got Annisa book about English syntax and started with that, if we're gonna need to do English before French the whole time anyway?"

"Maybe? I'm slightly worried that this is, uh, an entire semester to master all by itself and I'll be pretty behind in French by the time I fully understand syntax - I guess that's fine since I might need to learn other languages after French and being pretty behind in French was the default outcome anyway -

She is examining the English sentence trees and trying to write her own. "Did I do this right?"

[Annisa] (dislikes French.) 

[Annisa and her classmates] (are studying in the library.)

[Everyone] (dies horribly.)

"Yeah, I think those are all right. Probably you don't need to entirely understand all of syntax? I dunno, I guess we can keep going until we get stuck, it did say that there were only a few rules and the book isn't actually very long, as books go."

"All right, I think I can take a look at the French examples -"

 You can see in the sentence above that the verb vouloir agrees with the singular Noun monsieur, and this demonstrates that the main subject Noun is monsieur while the phrase qui porte des lunettes is simply part of the overall subject NP. 

"...so if, hypothetically, I could not see that, how would I be able to figure that sentence out..."

"Um - I think if you're learning the language and not learning how syntax works it's the opposite, right? If you already know that the main subject and the verb have to agree, then you should be able to look at a sentence and see which nouns the verb agrees with, which narrows down which nouns can be the subject of the sentence. But to use that knowledge you're going to have to learn which verb forms do what, in this case which ones are plural and which are singular."

Annisa is no good at remembering how verbs change around but she does not say this. "I guess I can at least pull out the possible nouns and then look up in the textbook whether the verb is singular or plural every time."

"Yeah, I think so. You can make a chart of the transformations and consult it, for most words, and maybe also have a list of common exceptions."

"Can you help me make one, I'm pretty sure I'll make it wrong and then confuse myself further - you can just check once I think I've got it -"

"Sure thing."

In the meantime, Naima is going to take out her History of Alchemy textbook and start reading the next section. She reads... really fast, if she is in fact reading the whole thing and not skimming.

(Annisa knows her friends will glare at her but she raps her knuckles sharply against each other so she can concentrate on her verb charts.)

Nah, she's too busy reading to glare this time.

Oh good. She does get the verbs down on the paper, even if they're only on the paper and not in her head because her head was full of suffering. She rereads the first few pages of the syntax book, the part that's just an introduction about Noam Chomsky and principles of language and then the part with the sentence diagrams.

"Okay, I think I might be ready to try to make sentence diagrams of my homework? Do you think I'm ready to do that?"

"I can't see any reason not to try!"

Annisa's homework wants her to translate to English:

un homme et un garçon 

un chat et un homme

une femme et un homme

un garçon et une fille

un cheval et un chien

Je suis Marie

Je parle anglais

C'est un chat

Tu es un chat?

Un chat et une pizza

Tu manges une pizza

Comment tu t'appelles?

Je m'appelle Paul

Marc est anglais

Il s'appelle Marc?

Non, il s'appelle Pierre.

Annisa tries VERY HARD not to panic about the fact many of these DON'T SEEM LIKE THEY FOLLOW THE RULES IN THE SYNTAX BOOK but they DON'T.

Some of them do, so she tries going through her verb chart and finding all the verbs and finding the nouns they could plausibly match to and finding the sentence structures this could plausibly imply. By lunchtime she's about halfway through the ones this approach works at ALL on.

Nah, the three more hours until lunchtime are way too long to work on this. Naima is going to look over when she's halfway through her alch homework and casually point out that some of these aren't sentences.

Oh.

Well, that seems concerning for the prospects of using syntax to understand French.

"I'm sure it'll move on to full sentences later, it just wants you to focus on vocab right now. These phrases at the top are totally structurally the same as English phrases, the reason you don't need to use syntax is that there isn't actually any unfamiliar grammar there at all. It's just, like, a word-substitution code."

"- okay." 

"Thank you."

"Of course! I do want the knife, though."

