"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.

"Thank you. Maybe by then I will have learned French and paid you back off the sheer power of my hatred of French."

"If that's how you define 'slow with languages' the rest of us don't stand a chance."

"You'd think, but the days feel veeeeery long here. Lots of time for mana generation. And French."

"Maybe when they made the school they did something weird with time as well as space, give us all extra time to study."

"If we all believe it I'm sure it'll be true sooner or later. Of course, I bet most people don't want to spend more time in here than they have to."

"Really you'd want to speed us all up, get adult mana production sooner."

"Wouldn't that also make us tastier sooner?"

"It's not like this place could be any more attractive to mals. And inside the school it's all relative."

"Maybe we should come up with a bunch of useful mythology to tell next year's freshmen. We were talking during class about having improved history lectures as a senior seminar project, you could make really good ones."

"God, the history lectures are terrible. I've seen mundie school in movies and I always thought that sounded awful and this manages to somehow be worse."

"I went to mundie school for two years! It was very like the movies, really. One year I had a good history teacher so now I know all about the history of the settlement of the Pacific islands, which was less of a horrible waste of time than it sounds, I was there to improve my English. The other year I had a bad one so the World Wars had better never come up in the Scholomance."

"Freshman myth number one: you get history classes only in subjects you've studied. Though in my case that would leave me with modern enclave politics, I don't think that counts as history."

"Maybe "history classes give good spells, and usually give them early in term"."

She looks up at the ceiling. "You hear that? I'm expecting good spells on Monday."

"Also I expect the cleaning mechanism in the graduation hall has been all fixed!!"

"That one's New York's fault, not the school."

She doesn't think of those as different, really. "Darn. Hmmm. ...I wonder if telling freshmen that vents and drains are dangerous makes them moreso. I mean, not that you can really avoid it, but..."

"'As long as you check the vents it's really unlikely that something will jump out at you.'"

"Might work. Too bad it's impossible to coordinate this many enclaves on anything."

"Yell about it in the cafeteria. 'Hey, everyone, let's all lie to our freshmen about things, no way this'll go wrong!'"

"I will keep the option in mind."