Bella studies her spell for a bit but doesn't use it right away, goes back to writing.

"What language is it?"

"Mandarin."

"Ah, rats."

"I know a Javanese one but I doubt that's any more helpful."

"Thanks anyway. I only have three, languages aren't my strong point."

"Me neither. I was kind of hoping I could dodge them, but evidently no."

"I think sometimes you can avoid language labs as an upperclassman if you're an alchemist or artificer and you rack up enough credits. But at least spell-competence doesn't have to be fluency."

"Yeah. And at least it's not all languages. What classes do you like."

"I like math and lab and chemistry best. The history classes are okay too, they'd be great if they didn't have lectures but the lectures are pretty soporific."

"My and Bella's history study group was discussing a scheme to convince the school to let students design better lectures, as a class of its own."

"Oh, I like that idea. Though it'd wind up being a very small class, it's not the sort of thing you'd be able to straightforwardly cheat on without wrecking the lectures for the next bunch of students, it'd all be valedictorian track kids."

"Yeah, true. And presumably if the curriculum were editable then it'd be more survival-focused and so there's some reason it's stuck the way it is."

"It does update, my lab recipe had a brand name it wanted for the chalk that I'm pretty sure was not around a hundred years ago. Though I guess maybe the brand was and it's just the packaging is more neon now."

"Your lab assignment wanted chalk? I just had to stir some soap."

"Mine was more complicated than soap but it wasn't that complicated and most of the complication was the incanting not the mixture. Was the chalk an ingredient?"

"No, it was for the array..."

"You got an alchemical array in week one?"

"I assume it's in-affinity somehow but I don't actually know my affinity - the potion was an antitoxin, I don't think my affinity is antitoxins -"

"Huh!! Do you have even, like, a ballpark sense of your affinity -"

"I'm pretty sure it's in alchemy somewhere, and this supports that? But I don't know exactly."

"What do you get when you ask the Void for standard stuff - ward for your room, tripwire, poison detection -"

"I had room wards already that my dad taught me so I didn't ask for those. I asked for a danger divination, when I heard about the murders, because I would really rather not be murdered, all things considered, and it didn't seem exceptional? It's in Portuguese and it's two verses and it's kind of expensive but it's good for if I hear a weird noise when I'm about to leave a room or something. My poison detection's a recipe and I'm going to make it next week since I finished my assignment this week, it wants apple seeds and butterfly pea flowers arranged in a mandala around the burner but the ingredients are actually just saltwater and vinegar."

"So, another array."

"I think array is a technical term and the apple seed thing isn't."