"--Yes! Yes we are! Hi, I'm Lucy, this's Wilbur."

"I'm Lissa! Um, how much of it do you want?" She pinches it at both around the top of her shoulders and just below her ears. "I hear it's safer to keep it short here anyways?"

"Yeah. You want to get it as short as you can when you can because scissors that haven't gone bad are a limited resource, so it doesn't get too long in between and mals don't grab you by it. Long hair is either a really bad idea or a power move depending on if you can back it up or not."

"Scissors can go bad? Do you mean rusty or, like, bad in a magic way?" Lissa frowns, looking down at her bag. "I brought a Swiss army knife, do I also have to worry about that?"

"Bad in a magic way. It can happen, but it'll be really useful until then. Keep it unless someone offers you a really good deal for it."

Lissa nods. "Alright. Is it easy to tell when it's gone bad? And, um, what do you guys have to trade for my hair?" She didn't really see the other trades, so she has no idea of the general value, but these two seem nice enough, so she can probably trust whatever they tell her.

"What did you have on you when you got swept up? I ask so I'll know if there's anything you don't need to acquire, besides a multitool."

"Um...some granola bars and jerky and two apples for food, plus a bunch of those little soap samples? And a water bottle with a built-in filter, although I don't know if that part actually works. Plus my wallet and library card, though I guess they're not useful here." She's pretty sure no one's using money, after all. "And I have some changes of clothes...is there a laundry room here? Or do I have to wash everything by hand? Oh yeah, and my phone and sketchbook and pencils, that's about it."

"You wash clothes by magic, or in the bathroom sink as best you can. What kind of wallet is it?"

"Um...mostly cloth, I think? Wait, let me pull it out." It's in an outside pocket, so she can unzip it fairly quickly and pull out said wallet. It's fairly small and foldable, with spaces for cards that Lissa seems to mostly use to hold coupons and business cards. There's a bit of plastic as well, used to make a few visible pockets, and some metal zippers.

"Yeah, never mind. We'll trade you some of Mum's healing ointment and some advice on not dying, how does that sound?"

Lissa tucks her wallet back into her bag, patting it to make sure it's secure, then squeezing the pocket a bit more to make sure that nothing has slipped in since. "Oh, that would be nice! I'd definitely like to not die here." El already shared some advice and they are going to meet up tomorrow, but she does realize she needs to survive the night for that.

"You have worse odds of that than most of us."

She gets a large container of some kind of blue-green swirling substance out of her bag, and Wilbur fishes out a very thin plastic baggie, and she pours in some of the substance before carefully recapping the bottle. She hands the sealed bag to Lissa. 

"Be very careful with this; we didn't have the weight for sturdy trading containers. And do not use it for anything minor, bruises or cuts that haven't been badly poisoned or infected badly enough you're worried about losing the limb. You're going to need it to go a long way."

"Got it," says Lissa, taking the bag and carefully settling it into another outside pocket. She's probably going to repurpose one of her other plastic bags to double-up on the bagging just in case later. "How much should I use at a time?"

"Unless you have an imminently life-threatening injury, use the littlest dab you possibly can and then another littlest dab if the first one wasn't enough etcetera. To clarify, if you have an injury that mundane medical professionals wouldn't call life-threatening, but it's going to slow you down enough that you get eaten, that's imminently life-threatening."

That's a fair definition, honestly. Part of her wonders if she could also trade dabs of this to other people.

"Yeah, it sounds like the monsters get pretty bad. Although apparently they can get even worse out there?"

"Oh yeah. Anyone give you the rates yet?"

"...not the exact rates, I think, just that there's less of them inside because the school has some way to kill them regularly." She's overheard some numbers around, but she isn't completely sure those are the rates she's looking for.

"The average survival rate inside the school is twenty-five percent. The usual survival rate outside the school is--well, I don't know if anyone ever took an average over the whole population, but for independents like us it's one in twenty. By 'us' I mean me and Wilbur. I don't think there are any records at all of uninformed muggleborns surviving."

She lets out a slight hiss at that. "...I'm guessing it's slightly higher for those people who already have cliques and stuff?" At least, that's the impression she gets from how the enclave kids seem to be sticking together in some way.

"The enclave kids' survival rate is forty percent outside eighty percent inside."

"Oh, enclaves, got it." She nods. "Oh, and El suggested I ask the void in my room for some combat spells, is there any particular trick to it?"

"What languages do you know?"

"English, Chinese, and French," she rattles off, much quicker than she did with El. "I'm best at the first two."

"Okay good. That's solid. No inconvenient bits of anything?"