"Luckily, the Scholomance is flexible about 'location', so if we try hard and believe in ourselves we can probably make the door come to us, even without the secrets of geometry."

"How clever an idea! Heeeeere doory doory doory pspsps."

Nia is charming! Theun is charmed.

"If we manage to coax the door into letting us out, there should be lots of we will have many new kinds of interesting things to meet. I'm looking forward to the languages, mostly."

"Languages! Bliss itself. I wish to meet French. Invite it home to watch Netflix and chill."

"Well, it does have a reputation for that! The language of love, or so Hollywood says. Currently I am mostly meeting German's grandparents, and Mandarin. I think Mandarin prefers spreadsheets to Netflix."

Lucy is very nearly late but, thankfully, not quite. 

Oh look there's El and Lissa. Lucy sits down on the other side of El. 

"Hi! How has you guys's day been so far, I had to evacuate shop."

"Two at once right away and one Mandarin! Awful. What terrible things is the school after your blood for?" Nia says to Theun.

"Pretty quiet on the whole. Did you get your assignment made or at least put away?"

"I stashed it in my locker fine. Someone mixed up tin and zinc." To Lissa: "Tin is necessary for the first project--casting a bronze knife--and zinc gives off toxic fumes when melted."

(Montréal arrives shortly before class starts. They scan the room for mals and good seats, and Zed spots Nia and Theun fairly quickly, pointing them out. They take seats nearish them, because there are no sets of three empty seats right next to them. Angie waves, notes that her textbook has arrived, and cracks it open to investigate.)

"Oh, yikes," mutters Lissa. "Is the classroom still going to be usable?"

"Oh, yeah, the vents'll clear it right up after a while."

She sighs with relief. "Will it make mals stay away for a while too? Or do they not care about toxic gas?"

"Probably depends on the mal."

"They don't all even breathe."

Theun gives Nia a wry smile. "I was not very grateful for my void floor, perhaps I should apologize. Though I think my punishment was the two math classes, not the languages. Algebra is no fun, and I doubt I'll find much use for it."

"How irritating to have any classes that are meant to be ornamental only to fail!"