She sporfles. "Honestly, I wasn't even expecting you to be able to get the tones right!"

"We manage it."

"Yeah, after I spent a couple weeks sporadically drilling you on it." 

"I'm the only one on my team with Mandarin specifically but even Caio speaks four languages. Nearly half the kids in the Scholomance are Sinosphere and a lot of people just stick to their half but it's handy to be able to go between."

"I am intensely curious how that works but I wouldn't be surprised if you have better things to do than explain."

"Not lined up for right now. Besides eating ice cream, and I don't want to get a brain freeze so I'm taking that slowly. Uh, the school was built by Brits, mostly, British enclavers, and at first only kids from the enclaves - those are relatively safe pocket dimension dealies - got slots to attend. Later on the rooms were subdivided considerably and admission was opened up to independent wizards and other enclaves who hadn't been involved, and Shanghai enclave has been making threatening noises about making their own Scholomance - it would be heinously expensive, so they don't want to, and it would mean that to fill up the existing Scholomance both sides would have to actively court indie kids, not vice versa, so the Anglosphere doesn't want them to, and it's currently settled in a detente where the Chinese kids get lots of space in the Scholomance and core classes are offered in Chinese as well as English. It's not worth it to send a kid who doesn't speak either fluently, though, the coursework would be an issue."

"Mandarin Chinese?"

"I think some kids come in who are primarily users of other dialects yet can at least read fluently, but they need to be able to understand Mandarin or English to understand the history lectures and group conversations and stuff."

"Yeah, ideograms are convenient that way. In most of the classes I'm familiar with lectures are a big part, but..."

"They don't have teachers."

"--Uh--"

"Transit to and fro is extremely dangerous and they magicked the school itself to do the teaching." 

"--Wow."

"It's a monstrously clever bit of artifice."

"Artifice?"

"Magical concrete objects. Our artificer is napping but Caio and I took shop and can answer the very basics?"

"Oh, like relics. As far as I know there isn't an organized discipline of making those, just runes that you can put on things, and I've seen relics without any visible runes--hm. Food for thought, I hadn't given nearly enough thought to relics before, on a theoretical level..."

"Huh, seems weird that it wouldn't be organized at all as its own thing but I guess if you do things with runes then that's an obvious way to enchant stuff."

"We do! Johann has a set of needles for tattooing runes that he inherited from his grandfather, it's very cool."

"My grandmother's got magic tattoos, though I think the needles weren't artifice, the ink was just alchemical."

"It could be done that way, yes, but the needles make it less mana-intensive."

"Neat. What kinds of things do you do with tattoos? My grandmother's are for arthritis."

"I haven't done many yet, but luck and minor elemental resistance are popular."

"Oooh, luck tats."

"They're very cool," Eliza agrees, turning and sliding the left shoulder of her dress down to display a small cluster of runes on the back of her shoulder.