He actually did it.

Okay. Uh. She had a plan for this. Probably. What was the plan.

"Okay! Cool, I'll head over in a bit."

- okay that's the world's...most obvious...trap. Right.

"I really need to start taking meals in my room. Let's, uh. Eat. And figure out what in the world is going on."

She heads over to where Julian is sitting.

"So it's definitely evil mana storage," she says, just to clarify that she's not stupid enough to think that it's probably legit. "...probably. Right? Is there any way to tell?"

"Well, if you take it, and get drained and die, then we'll be able to tell it was evil mana storage."

"I think mana storage that drained people who tried to use it would be pretty complicated to build? And if it's big that means it was made by teenagers in here, so – maybe it's okay? ...but also obviously it has to be some kind kind of set up."  

"Maybe he just has a way to steal Naima's mana from it."

"Yeah, that's the most likely thing. There's probably some way to tell if it's networked or not, but I don't know it." 

"I don't either." She sets her tray down and flops at it. "And here I wanted to spend lunch uneventfully complaining about classes."

"The thing is, he's crazy, right? Or at least, like - he's not exactly flying under the radar, with the standing on tables routine? If he were a maleficer, wouldn't someone have noticed?"

"It's hardly maleficing if you put your mana into the thing voluntarily and he has another sink that draws from it. That's just like an enclave power-sharer, but – sneaky." 

"Being crazy and getting a lot of attention is not a good way to be up to anything nefarious but it's also not a good way to achieve any non-nefarious goals so I don't know that we can conclude much about his goals from him doing it."

"Yeah, okay, probably it's at least a scam to skim some mana off the top, but that's way less worrisome? What I want is something that holds enough mana at a time that I can draw on it to kill anything that slithers under my room door at night, as long as it still holds enough for that, that's... not actually bad to use until I can build something for myself? Unless it's evil in some other way. Which it might be."

"Of course, networking mana sinks is also hard, it was easy everyone would do it – actually, if he could do it he'd have better options than stealing from freshmen." 

"He might've found a preexisting networked one."

"You said he was with Seattle, right? Why would an established American enclave be - I guess if he's an enclaver he's probably not maleficing, I want to say, except apparently we can't actually expect that very strongly these days."

"Is he with Seattle? I didn't see a power sharer. ....Also, now I want to know how big it is exactly – if it's too heavy to carry in, that's a point against it being networked but not definitive. My mana storage is big, but, like, as a fraction of my weight limit, not like it's person-sized."   

"Maybe the Seattle power sharers are less obvious than most enclaves'? I'm not seeing anything that looks like one on any of the people at his table, but of course I might not from this far away. It's not a very good table location though."

"Seattle can't have ditched him, can they? I thought enclaves didn't always do that even for murder."

"Does he have an obvious mana store with him?" she asks, craning her neck and looking for him.

It does not look very obvious. "Also it's possible he just went around asking everyone 'hey do you have spare mana storage' because he's an idiot and someone said 'oh, why yes I do' and that person is the maleficer."

"If all this is legit it'd be stupid to say no, but - there's just no way, right? It's just... so obviously too good to be true I have no idea what he could possibly be going for! And it's not like we're the easiest people to try to trick with something like this, there's all the Chicago kids who might legitimately fall for it..."

"Right? Except that if we do go for it then maybe we are the easiest people to trick?" 

"Maybe you are the only person who had the nerve to ask him for something."

"Maybe? I wouldn't even exactly call it asking, it was more - answering a question with its obvious answer," she says, half mumbling. "I wonder if there's any way to test it safely. Or get someone else to test it safely. Someone, you know, harder to mess with."

"I wish we knew more upperclassmen, or more Americans. Someone has to have a better sense of what his deal is." 

"Well, Malak has siblings, but she's already asked them. I... think there might be circumstances under which I can ask for help from Cairo, but I don't know that 'can you explain the deal with the guy who stands on tables' is one of them? Did we ever ask Bella to ask her cousin?"

