This is HER furniture next (and look, that bookshelf is the perfect shape to be used as a barricade, excellent), so she's going to volunteer to help handle it. She also wants to go in the group going to the bathroom, she hasn't done that yet and her internal clock is really confused about what time it is (it's, like, six AM in Missouri right now, right?) and she's not sure she's going to be able to sleep through the night, so going to the bathroom is probably a good thing to get out of the way.

If they're doing polishing first then she can help Vernon with polishing; she has splash goggles but no gloves, do they have a second set of gloves for this? Or she can help Lysander hold stuff while he's assembling the desk, if he looks like he might need help and can tell her how to help him. Really she's enormously willing to do whatever it takes to make sure she doesn't look useless, although she really is going to need gloves if they want two people handling acid.

Lysander has taken Karen's suggested Spaceship Control Panel aesthetic and turned it into a series of somewhat baffling instructions like "hold this in this exact spot, don't move" and "stand on that while I hit it with a hammer." He doesn't super care which of the stack of minions actually does these things, he just wants the art project to succeed (and maybe lay claim to the stray metal scraps at the end, if it is successful enough?) 

Vernon thinks that actually she can do installation of the wall desk and shelves while he gets started on polishing, which involves much less acid. Julia seems to want them attached directly to the wall? And this will take some assembly and measuring to get right. And he's got the gloves, goggles, and some of the spare clothes that looked the least salvagable, as rug and a makeshift mask. Since acid fumes are probably not the healthiest. Actually, anyone staying inside the room while he's polishing should probably have some kind of facemask on, this is basic alchemy safety.

Does he know how to polish a surface to a chrome finish with acid and a lot of nerve? Not really! Is he going to try anyway? Obviously! Careful scrubbing circular motions, let's get this to an almost-mirror finish!

Julia aids in this project by being utterly, unshakeably certain it'll work. That's an important component of interior decorating in the enclave, too, though not as intensely as in the Scholomance. She declares every few minutes that she can see some improvement already, that she thinks it's going to come out the exact right shine, she points this out to everyone else, she has them look at the sketches, she occasionally pushes a little mana into making the wall look just right, not as a permanent thing, just as a nudge to get it where it's going...

It takes a lot of scrubbing circular motions, and he is going to be sore tomorrow, but! The wall steadily becomes shinier. In small, small sections. He gets faster as he gets the hang of it, thankfully, but this will still take a while. And he hopes that someone is, uh, watching out for mals while he's doing this, because wow is he vulnerable.

Julian deposits Wen Ning in his room and is about to head back when he notices some sort of party going on next door. 

It'd be hard to miss! There's about a dozen of them, mostly in the hallway with the door open for ventilation, assembling some stuff out of metal. At the center is a blonde girl wearing a full face of makeup, in expensive ultralight enchanted clothing that's also tailored very fashionably, loose enough on her to leave room to grow without looking like that's the only thing the fit was optimized for. She is doing yoga on a Tibetan prayer rug and periodically yelling encouragement to the students working inside on polishing the walls.

Is he going to finish up this long, exhausting day of sucking up to enclavers by sucking up to more enclavers? Yes, yes he is. 

"Do you guys need any help?" 

Lissa' brought a few sketches, including one of a shelf with trapezoid-shaped ledges, though she'll defer to whoever was here first about exact aesthetics. She's also got a lot of ideas for light arrangements, mostly based on existing constellations.

She's quite happy to listen to Lysander and help hold things in place with her scrawny girl arms the best she can, as well.

New Asian kid!  Unless she met him previously, she's not great at telling Asians apart. "Oh, hi! Sure, we might, what can you do? Biggest thing that would be useful is ventilation, also useful would be lemonade, or seltzer, or design ideas if you've got those -" she gestures over at the people on the design team, an innocent-looking girl in street clothes with a sketchbook and a thin, striking kid with a lot of piercings. "We're going for a Buddhist spaceship aesthetic. Chrome and, you know, Buddhism."

"I'm Julian Chan. I guess I'm, uh, technically Buddhist? My family are like lazy Buddhists. We're from Hong Kong, so, certain level of ambient Buddhism. Maybe I could advise?" 

It looks like they could really use some protective gloves, and he has a pair in his pack, but he's waiting to offer until it's clearer he might get something out of this. 