"You got it. I'll probably do yours before Julian's because you're more of a hardass than him."

Julian looks up from his math homework. ...Yeah, that just seems accurate. "Okay. Take the sentences you've diagrammed and translate them for me." 

"Okay. I diagrammed Je suis Marie." Her pronunciation is atrocious. "Suis is on my chart of verbs as the indicative present first person of suivre, which the dictionary translates as 'to follow'. Je is "I". Marie is just a name. So it's "I follow Marie"."

"Well, you're not wrong! But suis is also the indicative first person present of être, to be, and that meaning's much more common – so it's probably supposed to be 'I am Marie.'"  

" - why would two different words be spelled and pronounced the exact same???"

"You get that in English, too, any word in the dictionary that has multiple definitions. Like, uh, 'comb' the noun and 'comb' the verb."

"Does Javanese not have homophones?"

"Some but not ones that would fit into exactly the same kinds of sentences!"

"French is rude. Do the next one." 

"Je parle anglais means I parle English, which my chart says is the indicative first person present of Parler which means to speak, but for all I know it also means 'to murder', so probably it's either "I speak English" or "I murder Englishmen"."

"Which seams more likely on a - no actually that's a bad question in here. 'Speak' is right."

Julian thinks Annisa is trying to stall and he's not going to enable it. He might not be as much of a hardass as Naima, but he has his pride. "Next." 

"C'est un chat. C'est is the verb. The worksheet in class translated C'est as 'that is', which I'm relying on because it wasn't in the dictionary. un is 'a', if the thing that follows is male, and 'chat' is cat, so, that is a male cat."

"It could be any cat, 'chat' is a male noun."

Julian considers the advisability of trying to explain elisions in French and ultimately decides against it. 

"A male noun? ...even if it's a female cat?"

"Yeah it - oh this is your first gendered language. Sorry about the Romans."

Naima's going to take a few minutes to finish up her own homework, it's probably not actually effective for all three of them to be trying to help Annisa with her French homework at the same time.

"Gendered language? What do the Romans have to do with it?"

"Some languages assign a gender to every noun, even inanimate objects. Like Latin, and all the languages descended from Latin."

" - but that's stupid! And English doesn't do that."

"English isn't descended from Latin, it's Germanic – and it's weird for not having gender, actually, it used to but it lost it."  

"What does having gender mean, like, we have the concept on Java that there are male things and female things -"

"It's loosely connected to gender in that nouns that are always male or female will be masculine or feminine, but for most purposes it's kind of random and doesn't really mean anything. I apologize for the people who wrote this code."

"Great. Okay. So cats are...male? All of them? Including the girl ones?"

"Yes."

Annisa makes a new page in her notebook. Labels it "things that are MALE according to FRENCH".

Writes "CATS".

Julian peeks. "That's not a bad idea. Every time you learn a new noun you should write down its gender anyway, that's just good practice." 

"Better practice is using gender for ability to bear children!" But on the next page she writes "things that are FEMALE according to FRENCH."

"You could also put gender on your flash cards, when you make those, after you finish the worksheet. Probably best to finish the worksheet first, though, so you can be sure you're not behind."

"It could be worse. I think there's a Bantu language that has 27 noun buckets." 

"Tu es up chat. You are a cat? Tu manges une pizza. You mange a pizza. Manger is 'nursery', according to my dictionary, but I am assuming it's not 'you nurse a pizza'. The pizza is a girl pizza."

"...okay, something is up with your dictionary. Or the way you're using your dictionary." 

"It's just the first one I could find, I doubt it's gone bad already?" She hands over her dictionary.

Julian looks up the entry for manger. "See, right here? It says 'to eat.'"

"...I swear it said nursery!!! Okay. I eat a girl pizza."

Hmmm. "Annisa, are you looking up words on the French side or the English side?"

Does it have both? Shoot. "Uh, I'm not sure."

"Yeah, see  – it's got French to English and English to French." 