"No, we should ask her about that in history of artificing this afternoon."

Wendy in her crinkly raincoat and ugly purple backpack (weighed down really heavy, enough that it's messing with her posture) has gotten pretty good at broadcasting her intent to approach a table through Body Language and Being In Sightlines, before actually approaching it. It's a small skill but it's a skill.

She Intends To Approach Annissa, and then when she gets close enough to be heard, "Annisa, right? I'm Wendy, Chicago mundie. We met at orientation. I have a trade to propose."

"- hi, Wendy." She does not invite her to sit down, yet. They're a Group, they can be a little picky, wait to hear the offer at least. "What're you interested in?"

"Lots of things. More clothes, first off. What I have to offer is I think kind of a big deal, 'specially long term. I have second pickings of Monday morning shop 'cause nobody warned me not to ask for too many schedule changes. So, kind of doomed except," she pauses dramatically, "Orion freaking Lake is in that class so as long as I'm not the first one to the cupboards maybe I won't even die!"

" - Orion Lake? Sorry, I don't know who that is - uh, awesome if he agreed to protect you in Monday morning shop, though - is he an upperclassman -"

"New York's wonder kid? He barged right into the room and killed a huge mal like nothing and none of the other New Yorkers acted surprised, but like they're all there, like six of them, and if they think it's safe-"

Naima turns around from looking at the table that may or may not belong to Seattle.

She hasn't heard of Orion Lake, and she's never seen this kid before. She's - pretty sure this kid is going to die, if she ended up taking Monday morning shop through sheer incompetence, but - 

"New York's taking Monday morning shop?"

"Yeah. I mostly have a lot of metal, that's what seemed good and what was left after a bunch of New York seniors plus the freshmen went through everything. Have a shopping list I can try to fill?"

New York is in Monday morning shop?

Annisa quite abruptly fucking hates them, as intensely as she's never hated anyone in her life because -

- she had that shop, and she switched out, because you can't dream in high school, you can't imagine what you'd be able to build with all the supplies you wanted and all the time to work in safety in the world, and even enclave kids have to be careful, in school, it's not a fact about being weak it's a fact about being human, and -

- and it's stunningly unstrategic to be jealous of them for it, the Annisa who is hurt dies, the Annisa who lives is fine with it fine with it fine with it fine with it 

"Wow, that's so lucky! So you're offering to trade second pick of the shop, for more clothes and then whatever else?"

"Incredibly damn lucky, and I know it. I cannot count on anything like that that happening again. But- Yeah, more or less. Do you mind if I set down my backpack, it weighs like eighty pounds right now-"

You know what, she is not going to try to comprehend what New York is doing. Whatever the foreign enclaves are doing this time is not her problem and not her focus.

"Sit. I can make clothes. I made a pair of cargo pants this weekend, if you want to check the quality of what I can make in here."

"This is my group - Naima, Cairo, healing, Julian, Hong Kong, large-scale artifice, Malik, Damascus, stealth." We are very serious people and getting to sit with us is a big deal. "You might want to trade for a better backpack, too, the backpacking kind, you'll throw your back out trying to fit too much in a small one."

(Annisa has Chantal's clothes and backpack but she is not going to volunteer that just yet.)

"I can also make a backpack. I have canvas, which is great for that, but I don't have anything soft. - here, do you want an actual shopping list, I can write one up."

Annisa is doing some sort of social game. She doesn't really have the energy to respond to it but doesn't feel like Annisa is a Big Player, so luckily she doesn't really have to? It might be better if she could but she really has no brain for that kind of shit. So just do what feels natural.

"Healing? Nice. I could use a bit of mending on this jacket too. Wendy. Chicago mundie. Metal, I think, let me know if anyone hasn't disassembled their furniture yet, I can do it in ninety seconds. Another backpack is on my list, but what isn't? I'll have to rely on this cute little one for now. And an actual shopping list for next week sounds like a way for both of us to get things we want."

