"Is that a hard one?"

"Not especially? Nobody can agree on whether it's ideograms, pictograms, or logograms, but whatever they are it's got way fewer of them than Mandarin. And it was the main writing system of a bunch of secret societies and supposedly they wrote a lot of cool stuff that never got shared around."

"Ooooh."

"Yeah, it's fun. How hard is Hindi? I haven't gone anywhere in that language family; I started with English and Korean and sort of migrated around from there."

"It's up there, though Devanagari isn't anywhere near Chinese in character population."

"Probably not any time soon then, unfortunately; I want to start German this term and I'm planning to spend a lot of time in the shop too."

"Is there a particular spell you're after in German?"

"No, it's just popular enough to trade spells in and so closely related to English that avoiding it is almost more effort than learning it."

"That's not a problem I've ever had with German."

"I know English and French and Latin and there's--sort of a negative space, there, I can see where a piece of English must have come from German because it isn't in either of the other two."

"Oh, that makes sense. Conveniently Hindi is totally unrelated. As far as I know English sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus."

Marcy chuckles. Perks of picking languages by wandering the relatedness tree: she has read enough Greek stuff to understand that reference. "Convenient, I suppose, once you get over the initial work of learning English with no head start."

"That was baby me. Baby me was a sucker, doing all that work for me."

"The one and only good thing about being a baby."

"It was nice to meet you, maybe we'll have some class together," says Aadhya. Marcy is great but she is also one person. Aadhya wishes to meet lots. Who's next.

"Likewise. See you around!" Aadhya is also great and also one person; back to the small talk carousel with them both.

Here's a slightly harried-looking gothy kid trying to pass out mail. He probably qualifies as a person!

Well, Aadhya's not going to interrupt the mail run, people have been waiting for those letters all year, but once he's handed them off. "Hi! My name's Aadhya, what's yours?"

“—oh. Hey. Z. You?”

He peers under one of the nearby lunch tables to check for pests before he hops up and takes a seat, feet resting on the bench.

"Aadhya," she repeats, slower. Sometimes people have trouble with the dh.

“—uh—oops. Aadhya. Sorry.”

He laughs awkwardly and looks away. (He did pronounce it right, though!)

"That's right! I'm going into artificing, what about you?"

“—oh, same! Pretty sure, anyway.”

"Neat! Do you know your affinity yet? I haven't figured mine out in the general case."

“—thank fuck, I thought I was the only one.”