"All right, then, I think you should go for it, and if it sucks, better to find that out now, yeah?"

“- Yeah, that makes sense.” Shavri offers Annisa her best grateful smile. It’s reasonably convincing, even. “Thank you so much for the advice. I…guess I owe you a bit of a favor, for that?”

Talking is free, Annisa does not say. She's even been woodworking the whole time. What can she get away with instead - "so, if anything happens to me, I'm obviously willing to pay for healing, but let's say that I'd consider it a favor back if you heal me first and then talk payment once I'm on my feet" and in a wildly better bargaining position. "Just so I'm not fretting about staying conscious enough to remember what's in the chest."

That's a very big favor, much bigger than talking about boys, but she's trying to make it sound like a small one. Just about timing, after all.

Shannon is in fact able to notice that this is a much bigger favour than what Annisa gave her, but - well, having a friend is an even bigger deal, right? Especially a friend with a nearby room, who she can go to the bathroom with. 

"- Uh, deal, although it'll depend how much mana I have - right now the only potions I have aren't very powerful for healing." 

"Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully I can avoid getting grievously injured in the next couple months and then we can work something out once you've got more potions. Once you have a given thing I'm happy to tell you up front what I could give you for it."

"Sounds good!" Shannon smiles brightly at her. "Uh, I'd better start getting ready for bed, but - I'm really glad I met you, and, uh, if you wanted to do a bathroom run at some point, I'd be happy trading off watching each other's backs to shower?" 

"Yeah, absolutely! Tomorrow morning we've got homeroom first thing in the morning but day after it might be worth risking the showers."

"Sounds good! Uh, goodnight, I guess." And Shavri smiles at her again and then heads for her room. 

Okay time to beg Daria for that ward so she's not conspicuously way less defended than her neighbors, who are lovely people who she needs to remember would also be delighted to have twice as big a room.

Daria's doing pushups, counting in Ukrainian under her breath, but opens her door at the knock.

"Hey! I think I do want to take you up on the month and a half of mana for a ward, my other neighbor's buttoned up all cozy with senior enclave friends and I'd hate to be the tastiest thing on this hallway. Can I pay you incrementally and give you something for collateral and get the ward now?"

"If you have another dagger or something else better than this -" she gestures at the 4-centimetre blade of her multitool, lying on the bed - "and will let me use it until you pay me back, I'll take that as collateral."

She's only got the one - well, and her Swiss army knife - but you make them pretty early in the year in shop class, and a ward's probably going to do more than a knife for safety in the interim.  She hesitates, but only briefly. "You can use this one until I've paid you back."

- huh, she'd been sure Annisa would've negotiated down from there, she hadn't expected to get what is presumably her best knife. "Deal. If something happens to it I owe you all the mana back?"

"You sure do. And have you got a crystal or something that's about a month and a half to fill, so that we can call it even once it's full even if I'm incredibly hardworking and fill if faster? Otherwise I'll be unrewarded for all my extra work and it's a great time of the year for extra work."

She pulls out a necklace of amber beads from her pack. "Should be about thirty of the smaller beads plus the centerpeice."

This is gonna suck. It'll help with not getting eaten, though, so there's that. And Annisa doesn't have a mana-heavy graduation plan. She's going to build stuff for people who can use it to get them out. "All right, deal."

"I need to finish mana-building, but that shouldn't take long."

"Guess I'll help you out." And she picks up the woodcarving she's been working at - it's going to come out kind of ugly, wood doesn't especially like her - and focuses on filling Daria's beads. 

Oh, good, she was not looking forward to trying to trying to build it all herself in a reasonable timeframe. "What are you making?" she asks in between sets.

"Bookend to keep my books from sliding off my new shelf, which is not level. Carpentry isn't among my strong suits."

She gestures at her shelves. "Not my area of expertise either. Maybe that kid you know with a wood affinity could fix it for you in exchange for the leftover wood?"

"Yeah, I'll probably let him at it tomorrow if he's not all booked up with people on his hall." Cut cut cut. "You should hang out with Shannon tomorrow, by the way, she's got a healing affinity. Most useful set of neighbors in the Scholomance."

"A healing affinity! That's handy in a neighbor," and then she's too out of breath to talk again.

Annisa should probably do more physical exercise. She hates it - building things with her hands is much more fun - but that's why it's so good for mana building, and she has to fill that entire necklace before she can be building mana for herself. She doesn't want to look like she just mindlessly copies whatever Daria's doing, though, so she keeps working on her bookend until it's all done, and then sits with her back to the wall and no chair, legs trembling, which gets you fantastic mana generation in the last minute before your legs collapse of it.