She seems surprised to be addressed.

"Just storage. Why?"

"Just curious. My storage is all in my bag, everything I'm wearing has some other function." 

Her spider skitters across her forehead. 

She startles slightly at the spider. "- familiar?" she asks, when Lucy seems unharmed.

"Yeah! My brother's is female so we have a breeding pair, and he has a thread affinity so they're super useful." She bounces slightly. "Darwin's Bark Spidersilk has the highest tensile strength of any mundane organic material in the world."

"...wouldn't it take a long time to get enough to do anything with?"

"We're planning on feeding them a lot of mal grubs. They can go pretty fast as long as they've got protein to convert. Wilbur made all our clothes," she adds, gesturing to the creamy undyed silk of their outfits. 

"Huh. Okay. I'll think of you if I wind up with a basket of mal grubs."

"That sounds sarcastic but would be genuinely useful. We're planning on selling babies, too, since the ones we have are a breeding pair."

"I guess that'd have a market if people reckon they want baby spiders."

"Familiars are useful, and familiar silk is a good material even if you don't have a thread affinity, which Wilbur does, and probably some kids who want to go maleficer will want them for that purpose."

"Yeah, probably.

Uh, I'm strict mana. I don't want to - waste your time."

"Oh! Wow, that's really cool, actually--uh, do you have any idea why you have, like--vibes? Not that I'm, like, accusing you of anything, and actually looking at you closely I don't see any telltale physical marks, but--you totally have vibes."

"Maybe it's Maybelline!"

She dissolves into giggles. "Can you imagine? If you actually had a recipe for a cosmetic that did that I imagine you could make a mint selling it to seniors or juniors who want to look more impressive for alliances." 

"No such luck."

"Yeah. I've got some recipes from Mum but nothing that impressive and anyway I'm languages track. Wilbur's artificing, obviously." 

"I'm going languages." Is this small talk. Has she somehow stumbled upon someone's secret trove of small talk. Irresponsible to leave that sort of thing lying around.

"Nice! What've you got? I'm functional in twenty-three which is apparently a lot even for languages track but Mum married a mundane linguist after she couldn't find a wizard who would get on board with her plan to have exactly one child and spend fourteen years building resources to keep that one kid alive. ...Unexpected multiples notwithstanding." 

"Well aren't you lucky. I've got Welsh and Marathi and Hindi at the moment, I'll pick up more here."

"--I have Marathi! It's not one of my best ones but I have it." 

"Huh, color me surprised, I thought it'd be a couple of my distant cousins we don't talk to and nobody else."

"Dad's a linguistics professor, he wasn't really picking practicality as a reason to learn languages. That might be the most obscure one, though. I mean, here, Gaelic isn't objectively better but we do have an overrepresentation of Brits. Not that I can complain."

"Huh. If you find good spells in Celtic maybe I'll pick it up, it's the same family as Welsh."

"I actually do have Welsh too it's just less of a huge coincidence than Marathi. If you do pick up something I've got you can come over to my place to study anytime I'm not in the library or something, just bring some grubs, I'm in room 630B."

"Half six, all right. Good luck with your spiders thing."