Ghassan has not read any Victor Hugo. Literature wasn't a priority for his parents; they had him practice his reading comprehension and analytical skills on nonfiction. This class seems to know what a Scholomance class should cover, unlike some classes he could mention. So far there's only a few people in the classroom, so he snags a good seat. Since it's the first day, he should probably take the opportunity to make conversation with one of his classmates. Ghassan looks for someone who seems in the mood to talk.

"Afternoon. Do you have French?"

"Not yet. There's only one other language I'm at risk of getting saddled with, so French is up first on my list."

"I'm Bella. French is a solid choice and I wish you luck with it."

"Ghassan. Do you already have it, then?"

"Yeah, New Orleans has a lot of French ambient so it's typical for us."

"Have you read any Victor Hugo before?"

"Some of Les Mis for French practice but I didn't finish it. I liked it, though, I have the taste of a literature professor."

"It sounds like you'll like this class, then. Any tips for someone who doesn't have the taste of a literature professor?"

"Buy homework off me?" she suggests. "I have no idea if the class is going to frown upon skipping the digressions about the Parisian sewer and whatnot."

"Is there something specific you want to trade for?"

"Well, nobody's paying in mana this week, but I'd take snack tokens, those are fairly fungible? Or if you're in anything else I'm in I'm not excited about most of my other homework." She pulls out her schedule for him. "Or whatever you're good at that I can use or that trades well."

"I'm working on some mal-affecting poisons, if you want to get in on the ground floor of that."

"- that is actually super relevant to my extracurricular project!"

"That's good news. I was starting to wonder if I'd get any of that in here. Tell me about this project."

"I want to apply the standard kinds of mundane pest control to mals and see if any of them work. I'm having an agglo tank built, and I'm going to have a control group and a starvation condition and a poison condition and an attempts-at-birth-control condition and see if literally any of those options can actually kill mals."

Birth control. If that works, wizards world over will be kicking themselves for all the wasted potential.

"I'm happy to help such a noble cause. How much poison do you need?"

"Well, you're the one who'd have any idea how much it'd take to kill an agglo - or how to package so it'd poison whatever ate the agglo carrying it, in a later project stage. I don't actually have a way to forcibly poison the agglos, I'm hoping they pick it up and die like mice."

"Agglos I can do. I've only tested on a few kinds so far, so I can't promise it works on everything. I was hoping there would be chances to test in here with a few people to back me up."

Not that Bella can offer that directly, but he's hoping her connections are more useful than the enclave he's hitched his wagon to.

"If the agglo stage of the project goes very, very well, I will escalate to staking booby-trapped agglos out overnight and seeing if there are dead predators near them in the morning. I'd have to be very, very ambitious and also have a way to definitely get submissions to the journal of mal studies from within the school in order to get more elaborate than that, but it's crossed my mind that it is not impossible to keep a chayaena or a quattria without it eating you, though of course if you're poisoning them I imagine it becomes far more difficult."

Appropriately cautious; Ghassan was getting ahead of himself.

"I've developed a paralytic..."

He goes over the maleficaria that he has tested his paralytic on so far, how long the effects last, how much of a dose it takes to work- and tells her what little he does know about his poison: which mals it works on (agglos, amphisbaena...and not much else, not reliably, not yet) and the required dosage.

"What's your prognosis on getting it lethal or broader-spectrum or more reliable? What are you bottlenecked on?"