"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.

When Dasha's too tired to continue she pulls her skeins of silk thread out of her pack. "Color doesn't matter for this one, pick your favorite," she says, gesturing at the skeins.

It has literally never occurred to Annie to have a favorite color. "Uh, the white?"

"This one's going to be Russian," she says as she unspools it, measuring lengths against her wingspan.

She'll plug her ears and hum when it looks time for the chanting part.

The chanting part is most of it, this time. She cuts herself eight lengths, ties them all to the back of her chair, and then starts braiding them together, repeating the spell as she braids.

Magic is so cool and Annie wishes it was safer to listen and imitate and learn and understand. It's at least safe to watch.

It gets very repetitive after a while, but eventually she cuts it off from the chair and gestures that she's done. "There'll be another spell in your room, but that one's just to make sure it knows where the borders of your room are."

"Thank you" is too much like it was a favor, when actually Annie's paying quite a lot for it. "It's lovely," she says instead.

"Thank you!" And after they check over Annisa's room - "It's probably best if I hang it off the shelves, but if you do get them magicked better that might mess with it. Let me know if that happens, I can redo this part for you if they interfere."

"Thanks. Maybe I'll just leave them for first semester, bother the guy with the wood affinity around midterms when he's less in demand and my wood's more exciting."

"I'd be kind of nervous leaving it lying around."