(Thin, striking kid is great at holding things for hammering and venturing the occasional opinion on metal etching.

Hey, it’s — apparently — a living.

He’ll take over some polishing in shifts, too, if Vernon’ll let him. And pocket the occasional bit of scrap.)

"Great, perfect!! Do you have ideas on wall art, I don't have much on the wall art front now. I was thinking something that looked like a window on a space station, but something sort of Buddhist-themed on the other side - if there are meaningful constellations or if the Earth at a particular orientation is auspicious -"

(His other talent is not rolling his eyes.)

"In my experience Buddhist interior decorating mostly involves a lot of gold. Just like really vast amounts of gold. And portraits of Buddhas and lotus flowers and things? I'm okay at calligraphy, I could paint some precepts or something." 

"Sure, that'd be great! I just want my rug to feel at home." She kisses it. 

"Great! Happy to help." Okay is definitely stretching Julian's calligraphy skills but he can sure write in traditional Chinese and this girl won't know the difference. "I don't think I got your name? Or your enclave?" 

"Julia. New York."

Oh okay that explains everything. 

"Cool! I haven't decided between creative writing and artificing yet." 

A pale girl in undyed silk approaches from the other end of the hall, accompanied by her matchingly-dressed brother, just in time to see this kiss. They pause for a fraction of a second before proceeding. 

"Hi, uh, we were told somebody" from New York "wanted to buy slippers?" the girl says as soon as this wouldn't constitute interrupting. 

"I could probably do a portrait of Buddha if you don't mind it being sketchbook-sized?" pipes up Lissa after Julian and Julia finish up their part of the conversation.

Julia's life is amazing. "Yes please!" she says to the portrait of Buddha. "I DO want slippers," she says to the slipper sellers. "Silk, just like Rebecca's. What are you offering them for?"

She holds up the slippers. "Silk is what we have! These are all we've got until the spiders start producing in earnest, we don't have a particular advantage at acquiring non-silk fibers. If you wanted them dyed you'd need to get us dye and wait a little while, but they're perfectly comfy as-is. What do you have to trade?"

Gosh look at all these people helping with the project! It is technically not his project, really, but he is so pleased anyway.

You there, put your hand right there so we can make sure this line is straight - oh, this one is surprisingly good at standing perfectly still, good job, Z, you get a sympathetic shoulder nudge that says yep, Totally Not Rolling Our Eyes, Amirite, - oh, design ideas!! Lysander loves design ideas, he is the implementation guy, he will totally inhale Lissa's design ideas to make Karen's vague trapezoids concept cooler - hammer hammer, "you're doing such a good job, you're my favorite, I love you," he murmurs to his tool as it punches perfect neat nail-holes. 

This'll be worth it just for the mana and the time spent doing Real Work (TM) with the weapon he's hoping to keep functional for four years. Vernon and Karen both have preexisting claims on other benefits from this several hours of work, so he's letting Z and Lissa get most of the scraps. 

"Hi Lucy!" calls Rebecca, from where she is polishing the walls and refining her sense of how much mana she has.

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."

"Oh, has no one done that? We should definitely do that. - I will do that. With you."

Not by herself, though, that sounds like the sort of thing that gets you killed in a (movie? game?) place like this, and also not with only one person who knows how magic works. She heads back into the hallway. "I think nobody's gotten water yet? Anyone else wanna head with us to the bathroom to fill up the water storage?"

Nope, busy doing CRAFTING, the best thing in the universe. 

... hey fellow minions, would anyone perhaps feel inclined to carry along and refill this vaguely container-shaped bit of totally useless scrap metal that will otherwise serve no function for Julia, if they're going to the bathrooms anyway?

Well yeah, Lysander's obviously busy. And is also a boy. Who is not a boy and also not the girl who has been going around in pajamas, which Karen is not judging her for but which does suggest kind of limited magical competence. Not that she's anyone to talk. Also she feels kind of bad about totally missing that Rebecca had the other glove and was polishing stuff earlier.

Anyway.

"Do you want to come to the bathroom with us?" she asks Lucy, because Lucy is a girl and seems pretty magical.

"Sure, I've been too busy to go on a bathroom run yet." There, that ought to strike the right balance of 'this does not lump me in with the minions' without being very condescending to the minions. 

