They're only in here for a moment, so Dasha watches her back until they get back to her room instead of checking Annisa's drawers too. She does another spot-check in her room and sets to work. The screws are very, very old, and if she has to watch the wood for splinters, but it's not bad otherwise.

There's no reason for the screws to be old. These dorm rooms were - well, the matter was probably in a fashion reused from the vanished senior dorms, but those didn't have the same furniture; the furniture did not exist eight hours ago. Annisa wonders what would happen if every parent told their children to expect nice modern rooms with drawer-less desks. Maybe the expectations of the students inside would be controlling.

She doesn't say any of this aloud; it's easier to sound stupid than to sound smart. She disassembles Daria's furniture. The fact they're doing Daria's first leaves her vulnerable to Daria declining to do Annisa's afterwards, but that's a good thing to know about someone on the first day, if that's how it is. And maybe having done it once will make it easier to do a second time.

When she's about halfway through her side she stands up to rummage through her pack. "It'll be quicker if I start on the wards now, I can do almost all of it with the door closed. I assume you don't have Old Church Slavonic?"

"Sure don't! I do have earplugs, though." She puts them in. She does not confess that you could straight up assassinate her by saying something in Old Church Slavonic.

"All the chanting's at the end, mostly I work in physical materials. I'll let you know." She grabs a many-colored silk cord and start laying it around the boundaries of her room, threading an amber bead on at each corner.

Annisa keeps assembling desks. No point in being distracted by how someone else does magic, she's not at magic school because magic is cool and interesting, she's at magic school to not die.

She does a second pass with a needle and gold thread, working it into bit of the cord, and then wraps some thread around the legs of her bed with a tiny ruby bead on each. Those are for trade, eventually, but she'll use them while she has them. Then just two tiny complicated knots of thread on the vent, the more fiddly detail work she does here the less mana it'll cost and the more she'll have.

When she's done she fetches a paintbrush and a tiny jar of golden ink and tries to get Annisa's attention without tapping her on the shoulder.

Annisa is paying her a fair bit of attention as part of in general trying to pay her surroundings a fair bit of attention as part of trying to not die. "Now?" she says, and then starts humming to herself. 

She nods, and opens the door. She needs to stand up on tip-toes to be able to paint an arc over the door but does manage it without having to pull anything out to stand on, and then paints two careful lines down the side. Then she ducks back inside, closes the door, and starts chanting, slow and almost sing-song.

Annisa is not listening.

Annisa will have thirteen minutes of not listening, and then Dasha lifts up her hands above her head like she's conducting an orchestra and says "аминь" to each of the four corners of her room and then brings them down, sharply.

Then she staggers, catches herself, and sit down unsteadily on the bed.

Earbuds out. "That's the spell going right, I hope?"

"Yeah, I'll be all right in a moment."

Where Annisa was raised it's - practically intimacy, to be visibly at all tired or strained around another person. But people in other countries are different. Very different, in some cases. She will not read anything into it and also not acknowledge it - except she kind of did acknowledge it, and then Daria confirmed it?? Aaaah?? Maybe they get a pass because it's the first day of school? Maybe Daria likes her and wants to be friends this is literally the mistake she was repeatedly warned she'd be tempted to make and should not make, except she didn't believe she'd really be tempted to make it.

She acknowledges this with a tense head-gesture and goes back to vigorous disassembly. Vigorous enough to snap a horrible old screw as she pulls it out.

Ugh. She was hoping to use those and now she needs to make it clear that she wants something in exchange for the broken screw while also not coming across as an asshole, fuck, how do you do that. Oh, there's the obvious thing - "Trade you that one for one of yours?"

Which is completely fair so why does Annisa want to sink into the void floor and never return. "Yeah."

Her head's still spinning but she gets off the bed as soon as she's sure she can keep her feet underneath her to help with the last of the desk.

And soon it's a pile of lumber. Later it'll want to be a safer desk, and safer shelving, but that's a lot to expect to get done on the first day. "Shall we do mine next? Get you your screw?"

She finishes stacking the lumber carefully so it doesn't leave any shadowy crannies and then heads towards the door. "If your screws are smaller you owe me two," she says, and tries to smile to show that she's joking.

Annisa has no idea if she's joking, but she laughs. "You love screws that much you could probably get 'em off the mundies in exchange for disassembling their desks and saving them from getting eaten. Or I guess you could wait until they get eaten and then take their furniture but first way there's no risk of being beaten to it."

"I don't think any of them are close enough that it makes any sense to go screw-raiding. Maybe I'll find a particularly lucky agglo, get a screw delivery."

"You could leave out shinies in a little bowl for 'em, like people do for stray cats if they need stray cats for their kids to practice on. - I have no idea if that works, we didn't get a lot of agglos at home."

"Aww, now I almost want a pet agglo." ...stray cats? She busies herself checking the drawers rather than reacting to that.

One of Annisa's drawers has something fast-moving and small in it; it darts out of sight when the drawer is opened, wriggling back behind it.

"- ugh. I'm not going to be able to stab that, and I hate stuff I can't stab." But they've been working on desk disassembly for a while so she has the mana, and impressive prospective allies isn't a bad idea - "This is gonna be Surabayan Javanese," she warns Daria.