"Marcy Park; pleased to meet you. What's your affinity? Mine's projectiles."

"Something in artificing, some things that should be hard are easier than some things that should be easy, but I'm not sure of the pattern yet." Write write.

"Well, the shop will try to give you in-affinity projects so I bet you'll know soon. I'm really looking forward to shop."

"Me too! My parents turned half our basement into a shop, but they're both pretty specialized, she's a weaver and he's a technomancer, so we didn't have parts and tools for everything I could've tried."

"Oh, that's cool! I've had basic hot and cold metal shop, mostly theory but some bench time too, and nothing related to weaving."

"Mum's a very good weaver, sells to enclaves."

"Nice. Mind if I ask you an odd hypothetical question?" 

"...go ahead."

She asks the question about the box alien again. It really gets around, that box alien.

"I think probably if somebody offers me this deal they are a mal who has figured out an interesting bait strategy and I should run away and not touch any of their stuff."

"That's a very reasonable level of caution, but supposing you had some way to be sure it was on the level."

"If it's on the level I take the one box, I'm not a cheat."

Hmm. Sounds like an instinctive response rather than a reasoned one, but Marcy has spent years learning to carefully reason out the correct thing to say and then say it casually like it was natural, and furthermore the analogy to cheating suggests she's seen to the point of the question, so she's clearly not not reasoning it through. She smiles.

"Makes sense. Speaking of, anything you're looking to buy or sell? We came in with some trade goods an artificer might want. Mostly stuff we can find a use for if we don't end up selling it, but variety's often useful."

"I'll want that very much once the void or my shop assignments tell what to focus on. For now I have what I came in with and my parents didn't recommend bringing anything specifically intending to trade it. What is it you have? I can write it down for later."

Marcy can give a list of the three or four things they have the most interest in selling, and her room number so Aadhya can find her if she's interested.

"Cool, thanks!"

"So, where are you from?" Marcy asks now that they've been talking long enough that she can be curious about the combination of name and accent without looking like she's hunting for an excuse to say she's from Boston.

"New Jersey. Though I've got Hindi as much as it looks like I ought."

"Boston and I have Korean as much as it looks like I ought."

Enclaver. A cool kid. But she's still smiling. Yay. "Does Korean have good spells?"

"It does! A lot of the ones I learned because they're in-affinity are in Korean. I bet Hindi has some cool ones too."

"I'm not going to be able to cast my family's spells for a while, but maybe the void has good freshman-level stuff."

"Yeah. I'm really excited for getting spellbooks from the void; everything I've learned so far is by definition something my parents and teachers can do better. Probably that'll be true of everything I get this year too, but it's the principle of the thing."

"My mother recommends learning obscure languages about it but since I'm an artificer I'm not planning to take that advice much. I guess Bengali is a little obscure."

"My really obscure one is Igbo."

"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.”

"Apparently it takes some people a while but if you pay attention to patterns in your assignments and void spells it'll present itself sooner or later. I know mine's in artificing because there are some hard things I found easier than some easy things, but I don't know what about them made the difference yet with only a couple examples."

He nods.

"—yeah, I've had a couple things like that. But I wasn't supposed to be doing any of them, so I dunno if it was just spite and hormones."

"What were they?"

"Some metalworking stuff, some tattoos I wasn't supposed to get."

And a couple of really stupid casts with no mana, but he's smart enough not to say that in front of a stranger, at least.

"You?"

"Mum gave me some clothworm eggs to make beads out of, or try to, and those came out, even though the week before I hadn't been able to cast a little protection spell I was trying to do for myself instead of getting Dad to do it for me before I went to school."