Annisa manages to make herself not actively run down the stairs to shop but it takes some making herself. She's clutching her mold in her hands and her heart is beating about six times faster than is reasonable and she's pretty sure if she survives she's going to think she was stunningly immature for being so nervous but if she survives she can think whatever she wants.

She already has copper and tin in her backpack. She picks a table, sets up a crucible, and has her metals heating by the time anyone else comes in.

She sets out a sign.

Hi, I'm Annie!

~Weapons Affinity~

Help figuring out why your knife won't work....1 snack token

Use my reusable mold for your knife.....2 snack tokens 

Dueling knives (don't harm humans)....price available on request

Malak walks with Kevin down the stairs to the shop level, grumbling together about French poetry and excited for shop class. There aren't too many other freshmen here yet, so Malak keeps chatting with Kevin as she walks over to Annisa's table, hopefully dragging him along so Boston will grab one of the large tables next to the Group's.

"Hey Annisa! I see you're prepared."

"I must have done this assignment.....fourteen times, by now? I'm very excited to do it and more excited to never do it again. It's not a good way to make a knife! Hey, Kevin." Trying to keep Boston talking so they set up nearby is a good idea. "Boston seems to throw a lot of artificers, is it something in the water?"

Julian is not looking forward to shop. 

It's not that he expects to be particularly bad at it. He's a quick study and has a good head for numbers and spent over 200 hours watching youtube videos on how to use late 19th century metalworking equipment. He'll be fine. The danger is that he might never be anything other than fine, and if he's going to live, he needs to be exceptional. He's never seen half the stuff in this room in real life – it's not like his family apartment had room for a forge or a table-saw. His alchemist mother did have a home lab setup; at least there he's on steadier footing. But for shop, he needs a plan. He's going to spend the next four weeks learning everything he possibly can about hands-on artificing. If he has a knack for it, no problem. If he's hopeless – which is to say, average – he'll fob off as many assignments as he can on Annisa or anyone else with a relevant affinity in exchange for copious amounts of homework help and hope he can do their work on top of his own and still stay on track. 

...at least his first assignment's taken care of! He's going to take a seat by Annisa and pay close attention to everything she does. 

Naima looks extremely unimpressed with everything about the entire world. She's wearing something that isn’t exactly what a firefighter would wear, but that looks weirdly reminiscent of it, possibly because it has reflective tape all over it. She’s traded her usual Nike shoes for steel-toed work boots. She’s also carrying two dictionary-sized books books with her, which she couldn’t fit in her bag. (It did occur to her to come in with a mostly empty bag, today, but she does have her gloves and her splash goggles and her respirator mask in it, plus now her algebra II textbook and five books of the canon of medicine, three of which managed to fit inside her backpack, which makes the backpack not actually very empty at all, at this point.) She sets the books down at Annisa’s table.

“That's smart," she says of the sign, and then steamrolls ahead. "Change of plans, Annisa. I am going to need a knife that gets a very good grade, in case I have to turn in something totally horrible later while I am busy being crushed under Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. This is not the entire Canon of Medicine. This is two fifths of it.”

"Oh, hi. You look like someone who has gazed into the depths of Hell. - noted, I'll be sure to switch out of that class if the school ever tries to stick me with it. We haven't settled for that ingot and that's probably good enough for a knife that gets an A, maybe throw in a couple snack tokens if you want it as fancy as Julian's."

At least someone is having a worse day than he is.

"Shit. Is that a freshman class?" 

She slams two snack tokens on the table.

"Hell had fourteen hundred and fifty medicines to memorize in it. And no. It is a sixteen people in the school of all different grades but mostly not freshmen class. I am going to be fine," inshallah, "but I am going to need a very good knife."

Oh no.

"Did you...murder the school's mother or something?"

"I am about fifty fifty on it trying to assassinate me or it having a very high opinion of my abilities. I am good at medicine. I mean - I'm not a doctor, but I have read materials for medical students before. And the original language of the Canon is Arabic, I'll be better at understanding it than most of the other students. But - it may take most of my time."

