Aha, there's Nia, who is probably somewhat safer than Leander to talk to right now. Probably. Maybe.

Val begins by lurking in her vicinity, smiling, and waving.

"Hi Val!" Definitely not "bonjour", she's being so good.

"Hey there. You have such interesting things to say that I was wondering if you had anything interesting to say about time management."

She hops up from her homework and beckons him off into the stacks so they won't bother people. "Show that time who is boss, weekly performance review," she says. "What specifically?"

"What's your favorite way to find time to do things besides homework?"

"Schedule not doing things besides homework! Otherwise your brain goes out your ears which will kill you quicker than homework. Say, this hour is for this homework, and that hour is for mana, and then, before you have begun hating the whole entire universe too hard, you say this hour is for - what is it you want time for, there is not too terribly much to do."

"I wouldn't say not having much to do is a problem I have at all, personally, if I finished all my homework and everything I'm doing for Sacramento and filled my mana storage and learned the whole spellbook I got from the void, I'd make more friends, throw wild parties, start a drama club, talk some musicians into being accompaniment for me to put on a dance performance..."

"Ooh, fun! You are a making fun of your own sort of person! Right, so, put things in your schedule. Especially making friends! Terribly important. Friends keep you alive a little longer, let us say a day each so you will need to be friends with most of the school to get to graduation, better start!"

He is not sure whether that's a joke, or unrelatedly whether it's funny, or whether it's horrifying or heartening or what. Sounds kind of plausible, but in a nonliteral satire kind of way?

"Um, I'll try that, thanks, although I think I might have more than twenty-four hours of things I need to schedule each day." Oh, please don't let it turn out that all the other kids have time-turners...

"Huh! Do you write it? Let me see."

"I mean, I don't have it written yet," and his to-do list contains incriminating items he can't share and will need to be rewritten, "but I can show you a written version later if you want."

"It would help! Do you want to look at my one?"

"Yes, please!"

She pulls it out. "Some is in Spanish or Swahili, I will cover it with a hand - oh, you have Spanish, of course, only the Swahili." She has a Timex watch (just the face, no strap) sewn to the cover of the planner. She has all her classes marked out, including what to do during them if she has time to spare from learning the material ("revise for quiz", "mana [exercise]", "mana [meditate]", "French", "supply trades"). Before classes she has written "up!" and "bathroom?" and "meditate" and "pack bag: due today:" and a list of assignments, "breakfast"; she has lunch down, and work period is assigned depending on the day to "maintain!" and "French group" and "Spanish spell swap alliterates!" and "revise for artifice history" and something in Swahili that she is covering. After classes is similarly laid out. "Homework trade with Maria C." and "French" and "mal studies essay", broken up with "break: chat!" or "break: flop!" or "break: wander library!", interspersed with more mana and study groups. After dinner is the same way, but she has given herself Friday evening off for "DECADENT RECREATION and also asking void for:" and she has a list in progress. On the parts of the week that have already gone by Val can see that there are arrows exchanging things between places where she's rearranged this for that. Right before bed every night she has written "*!*self care*!*"; she shows him another page with a list of things that count for this ("I don't do them all every day" she clarifies), including "shower?" and "moisturize" and "no le digas a papi.... :)" and some stuff in, again, Swahili.

"That's really organized of you! - Ooh, a spell swap, I'd ask if I could get in on that but I would probably need a time machine... huh, you schedule asking the void for things, how come?"

"If I think of very good asks on Thursday, better if I have not made less good ones Tuesday. Spells should be not enough to make a big heap all at once."

"Oh, that's smart."

"Maria's advice! Spanish spell swap is to be monthly, if you want to come next time."

"If I can make my schedule work, I'd love to! Oh, have you invited Miguel Torres, by the way?"

"I do not think I have seen much of him since that one supply run! Possible I am too short to see through crowds. He can join too if he has Spanish spells for trade, though you are only supposed to be there if you have new ones to bring the group."

"Well, I don't know what the group already has, or what he has, I'm just guessing based on him being from Venezuela and having enclave connections." Shrug. "Anyway, thank you for showing me this. Did you happen to want any help with geometry or anything?"

"How can I say no? Come, explain to me sohcahtoan mysteries."

He can try, at least. He's good at geometry and less good at teaching people things. He attempts to subtly figure out whether Nia is already aware of the secret conspiracy to pretend memorization is useful, without signaling the wrong level of confidence that any given wizard would already know the truth about any given Santa-like conspiracy.

She seems to be trying to memorize things but is also in progress on a cheat sheet of formulae.

"You know, unless you expect to use them a lot, it's probably a waste of time to frontload that many formulas, like - for example, you don't really need to know a bunch of triangle congruence theorems, because if a pair of triangles are really congruent then you can just always prove that side-angle-side applies. If you're just going to do fifty problems with something once, you don't have to memorize it because you can just look at it while you're doing homework, and if you're going to need it one more time on a test in six months you also shouldn't bother to memorize it because that'll take more time than you'd save by going into the test already knowing it."

If the Scholomance grades differently he's so sunk, but why would it?