"Oh."

"Try not to die. Your parents would probably rather have no idea what happened to you for years than to lose you forever because an opportunistic mal got you in your home."

"They were never that big! And it helped when maintenance redid all the anti-rodent stuff!"

"Yeah, for now. If your mana kept growing and you never learned to make yourself unappetizingly dangerous? Bigger ones would have come."

"They're going to think I ran away! I wouldn't do that! And if they think someone kidnapped me from thirty stories up that's worse!"

"Yep. It sucks."

"And there's no way to get them an email or anything? For a year?"

"There's a reason people sacrifice part of the precious weight allowance to bring in letters. There really is not any way to get things in and out except once a year."

"Well that sucks, I wish I'd told them I was magic."

"Convincing them would have been hard, magic is a lot harder to pull off when someone who doesn't believe in it is watching."

"Well they could've gone out of the room while I sang to my pothos!"

"Maybe you could've done it. Convincing mundanes isn't impossible, our dad is a mundane."

"Okay. I think - oh, I think I don't have any mana right now, where did it go - I usually have some, I guess from walking around and doing math homework or whatever?"

"The induction spell sucks it all out. Wilbur and I had some filled mana storage, it's empty now; you can get extra weight allowance by providing mana to the spell."

"Okay, I guess the thing I whipped up for killing the monster rat won't necessarily get me all the way to wherever sewing stuff is?"

"There's safety in numbers. You can walk with me to the workshop if we get it at the same time." 

"Get what at the same time?"

"Artificing classes."

"We can't just go, like, now?"

"--Well not now. Now everyone is feeling very generous towards the freshmen who bring in news of the outside world. Maybe after, but Wilbur and I have to do some settling-in stuff. Plus the upperclassmen have already cleaned out the shop some since graduation."

"The upperclassmen probably already have needles'n thread 'n fabric if they want them already. Maybe. I don't really know. After's fine, at least I don't sleep naked."

"When you're getting things out of shop stores, you don't just get what you personally need, you get things you can trade," she explains. "Every trip to a cupboard like that where a mal could be hiding is a risk."

"Oh. ...I don't have anything to trade now that I gave you guys my hair."

"You can trade your spells, and mana, and there'll be more stuff by tomorrow."

"Trade my spells?"