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."

"Except to stay out of the way if New York and Shanghai start flinging curses at each other."

"... Hopefully that won't start until next year."

"It only takes one idiot."

"Mother always said there are a lot of those..."

"And the enclave kids have been less aggressively pruned of theirs."

"Because they get more slots here and have an easier time graduating?"

"And are less likely to have died before now if they were."

"Is it hard to keep safe from mals before puberty?"

"Not hard hard not usually, but generally speaking everyone's tastiness start's blooming at thirteen."

"I guess there were more mals around the past year or so."

"I grew up with a mundane in the house, so that helps."

"That does sound like it would help."

"Pity the nurse has to be so thoroughly scrubbed of monsters-don't-exist or she'd be useful for that here, though not useful enough to offset the plunge in already miniscule life expectancy. Maybe we should poke our noses in there, sound her out about buying magic bandages."

"Oh that's a good idea, I know some healing magic but I only have a few healing cookies for serious injuries."

"We used up a chunk of our weight allowance on the best healing goo Mum could brew, but that's less of a renewable resource than bandages are since neither of us is an alchemist."

"Silk should be good for bandages shouldn't it?"

"Exactly!"

"I'll keep you in mind, if I have mana I shouldn't need bandages but well... the times I need bandages I'm probably going to be low."

"Bandages should probably be a staple honestly, they don't use that much silk and there'll be loads of call for them..."

"Is good to have something lots of people need. I'm hoping that healing magic is that for me, also Mother taught me to do abortions safely, I don't know how often people need that but I expect it's valuable when they do."

"I have an implant in my arm but not everyone's willing to risk the odds that nothing will go wrong with an implant or an IUD for four years."

"Mother took out my uterus, she says she'll give me a new one after I graduate if I want one."

"I guess you could do that with her affinity!"

"It's really cool what Mother can do. She does some medical magic for mundanes, they pay lots of money for it."

"I bet. She disguise it as really good mundane medicine?"

"It's easier to disguise it as alternative medicine otherwise you have to talk with the mundane government a lot more. Also mundanes who believe in alternative medicine are more credulous."

"You know what, that's fair. As long as she doesn't humor them about vaccines being bad because fuck that shit."

"I don't really know the details, even with more credulous mundanes it's easier to do magic on them when they're asleep so I usually don't talk with them."

"Valid but my opinion stands."

"It's nice that you care about the whole world. Mother and I are pretty isolated honestly. I don't know that much about a lot of things. Just bits from the internet and what Mother thought was important for me to know."

"I mean, belief is belief, and I really want to not get sick with a dozen diseases that should have been squished by herd immunity."

"I guess that would be a worry if you have to pay for healing."

"Yep, it sure would."

"Sorry, I knew mundanes had trouble getting healing but I didn't realize it was a problem for wizards. I thought healers were more common than that."

"It's not that big a deal on the outside but in here you don't want to spend healing on being sick that you could instead spend on not dying of a horrible bite or something."

"That makes sense. Hopefully you won't get sick. If you do, I might be able to help but infections are harder than injuries for biomancy and it's not my affinity."

"We have some healing. We'll see how bad it gets if we do get sick, if it's not bad enough to keep us from going to class we might just use the misery to grind mana."

"That might work, it sucks that you build more mana doing things that you don't like or that make you miserable."

"It's not the first thing I'd change about magic."

"Obviously the first thing anyone would change would be the mals, is there something else you have in mind though?"

"No, it's mostly just that!"

"Yeah, it's sad that so many people die so young. And that often times they spent so much of their life doing things they didn't enjoy just to have better chances."

"And the whole--zero-sum nature of wizard society."

"Yeah, until someone comes up with a better way to keep teens safe things aren't going to change. Maybe we can think of something though."

"It'd be nice. Have to live long enough first."

"You seem to be off to a good start."

"We sure hope so!"

"I think we all do. I'll let you get back to your deal making. Hopefully we'll see each other around for a long while yet."

"See you."