"Oh, hey!" - is that too friendly. Ugh. Stop overthinking things. 

"Hey! I need to reinforce your wards a couple times after the initial casting, is now a good time?"

"Yeah, sure. I have mana for you." Quite a lot of it because while trying to force herself to do French doesn't result in much French it does result in a fair bit of mana. Her storage is four pounds, not fancy enclaver storage like Daria's necklace, but it's not that leaky and it got her mother through. She takes it out of her backpack, hands it to Daria.

She puts a hand on it to estimate the amount of mana and raises her eyebrows. "What were you doing, pushups in all your classes?", she says, and then immediately regrets it, because what if this is a perfectly normal amount of mana and she'd just underestimated how far behind her own mana generation is.

"Lang lab stuck me with French! I hate French! My study group attempted to persuade me that it's not so bad, really, but if I let myself be swayed then where will I get all the mana to repay you from." That should be sufficiently lighthearted without making her sound extremely disabled. And while slipping in that she has a study group.

"I've heard that French isn't bad at all if you have English, but this was in comparison to Mandarin. - we shouldn't be standing around in the hall."

Annisa goes into her room with her Swiss army knife in hand, just in case, but no mals are lying in wait for her. "I don't think it's objectively a very hard language but I'm slow with languages, and I want to spend the first weeks of this term in the shop while it's relatively safe, making everyone practice knives." Shrug. "Could be worse, one kid in the study group now has to learn Middle High German. I didn't even know German came in Middle and High.

"It gave me Old East Slavic! I don't think I'll be able to find a study group for that one."

"Is that lang lab, or for a class?"

"Both, I have an assignment in Russian Lit that has an English translation, but it's awful. So now I'm stuck with it instead of reviewing my Mandarin."

Daria thinks Annisa is a normal person with normal 'ugh gotta learn a new language' problems and Annisa wishes she was so badly it feels like the wish is devouring her from the inside out. She wants to tell Daria to go away but she absolutely cannot do that. "Ugh. Good luck."

"At least it's a Slavic language! I've got three of those already, it'll probably have it spell-adequate by the end of semester and then maybe it'll actually give me class time for my Mandarin."

Internal SCREAMING!!!!!!!

...oh no, did she say something wrong? Annisa looks a little worried. Or maybe stressed? Um. Change of topic? "So what's your schedule like?"

"I complain about the French but it's not bad at all, I have intro comp, which I like, and history of artificing, which is how I met my study group so it'd have to be really terrible to cancel that out. Shop Tuesday, Lab Thursday, English lit should be fine."

"Ooh, history of artificing, I'm jealous. I have history of magical conflicts, which sounds like it'd be interesting but so far has spent the entire first class defining a conflict. We do have the same shop and lab, though."

"I bet history of magical conflict will have good spells once it gets past the describing-words stage, at least?"

"Hopefully! I was hoping to swap actually going to class with a couple people who are good at taking notes, get out of most of it that way." She's transferred all the mana to her own storage and moves on to inspect the ward she'd left hanging off Annisa's reconstructed shelves.

"I think Naima and Malak are in that class and I've already promised to introduce you to them, you should join us at lunch tomorrow."

"I'll take that as a vouch for their notetaking abilities." Annisa wants to introduce her to people! She made enough of an impression to have come up in conversation! Hopefully as something other than 'she's an enclaver but all alone, get in on the ground floor'.

"They seem quite proficient notetakers to me, unless the class contained a bunch of fascinating practical military history in which case they both totally forgot to write it down."

"I wish." And when she'd done examining the ward, "Russian again, shouldn't be more than thirty seconds."

Humming! 

Spellcasting!

"Right, next time shouldn't be for another week or so," she says when Annisa seems to be listening again.