Julia has done endless tutoring practice at trading. You want to seem like you're rich, and can afford to be generous, but aren't an idiot. You want to remember that you're New York, not just yourself, and want to preserve relationships for the future. "I have a lot of options - spices that make the food not taste like crap! Mascara that helps with seeing mals, moisturizer that helps with alertness, lipstick that detects poison, healing and renewing potions. Any of those would be really generous for nonmagical slippers but maybe you can give me those as a down payment on some future stuff once your spiders produce silk, New York could definitely benefit from having a source of silk for projects. How much will you have by midterms?"

"Lots. How about--the mascara in exchange for the slippers now and an enchanted shirt later, spidersilk is really tough and Darwin's Bark Spider silk is the best of any mundane spider in the world, plus Wilbur's affinity is thread. And you can say what style of shirt and how you want it customized."

"Sure! The shirt won't be for me, I'll ask who in New York wants it." And she reaches into her bag and fishes out one of her mascara bottles; she brought twelve, each of them 0.33 fluid ounces.

"Uh, if you have gold paint do you want me to get started now?" 

She accepts the bottle and hands over the slippers. "Thanks. What's going on, do you need help?"

"We're designing my room! You can absolutely help, maybe you could do a tapestry?" And to Julian, "You can start painting as soon as there's a chrome tile that's been polished to perfection -" She peeks inside to see whether that has been achieved yet.

(Team Wallpaper Maintenance is totally listening, from over here where they're loyally constructing art, to the negotiation between Real Serious Players. It's important to know what incoming trade goods are worth, for when he and Vernon and maybe Karen and two dozen other indies are carefully agreeing on who gets to continue hanging out with New York. The last thing they need is to be backstabbing each other when they're going to be delving into the septic system together but the second to last thing would be not knowing exactly what their time is worth.) 

She's honestly kind of overwhelmed by the number of people here? It makes it very hard to act like she's in the process of making friends with Julia and not desperately begging for table scraps. Hm. Maybe she should try to say something to some of these new people.

"What're you gonna write on the walls?" she asks Julian, when Lysander doesn't happen to need her to hold something at this second. Probably writing on walls is not a two-person job, but she can at least look useful and not look standing around.

There is a tile polished to perfection! Two, actually, they figured out how to split the acid work by splitting up gloves, which makes things go much faster.

Okay, maybe not Karen. Karen apparently is brave enough to act like she is a real person right to New York's face. He wishes her all the success in the world but thanks but no thanks. 

Julia's so delighted with how the completed tiles turned out. She digs some gold paint out of the art supplies for Julian."You should write it there, then," she says, pointing. "I think you're getting better at it with practice, you're going lots faster than when you started. The acid's probably figuring out what to do, too," she calls inside. "We're actually well ahead of schedule."

"A tapestry would be a huge investment in time and skill, even if you already have materials for it. I'm not saying no, but it would have to be negotiated separately. But--what aesthetic are you going for exactly, I'm getting a sort of mystical-futuristic vibe?"

"Buddhist spaceship!" calls Lissa, holding up a design sketch. "Maybe a star tapestry or something like that?"

"Hm...do you hate having a void floor?"

Hi, other Asian! "I don't know, like the five precepts? Just something generically Buddhist-y," he says in Mandarin. 

The cross-talk in Chinese is rude, even though they're being very quiet and Julia did just ask him to write on her wall in Chinese and so obviously has it. She glares, and then gets distracted by complaining about her void floor. "I hate it so much. I was utterly despairing of finding a good rug in here so I didn't have to walk across that grate all the time, and then I found her! She's stunningly beautiful and the whole decor is going to be inspired by her and the tapestry would want to be in the same style."

Oh hey a REAL Asian person. Well, maybe. She is focusing on Julian and totally misses the glaring. "That makes sense," she says, also in Mandarin, like she knows what the five precepts are. "Do you think you have enough space here, or is there some specific area we should be getting polished?"

If they're having two people work on the polish at a time she doesn't mind being the other one, Vernon is cool and it looks like this is more likely to be the sticking point in terms of time than the furniture is, at this point, given the number of people working on the furniture.

"Is there any area the rug won't cover? Besides the hatch."

Julian does notice the glaring and switches back to English. "How long do you think getting the wall ready is going to take? I need to go disassemble my furniture after this." 

Oh okay they're talking in English again, she can also talk in English. "Probably not that long for just the section you need?" She glances at Vernon. "I have goggles, if you can do it with one glove like that do you want me to take the other? I'm probably not as fast as you but I'm sure I can make it go faster."

(am halp - ?) 

Lysander points, silently, in response to Lucy's question - the desk-in-progress covers one wall, the bed another with the hatch covering the corner, and the rug is rounded, leaving one corner not quite accounted for. 

"How about this."

She kneels to the grate floor, and Atlach scuttles down her arm from her shoulder, from her pointed fingertips to the grating. 

It starts busily spinning a web in one of the grating-squares that won't be covered by rug, forming a pattern of a nine-petaled lotus suspended over the void. 

"Probably we should work out glove shifts," says Vernon politely. (Rebecca already has his other glove.) "And a couple of us could go to the bathroom for water for Julia?" Since she asked for it and no one has... done that... and the newbie minions are all sort of confused about how minioning works around here.

(Julian puts his head down and starts polishing. Grinding mana is good, vague goodwill of New Yorkers is good, if he doesn't think too much about the sheer indignity of it all he's going to be juuuuuust fine.) 

"I can go for that?" suggests Lissa. "I need to go there myself anyways."