The first person he sees is a Japanese girl with a Kyoto power-sharer clearly visible on her wrist, and what she thinks of this is: ...wow, that's a bold move.

"Sure, okay," she says, even though if you're an enclaver and you say yes to things like that it's filtering for people who have few enough social skills that that seems like a good idea to them, because fuck it, she hates studying alone and also she's curious. "Are you busy after class today, I'm free for the first two hours after our last class of the day but after that I have a different study group for one of my other lit classes."

...Success...?

(Also: holy shit, he's talking to someone. He's talking to someone who isn't Clay and isn't Clay's friends and she hasn't even made fun of him yet for being a fucking loser.)

"I'm free. I just gotta let Clay know where I am, but it's just, like, a study group, right? And I lost my last one so it makes sense for me to get another one instead of bothering him all the time. It'll be fine."

Is Clay one of his upperclassmen? No, he doesn't have a power-sharer, maybe a sibling or ally or friend. "Cool! I don't actually know your name, I'm Ayako Mochizuki-- Kyoto-- and we can meet in the library?" 

"Tommy. Tommy Ingram. I'm indie but Clay's from Manchester." He says this like it is the coolest possible thing. "Library works, yeah."

Aw. That's kind of cute. "I'll see you there, then."

The rest of the day's classes go fairly quickly-- or like, they don't, her math class and history of alchemy move like molasses, but it's fine she's used to it-- and at the end of them she's there in the library, near the door, waiting for Tommy.

And here's Tommy. "HELLO," he says, in a voice that is not really suited to libraries.

"Hey! Reading room is this way. What did you think of the reading today, I have pretty strong opinions about Romeo and Juliet in general but the Mab monologue isn't doing much for me and I'm not totally sure why—"

(The Kyoto reading room is mostly empty; there are two older students, one of whom has draped her legs across the other's lap. There is also a small but beautifully maintained Shinto-looking shrine with its doors closed.)

"Uhhhhhhh." Oh shit she's actually, like, super smart. "You are definitely saying words, and Shakespeare also said words, and I am saying words right now. In orders. They have syllables!"

...ah, it's going to be one of those study sessions. Which is not a bad thing, she needs to practice teaching before she hits upperclassman and also explaining things does help her learn them, but they're harder to predict.

"Fair enough, those are certainly facts about words and people who say them. Okay so do you know the plot of the play, I never have any idea how much people in the Anglosphere actually pick up from cultural osmosis as opposed to how much my tutors liked to claim they do."

"Romeo and Juliet are in looooooooove" --he punctuates this with a fake gag-- "but their families hate each other, right, so they run around for a while being in love in secret but then someone tells Romeo that Juliet's dead so he thinks he has nothing to live for, but he-- he does. But by the time he realizes that it's too late and he's already dying. Does Juliet die? I feel like Juliet dies. In the version I watched she doesn't die and everyone just stops fighting but that's not really how it all works, is it, people aren't like that."

"Juliet also dies," she confirms. She's visibly holding back laughter, which is a little fake — if she actually didn't want to be laughing she just wouldn't be — but not very fake. 

Fist pump. "Knew it."

"You did! You definitely did know it!" 

"I am like a Shakespeare god. I am a genius who is only at this study session to bless you with some of my wisdom."

Ayako, you make such choices, Rin does not say from her place on the couch. 

"I bow to your mighty wisdom, O Scholar. Do you want a more detailed summary of what we're supposed to have read so far, I can do that, fair warning I might get sidetracked talking about different kinds of sonnets but I promise I'll keep it relevant." 

Uncomfortable shifting-in-seat. “Yeah, okay.” 

"So the play starts with a street fight, the Capulet and Montague servants get into a brawl in the middle of town, and we find out that this feud has already ended with three people dead and the prince of the city comes out and announces that they're finally cracking down on all of the street fights and anyone who starts it up again gets the death penalty which is, I think we can agree, not the most auspicious way to start your day. 

Meanwhile, the prince's cousin Paris talks to Juliet's father about wanting to marry her; her father isn't really sure about it, because Juliet is our age, and wants him to wait another two years so at least she'll be sixteen and not fourteen, but he invites Paris to a party the Capulets are throwing that night. Juliet's mother and her nurse try to get her to accept and marry Paris but she's not having it." 

(This is turning out to be really good practice for colloquial English, honestly, and if Hitomi raises an eyebrow at her from across the room one more time she's going to make that argument out loud in words.)

“…What’s auspicious mean.”

"Sorry, uh, lucky? Good omen?" 

“Oh.” Pause for contemplation. “It’s kind of fucking weird that people got married that young. Like, I’m fucking, I’m fourteen, mate, I wouldn’t marry Paris either.”

"Well, that's part of the point, right? That her parents are being unreasonable and the whole thing is absurd and shouldn't be happening." 

“I guess. …It must suck to be Juliet. Because, like, that’s her parents, and it’s the past so everyone’s all sexist or whatever. She can’t just go, what the fuck, that’s illegal. Unless they are also street fighting. Maybe they should get in a street fight and then Juliet can execute them and take their money. That would be a pretty girlboss thing to do.”

She can... sort of work out from context clues what it means for a thing to be girlboss, even if she has no idea why those words together mean that thing. "They're mostly not street fighting, because they're the heads of noble houses, their servants are the ones doing the street fighting. And also she's... fourteen? Most fourteen year olds do not kill their parents even if their parents are terrible, I'm pretty sure, her life just is horrible in this way she can't fix really at all.

So instead of Juliet killing her parents the next thing that happens is that over with the Montagues, Romeo's friend Benvolio tries to get him to talk about why he's been so miserable lately, and it turns out that Romeo is in love with this girl named Rosaline but Rosaline doesn't love him back— this is the part where I go off on a tangent about different types of sonnets except I am not doing that, behold my restraint— anyway, his other friend Mercutio says 'Romeo this is stupid and you're being stupid and the whole idea of love is stupid, stop it, get hobbies that aren't sighing over girls, like sneaking into Capulet parties,' and Romeo tries to give reasons he doesn't want to do that but they're all kind of dumb reasons and Mercutio is making fun of him for them, and that's the Queen Mab monologue which is where we're at right now." 

“Who’s Mab and why’s she in all of this, you didn’t mention a Queen or a Mab.”