"Right, that makes sense. Okay, so if you look up manger on the second side it says 'la crèche: creche, nursery, manger, day nursery' and if you look it up on the first side it says 'to eat' which is way more reasonable as a thing to do with a girl pizza."

"All pizzas are girls."

"It's a good thing the Scholomance still gives out dead languages or I'd be tempted to solve my language problems with nuclear weapons." She writes down "pizzas" under THINGS that FRENCH thinks are GIRLS.

"Honestly, it sounds kind of ridiculous, but I'm not convinced that calling it a girl pizza isn't a good way to remember that pizzas are girls."

"Next one is comment tu t'appelles, which is what is your name, and then Je m'appelle Paul, my name is Paul, Marc est anglais is Marc is English..." It's not really even that hard aside from how it's horrible.

She's just gonna wait to see how many of these Annisa gets.

She doesn't actually get tripped up again because there aren't that many left and they're more variants on 'what's your/his name'. She bruises her knuckles but only sort of by habit.

"See, that didn't even take that long. All right, I think you should make flash cards for all of the words - uh, codewords? - in this lesson, and then go through them twice. Maybe don't even test yourself on right now if you're not feeling up to it, but at least make the cards so you can practice them again before you go to bed. And now... I'm gonna work ahead on Conflicts before lunch hits, do you wanna split the questions again Malak?"

Annisa can spend the rest of the time until lunch working on flashcards, sure.

By lunch Naima is done with everything due on Monday and Wednesday except for History of Artificing, and sets a private goal of being at least one week ahead on Conflicts, Alch, Artificing, and Mal Studies by the end of the weekend.

But it's not time for that, now; too much studying in a row dulls the excitement of learning and hampers recall of information later. Also, she has a lot of artificing stuff she wants to grab for personal projects, and today seems like as good as good a day as any to grab it. So after lunch, she asks if the others still want to head down to the shop and raid the supply cabinets.

"I'm down. It'd be nice if we could round up a few more people, if you know anyone?"

"I know... a couple of the kids from Cairo enclave, sort of, but I don't know if those count? Oh, and Shannon, I met Shannon. Briefly. I think other than that it's just Bella."

"We can ask Bella and I can ask Daria but I think it's actually not a good risk calculation, if you're an enclaver. ...possibly we are transitioning away from exploration too early and should make ourselves meet more people."

"Yeah, that's possible. We haven't even taken all of our classes, yet, we should probably still be meeting new people?"

"Yeah. And it's kind of a strategic asset, right, that we can invite people to sit with us at lunch rather than going around hoping to sit with them - but we should be using it and trying to invite people to sit with us at lunch.

- you know what else, if there's a war among the seniors we'll want to ditch shop on Tuesday, and I can do baby's first knife without any tools if we get the metal and if people pay me mana, which you'd better be willing to if there's a war. So we should go, even if we don't have company."

"Sure, if things look bad on Tuesday. Malak, you in?"

"Yeah, absolutely. We did a shop run earlier but I didn't get any metals. You can make a forge in your room, did you know? Just like some of the alchemy kids tap the lamps for a bunsen burner, you can run a forge if you can find some stone or concrete to make it out of. So maybe if we're expecting an unsettled year we should keep an eye out for that sort of thing for Annisa."

"Oh, that'd be neat. And plausibly worth it even if the year goes smoothly, since I don't want to spend all my time way down in the shop and I do want to spend all of it making knives."

"I think it's - well everything is dangerous, but it's more dangerous than a bunsen burner and maybe concrete is hard to come by, there are reasons not everyone does it."

"You can absolutely kill yourself with a forge you don't know how to handle. However, you can also kill yourself going down to the shop as a freshman, so if we can find the concrete I'm inclined to try it. And none of you all have any cause to worry 'cause if I die you can just grab all my stuff."

"I would rather have you around through senior year to trade with than get a third of your freshman possessions, but point taken."

Awww, what a nice thing to say. "Well, I'll do my best." 

And they can split off to see if they can find people who want to accompany them?