The youngest of them replies. "Oh, you too? I've got some too, just give me a minute to drink some more water and we can go over together."

A couple paper cups later, one of the older girls points out a group across the room. "You're looking for Anwar, I don't see him here but those are some of his friends."

As they wind through the cafeteria, Malak introduces herself.

"Haniyah Malak Bahar, I go by Malak. My family lives in Istanbul, we're affiliated with the enclave but not members. I haven't seen you before so - Cairo? Dubai?"

"Naima Saadawi. Cairo but not enclave. First sibling to make it in, actually."

"Well there's a touch of good fortune! Last I heard Cairo doesn't usually have enough slots for just the enclave kids, I guess they didn't have as many admits this year? How many siblings have you got, would the next one be coming of age while we're still in here, or are you more spaced out?"

"I made a deal for a UK slot," she says, flatly. "Talal and Dahab would arrive my senior year, if they come, but I doubt they will. It's possible they'll be allowed to room in the enclave while they most need protection, though." Or at least that Dahab will, Talal is kind of impossible. This is such a grim thing to think about.

"Oh. I'm sorry." And it can't be a good deal, or at least not a repeatable one, or her siblings would be planning on it. They walk in silence the last little bit to the Damascans.

"We're looking for Anwar? We've got mail."

The Damascus kids do not look as happy about this as they should.

"Thanks for your troubles but it's probably no good. Anwar's blind."

"He's - " she's not that slow, so it only takes her a second's pause - "Because of the microfilm reader?"

"Well either that or his mother put a curse on her last letter to him. So. Yeah, reader's bad. The guy who made it graduated last year - or didn't, I bet the letters you've got say which - so we're probably out of luck for getting it fixed. So no mail this year, or next year, and no way to read the microform books."

She thinks about this, tapping her fingers on the table a couple times.

"I have a pocket microscope with me," she says. "Normal, nonmagical, don't think it's developed opinions yet. Transcribing the letters would be - dozens to hundreds of hours of work, depending on how much people wrote, and more to transcribe any books that are especially valuable, but I bet I could do it. Could try, anyway."

"Hm. That could work, for anything really important. What do you want for the microscope?"

Malak is pretty sure that's not what Naima was suggesting, but she's not going to say anything yet.

Careful, careful, she's not very good at this dance and getting it right is important. "I need to keep it for affinity stuff. I don't mind getting the letters off in between schoolwork, though, if you can offer anything for the time cost. You've got to be busier than I'll be, anyway."

"There's some stuff people'd want to read that they wouldn't want just anyone seeing. Private stuff."

Well there's confirmation that Damascus is sneaking in microform spellbooks, or at least something very valuable. Which strongly suggests they have books that their kids can't just get from the library.

"Well we could copy some of the less sensitive mail for you for a favor. And Naima would probably be willing to rent some time with her microscope if the price is right."

"Is that so."

He looks at Naima and raises an eyebrow.

"Yeah, I could do that," she says, lightly. "Long as I get it back when I need it. For a start I'm going to need an escort to the school supply rooms," ideally before everyone else picks them over, "at least if you'd like to take me up on copying some of the rest of it. I don't have paper yet."

"Hm. Sounds good to start. What would you want per page of copying, I can talk to the others and see who's willing to pay for a letter." This boy does not think a letter from his mother is worth paying a freshman to copy it, not in senior year when he really needs to be stockpiling everything he can, but being able to be a middleman for all the sophomores desperate for word from home could help with said stockpiling. "You might not get very many takers if you're asking a lot for them, word from home is nice but it won't save you from a hungry mal."

"Hmm. Off the top of my head I don't have any water storage solutions for my room, and I'd like one. But I also don't have an enclave to consistently tag along with, so I'll probably have lots of use for babysitting, or for groups to follow along with to classes and bathrooms, if you think anyone wouldn't mind arranging or offering that. I probably shouldn't set a firm price per page until I've tried it and have more sense of how much hassle it is to read a whole page of microfilm through a microscope, though."

