She standing near the rough Mandarin-English boundary, looking for someone else that looks approachable, when she see some very colorful girl... dancing? She squints at her in confusion. That doesn't look like any kind of dance spell she's familiar with.
The girl who is staring at Luna obviously speaks English and Mandarin both, judging by the way her eyes had lingered on everyone nearby when she was looking around for someone to talk to, instead of passing quickly over groups speaking the wrong language. Luna speaks both, but she chooses her native language to start in. Your first conversation with someone should always be in one of your native languages, so that your native language knows you're still fond of it, even though you've been flattering all your other languages so they'll let you learn them faster.
"The dance is to calm the wallwockles," Luna informs the girl. "It's a good way to build mana, too."
"They live in the walls in buildings built into the void. And the ceilings, I think," she adds, glancing up as if to check. "When they get overexcited they like to change the building a bit. And I'd expect that right now is a very exciting time, since there are all these new people who the wallwockles here haven't met before."
That sounds a little like a voyda but if one of those is nearby right after the school cleansing she doesn't think it's going to be kept away by one freshman girl dancing. Probably nothing new showed up between the last Kiev cluster and now? No one else she can see is dancing like the colorful girl, or visibly casting, so she doesn't think she's missed something important. "Well, looks like it's working," with a half-laugh in case the girl's having her on somehow.
Luna smiles back. "So far, at least! And I've filled a couple of beads." Her beaded belt indeed has a few particularly shiny beads. "My belt likes it when I dance. It's a good mana belt and it's doing a very good job at holding my pants up while I work on growing into them," she says, petting her belt fondly.
"Oh. Uh, Daria Chernova, Kiev," and then she wants to hide again because that was not an invitation to introduce herself, was it. "I'm pretty good at wards, I guess that's kind of like making things like me." There, good, she took the conversational hook even though this girl is thoroughly throwing all of her scripts off.
"Hmm, periodic reinforcement does seem like something wards would like!" Her eyes brighten. "I wonder what other sorts of things wards like. Everything likes to be complimented, of course, and languages like when you speak them, but incantations don't like to be repeated too often... I guess reinforcing a ward isn't quite the same as repetition, sort of like how adding more clouds to a painting isn't the same as painting a new sky."
Luna either knows way more about magic than her or is just straight up making things up out of whole cloth. 'Incantations don't like to be repeated too often' just doesn't make sense, she's never heard of that before. Maybe she's testing if she's gullible enough to fall for it??? "I've never heard of incantations that get worse if you use them a lot."
"I mean, if my wards make mals whisper in Sanskrit if they decide they don't like my shirt that isn't something I would necessarily know to watch out for, but it also doesn't really seem likely? Mostly wards do about what you expect and when they do weird things it's usually consistently weird, same reaction when you mess up in the same way."
"Well, I haven't heard of a ward making mals whisper in Sanskrit because it doesn't like your shirt. But I wouldn't be so quick to say it doesn't happen. Once I was casting a freshening spell on some cut flowers and the incantation wouldn't work because it thought I wasn't fresh enough myself, so I went and showered and after that it worked."
"Spells have all sorts of arbitrary-seeming criteria, that's not the thing I meant. It's - so if you respond the exact same way to the same inputs, each time, you're basically just a fancy computer? Something that's thinking will maybe not work if you haven't had a shower if it's had whatever the spell equivalent of a bad day is and wants to express that it's annoyed at you, and spells don't do that. And it's not like there's nothing that works like that, right, if you want to say that spellbooks are sentient that seems about right, honestly."
"If something is like a computer that doesn't mean it doesn't think, how do you know that computers don't think? And spells do do that, sometimes, you just might not have noticed. Lots of people don't. But just because humans aren't very good at seeing something doesn't mean it's not there."
"I guess if you want to say a spell thinks the same amount a computer thinks that seems fair, but I don't think computers are complicated enough to think." That's a dumb argument, wow. "Theoretically my spells could be doing something weird out of sight of me and also everyone else, but that seems less likely than them just not, because that would mean that everyone has been missing all of that weird stuff that spells are doing for thousands of years" That's maybe a slightly less dumb argument?
"Oh, not everyone, just most people. Some of the people who write for my daddy's paper have noticed things that their incantations like or dislike. That's how I learned they usually don't like to be repeated too much, there was one lady who overused a heating spell and the spell got upset and set fire to her bed."