"Yeah, I am vaguely planning to catch a bunch and do experiments on them and hope they generalize to worse mals. Why do you ask?"

"What kind of experiments? I might be interested in buying the dead ones off you if they're not too contaminated, protein is kinda the bottleneck on producing spider silk." She waves a hand in the general direction of her familiar, who is currently quivering above her right ear. 

"They will probably be contaminated. You know those ant traps where the ants don't die right away but they bring the poison back to the queen and kill the whole colony? Though I guess I might have a control group."

"Ah. Hm. Yeah, I dunno how well that'll work, but it's still worth thinking about if you try poisoning them with anything that isn't harmful to spiders." 

"We'll see, this is early planning stages yet. I can take down your room number, if you want, and bring you dead relatively-unpoisoned agglos or excess baby ones."

"Cool. I'm in 630B. My brother," gesture, "is an artificer with a thread affinity, so he can do some cool stuff with it. That's a really neat idea about ant poison. I'm Lucy and this is Wilbur."

"Hello."

"Hello." She pens the number (630B Lucy grubs) on her arm. "I'm Bella."

"What track are you thinking? I'm languages."

"Creative writing. My affinity's metamagic though, so I'll probably generalize a little."

"--Oh, nice. I haven't managed to figure out my affinity yet but I speak twenty-three languages."

"Jesus! Well?"

Giggle. "Yep, Mum couldn't find a wizard who met her husband standards so she married a mundane who spoke fourteen languages and they spoke all of them at us at home, all the time, sometimes I'd get confused in public and ask someone for directions in Gaelic. I've already found a couple people here who weren't expecting any overlap on obscure ones that I have." 

"I haven't got anything obscure, though I figure I'll have to add at least one or two while I'm enrolled and I would consider suggestions."

"Basque and Marathi will as far as I know get you trades with all of me and one girl who's definitely a maleficer and one girl who has maleficer vibes but she says she's strict mana and I believe her, and maybe some of Weird Vibes Girl's distant cousins, so probably not that. What do you already have?"

"English French Spanish and tolerable Chinese. Why do you believe her? Maleficers claiming to be strict mana do not burst into flame."

"Several reasons, partly there was no reason to go farther than 'not a maleficer,' in her claim, partly that she was very into responding to things sarcastically and could easily have done that, partly that I wasn't actually outright saying it and she could easily have let the hint slide, partly that she didn't have any weird marks and she wasn't weirdly pretty."

"Huh. Okay. Good to have intel, I suppose."

"Do you have any preliminary ideas for mal poison survivable enough to make it up the food chain?"

"Possibly something in the heavy metals genre that concentrates as it goes up, like in fish, possibly something that is mostly neurotoxic and will hinder if not kill dumb ones and leave the stupid little ones functional enough to go get eaten..."

"Makes sense...might make sense to dissect some agglos to get a better idea of what organ systems they have to mess with."

"Yeah, though I expect that to vary enormously between types and agglos are a major outlier."

"Yeah. But they're, you know, a thing, and if you can send some poisoned agglos off to get nibbled by chayenas that's better than nothing."

"That's the idea! I could carry a bunch of them around in a bag and throw them at things while running away."

Snort. "Probably better to focus more on the running-away part."