A PRETTY ENCLAVER IS TALKING TO HIM AND INVITED HIM TO HER ROOM TO STUDY WHAT IS HIS LIFE

Annisa's hands are starting to ache from knife-polishing which is her cue to go do something else, the extra mana from doing it while it hurts isn't worth the repetitive stress injury. Probably the thing to do is French, but she's so incredibly sick of French. Maybe she can find some people going to the library, work ahead on Mal Studies or Romantic poetry or something. 

Daria's not home, but Bella walks down the hallway while she's checking. It is really convenient to be on walking-places terms with enough people that can happen! "Hey! Where're you headed, I might want to tag along."

"HI Annisa! This is Caio, we're going to study in my room, do you want to join us?"

- well she can hardly turn that down even though it's not exactly what she was planning. ....is the boy disappointed. Shoot. 

Boy is going AAAAAAA but not out loud. "Hi Annisa!"

Okay she'll accept. Maybe Bella was hoping for an excuse not to be alone with the boy anyway. "Sounds great! I am tired of knives and was vaguely aspiring to get ahead in Mal Studies; what are you two working on?"

"I'm selling lit homework so I need that to come out nice, and Caio was going to do his math."

"What lit are you in?"

"Cervantes and Victor Hugo. I would consider doing other lit but I would charge a lot more for doing additional assignments versus letting people copy mine."

"Nah, I like my lit class. For my first assignment I tore off an essay in an hour about how the poets were wrong and dead, and I got a B for it, so I'm hoping that the school will continue to accept tangential rants as poetry analysis and it'll be a refreshing break. Who is Cervantes." 

"Spanish dude. If you have heard the phrase 'tilting at windmills' that's a reference to his most famous work but we're actually only covering less famous works in the core syllabus and I'll do the windmills one for extra credit, skip the final." In any non-shop-nor-lab class you can finagle reasonably well you should aim to skip the final. Finals are much harder to sell, because of the time limit, and they don't actually teach you anything new, and they take hours so if you can skive off one you have a huge block of free time.

And they're at the most dangerous time of the year and sometimes in unfamiliar classrooms. Annisa's hoping to skip poetry, drafting, and history. And she hates admitting not knowing words of English but everyone's insisted she's successfully practically-native, so: "I haven't heard the phrase. What is tilting at windmills."

"Making up enemies and then attacking the imaginary enemies. - to be clear, Cervantes was not a wizard, and the act of making them up did not cause them to appear in any way. Protagonist was nuts and charging at literal nonmagical windmills he thought were monsters."

"Huh. Are you in Cervantes, Caio?"

"No, I have a Spanish lit but not that one."

"Is Spanish worth picking up? My initial plan was to dodge all languages so I can do shop, which I'm better at, but the school seems to think I need to be more well-rounded so I might as well be strategic about what it sticks me with." Haha Annisa's going to do her absolute best to make learning French take all four years.

"You're doing French now, right? Spanish is pretty similar and much more phonetic, it'd be a good next."

"Oh, that's a strong argument, my least favorite thing about French so far is the not-at-all-phonetic-ness." At least, it's tied with like six other things.

"Yeah. Just whatever you do don't get Chinese."

"I'll do my best! I wish we could pick, so many things about this school would be way better if we had some ability to set them."

"I mean, you can sort of pick, in the sense that you can definitely tell it now you are studying Spanish if you want, but yeah, there's no drop period." Here is Bella's room! She lets them in and takes up a position on the bed.

...Caio will take the chair and then he's not being presumptuous. It's normal for girls to sit on a bed together.

Yes, that is better than the boy sitting on the bed and Annisa being a third wheel in the chair, which would be awkward. Annisa sits cross-legged and starts in on an essay about lye-flies.

Bella has her references for her essays already and leans off the bed to pluck them from her desk as necessary. At one point she asks the void for a spell to copy writing.

Annisa is jealous of being able to casually ask the Void for spells and not get something in a language you don't speak. ...possibly she should try it. if she does get French then she won't get into that much hot water for ignoring it for a month, and she'll have a bona fide complaint because even kids who are average at languages aren't supposed to be getting spells in them by the second week.