(Annisa scoops the two snack tokens into a stack with her own three snack tokens in a visible location near the sign so as to make it clear she's doing brisk business. This means burning one of her remaining pieces of gold foil on two gilded-handle baby's first knives, which is completely ridiculous but should actually vastly simplify the laying the safety enchantments; the gold communicates 'decorative not deadly' and will sit nicely with the safety enchantments. Maybe she can convince the knives to act like they have soft gold tips, when they meet human flesh rather than mal whatever-mals-have.)

There are people things happening! Teresa could investigate the interesting people!

...no, what she should do first is loot the supplies. That's important, the people will still be interesting in fifteen minutes.

Cane, knife, cabinets: let's see what's not too picked-over.

Alright, someone else has headed over to the cabinets and she won't be the first one opening them. She excuses herself from chatting with Kevin and makes her own way there. She needs plaster for her mold, even though Annisa owes her a knife, because she wants to match the shape and weight of her combat knife.

She sighs deeply and turns to Annisa again. "Protect the Canon and my backpack while you start on knives and I'll grab you any metals I see while I'm hunting for anything vaguely like cloth?"

Kevin is totally fine with picking the table next to Malak's; Marcy said she and Annisa were cool and he has seen no reason to doubt this assessment. But nobody is as cool as shop! He is so looking forward to doing things with his hands in the real world after two days of classes about words on paper. Sifting through piles of text for the occasional spell, farming out all the writing and most of the reading to Marcy: difficult and lame. Doing things all class period: easy and good.

When Annisa's done negotiating knives, he says, "It's mostly just this year? Next year is going to be all one or the other kind of incantations people. But also the enclave has a really nice student lab."

Marcy is not as excited for shop as some people, but she's still pretty excited. Most of that is being able to start learning what she'll need to know for making weapons, but some of it is that it's an excuse to hang out with Annisa and Malak again. Ah, excellent, Kevin snagged a table next to them, that's Kevin for you, always being awesome. And there's Naima and Julian. Kevin mentioned they had all done a shop run together; cool that they're all in this section.

Marcy waves to Kevin and joins in the raid on the cabinets to get stuff for both of them. She'll probably be able to get an excellent grade on this knife if she balances it for throwing. Not that it could ever replace Dagger, which is the best dagger ever. She pets it before pulling it out to check the cabinets.

Intro Incantations is close enough to the freshman dorms that Connie risks swinging by her room to drop off her textbooks and empty her backpack of everything but minimum viable supplies, gloves, and her spare shirt to turn into a makeshift bag.  She's in luck- enough people are doing the same that she can tag along after a small flock of girls from Harbin-city-not-enclave all the way down to the shop level, and there's still plenty of other people in the halls regardless. 

She skims the anglo side of the room- less than half-full, she didn't even need to worry.

Pisa girl and an older boy, nope nope nope.

Is that girl wearing a scarf, she's either clueless or really confident and the sign and the stubble say it's the second one- Connie heads a little closer, she can't read the sign from the door-

...Kevin is in her shop class.  Marcy and Kevin are both in her shop class.  The Scholomance hates her and wants her to die.

That makes her choice of table simple, anyway- she heads over to the one farthest from Kevin in the same row, so she won't be tempted to look over at them all the time and won't be wondering if they're watching her.  Whoever wants to sit with someone by her lonesome can, she's used up all her pickiness at this point.

She is just slightly late for shop, and comes in with a cluster of freshmen who got the same advice she did. She looks for Annisa - oh, there she is, with Malak and Naima and some Asian boy she doesn't recognize. Annisa's wearing a bright blue scarf, which seems like a strange thing for her to have wasted weight allowance on. Maybe it's enchanted, although why would you lay an enchantment for shop on a scarf, it'll inevitably get caught on something.

"Hey," she says, "is this seat taken?"

Well, she's not sitting with the table half-full of enclavers without an invitation, and the enclaver sitting by herself is presumably saving seats for someone or there would be more people sitting with her. There's another girl, not an enclaver, who seems to be sitting by herself and looks like a reasonably safe person to sit with, which at the very least looks like a better option than any of the other ones available.

She walks over to Connie's table. "Want to go pick up supplies together? It's safer with two."