When she sets it down on the seat carefully, there's an audible clank.

"Metal's a really solid affinity."

"I have a few clothes I'd be willing to trade, I can also hide your room from mals if you can get me something good. Looking to buy fabric - lighter ones, no canvas - and gems and animal parts. Treated leather's no good, hides are."

"I have extra clothes and a backpack, and I could make you a proper forged combat knife, and I'll take leather and steel and ivory."

She pulls out a sheet of paper and starts writing. 

VERY VALUABLE:

- Soft cloth, particularly patterned cloth, particularly beautiful patterned cloth. Anything that seems suitable for underwear is great. Large sheets are better than small pieces, but bring small pieces, too. If you find something you like a lot, I'll turn it into clothing for you in exchange for additional fabric.

- Memory foam.

- AA Batteries.

VALUABLE:

- Cloth that seems too rough to use for underwear, but not too rough for clothing, especially if it's patterned.

- Elastic bands, spandex, or other fabric that's very stretchy.

- Things that seem sort of like cut-rate memory foam. 

- Thread.

- Cotton, linen, or flax fiber, especially in large amounts. Wool is also valuable, but less so. 

- Paint in colors other than pink and orange.

- Duct tape.

- Wood or metal glue.

- Leather.

SOMEWHAT VALUABLE:

- Cloth that's too rough for clothing, even if it's basically a rug or a carpet.

- Sponges.

- Drawing or coloring materials other than paint, including oil pastels, colored pencils, or wax crayons.

- Chalk.

- Tape that's sadder than duct tape.

- Cardstock or patterned paper.

- Sandpaper.

- Hardwood. 

- Beads.

- Buttons.

"This isn't exhaustive, and obviously you should use your judgement, when deciding what's valuable, but that's a start. - And can we see what you have? If you happen to have anything very good I'll give you the pants right now."

"It looks like that's full of metal? If some of it's steel I'll give you a shirt now as well."

Hmmmmm.

"Yeah, basically full of metal. I'm going to stockpile them in assumption of having lots of use for random metal later. New York dibsed literally all the gems. I have some pieces that are either iron or steel, I don't actually know how to tell those two apart - and tin, pewter, copper, a bit of bronze scrap, lots of other metals I'm going to try identifying. I'd like some knife care lessons actually, Annisa. And artificing tips. Maybe a whole third knife but I do need to treat mine right- And I have some fabric, here lemme-" It was being used as padding for the big glass casserole tray.

She passes over the fabric fold- It's thick linen of some sort. Off-white, maybe eight by five feet. "I guess it was destined to be a curtain before it came here? Naima, do I need to sweeten it any from this for those cargo pants?" She can offer a tip about Karen's bigger piece and similar need to make up the difference if she has to, but then again that might be a fairly big reveal, but then again it's not exactly a secret that Karen's in monday morning shop so she may as well cash in-

"I can offer knife care lessons and metal identification lessons if you want those though I think class will get to it by September or so.. I'm going to make a honing steel once I have a free hand in the shop, knives like being sharp." New York can DIE IN A FIRE consider Annisa's application for membership after graduation.

"Learning what the hell to do sooner seems obviously worth it. Bonus if you throw in lots of survival tips as we go. I think I'm going to spend a lot of time in shop if I can find people to go there with during work periods, too."

"That's my plan, if I don't build a forge in my room, and you can come with me or use the one in my room if you're supplying. Show me the metals and I'll tell you how to identify them."

Metals: Are laid out. She grabbed a lot of random bits of metal. Ingots, disks, lumps. She knows this is pewter just by the look and texture, and these are iron or steel because her makeup mirror's fridge magnet sticks to them, and this is tin and that's copper, but the rest are a mystery to her.

