"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?"

"Yes, but I find that for once I do not have the strongest opinions in the bunch."

"You normally have strong opinions?"

"Yeah, but in this case my strong opinion is 'we should come to an agreement on a topic, any topic, so we can start the project'."

He really likes the idea of her having strong opinions.

"I hope I don't have any group projects this semiquarter. Partners are fine, less time wasted on coordination that way."

"Yeah, Carruthers said something about not wanting to grade ten projects when he could put us in groups of five and grade four."

"I guess that means more time is spent figuring out what ideas are good but less of his time is spent on that."