"Cut them open, take out the seeds, and sell the slices to the seniors in case the orchard doesn't work," Lucy suggests. 

Yeah, that's fair. "Cut 'em tomorrow at breakfast, though, not right now, they'll go off fast once they're cut."

This plan seems…dubious. Even for Ms. Buddhist Spaceship.

“…where would you even put that?”

"Cafeteria! It's the only place with sunlamps."

That’s actually not the worst idea.

“Good luck with the farming operation, I guess.”

"Thank you! Tell all your friends about it, that'll help it work."

Lissa smiles a little. And hey, she even has a knife to cut them with!

"Does anyone have dirt? Or anything else to grow plants in?" You can grow some plants in rock, can't you? She doesn't know if that works for apple trees.

She does not have dirt and is definitely not going to be the best person to take point on this project.

Eventually the walls are fully polished. She hasn't seen a clock, so she doesn't know whether they're ahead or behind schedule, but that's what she's been waiting for to attempt to peel off Vernon.

"Excuse me," she says to Vernon, "Julia promised me her extra furniture, do you think you could help me carry the old bookshelf back to my room? I want to make a barricade. It's not far, and there are no stairs."

She is trying very hard to do the subtext thing. The subtext thing is that she is not as bad at advocating for herself as she may have at first appeared. Hopefully this distracts him from the fact that she doesn't have anything to pay him with, but it's going to take, like, five minutes? Probably? Hopefully?

Vernon has been scrubbing walls for what must have been a couple hours, and he is tired. Teenage boy he might be, he's more of the scrawny and wiry variety than one of the more bulky examples. The idea of carrying a bookshelf anywhere after all of this scrubbing and carrying sounds... unpleasant. Mostly he just wants to go back to his room, remove the drawers from his desk, and then go to bed.

But something about Karen's logic bugs him anyway.

"Uh," he says, blinking and rubbing the sweat off of his forehead. His shaved head feels weird and light and yet surprisingly sticky after the exertion, he doesn't like it. "... Do you not know any wards? Those would do better than a barricade."

The mals of Scholomance generally aren't the type to break down doors. They slide in through the air vents or the drains or the cracks under the doors, and a barricade isn't going to help at all with that.

"I know exactly one ward, and I think all it does is warn me. So I guess if anything does come I want to slow it down so I can - grab something to hit it with?" Apparently this is not a good plan. Okay. Well. Vernon is being very helpful by telling her. "Should I be doing something else? I don't know a lot of something else's, but I'd like to at least live long enough to get to the first class about it."

"Put the ward up, sleep with something heavy or sharp near you, and if it wakes you, kill whatever it is. Most mals are little and sneaky, especially on the first night. A warning is better than a false sense of security," he advises, and then gets some of the chilled water to drink. "And no, sorry. Good luck with your bookshelf, but I've still got to take my desk apart and ward my own room."

Also? He's tired. Which is a risk and he doesn't want to tire himself out more.

"Legit," she says lightly, carefully keeping the disappointment out of her voice. "See you tomorrow!"

....well, in that case she'd better get to work on dragging this bookshelf down the hall. Not like anyone else is gonna be any less tired (...well, maybe they will be, but she doesn't really know the people who just showed up), and she still thinks that having a barricade is better than not having a barricade, if running out into the hall is absolutely not an option. She thinks she's perfectly capable of having a barricade and a ward up and also being terrified enough not to have any kind of sense of security at all, on account of this entire place is terrifying and the idea of it almost being monster hour is extra terrifying on top of that.

"Can I come back for the desk tomorrow?" she asks Julia.

"I dunno if it'll keep in the hallway. I guess we could store it in my room in the corner for now even though it'll wreck the decor.. you're, like, right down the hall, right, probably if we all carry it it'll take like two minutes, Come on," she adds in a chipper voice to Eliza and Justinian and Lissa and Z and Lucy, "everyone grab a corner, it's character building." And to Karen, "you never want to have one person doing a thing for you, they won't have made an encouraging amount of progress by the time they start getting tired. If you have enough people you have momentum."

"Oh. Okay, thanks!" she says, trying to sound like - this is really good advice that she's never thought of? Mostly she kind of just assumed that nobody else would want to help her and she couldn't lift the thing entirely by herself. But - man, maybe it is good advice even if you don't actually want to avoid doing any work yourself, the principle of the thing should still work, right? "And yeah, it's just down the hall."

She's definitely gonna at least help carry the things, and take on as much of their weight as possible; she's trying to go really hard on coming off as strong and sensible and able to land on her feet even though she's in a totally bizarre video game scenario, that seems like probably the only way to get anyone around here to take her seriously for long enough to catch halfway up.

Lissa jumps up to tuck her stuff away, pausing with the design sketches. "Oh, I can help with that. Do you want to keep these?" she adds, holding them out for Julia. Once the question of that is settled she'll grab one of the longer edges, hopefully with someone else on the same edge.

He’ll grab an edge, too.

(He keeps glancing aside at Karen, clearly conflicted about something.)

- oh hey does that kid have an opinion on something about her, that seems... positive? Because people have to notice you to want to be friends with you, right?

Maybe she can attempt to ask him what it is via faces and telepathy and vibes after they set down the furniture inside her room?

…yeah, he has no willpower for this.

He glances at the other inhabitants of the room, though, before he speaks, and clearly doesn’t quite say what he wants to.

“—do you have some paper and a pen?”

"... uh, I have a little pocket notebook? And a bunch of pens."

Is this a request for paper? She doesn't have a lot of paper to give out. Is it checking that she has paper so she can do her assignments? Oh shit wait is it a request to write something down that he doesn't want to say aloud in front of everyone?

Uh. She fishes the notebook out of her backpack again in case that's helpful. It is indeed pretty small and pretty thin.

He leans over it, scribbling furiously for a minute, and then shoves it back at her.

...oh wow.

That's - that's very thoughtful. She stares at it for a while until she thinks she understands what you're supposed to do.

"Thank you. Um. I'm Karen. You're - ?"

“Z. Don’t mention it.”

He does an awkward little wave.

"Okay. Thanks, Z. I'll see you around, hopefully."

And she will thank all of the kids who helped move her stuff, and thank Julia for the furniture again, and then she will get to work setting up her own room.

"Great job everybody!" Julia says gleefully. "I'll let you know next time we need to build something. Stay safe!"