"Yeah that'll do. Do you want to do your supply run now? I can escort you and we can talk rental prices."

"No time like the present. You should come, too, if you're not busy, we can both pick up stuff," she says to Malak. 

"Well I can always use more stuff."

"Great!"

The trip down to the supply closet is long enough and involves enough stairs that Naima manages to earn back some of the mana she lost in transit, which is good, not having any left was making her pretty uncomfortable, under the circumstances. There are a couple mals in the supply closet itself, but luckily she had the foresight not to come down here alone, which is not really foresight so much as not being too dumb to live for even a single day, but. The upperclassman makes short work of them.

The supply closet has mountains of lined paper right now, although if you divide the mountains by 1600 new students she is not actually sure there will be enough for everyone to have the amount they'd ideally like. Not her problem; she's here first, she's going to need a lot of paper, and she's going to take more than her fair share. Plus a dozen pens, a dozen pencils... no, two dozen pencils, be on the safe side. There are even a few notebooks that don't have horrid designs on the front; she grabs those, too, although she also points them out to Malak in case Malak wants half of them.

There don't seem to be any other school supplies apart from paper and pens and pencils - except for, bizarrely, exactly four plastic protractors sitting on a shelf by themselves. She's... not entirely sure what she'd need a protractor for here, but better safe than sorry? She takes one of them and then agonizes over whether to take the others. She does point them out to Malak, while she's in the process of deciding.

There are artificers who could use a protractor. She grabs two, and tucks them into her bag overflowing with pens. (There's some pencils and paper and a notebook in there for personal use, but pens are more useful to trade or take apart so that's what her extra space is going to)

"Take them both, barter them if you don't have a personal use for them. Odds are that's what the next kid down here would do if you leave it. Or an agglo would get it first and then nobody gets any use out of it."

As if to prove her point, a rubbery pink orb drops down from a high shelf and makes a run down the hallway. Malak pins it underfoot.

"Found where the erasers all got to, you want one?"

"I would! I guess it's not like we're taking it out of the system or anything."

She accepts erasers. And also takes the extra protractor, guilt assuaged.

Stocked up on school supplies, they start to head back up to the cafeteria. On the way the Damascus boy asks Naima what her price is for renting out her microscope.

"If you want it first thing, for, say, two weeks? Guaranteed babysitting on demand by people who are not freshmen, for the first six weeks of school."

She's not sure how reasonable an offer that is, because she doesn't have a very strong sense of how much time crunch most people perceive themselves to be under here (or, like, the specifics of class logistics and how difficult they make this), but in fact her priority is to avoid getting eaten while she's still getting her bearings, so, best to try her luck in this direction, probably.

His reply is almost immediate. "Three weeks of babysitting for two with the 'scope."

"Four," she says, sort of habitually, and then wonders if she should be kicking herself for thinking that she can haggle like that here. "....actually, you know what, I'll take three, if you swear not to let anyone outside Damascus have a turn with it without negotiating directly with me. Then I can make offers to Cairo and Istanbul and Dubai afterwards for reading their mail, if I don't have a system worked out by then."

"Deal." He was totally expecting to haggle, three weeks was a lowball offer. He'll put one of his sophomore minions on escort duty, so it's not even his own time he's trading away.

Well, that response means she probably could have gotten four and the promise of renting the microscope to others after, but she's going to try not to waste time feeling dumb about it. The microfilm reader breaking is still a stroke of extremely good fortune for her, and she does think she can get something from the other enclaves with microfilm letters. If God is apparently actually looking out for her, best not to be too ungrateful for his gifts. She now has three weeks to find some people who can stand to be around her without being bribed into it. She's hoping this will be easier in the Scholomance, where everyone is hopefully as serious as she is about learning, but it could also easily be harder, because everyone is on a hair trigger and social decisions can be life or death here.

Anyway. "Pleasure doing business. Naima Saadawi, I don't think I said. I'll get the microscope out when we get back to the cafeteria, I don't want to get in the habit of being distracted in stairwells."