Annisa is SO DELIGHTED that the kid thought to come to her. She picks the metals up and sorts them on the table in front of her roughly by density, and then pulls out a file from her Swiss army knife and starts scraping at the metals. "Checking magnetism is smart, that's one of the things to do. The other thing I did was sort them by approximately how dense they are, it's really hard to get a feel for objective density but it's significantly easier to rank things by density when you've got a bunch of them, and then once you've identified some that helps narrow down the others. The next thing I'm testing is the color of the freshly filed surface, steel and iron will both be silvery grey but steel will be brighter than iron and also harder to scrape with this file.

Copper can look like various things tarnished but it's unmistakeable fresh. And see this, it's nickel, because when we scrape it it's bright white rather than grey on the inside. If it were white and not silvery it might have been aluminum, which would be a fantastic find, it's worth a lot in here, but I already knew it wasn't because it's too heavy to be.

You don't generally have to let the enclavers claim the entire shop supply before anyone else, any specific cabinet that they're at, sure, but you can look at ones they're not, but with Monday morning shop I actually wouldn't chance that since they're keeping you alive and could decide to stop, or just to not check some cabinets for mals before you look in them. But in general, you know, you want to treat them like smart talented well-resourced people worth impressing, not like they can step all over you, or they'll step all over you. Sucking up to them is part of many valid strategies but only worth doing if you in fact have a strategy for it.

This here is lead. White on the inside but not silvery like nickel, and too soft to be aluminum. Have you heard the claim that lead will give you brain damage."

She feels the fabric that might have been a curtain. It's slightly softer than her canvas, and it's certainly different, which is good, she might be able to use it for something else. It's... maybe ten square feet more than what she used to make the pants? Which isn't really enough to make a garment, but it's not nothing. She'll be gaining amount of fabric and diversity of fabric, in exchange for... how long did the pants take, three hours? Four? And the charge on the batteries, which can be made up later but will take more time, and the thread, although she can probably get more thread later without even paying a bunch for it. So it basically comes down to whether ten square feet is worth four hours of work - no, five or six, because of the batteries - which it... probably is? Maybe?

"It's only a little more fabric than what I used to make the pants, but I'll give you the pants for this and... any one ingot for Annisa, since she's going to make me a knife."

- Annisa is going to make Naima a knife but has already been paid for that!!! Is Naima requesting revisions to the knife? Is Naima -

- it's an alliance thing to do, to trade for resources for other people - 

- probably Naima is just...arranging to have a nicer knife. Annisa will catch Malak's eye in case Malak has more insight here.

Malak does not have more insight here, except that Naima doesn't have interpersonal skills and might? be assuming? that the Group is more serious than it is???

That's what Annisa is worried about too!! But she'll worry about it later, not in front of the Chicago mundie.

"If it's a deal I'll take this one," she tells Chicago mundie, pointing out one of the steel.

She is taking notes about metal identification. "Forge in your room sounds like a good idea. In my experience it's not smart to poke your nose around gangs until you know how they operate, and I don't know how any enclaves operate, but I guess I'll take your word for it. I have heard of lead being bad." Coca Cola company made a huge deal about cleaning up lead paint for PR reasons and barely actually helped people at all. Spent more money on the ad campaign than the actual cleanup.

"I was going to offer a tip on another deal you could make but that works too. Uh, I've heard nice things like healing potions exist?"

"Yep! My advice about lead is actually don't worry about it at all, aside from not identifying smooth grey metals by licking them. If you get out of here with a little bit of lead poisoning it'll be really easy to clear up as an adult and it doesn't hit you that fast unless you're eating it."

"Right. The ancient romans used lead as a sweetener. Maybe that's why all their leaders went insane and murdered each other a lot, in the end. What's making something magic like, what goes into it?"

Annisa is resorting the metals by trade value. The pewter's not worth much; these impure irons aren't either, because you'll have to separate them out and that's a chore only some students will be down for; the nickel is solid and the purer irons and the steel are good. "So it's not actually a sharp distinction, right, especially not in here. Items that you brought in from the mundane world will pick up personalities eventually, the way things behave will depend on intent and force of will as much as on concrete features they have.