Cool! That's probably enough people then. She will go to the bathroom with Lissa and Lucy and she will pee and she will fill up containers with water.

Julia, when they get back, will spend some mana chilling the water like it came from a normal fridge instead of from the horrible Scholomance, and encourage her hardworking polishers to take a break. "I'm thinking my first priority for spellwriting is going to be something to make it taste like lemonade or soda, since apparently no one brought those and it's hard to stay hydrated if you've only got water that doesn't taste good."

"Ah, creative writing? I'm languages, I'll let you know if I find such a spell." 

"Why would you do that with a spell and not a potion?"

"I don't really want to spend more time in the alch lab than I have to, it has more ways to try to kill you than the library does. And a potion actually changes the water, whereas I just want to change the taste of the water."

"There's probably a way to do something like your spices that'd do it, but I'm not an alchemist either."

If the polishers are taking a break now she's super willing to sub in for them! Although she wants to follow this conversation too.

"How does the alch lab try to kill people, in particular?"

"It's lower in the school - mals mostly come up from the graduation gate, so the lower levels are more dangerous - and if your neighbor fucks up enough that something explodes or animates or eats them, you're in the blast radius. Mostly you should go incantations track unless your affinity drags you alch or artificing, the coursework's safer and it's easier to hire people to do it for you."

"Good to know."

Like, she's totally not going to pay anyone to do her homework, how is she going to learn how to stay alive if she pays someone to do her homework, and also she doesn't feel like she's gonna be able to pay anyone, but still, good to know about the safety thing. 

She can't think of another obvious question, so she's just gonna really throw herself into polishing this wall while it's her turn.

And he can start painting. It's really more "decent handwriting" than "calligraphy" but it's gold and Buddhist and that's probably enough to placate the rug. 

The overall aesthetic really is going to be quite nice, even though they had to make several artistic compromises due to being stuck in the Scholomance. The desk is looking great, Lysander can clearly build stuff, the design sketches are nice and detailed, the walls do polish to a glorious gleaming chrome, there's going to be enough leftover metal for shelving, and she's got several Buddhist touches already! She strokes the rug. "See? All these people are working so hard on a lovely home for you. And we'll just make it better and better over the next four years, and then give all the good stuff to Teddy, if he appreciates you properly, or someone else, if he doesn't."

Z will take a break from grinding mana and get a drink while the getting’s good.

“…anything you’re looking for other than, uh, lemonade?”

"Someone to do my history homework! ...honestly, I want to also spruce up the hallways and cafeteria, but probably we haven't got time for that, soon we're going to be all stressed and have tons of homework... and then we've got a teapot that would be on our side if only we can arrange tea for it, so there's that."

"I have located some people who definitely have tea to trade but I didn't want to make any promises on your behalf without your approval."

"Oh perfect, Eliza, you're lovely. Who has tea, I guess maybe I should go with you to negotiate with them?"

"Yes--one of them is a girl named Iris, the other is a boy named Kevin, I can show you what they look like when we get there."

Lissa also gets a drink while she considers the problem of lemonade. "Yeah, it'd be healthier just to change the taste, wouldn't it?" she agrees with Julia.

"Well, it'll mean less calories! And normally that's healthier but here we're all apparently at risk of coming out looking like anorexic Holocaust survivors so I'd actually take the extra calories, if there were a safe way to make 'em, which there isn't."

...huh, good to know that. She makes a mental note to try and choke down more food at breakfast. "Well, it's not lemonade, but I did bring some apples. If anyone had something to squeeze them I guess we could make a little bit of apple juice?"

"That - sounds like it might just be better to eat the apples, if you're better off getting all of the calories you can out of them?" Not that people can't do what they want, but, uh.

"What you should do is take them to the cafeteria in the morning and trade them to a senior who hasn't tasted real fruit in three years, it'd be mean of us to take the apples off you when we have barely even started missing apples. ...no, never mind, what you should do is eat them, and take the seeds, and find someone with a plants affinity - which will take some doing, I bet they're not advertising it - and then we can see if we can get an orchard going after all, and then we can trade everyone apples."

"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!"

Time to go ward his own room, then. And take apart his own furniture.

And be aware that his own situation could, in fact, be way worse.