Alyona's parents did not attend the Scholomance. Her mother was the eldest of six. Was. This made her very, very eager to get her children in. Alyona's brother is nine years older than her. They don't talk about the gap.

When Alyona was around 8, her uncle designed a complicated bit of artifice to help students start preparing for graduation before they ever attend the Scholomance. Alyona has spent the years since then playtesting. It's not fully built - it would take a whole team of adult wizards to complete. But if she makes a good showing at graduation, then maybe he'll get that team. She does solidly well at most of it, and exceptionally well at the verbal components. It helps that she has an affinity for words and language.

What her affinity doesn't help is that she picks up languages like a sponge. She can't help it. Encountering the same morpheme - or even close cognates - in multiple contexts is enough for her to retain the meaning, including shades of connotation. Her parents raised her speaking the languages they had fluency in - English, Spanish, Russian - but by the time she was 14 she had picked up bits of several other languages besides. In the Scholomance, bits of a language are decidedly not an asset. She spends most of her time outside standard graduation prep on getting any language she has a few words in up to the level where she can at least muddle through a spell with a dictionary.

A portion of Alyona's weight allotment goes to pocket dictionaries in those several languages. It'd be a waste for anyone else, but for her it's necessary. The rest goes to a wide variety of useful things, including safety boots, an ultralight backpack, clothing, an enchanted pitch pipe, a first aid kit, an array of both modern tools and magical reagents, school supplies, supplies for embroidery, crochet, and illustration, and some semiprecious stones to store mana in.

She hugs her mother goodbye, and then steps back. A minute later, she is wrenched from reality.