Uh. 

He glances desperately at Lucy. 

"Provisionally, sure! What can you do with it so far?"

She mutters something under her breath an the coil unwinds a little the end reshaping itself into a screwdriver and then a smiley face. "I can turn it into tools and make pretty things."

"Neat. Wilbur made all our clothes."

"They look nice that must have been a lot of work."

"The spiders did most of the actual weaving."

"Ooh, are they familiars or do you have some kind of animal control magic? Or maybe they're engineered?"

"They're familiars! They're not engineered, they're Darwin's Bark Spiders, they make the strongest mundane silk of any spider anywhere."

"Oh cool, I think Mother has a few of those around somewhere, she has a lot of critters it's hard to keep track."

"Oh, really? Is her affinity animals or something?"

"Biomancy, she tweaks animals to be more useful." And also people but Ribo isn't supposed to tell people about that until she knows them well.

"--Whoah, that's insanely useful."

"It is, she has to be super careful though if the changes rely too much on magic to work they can turn into Mals."

"Yeah, I can see how that would be a risk. She send you in with anything interesting?"

"Yeah some alert bugs, they make a bunch of noise if they notice people or things they're not used to moving. I don't know if they'll last in the Scholomance though and the spells Mother taught me to check if they're going bad are in Lojban."

"I speak an implausible number of languages but that isn't one of them."

"Yeah, that's why Mother picked it, almost nobody knows it so the Scholomance won't give people her spells."

"On the other hand, if anyone does know it, they're practically guaranteed to get them."

"That is the bet she's making, yeah. Still most people go for ancient languages not conlangs."

"That is true. She might have to worry about the muggleborns coming in from the Chicago incident."

"Do you know anything about that? I've only overheard bits here and there."

"The Chicago enclave is gone, nobody knows how or why, there are a couple of surviving freshmen who were outside the enclave at the time but not a lot, now there's a passel of muggleborns who are probably going to get eaten inside a month."

"Well that's concerning, I guess we won't know more until next year though. Hopefully there won't be an enclave war."

"We all hope. I suppose it's less critical for us indie freshmen who won't have any kind of cemented alliances until we have any idea, though."

"That's true. No sense in worrying about it now I guess."