"Okay, but your affinity might not care what sets of things do and don't have technical terms."

Annisa has no idea what makes something technically an array. "Or you might have one like mine that gets less useful the farther you get from its core, but is still reasonably useful on things that are kind of edge cases."

"What's yours?"

"Weapons. Most strongly favors sharp things I hold and actively use to stab or shoot enemies, but it was moderately cooperative with, like, sticks, if I used them for sparring, and I find tripwires that deliver a bit of a bite cheaper than ones that just warn me."

"Oh, that's a good one. I guess mine could be arrays and stuff like arrays."

"What...is an array." Probably it's not embarrassing to not know things that obviously aren't your specialty.

"Arrays are the kind where you draw a path for the mana to take toward your alchemical reaction from the outside. The thing with the apple seeds doesn't need a drawn path, everything being placed correctly is all you need."

"Huh." Annisa can't think of anything else to put in an essay on lye-flies but this isn't a 'you have enough extra credit to skip the final' kind of essay. "Do either of you have a mal studies textbook in English?"

"Portuguese, sorry."

Bella pulls hers from her desk and hands it over.

"Thank you. If, as I've heard speculation of, there's some slight variation and you can get extra credit for mentioning anything that's from a version other than yours, I will tell you any interesting divergences between the Javanese and the English."

The divergences turn out to be mostly incredibly slight aside from the section about recommended spells for handling them, but it's good for a couple of additional paragraphs.

"I know, I've wanted to swap with someone for that reason but I can't find any of the Chinese people I've met in a crowd reliably and people who've natively got French or Spanish you can't really tell by looking."

"I think Julian's got a Chinese one and would swap you. ...Cantonese, though."

"The writing's actually identical, modulo traditional versus simplified characters! Or if there are written dialect differences they probably don't make it into academic writing. I should ask him about it."

"I thought it'd be kind of pointless being in a study group with someone going for valedictorian but actually conveniently 'I'm trying to skip the final' and 'I'm trying to have ridiculously good grades' dovetail fine."

"My mom said I'm not allowed to try to be valedictorian."

Why would one's mother have to tell one that they're not allowed to do something rather than that it isn't the best way to stay alive. "Do you like getting good grades? Doing that and then skipping finals is a perfectly legitimate strategy."

"Yeah, that's what I'm going to do instead. I was supposed to try for C's in school to get used to it since I cared too much about getting good grades when I was little except then I kept getting them by not doing any homework and they didn't think that was a good habit and they hadn't picked another strategy by the time I inducted."

"What does - caring too much about getting good grades - feel like, like, do you just inherently feel more pleased about having an A written on your paper? Would you even if the score for the best work was a C? If grades were explicitly assigned for quality given time investment would you feel just as pleased about having the highest score at quality given time investment?"

"Uh, if the letters changed I would have wanted whichever one meant it was the best work, I liked my teachers being impressed with me and they were mundies and so when I got Cs they gave me sad looks and told me I had so much potential. But if they graded you on being fast for homework as well as some tests I guess I would have treated it all like a timed test? That's sort of what I'm trying to do now, I have a schedule and I just do algebra for half an hour as fast as I can."

"Oh, clever." Annisa's motivation system is shaped extremely differently than that!

"It seems to be working so far!" He has been intermittently been doing steps in algebra problems through this conversation.