She sets down her full tray and lets her bag slide to the floor with a significantly thumpier thump than usual. "Hello, all. I pray you all got kinder midterm assignments than mine?"

"Akkadian Divinations needs me to have a nightmare sometime in the next week and I don't actually know how to do that on purpose but German mystical verse had a new spell in the assignment so, eh, you win some you lose some. What'd you get stuck with?"

"Secret societies wants me to compare and contrast a bunch of groups that we learned about in the lecture, plus one which I had never heard of and seems to have been good enough at the 'secret' part that I can barely find any mentions of them in the library. Founded by Pythagoras, who did not, in fact, invent triangles, which is what I was told by the first person I asked about this."

"Also I have to make a helmet for shop and write about the inter-enclave warfare in China in 400 BC, but really it's the secret societies that has me wondering whether I got on the bad side God or of the school. You haven't caught me worshipping any idols recently, have you?"

"If you've been worshipping any idols you've been doing it very secretively, which would probably be good news for your grade in secret societies class if anything. I've read a bit of Pythagoras and vaguely knew he had a cult; they hated--fractions and beans? No, square roots and beans. Definitely some kind of math and also beans." Why does she remember the beans thing, which is objectively not that interesting, and not anything about the actual cult, which is presumably above the minimum bar of coolness that most cults are above. 

"...Beans? The math part checks out, if Pythagoras was really into triangles, but...beans?"

"I have no clue and now I've made myself curious. Want some research help? My Ancient Greek is pretty decent."

"I'd be delighted! My ancient Greek is - well it's mostly what I can puzzle out from my modern Greek. I found some old texts that mention Pythagoras but they are mostly untranslated. Is there something now you want help with in return or will I owe you?"

"I'd take a spell to induce nightmares if you happen to know one I can cast but if not you can pay in mana or owe me a favor."

"I don't, I'll owe you some similarly-costly favor later.  You should ask Naima, though, next time you see her - I don't think she has a spell but she does lucid dreaming and might have some ideas for inducing nightmares?"

"Oh, cool, I'll do that." Marcy hurries up with her food so they can go to the library sooner.

Malak, too, can hurry up with the eating and head back up to the library. "Where to? I've got some books here already, but we could check the stacks again with your extra eyes and better Greek." She is also asking whether they'll be using the Boston reading room, without actually asking that, because asking, or worse yet, assuming, would be rude. Even if there's not much uncertainty there at all.

"Let's grab what you've got, do a first pass of the stacks for anything really good and then head to our reading room to go through it all and narrow the search." She knows when it's her job to get rid of any residual uncertainty.

"Well, step one complete, I checked them out before lunch." They head for the Greek section of the stacks. "So we're looking for... Pythagoras, Pythagorans, Samos, cults, and... beans I guess? I'd be surprised if the beans are the secret to the whole thing but at least we might answer your question."

"I doubt it's important unless there was some kind of bean-related spell." She grabs a book whose title translates to 'Sacred Geometry', flips through it, and tucks it under an arm.

"I don't know much about ancient Greek psychology but I would guess if they hated beans there was a reason for it? Like if you told me Boston hated beans as Enclave policy I would guess you knew something I didn't, like maybe beans make you generate less mana or, uh, somehow disbelieve in magic like mundanes do. I'd want to find out, anyways. Eukleídēs was another triangles person, right?"

"Yeah, he wrote a geometry textbook so good my teachers still use it. I don't remember him talking about Pythagoras at all or vice versa but he might have."

Well, it's better than nothing, probably the Greek Triangle People all knew each other, or at least read each other if they didn't live at the same time. She'll take that papyrus, read out a couple unfamiliar-words-probably-names, (She can read Greek just fine, she even knows how the ancient pronunciations are different from the modern ones, she just doesn't know what half the words mean. Mother said that phonemes would be harder to get help from other students with than meanings.) and then suggest that they've probably found as much as they're going to, at least until they know more about the Pythagoreans and have more threads to follow than "Greeks, Triangles, Beans".