"Faruq Al-Amin. Pleased to meet you, Naima Saadawi." And they walk back to the cafeteria in silence. They do run into one small mal on the way, but it looks to have been more interested in running and hiding than eating any of their faces. Faruq zaps it anyways.

After the microscope is handed over and they've left the earshot of Faruq, Malak gives Naima a look.

"Your first instinct was right, you want to haggle. People who don't want to will name their price and tell you it's not negotiable. My read is Faruq would've taken your first offer and just wanted to see if he could get away with less. And now he knows he can, when trading with you, so he's probably going to offer you even less next time."

"You're right," she says, immediately, face falling a little. "I guess at least I'll know to trust that and to get more from the next person, now. Just - suddenly aware that I don't actually have anyone around here who cares enough to enforce deals for me yet. - unless you want to help, you seem to have some weight behind you. I'm going to be useful, my affinity's healing. Just need to not get eaten for long enough to make that obvious to people."

She does not have very much weight behind her. She just knows how to stand up for herself ever. She doesn't say that.

"It's less about finding people to enforce deals and more about finding the right people to deal with. I can help you set up some trades as opportunities arise, until you've got the connections yourself, but I'm going to want a cut for my time. Here's a freebie, though - You're probably going to want to approach all the muslim enclaves yourself for letter copying instead of letting Faruq be the middleman, and you want to add Tehran to that list."

"And... if you've got healing, we could make a deal right now. I'll put up and maintain a ward on your room to make it hard for mals to notice, and if me or one of my sibs or - let's say one other person, to be named later - gets hurt, you patch us up at a discount. We can talk about exactly how much of a discount once you've figured out what you want to charge everyone else."

At least she has siblings! Siblings who presumably have mana. Naima does not have siblings and Naima does not have mana right now. 

"Deal. I did think of approaching everyone directly, there's no reason to let anyone from Damascus be middleman if the reader's broken. Not entirely sure whether to do that now or to wait until Dama - Faruq gives it back." Probably it's rude or something to use people's cities as a metonymy for them. "What are you planning to do with all your microfilm? Mine's not labeled, so I don't think I can send it out to all of the intended recipients until it's been read. Is yours like that, too?"

"- yeah. I hadn't thought of that, it's going to be a pain just addressing all of it. Faruq is probably right that most people are probably not going to be willing to pay much for a letter, less if you're also going to charge for the cost of searching through all the mail for theirs."

"Seems true. I was thinking maybe we could set ourselves up as the new Anwar, skim through everybody's mail first, and then offer to trade for copies of the things that it seems like people might pay for copies of. Since it's not like there are any options that don't involve someone reading everybody's mail. And there could be something interesting in there, who knows."

"Pretty sure Anwar didn't sell the service. Standard is usually for things like mail to be handled outside, people won't be used to paying for their letters. The situation is exceptional, of course, they'll understand and nobody would expect you to do it for free, but that doesn't mean you'll have a ton of buyers even if you're picking the people with a sick sister outside or something like that. Just - trying to warn you it might not work out profitably."

"Yeah, that's fair. Seems worth a shot, though, I don't want to give it up without trying. Not interested in helping look through everybody's private correspondence, then?"

"Oh I'll absolutely help, if nothing else comes up in the next two weeks. Someone offers me an enclave spot to help them make an invisibility cloak and you're on your own, though."

"Of course! Good to have lots of irons in the fire, though, right?"

She likes this girl. That's something.

"That is how it's done here. I'll see you tomorrow about the ward on your door? I'll need to build the mana for it, I can't do it today."

Actually, Malak will probably help Naima with the transcribing even if something facially better comes along. A strong working relationship with a healer is a great thing to have in this place. Naima doesn't project competence like an enclaver - if anything she does the opposite - so she's probably going to wind up undervalued. Malak might even do Naima's door before her own, the first days are safe enough and a good second impression is worth its weight in gold.

"Sounds good. The serious mals are probably still digesting anyway." Oh that's probably morbid. Whatever. "Glad I ran into you."

"Salaam."