Artifice is kind of just - imparting that intent and force of will deliberately rather than accidentally, filling the 'what-this-object-is' rather than leaving it to be filled in by whatever intents happen to be around. It's mostly done by incanting as you make the item, by having the work you put into it be very directed and very intentional - the reason mundie items are so vulnerable to going bad is that they're mass-produced in a factory, no intent for them to pick up at all. Wizard-made things go bad much much more rarely. If you want something to be powerful, then you're putting a lot of effort and intent into it, and a lot of mana, and it's important for the intent you're putting in and the mana you're putting in to be sort of commensurate - you can't rush a major artifice project by stamping a knife from a preexisting mold and then dumping an enclave's worth of mana on it, you haven't done anything to communicate your intent. So generally speaking what you do is have your aim in mind from the start of the project, very specifically, if you're confused about anything you're going to have a problem - if you discovered midway through that you were confused about anything you're more or less going to want to start over - and you incant over it, and you put mana into it where appropriate, and you try to build something mundanely high-quality enough to feel appropriately commensurate with the magical intent for the project, and you make sure that at every stage of the process your work in progress is well acquainted with your vision for it. 

You can make very powerful magic items by, like, planting cotton and tending it and harvesting it and separating it and spinning it and weaving it, singing the whole time, all full of intent to make an outfit that will be powerful or fascinating, because that cotton from the instant it starts to exist knows what it's for. There's not exactly an equivalent for metalworking, metals are all much older than us, but an alloy you made yourself is a little better than one you found on a shelf, for steel it's best to do it yourself from iron, and there's endless opportunity for guiding it while you forge it and grind it and fit it and polish it. 

With practice, artifice gets to be kind of - a conversation? You can feel where your intent isn't translating right, where your knife isn't shaped quite like your intent, and figure out what you're miscommunicating."

Wow. That sounds - really appealing, actually? She's barely ever made something from scratch before but mass produced consumerism always annoyed her. She likes fixing things. Making things should be like that too, she liked making her shop knife and cared enough to give it a second shot when the first try came out subpar. And especially knowing it's magic to do that...

"-Sweet. I already have half a dozen ideas spinning around in my head, probably better refine them and get my expectations down to a reasonable level, though."

"Is the tip you were going to give me about someone else in desperate need of clothes?"

"And they have fabric from the shop room. A bigger piece."

"If you give me the tip, I will fix the stitching on your jacket tonight at no additional charge."

"I bet I could do it myself if I had needle and thread, got any spare needles?"

"I will also trade it for a needle, if you prefer that." They're not exactly heavy; she has plenty of spares.

"I kinda need the practice and the mana, and I figure my jacket will like me more if I fix it, and I do have some thread I grabbed from shop, so yeah. Two needles? I imagine you've got, like, twenty."

She scans the cafeteria, looking for Karen.

Kind of annoying to give her two of them, but she's probably not actually likely to run into that many other people who need them. "Does this person have lighter cloth than yours? I will give you two needles for the chance to obtain something soft."

"It looked lighter at least, like thin cotton. I didn't actually touch it." Karen where aaare you, she'll have to settle for describing her if she's not in the lunchroom.

Karen is in the lunchroom! She's a little hard to see because she's hunched over some homework, and not talking to the other people at her table.

"-Over there. Karen. Doing homework. Let's walk over and say hi? Or I can just make sure you recognize her, either way."

She pulls two needles out of her sewing kit and hands them over. "Let's say hi."

"If any of those other than the two steel ingots goes missing I know who not to trust," She tells Annisa (after taking a quick mental inventory), then grabs her much emptied backpack and heads over towards Karen.

"Karen? Sorry to interrupt, but I met someone, Naima here, who's selling me clothes in exchange for material - you should get in on it too."

"Oh! What kind of clothes?"

"Any kind you have the material for. Let me see what you have?"

