- huh. 

Julia knows Marcy, sort of. There are periodic minor efforts to make sure the US enclavers go in knowing who each other are, though you don't want them to be friendly enough that people get confused about who is on your team and who is just, like, your neighbor. Boston is metaphorically their neighbor. Boston is where Harvard and Yale and MIT are and they go in hard on academic preparedness and Julia would not say she has clicked with any of them but she's aware of who they all are. 

She did not know that Marcy had....severe headaches? It's possible Marcy does not, there's a lot of uproar in the cafeteria and there are things that can give you a one-off headache, though she said it awfully casually, for that. 

A year older than Julia there's a New Yorker, Ellen, who gets chronic migraines. As a result she's not at the Scholomance; it's just not worth it, if you've got some kind of health problem. The rest of the enclave will run itself ragged protecting you. Ellen's slot got sold to some indie parents in some country where not everyone gets to go to the Scholomance, in exchange for their help protecting Ellen at home in the enclave, and Ellen's still there, guarded around the clock, studying on her own.

Julia's a tiny bit jealous, but only a tiny bit? It's not like Ellen gets to breathe fresh air or watch shows on Broadway any more than the rest of them. And there've been a couple close calls already; mals are able to get quite inventive, when there's delicious fifteen year old to be had. 

She seems fine the next day, though at breakfast she's doing a homework assignment with one hand and eating with the other.

Then on Saturday afternoon she's going up the stairs while Julia is going down, accompanied by a Boston junior and looking like she's trying to hide looking worn out.

"Remember," says the junior, "all the mana in the world won't help you if you can't A, keep a lookout, and B, run the second you need to."

"Yeah," nods Marcy, "in hindsight I should have started upstairs twenty minutes ago. Thanks for the escort."

The junior's reply is inaudible as they reach a landing and turn the corner.

Julia would love to gossip about whether Marcy has some kind of chronic illness but that's incredibly rude, so she doesn't.

Tuesday at lunchtime Marcy walks past the New York table on the way to bussing her tray, talking to one of Boston's sophomores.

"I'm not going to end up needing it as much in the evenings, actually, because Abigail asked the void and got this amazing spell that's like dark sunglasses, I'm going to be bugging her to cast it for when I . . . " clatter of trays going into the tray location.

"Hey Ennis!" Julia says the next time she sees him. "I have a business idea for you."

"Do tell."

"Moisturizer or spa treatments or something that treat migraines."

"...I don't know if I can do that - or, well, I don't know if it would be in-affinity, at any rate. Maybe that anti-glare stuff footballers put below their eyes could do something about migraines if it were magic. Did someone just come down with them?"

"Well, I assume they didn't know in advance because presumably you'd get a magic item for it, if you knew in advance. Maybe anti-glare stuff, or those salicylic acid treatments that make your face feel very light and cool..."

"Salicylic acid is for acne."

"I know that! But I don't know what kind of magic effects are conceptually adjacent!"

"Well, I can ask the void about it if you think there's a market but I don't know that it's worth developing from scratch while I still don't have poison-colors or the concealer upgrade."

"I think there's a market." She shouldn't say more. It'd be mean to Marcy.

Ennis dutifully writes this down.

Julia isn't sure when she will get the chance to tip Marcy off about this but it turns out not to be very hard. The search for the murderer hasn't turned anything up yet and the New York seniors are having an emergency meeting, and they kick the underclassmen out. And Marcy, too, is in the main area of the reading room, maybe for the same reason. Julia sits down next to her. They're not really friends but they know each other, it's not weird. 

"Have you met Ennis, Manchester?" she asks without preamble because it'll just weird Marcy out if she tries to be friendly.

Sort sort sort she has met so many people this week, "Oh, yeah, we have Applied Electromechanics together." 

"You should place an order with him! He's got the world's best affinity, I'm so jealous. Cosmetics! And he can do 'em for alertness or detecting poison or maybe camouflage, and if there's a market he thought he could work on anti-glare stuff that worked on headaches." There, that's not going to say to any eavesdroppers that Marcy is disabled.

"Alertness and poison are both cool. The anti-glare one would be great if let you weld without goggles or a sunglasses spell but I bet that'd be pretty mana-heavy."

Huh? Oh, probably she's proposing that as an excuse so when she gets the anti-glare one no one knows why. "Probably would be! But I figure now's the time to place an order before he's got way more than he can keep up with."

"I'll probably go for alertness if anything, less risk of eye damage." Hang on, why is Julia advertising Ennis to her in particular? She doesn't wear cosmetics and never has; all her minor health magic is clothes or pills. "Do you have an advertising agreement with him?"

"You know, that's a good idea, I should make him pay me," she says. "...I pointed out to him that right now wearing makeup in the Scholomance is mildly stigmatized, but that if all the rich kids start doing it then it won't be, and then everyone else will feel comfortable doing it too, and we can all be poison dart frogs, or camouflaged, except Orion who wants to be like the kind of flower that begs bees to come to it. But I'm not getting anything for it. I just, you know, thought you'd want to know."

