She grins. "It's an Amatsu word, they have a whole hierarchical culture thing going on and a senpai is, like, someone who's higher than you in some formal but not too formal hierarchy, or sometimes just older. So having been here a couple of months longer than you means I'm your senpai and you're my kōhai."

"Why does it sound like there's some fine print there?"

"Oh I'm not going to make you fetch me drinks, don't worry. ...or, I will if you can teekay it, but that's just because it's convenient and I want to get some benefit from being friends with a prodigy."

"Do I have to address you with a title?"

"...you know, I would like to be called Astrid-senpai."

"Is that how it goes? Your name then 'senpai'? Am I Vallynn-kōhai?"

"Oh absolutely not, you're just Vallynn."

"Weird. How do you even know all of that?"

"I used to read a lot of books from Amatsu."

Oh so she must be from a pretty rich family, then, interesting. 

"Someday I'll learn the language and the culture. That sounds fun."

"Good luck, it's really hard. You've seen their characters, right?"

"Yeah?"

"There's like ten thousand of them."

"There are not."

"Are too! It's insane."

"Alright that's maybe a longer-term project, then."

"Learning languages is hard, you know."

Vallynn almost says something in Brasilese but showing off like that is the kind of thing that gets you called a "prodigy" and it's been making him kind of uncomfortable (especially with the part of him that's preening) so instead he says, "Yeah, and I'm not even sure how I'll find the time, but still, it sounds interesting."

"Anyway I'm meant to be showing you around, uh, this is the atrium. Sometimes professors like teaching stuff here, there's those little nooks there for that or just chatting and stuff. Then down that way—"

"Wait hold on what about the huge crystal?"

"—right. It's kind of a huge battery? Oh, yeah, uh, you're meant to feed it some magic while you're here."

"I am?"

"It's not, like, required or anything, but everyone's encouraged to try to keep an open channel into it at regeneration rates? And then, like, it's got some cool enchantments to manage and convert magic and whenever you need quick access to a ton of mana you can fetch from it. So it's, like, meant to be a common resource and stuff for everyone to use and it's polite to contribute back when you're not using it. Some people get the hang of doing the channel thing even while asleep but I haven't managed, yet."

"Huh! Neat and prosocial."

"People use it a lot for spell development 'cause then it's easier to iterate without having to wait for your mana to replenish, and also it's a backup battery for the wards around the whole city. There's a beefier one in the Wizard Tower that's the main battery because the folks who live there have more mana than they know what to do with."