"It can't be that bad," says Naima, without even looking up from her set of Avicenna flash cards, and also without having the slightest idea what even happened.

"At least it's not ancient Persian medicine. You have beef with France, right Naima, is it the kind of beef where if I wipe out the whole country with a magic nuke you will think that's cool or the kind of beef where that'd be bad."

"Do whatever you want with France," she says, and then tries to think back to when anyone could have figured out that she might have an issue with France, that's going to be inconvenient when she inevitably has to interact with France.

She cannot start working on a non-lethal knife in this mood, the knife'll get all confused. She starts working on her French homework instead; it's about three pages of sentences only slightly more complex than the ones she had the first day, which is a mildly good sign that the school's not going to instantly ramp up the difficulty to punish her for how desperately she's working to keep up.

Julian did not know that Naima had a beef with France and now he wants to know how Annisa knows. Do the girls gossip together when he's not around? Oh, god, do they gossip about him? 

"Language lab went badly?," he asks instead, because it looks like Annisa wants to vent and he if encourages her maybe he'll be included in whatever secret gossip sessions may or may not be happening. 

"In a sense it went well. I got a 100 on my first assignment!!!! Except I'm, obviously, not going for valedictorian, and I was planning on getting a seventy two. You're not even supposed to err high for lang lab because the worst it'll do is give you remedial work, which I'm effectively having to do anyway! I don't know how to get a 72 aside from only answering 72 percent of the questions and that's going to leave me with knowledge gaps on the quizzes. And I'm terrified that if I keep doing well then it's going to give me harder and harder French, never mind that I'm spending twenty five hours a week on French and do not have space to increase it further. So I'm thinking I'll just fail to turn the next assignment in entirely."

"Or you could try spending less than twenty-five hours a week on French?" Which really isn't long-term sustainable anyway but he doesn't need to point that out. 

"Then I just won't learn it. The first two hours are just reminding myself of everything I've forgotten overnight. At this point I'd rather power through and get to spell-competence by midterms if not for the thing where then it'll put me in, I dunno, Middle High German with you, or Sumerian, or something."

"Maybe you should just try a week of studying the amount that would work for someone else. And worst case you do horribly on the homework and that balances out your first assignment."

"Worst case I forget all the French I've learned and have to start from scratch again. Not that I'm not tempted, but usually when I'm tempted to stop studying languages I shouldn't listen to temptation." She is making a first pass through the current French homework, looking up most of the words in her dictionary and making flashcards out of them. "I guess I could do everything else first and only do French with my remaining time, however much it is." She puts the French flashcards away, pulls out her drafting homework, which is labelling sheets and sheets of architectural diagrams. "I finished math during mal studies, if you want to compare answers."

"I guess I should switch, too. I think my brain is melting. I wonder if there's a medicine for that."

She's got - hm. She hasn't done her first econ assignment, which also sounds like it'll melt her brain, but maybe it'll melt it in a beneficial direction, or something.

Julian feels on top of all his classes, actually, although metallurgy looks like it's going to involve a mildly alarming amount of mundane chemistry and probably he should find some books to get a jump on that. His real problem is going to be figuring out how much extra credit he needs to do to stay competitive without over-investing and falling short on some other resource he needs to live, but he's decided this is something he can think about after he gets his first set of assignments back. 

"I wouldn't worry so much. About the French, I mean, it's going to get harder and then you'll probably do way worse! Sorry, Naima, I don't have a solution for your problem." 

"Thank you, Julian, I'm sure you are right. Naima, if I were in your class - and I'm very glad I'm not - I'd try to arrange for four kids to split all the medicines and ingredients, so it's practically a reasonable amount of memorization for each of them and we could pass quizzes around filling in the bits we knew - have you looked into that?"

She waves her hand vaguely. "Maybe we'll talk about it Sunday, most of the class blocked off the whole day for it. I'm not very sure what the quizzes will look like yet, if they're fill-in-the-blanks then splitting everything might work great, and if they're essay questions about how to treat patients according to Avicenna's model, or about analyzing how different medicines can be expected to interact, it might work less well. I don't know yet. I've got a couple weeks to figure it out, though, we're not actually starting the book of medicines until the third week, I'm just - not actually sure that it's possible for a human brain to learn all of them in just the time allotted for it."

Nod. "Well, you can buy shop homework off me at a discounted rate of the normal rate but I won't haggle about it, since you're evidently very busy."

"I appreciate the offer. I shouldn't have asked for a spellbook so quickly, I think, I've got to finish up learning that before it gets impatient with me, too. Does anyone know how long they usually take about it?"

"It let me toss my first book back without having learned all the spells in it. ...I asked for a warding spell and I got this very complete guide to how the Scholomance ward system works, which is, you know, as fascinating as it is useless." 

"Huh. Yeah, I guess that's definitely the sort of thing I'd want to see if, you know, I weren't busy figuring out if I'm going to be crushed under everything. But it's complicated because I really do think my spellbook is useful, it's just... big. I dunno, maybe I should look through all the spells and just pick up the ones that help with fever or fractures or bronchitis and not, like, managing arthritis."

Annisa hasn't asked for a spellbook because it's going to be in French, which she does not speak. She labels her drafting diagrams.

She pulls out her econ textbook. She understood... most of it, in class, possibly because it's in Chinese, and her Chinese is okay, but this is pretty technical.

"Julian, do you know anything about economics or should I go look for a Chinese dictionary."

"My dad is a banker, so I probably know most of the vocabulary. I think. What words are giving you trouble?" 

She shows him her textbook and points. She doesn't know the words for economics, scarcity, relative, opportunity cost, queuing, or lottery.

Julian knows all these words! Except for opportunity cost, which he recognizes but only knows how to say in Cantonese and has to resort to explaining the concept in English. 

"It's okay, though, it's not like you're graded on in-class discussion."