So Julia's trying to get a bunch of other enclavers on board so she can wear makeup without being thought ridiculous. Well, on the one hand, Julia's already a bit ridiculous, but having some of your magic items be smeared on your face isn't inherently stupid if it's not too time-consuming. 

"Gotten anyone else to try it yet? Ennis seems perfectly reasonable but trying other freshmen's alchemy experiments is such a crapshoot; did you hear about the memory potion business last week?" 

(Also, Marcy has no clue what a poison dart frog is and if this were anyone other than a New York kid she'd ask.)

Why is Marcy worried about being asked to go out on a limb when it's to solve a really serious problem that she already has her enclave covering for her on!!! Julia would wear something hideous if it meant her enclavemates didn't have to take over all her stuff because she was down with headaches!

She can sell it, though.  "Orion's got some eyeshadow because Orion's a very good sport. That might be enough all by itself, he's already got a little bit of a fan club and I bet once things start getting dangerous it'll be a big fan club. And cosmetics are better than potions 'cause if they're not working you can just wash them off...." OH - "were you one of the kids who took the potion and got side effects?" Marcy might be willing to admit to that even if she's not willing to admit they haven't stopped affecting her yet, and it'd explain why Boston didn't send her with a plan.

"No, fortunately, I had a near miss--I was all set to talk to the seller about buying one when I heard about the issues. In hindsight it was too good to be true; if it was that easy there wouldn't be such a market for homework." She's tempted to add 'and then where would I be' but that kind of sounds like she's unfairly benefitting from everyone else's misfortune instead of simply having a comparative advantage.

"I dunno, some affinities are really convenient. Orion's too good to be true and here he is."

Julia has probably done her duty here but she doesn't know how to gracefully exit the conversation now that the hint has been hinted!

"True enough." Orion is complete bullshit and she's so jealous. "But it didn't pan out and here we are. While you're advertising things, do you know anybody who wants their homework done?"

"New York's shopping around for some stuff, you'd have to ask Silas...wait, are you doing other peoples' homework?"

Why does she sound surprised? Enclavers can sell homework; it's allowed. "Yeah. History and literature, mostly, but math too if it's something I've taken already. If you want to offload trigonometry I'll have to refer you to Franklin."

Julia is so confused!

Why is Julia being so weird about this! Is it revenge for being weird about the makeup because if so this seems weirder than Marcy was being. "I know enclavers don't usually sell homework but I don't think there's actually a good reason not to, if I can do it fast enough to make a profit."

Okay you know what they're not friends but they're not enemy secret agents, at this point the thing to do is to just talk with their mouth-words. "I need to find a Gandhari dictionary, want to help me search the stacks?"

Yeah okay she will go talk about Julia's weird homework-market secret in private. "Sure." Did Julia get stuck with Korean? Is she doing some kind of weird schedule thing where she needs to buy homework for a class so she can pretend she's not in it? Is she trying to defraud someone on a trade and wants to bribe Marcy to stay out of it? Surely it's not that last thing; Julia's weird but she's not a moron.

. . . Man, if Julia actually just wants a Ghandari dictionary Marcy is going to be so disappointed.

Julia considers actually saying her line about how they're not friends but they're not enemy secret agents, because it's a great line, the kind that should escape her head, but 'we're not friends' is a kind of confrontational thing to say to someone out of nowhere. 

"So I was behind you in the lunchline when you said it seemed like your head was going to explode," she says, "and I thought that might be a metaphor, but then I was also behind you in the hallway when you said Abigail'd found you a dark sunglasses spell and when you were dragging yourself up the stairs while a junior scolded you for being out of bed, and so if you're trying to hide something I think you're hiding it kind of badly? And letting me bully you into wearing magic makeup will be hiding it lots less badly than that!"

Bwuh?!

"I wasn't hiding any of--okay I kind of was hiding having worn myself out in the gym, pro tip don't try to keep up with a junior with giraffe legs. But the head exploding totally was a metaphor. And the sunglasses spell is for my completely not a secret project welding myself some new shelves, not, I don't know, some disease that makes your head explode and then you borrow a welding visor!" Is that even a thing? Head-exploding welder's disease?

"...headaches. Are the disease that make you want dark sunglasses and that feel like your head exploding. You know, whatever. I'm glad you're okay."

"Huh. Okay. I'm glad you were trying to be helpful and not doing some kind of scheme."

"I brought in makeup from home, I'm not that invested in whether everyone else wears it. Aside from that it's protection that can be made in large batches so they'd be dumb to pass it up."

"Yeah, it does sound pretty neat." At least she got a useful tip out this weirdness. "Anyway, see you around."

"Yeah." She does actually need a Gandhari dictionary but she'll just go do that with someone else so it's not awkward.