"Um- I was, yes," and she brightens, a little bit, in a way that's curiously literal, where the light catches on her as she turns slightly, pushing her hair back with one nominally free hand and thinking about what she's going to order. There's a honey tea here that is even better, she thinks, with a little bit of company.

(She should probably work on being so personable to strangers, in that given the sort of people she ends up spending her time with it's clearly not a good plan- but she likes those people, making it a hard sell.)

"I'm Ilde," she says, "not an academic, I'm afraid, just a musician with bad habits." An interest in academia and tendency to lurk around Brock Marsh running errands and having lunch with professors counts as a bad habit, she is relatively sure; or it did when she was younger and she was lurking around professors because she was sleeping with them. Ilde thinks of this as 'precociousness', whereas there are those who'd think of it as 'statutory'. "Languages are my weakness, though- well, one of many- do you mind if I ask what you're studying?"