"Yeah, and my first class went well I think - I just came from Stats."

"Math first thing in the morning, bold of you. I'm saving stats for some semiquarter when they have it after lunch."

"I actually enjoy having math early I think - it's better than having something which means I have to interact with other people early."

"I'm half tempted to work in not needing sleep early in my magic progression but I went and picked up lucid dreaming in virtuality like everybody else and now the opportunity cost is not conducive. Still, not being groggy would be nice."

"I tried to pick up no sleep and got something out of it but it didn't go all that well so I switched to divination earlier than I'd planned at first."

"Ah, impractical intuitions for how to build a no-sleep power? That sucks."

"It mostly works when I need it. Sort of."

"What does it do, give you nightmares when you finally do sleep? Give everything dream-logic?"

"Lots of twitchiness, task switching gets really hard, feels vaguely like my brain's overheating when I pay attention to something for too long."

"So not really ideal for studying for exams, is what I'm hearing."

"It helps when I really need to cram. Though the overheating feeling is pretty unpleasant."

"Does applying literal cold to your head help?"

"Maybe a bit? It's closer to a fever then actual heat."

"Huh. Well, it's possible the rest of it will come together in short order and you'll have a fine sleep-skipper power one day but if it's this uncooperative it makes sense to focus on the moneymaker first."

"Yeah, thought it was frustrating to miss something so early in my progression."

"I bet one day a psion will turn up with a power to adjust people's magical talents."

"That'd be nice, though I don't expect I'd be first in line."

"Yeah, we're still in early days of the eclipsed boom, I wouldn't expect to see it advertised any time soon."

The teacher turns up and gets them underway on econ.

Lucien finds the class pretty interesting and takes detailed lots of notes.

Isabella is also a notetaker, busily scratching away and annotating everything.

Lucien starts to turn to chat with her after class but then realizes he doesn't have any idea what to chat about and instead scampers away before things are awkward.

Well, he'll have another chance at lunch! This time the guy who's harassing her is bothering somebody else and it's just her and Peony and a few guys from their history class.

"Chinese pirates are cooler though."

"Are you saying Genghis Khan isn't cool?"

Isabella is not contributing to this argument, just systematically demolishing her pasta primavera.

Lucien does not really have opinion on this and instead eats his stir-fry quietly. 

"Hi Lucien," says Isabella, pitching her voice to not really interfere with the history project argument. "Mr. Carruthers assigned groups for our history project today."

"Ah. Are you in their group?"