The pale senior who's been waiting in the hall walks in and starts doing a relaxed circuit of the room, looking at all the freshmen in it. Technically, he finds one! This is unsurprising, since it's his cousin Teresa. He keeps looking.

"Sure, yeah."  Connie's got her crucible started heating; she makes sure there's nothing on the table that could blow onto it and hops off the stool.  "I'm Connie, you?"

Briar glances around to see if anyone else has their crucible heating, concludes that this isn't just a weird thing that Connie is doing wrong, and starts hers as well.

"I'm Briar. Creative writing track, how about you?"

"Artificing- forces affinity, so it just made sense."  What is that boy doing, he's not moving like he's looking for a table or for someone in specific...

Why is there a maleficer here? He doesn't even look like a freshman. Is he here to attack them or something, it's not like any of them could defend themselves against an upperclassman maleficer...

Lucy stalks in. She is NOT HAPPY that she doesn't have this class with Wilbur, even though his access to everything New York doesn't grab on Monday Morning is really valuable actually. 

She considers announcing that Wilbur has Monday morning shop, observes that there are people doing things they probably don't want to be distracted from and also enclavers who she really shouldn't bother, and instead makes her own sign. 

Have you heard about NEW YORK in MONDAY MORNING SHOP?

My twin brother was in homeroom with one of them and managed to get in on it. 

Requests taken, prices variable. 

Whoa shit okay that guy has Vibes.  Which even more raises the question of what he's doing?  Looking for someone particularly tasty?  No way he'd be that obvious about it- does he want to make it look like that's what he's doing?  Is he just trying to find someone he saw one time in the sea of bald frosh?

"Let's hit some cabinets while he's over there,"  Connie murmurs, and scoops her mostly-empty bag off the floor.

...the people with signs seem kind of terrifyingly mercenary. He probably shouldn't be terrified by indies who are just desperately trying to survive, but here he is, terrified of them. Such is life.

Also there's a creepy older boy! That's also terrifying!! He was expecting to be terrified by molten metal and a cold and uncaring universe this morning, the rest of this terror is SURPRISING and UNANTICIPATED!!

Fine. He stakes out his OWN table. People can join him if they want. (He is going to end up sitting alone, like a loser, and everyone is going to shun him, and then he's going to die.)

Niccolo definitely has vibes and he knows it, so he parses the two girls as probably-running-away. They're clean, though, so he lets it pass, heads for the door, and nods to New York.

"Room's clean. No one with any aura but my cousin, and she's stable and not an idiot. Also, accounted for during some of the deaths."

Ohhhhh, so that's what that guy was doing. 

His cousin, on the other hand, notices Lucy and her sign, as she retreats from the supply cabinets. (She has fairly slim pickings, screw New York, but there was some shale that has some value, and she found about two people's worth of copper and tin.)

"Wow, you two are all kinds of resourceful. Or lucky, but they say good luck is a personality trait."

"Resourcefulness is an important survival trait." She's not going to air her ire about the riskiness to an enclaver. That would just be a bad idea. "I'm just glad the first part of the semester is relatively safe so nothing ate him while he was carrying a pile of fabric higher than he could see over back to his room before I could scold him for it." 

"Many skills are useful for survival, and stay rare anyway... Though 'restraining your greed' is clearly one he needs to work on, ouch. You really need someone to walk with before you do that. Possibly by bribing them with the large pile of value you just acquired."

"It was a dumb move! It won't be repeated. He did stick relatively close to the heels of the New York contingent, which apparently has a real mal-hunting wunderkind, but that's not good enough and he has been made aware that really clever rationalizations aren't."

"Oh good, it would be a shame if you two didn't make it. And not just because I definitely want one of your spiders."

"We are definitely not going to die before we can get you those spiders."

"I would be shocked if you did, for... the same reason, really. Actually, that reminds me-" she looks to the door to check Niccolo's gone - "I slightly misled my cousins about how willing you were to sell females, implied you were going to charge extortionate prices for a year or two to keep your monopoly. I'd appreciate it if you didn't tip them off until we've paid up, so I can keep the bragging rights."

"Appreciate how much?"

