Angie, the friendly face of the Montréal enclave, is keeping an eye out for interesting looking people to invite on a supply run.
Lily keeps watching the door, though the clink of glassware behind her makes her want to turn around.
"Do we have enough glassware for me to take a set?", she asks.
In the corner of her eye Lily spots a section of a very high shelf full up with small jars of different kinds of seeds and oil.
Tomonori is investigating these shelves in the back of the room. He finds...powder, although he can't tell if it's sandalwood, and he doesn't have an enchantment for identifying powders on his glasses. Maybe the school will give him one. He can worry about that later. For now he has alchemy supplies! Exciting. He collects the powder and jasmine attar and caraway seeds.
"I found some metals here, if anyone wants to look."
Not the ore he wanted, but that's okay. Tomonori puts some of it away that he doesn't recognize. He won't be able to carry much else anyway.
Alex comes to take a look, "Looks like... silver, copper," he takes a bit of each, after a careful look out for any signs of mimics, "And uh, something silvery but not silver? Tin?"
"Might be," he grabs some of it, brings it back to Angie to look over, and then moves to relieve Lily on guard duty.
Angie tests it for a few seconds - it's a little cube, she scratches at it and peers at it and rolls it between her fingers, and then nods, "Aluminum," she agrees.
...very funny, Sir Spell the Marvelous.
That's okay. He couldn't carry much more anyway.
Tomonori will offer to help everyone else with whatever they need now that he's got everything he wanted.
Lily smiles at Alex and thanks him, then takes a small magnet out of her pack and touches the silvery metal with it. It doesn't stick.
"Aluminum," she agrees. "Tin's magnetic." She takes some of the silver and copper cubes, as well as a set of glassware which she carefully puts in the top of her bag, padded carefully with the paper she fetched earlier. That fills most of her space - but the empty beaker can still hold something, so she points out the high shelf she's too short to reach. "More seeds and oils up there."
Once Nia's all packed up she does stretches again to donate mana for another casting of Sir Spell.
Lily stuffs her beaker with small vials of mustard seed and mineral oil and citronelle oil and eucalyptus oil and ginger oil, then zips her pack closed and allows herself a small smile.
Of course, after that it's back down to the floor for more situps.
For cheap mana, Tomonori uses meditation.
It's so hard to sit still and focus your whole mind on just his senses and not thinking at all, which is what makes it good for mana-building.
After dutifully mal-checking the nooks and crannies, Alexius beelines for a tiny cupboard in the back and cackles over a dusty steel bottle filled with mercury. And there's silver, and he spotted some fluorite and even carnelian on the shelves, and there's enough glassware and metal left over for a bootleg brewery in his room. He's over the moon.
"Zed, you are the greatest. There will be eidetic memory potions at breakfast, I'm gonna move up my timetable with this haul." Hint hint, weirdly altruistic spell.
Zed is just gonna not make eye contact with anyone and press themselves against Angie's back. All this lustre making them very uncomfortable.
Poor Zed. Even if they certainly deserve the praise.
"They'll take you up on that tomorrow morning, then," Angie tells Alexius.
Alexius nods, still grinning at his fortune mutually beneficial arrangement. "Shop last?" He doesn't have anything specific in mind but some basic tools would be neat.
"Yep," last thing, best thing for her, most dangerous for them all. At least she has a lot of space left in her bag, actually, courtesy of carrying most of Alexei's stuff through induction. "Pass the mana in, make your lists, and we'll be on our way." She accepts Lily's mana as she says this.
Nia does squats - they're efficient enough when she's got a heavy backpack on - and passes over her results.