She fishes her sheet of fabric out of her backpack very hopefully.

Oh it's soft! And it is bigger!

She is not very good at most social interactions, but she's okay at not letting how much she values a particular item show on her face.

"What are you looking for, exactly?"

"Uh, kind of everything? I don't... have any clothes that I'm not wearing."

"I will make you three pairs of underwear and two sports bras from this material, plus an extra pair of pants and an extra t-shirt from a piece of canvas I have, in exchange for the remainder of this material. They won't stretch as much as the underwear you buy in a store, but if you let me measure you, they will fit well enough that this shouldn't be a huge problem. I don't have time now, but I will have time after dinner; you can come to my room, with an escort if you feel you need one. Is that acceptable?"

It takes her a couple seconds to process all of that. "I - yeah, that would be great, thank you so much. What room?"

"36A." Normally she'd be worried about handing this out, but THIS KID is not the maleficer. She is too incompetent to be a maleficer. "I'll look forward to seeing you. And thank you," she says to Wendy.

"Yeah no problem."

She waits until Naima leaves before saying, "You probably could have haggled a bit?" Shrug. "Having that shop class is pretty lucky though, I think. I'm Wendy, I don't think I actually introduced myself in class?"

" - oh. Yeah, I guess I could have, but I'm really just - I don't actually know how to sew, so it's already a really good deal, I think? Um - thank you. It means a lot. Do you wanna sit, or do you have a place already?"

"Legit. I'm going to try making all the things, and I know a bit of sewing, so yeah. Uh, actually some of my stuff is over there. I just figured you'd want the trade? And like, full disclosure, she gave me a couple needles for the introduction. See you in shop?"

"Yeah, absolutely!"

She goes back over to where Annisa is staring hungrily at all her metal bits, then.

"They're sorted by trade value now, approximately; that's a favor but I'll consider it an investment in you grabbing the right stuff in the future. Trading out Monday morning shop stuff for the things that freshmen normally come with is a good idea, but I'd actually mostly focus on getting good in the shop. You want to learn how to use all the tools in the shop, the part where you build high quality things is at least as hard as the part where you imbue them with magical intent and it's a prerequisite and it's easier for freshmen - you don't need mana to do it.

The thing you're building towards is something that will make people want you on a graduation alliance, in four years. Metal's a good affinity for that. Trade people for things now - shop homework help, furniture, maybe steel-toed work boots, those are nice to have and not worth bringing in - for enough resources to stay alive through the end of term, and then plan on getting really, really good at something you can turn into a graduation alliance."

"Huh. Hell, I can make some furniture. I did like fixing things, out there, and liking something makes it a lot easier to get good at it, right? It's so damn cool that I melted metal and made a knife- Though I'm getting the impression this first assignment isn't super impressive all considered."

She peers over the assembled ingots again.

"Spells get invented, right, and it's probably better to use ones from spellbooks but what if you want to do something really specific, does it make sense to try to invent a spell even if you're not very good at that? Does what you, uh, sing to your artifacts have to be spells?"

"You use incantations for artificing, yeah. Creative writing's totally possible for people who aren't specialized in it, it's just that most of the time a spell you write is going to be worse than a spell that already exists and does the same thing. It's worth at least asking the Void for something before you try to do it yourself, unless you half-know a bunch of languages which I guess a mundie might."

"Oh. I literally just asked it for 'a spellbook'. It was a good book, mind, once I deciphered the German, but yet another thing I didn't know was a thing."

"Yeah, you can be specific. Though there's something to be said for being general if you have the affordance to learn a bunch of new spells, because you're likelier to get something good if you're not asking for something narrow."

"Speaking of which, any of you happen to know German and want a spell good against incorporal mals?"

Why yes, they do have one of those, although Julian seems to have gotten up for something at some point in the past several minutes, she wasn't really paying attention. She scans the cafeteria until she sees him getting water. 