"I'd owe you a favor, but probably not a big one. Though also, why aren't you keeping a monopoly? I would be happy to form a cartel to keep the price up, at least until end of our senior year."

"The short version is that if someone with resources wants to get around a monopoly, we could keep it until junior year, probably, when the freshmen coming in will have their weight allocation choices informed by the people who graduate a year from now. Having a monopoly until then would be valuable, but--we have ways to protect the spiders from cheating; we don't have foolproof ways to protect them from mals or sabotage. In the absolute worst case scenario that leaves us still alive, we want there to be a way to resume having spiders. Ideally a way with whom we have already established ourselves as reliable and valuable trading partners."

"That makes some sense, since it's a lot more critical to your strategy than your customer's. But I'd suggest you think of a target degree of spread, and make deals to keep it from getting too far beyond that; with the number of children spiders have, you could get a race to the bottom really fast. It benefits you to be able to trade for replacements, yes, but it also benefits you to have a useful scarce resource to charge for, and to have protective gear better than other people's. That's the nasty thing about advantages in here, right, they're mostly relative."

"Excellent point. Fortunately nobody else has jumped at the chance yet."

"Their loss, I guess. Anything Wilbur picked up that you're particularly looking to trade away?"

"Most of what he picked up was fiber stuff that he'll want to use, but he definitely got more than he's going to be able to use in a week, so if you have a use for...I actually don't know all the exact kinds of fiber he picked up, there were a couple absurdly specific kinds of wool...or sheets of clear acrylic, he was thinking he could maybe use those in constructing a loom but it's looking like no."

"Nothing comes to mind, but if I hear anyone's got uses for specific fibers or acrylic I'll send them your way. I have fun connecting interesting people to each other, even when it isn't useful."

"Good to know! Hm, who've I met who's interesting--there's the Chicago mundies who mostly aren't the relevant kind of interesting, there's Masozi who just got cleared of murder, there's El who looks like a maleficer but isn't..." 

"Looks like a maleficer but isn't? Why would someone... do that?" Present company excepted.

"Not, like, on purpose, her affinity is doom."

"Wow, and I thought Marino's was bad - That's the other freshman from Pisa, his affinity is blood."

"That sounds...uh...maybe he could talk the nurse into asking the void for stuff thrown out by blood banks? And do alchemy with it? It's not great though, you're right."

"He can use animal blood and we have plenty of dead frogs to take it from, otherwise I'd be much more concerned. But yeah, it's still not great. Thanks for the tip, though, I'll keep an eye out for El."

"You're welcome. Good luck with your clavemate."

Connie doesn't want to spend the mana to open every cabinet here with her grabber-glove; who knows how many they'll have to go through to get the project supplies, and she might need her fire spell at any moment.  She pokes the latches amd handles with her knife instead, and stands well back to open them.

Assorted rocks, some of which might be useful later but none of them worth more to haul up eight flights of stairs right now than the mana she'd build doing it.

An enormous wad of pink fiberglass insulation that appears to have been rained and/or sat on?

A big tub of sand, good to know where that is, they'll need it for the molds, but she doesn't have anything to carry it in at the moment.

A bundle of leather straps about twice the size of shoelaces, someone will probably trade for those.

What looks like it used to be a bunch of tiny glass jars filled with dried leaves before someone blasted a mal in that cabinet.

...ooh, pinecones.  She knots the bottom of her spare shirt together to hold it closed and the arms together for a handle, and starts filling it up.

Briar has a backpack, which should work for at least some of this.

"You want to take all the pinecones and I'll take the weird melted jars?" She's not totally sure if that's a fair trade but hopefully if it isn't Connie will make a counteroffer.

"Do you want them?  I can't mend-and-make glass yet, I was gonna ask if you wanted half this leather."  The pinecones aren't literally spilling out of the cabinet at this point, but there's more than Connie could carry unless she filled both shirt and backpack.

"My -- brother -- has a glass affinity. I can trade them to him."

"Huh, not bad- he must be going artificing, then?  Give me just another minute and I'll look out while you grab them."  And she'll stuff the leather in the shirt as well if Briar doesn't want it, it's light enough to go there instead of her backpack.