"--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?"

"Um...does a bit of counting in Spanish count?"

"Probably not. But if you get a spell in Spanish find someone to translate it for you and start studying Spanish immediately, and if you pick up another language make it Spanish."

Lissa nods, making a mental note to move learning more Spanish up in her schedule. "Oh yeah, you said I should keep my knife-should I figure out some kind of magic to do to it so it can kill mals or can it do that by itself?"

"Most mals will die to physical force and the ones that don't you want to kill with spells directly, not bother enchanting something unless you're, like, Orion Lake, and going to be killing a lot of them."

Lissa nods and puts "practice with knife" on her to-do-list as well. "Orion Lake?"

"He's this guy from New York--New York's the biggest richest English-speaking enclave and is therefore a big fucking deal--and he kills mals like they're breakfast."

"...wow. Does that have to do with being from New York or is he just naturally that cool?"

"He might be naturally that cool but he's had more resources to develop being really cool than if he wasn't from New York."

Lissa nods, peering around at the various groups. "Must be nice. For him and his whole enclave, too, I bet. Is he here, or is he one of the groups that left?"

"I don't see him but who knows."

Another nod, plus a shrug. "Yeah, I was just curious. Anyways, um, got any other advice? Or should we go to cutting my hair now?"

"Don't stand near any vents, or sit by them, if you can help it. Don't eat lunch by yourself if you can help it. Don't walk anywhere by yourself if you can help it, including to the bathroom. Curfew is at eleven and lasts until six; don't be outside your room or let anyone else in during curfew. If you need to pee in the middle of the night pee into the void. If you have a set of drawers or a cupboard in your room, disassemble it and reassemble it into shelving so mals can't hide places you can't see. Check the food in the cafeteria for mal infestation and poison before eating anything."

She nods, only pausing to pull out her notebook to write down the bit about curfew. "Is there a bell or something for curfew?"

"Yep. When you hear the curfew bell you have five minutes to get back to your room."

That might not be very long, considering. She frowns a bit as she considers. "Is it worth trying to get a watch? Or do they go bad too?"

"For you in particular it is not. They sometimes go bad, but also, they are very much an extra and you do not have the slack to trade for extras, you're starting at a huge disadvantage."

She nods, twisting her hair around her fingers again. "What time do classes end? The school's not mean enough to put class times way too close to curfew, is it?"

"No, class times vary depending on what your schedule is but that's not a problem anyone reported to my Mum when she bribed them to tell her things to watch out for."

"That's good. I guess I just have to get good at estimating the time myself?"

"Also pay attention to what everyone else is doing."

She nods. "I guess that makes sense for most things here. Thanks for all the advice."

"You're welcome. I wish you the best of luck in not dying."

Lissa nods. "So, just the haircut bit left, then?" She'll go to find a chair to sit down in if that makes it easier.