"--Sorry, do you need something?" Lucy asks when she catches him staring at her.

"Oh! Not, um, specifically - mostly I'm wondering what you had to trade the new blood to get the hair off them, people don't usually like that especially not when they're deeply confused and alarmed already."

"Well, the first girl was barefoot and I gave her my slippers which are spidersilk from Darwin's Bark Spiders," she gestures to Atlach, "which is the strongest kind in the world and you can't get it in useful quantities mundanely, the spiders are too hard to direct and also hard to prevent from cannibalizing each other. But also I explained, like, everything I had time to before she located an enclaver boy to fling herself at, which seems to be going well for her so far, she has bits of several languages, it's not great. The second girl it was a three-way trade with a guy who gave her six rubies for power storing in exchange for her giving me the hair and me giving him a bunch of spidersilk later on once we've got production running." 

She bites her lip. 

"I was trying not to rip them off or anything but I've never actually been here before, obviously, and it's not like they'd know...I don't want to be so generous I get us killed," gesture to her brother, "but I don't want to be stingy just because they don't know better either." 

Edmund softens from fake-jocular to real-wistful. "I hear you. It's good of you to - put your neck out, even a little, long as you're helping. Um. I'm Edmund Pevensie, London Enclave. Yourself?"

An enclaver!!! She'd better not fuck up this interaction. 

"Lucy Warren. Indie from Devonshire. And this is my brother, Wilbur. His affinity is thread, hence the spiders."

"Hello."

"Hi! Thread, that's a good artificing basis; I'm doomed to incantation. How about you, Lucy? - my little sister's named Lucy, if I call you Lu by accident just hit me over the head with something."

Giggle. "We haven't figured it out yet, so it's probably something really weird. I'm doing incantations too, languages or creative writing?"

"Creative. I tried languages but when I started I couldn't help tugging at word roots until I knew too much to back out of the connected language, and you can do that for five languages but not twenty, so Da had to traumatize me out of it."

"Oh no. My dad's a linguist, between him and Mum and some tutors they managed to cram most of twenty-three languages into my head, I'm not fluent in all of them but I can cast."

"Damn. My older sister Susan's languages but I don't know how many she has. Probably not twenty-three, though. And my big brother's an artificer, carries around a great bloody sword everywhere, and my little sister's angling for alchemy. Everyone's very amused that my parents collected the whole set."

Well. If they manage to keep the whole set.

"Mum was originally planning on just one but then she got twins. She put a lot of effort into making sure we survive, we had a kilo of extra weight allowance between us from how much mana she managed to put aside."

"Wow. My family are - old-fashioned, I guess, more of the 'if you have enough some of them'll make it through' school. Not that they didn't send us with anything - if you need any reagents besides your very nice Darwin's Bark silk, I'm sure we can make something work - but, uh, they weren't going to send us with mana for the system."

"Mum's the only one of her siblings to survive. It's probably different inside an enclave."

"...probably is. I was really worried, you know, that Peter and Su wouldn't - be here. They know what they're doing and they had the best chances but so do a lot of people, you know?"

"Mhm. I heard this one girl calling for a big sister, and..." she shakes her head. "Not that the outside is safe. See: all the muggleborns."

"Muggleborns. I honestly had not heard that one before. -but yeah. I wouldn't want to be stuck on the outside. Here there's leverage."

"I've never heard a better term suggested than the obvious pop culture reference. Yeah, uh, they're in a shitty position here but they wouldn't be better off out there, except to the extent that one can reasonably prioritize a better life over a longer one."

"Londoners say 'new blood' usually. And - yeah. And we can help them out, as much as is reasonable. - wonder if there's anything I can do for them. I doubt pyjama girl is going to be in my size and giving up a change of clothes would be a stumbling block anyway but... maybe I could get her to the supply cupboards for raw silk?"

"Are you offering to do her a favor if I pay you or are you saying raw silk is what she'd retrieve from the supply cupboards. I did discuss the option of going down with her earlier, it wouldn't hurt us to get ahead of supply runs either."

"Oh, saying we'd get it from the cupboards. I don't actually know if they have silk, maybe it'd be cotton or something, but saying 'raw cotton' makes it sound like someone's going to spin it themselves."

Snort. "Wilbur actually does have a drop spindle, but yeah."

"Drop spindle! How charmingly Tamora Pierce. - huh, it looks like Pyjama Girl acquired herself a big strong someone of her own volition, I think you mentioned but it skipped right through my head. Probably he'll want to cupboardhunt with her. There were others, though, did you get a feel for the redhead? Does she have needs, less obvious than her beslippered compatriot?"

"Her only storage is the six rubies she got for her hair and she has like...very, very little stuff with her. If there are any older girls in your enclave who might want to buy a tube of lipstick that'd be useful; I'm sure she'd benefit from a cupboard run but I can't think of anything specific she needs more than all the other things she needs."

" - I can find someone who wants lipstick," he says confidently. "I'll set about it."