"HEY JULIAN."

aaaaaaaaaaah fuck – oh it's just Naima. And she's talking to the mundie girl from German study group? Okay. 

He makes his way back to his seat. "What's going on?" 

She gestures at Wendy. "She has a German spell that's good against incorporeal mals and wants to know if you want it."

"Hi. I haven't actually used it against any incorporeal mals, mind, but it's two lines and I've cast it and the description is promising."

"What's the description say?" 

"Translated so I don't speak German at people- For the defense against and forbiddance of malign spirits, those which can normally pass through simply material defenses. Though it does not easily kill, it will cause them great pain and drive them out of hiding, repelling such evils- He calls mals evils- from your person. Take care that you speak it only against those who truly have no material form, liquid evils may yet infiltrate your walls and you should use other spells against those."

It sounds promising. On the one hand, the real challenge with incorporeal mals is noticing them in the first place – but on the other hand, it's not like he has a great way of dealing with them if he does.

"What do you – " No, wait, this is Strategic Julian, Strategic Julian doesn't offer open-ended bargains – "I'll take it in exchange for instructions for creating a basic tripwire." 

"Like, a ward? Is it an especially good ward?"

"It's a common kind of ward which you probably don't have, and it's always better to layer multiple wards if you possibly can. And they're artifice, so you can front-load the mana in the weeks when things are quieter."

Oh, an example of working artifice? Worth. "...Good point, sure. Is it also in German?"

"Cantonese, actually, but the verbal component isn't important and I can tell you how to do it in English. The materials do matter and I won't be providing them, but it calls for actual metal wire which should play well with your affinity." 

Naima taps her fingers on the table irritably a few times.

"I think I should talk to Cairo," she says, to no one in particular, and then gets up and heads for the table that Cairo seems to be sharing with some other middle eastern enclave, before anyone can tell her that this is a terrible idea because everyone from Cairo is now a bear, or something.

...probably Naima knows the rules for interacting with her local enclave??? Actually she wouldn't bet on that. Well, Annisa wasn't aiming to get Cairo anyway.

Some day she is probably going to have to teach Naima how to be socially careful, but that sounds like a lot of work and Naima's probably not willing to pay her enough for it yet.

Annisa feels like the group having a social reputation at all is probably solid for the second day of classes, though it's unfortunate if it's 'the stunningly rude girl and her three friends.'

She's over at the table for several minutes; the people whose faces are visible don't look incredibly upset or anything, though they're a bit far away to tell if they're more subtly upset.

Eventually she comes back. "Their upperclassmen have left already, but the rest of them don't think there's a good way to check it for safety, not without spells none of them have. They think I should pass. Which I guess I knew already. Does anyone... want to come along with me to James's table and leave us in a situation where someone around here has some idea how that interaction went."

"Sounds fun but I actually wanted to spend all of work period in the shop, since apparently New York cleared it out."

"... I will go. Also, when you are ready to pay me for social coaching I can do my best to provide that."

"I will seriously consider this when I have more stuff." For now they can go to James's table.

"Hey! Ready to go? It's down on the senior levels, you could wait for us at the top of the stairs if you want? Or tell us where you want it and we'll meet you there."

It would be so easy to accept it. And it might be real, might just be that someone wants to skim off the top.

"I - I think I shouldn't take it. Actually. Because I don't know where you got it or whether it's safe. I'm sorry about the hassle."

" - Yeah I suppose that makes sense, in these troubled times. Let me know if you change your mind, it's yours until I find somewhere else for it."

" - thank you," she says, because she's pretty sure that's about the best response you can expect. "I'll let you know."

And she can head back to the Group's table.

"I'm going to make a run on the shop and get stuff for my mold during work period, anyone want to come? We can go up to the library afterwards, if New York's cleared it out it's probably safe to look around for stuff but I'd still sooner not linger in there for hours getting my mold just right."

"Yeah, all right. I guess it'll only get more dangerous and more picked over."

"That's what I figure."