It looks from the fresh sawdust and the fact that someone's left the angle grinder running like there were upperclassmen in here this morning while the freshmen were studying mals. Ennis performs due diligence anyway, especially of the angle grinder, because if that wasn't carelessness it was appliance possession, but it seems fine.

"Good morning."

She waves with the hand with the power sharer on it. "Morning. Liath. Santa Barbara."

Introduction to Shop
Classwork for Day 1

- Study this map of the shop section to which you are assigned and learn the names of all the tools.
- Take a pair of work gloves from shelf 4.
- Find the following components in the stockrooms according to which category they belong to...
- Collect the following tools: pliers type 4, hammer type 1, clamp type 1.
- You will be making: this basic utility and combat knife. You have 3 weeks to complete this assignment. Put all of your materials and tools into one of the unlabeled lockers at station 8, label it with your name, and leave it there to resume on your own time or next week.

METHOD:

Ugh. Artificing. And a last minute reshuffled artificing, to boot. It's not that Alexius has anything against Welsh Mythology, per se. It sounds quite interesting really. It is not particularly likely to keep him alive as opposed to, say, learning Welsh.

Thankfully he's got the mana to keep up his stimulant spell, or last night's brewing marathon would be catching up to him right about now, and he really does not need that, with his affinity actively fighting him while he tries to make a crappy knife to appease the Scholomance. It's not going to be hard, per se, but it is definitely going to be annoying and time-consuming. Maybe once the difficulty ramps up he can trade with an actual artificer for mutual homework completion. 

"G'morning. Alexius Marcus, Jacksonville." 

Maybe he can coax his affinity into helping if he plans to stab himself? Seems legit. (It isn't, actually). 

"Pleased to meet you."

Oh look, a dick-measuring contest but with place names! She does not have her own place name to enter with. It is so sad.

Santa Barbara is either Florida or California. Maaaanchester, that sounds like it is in... Chicago. Jacksonville sounds like a dinky little Arizona town, but he probably wouldn't say it if it was? Unless he were really stupid? He doesn't look stupid, he's very sharply dressed.

"I got knives. Anastasia, and I volunteer my fingers for the five percent chance of getting bitten off," she says, stepping up to take point in front of the cupboards — waiting for people to crowd around so the risk is just a tiny bit more distributed.

Stasia— realizes a second late she doesn't know why she's sucking up. She's already admitted to herself she's chanceless, so she was planning to be as crass and unpleasant as possible without getting literally decked in the face. Except now she's orderly and eager and smiling. Apparently her reflexive social mask will just dip her into playing whatever role people are perceiving her as, uninterested in slowing down enough to ask for confirmation.

Wow, she's stupid.

"The rest of our fingers will thank you, Anastasia." Indie kid, volunteering for job the enclavers don't want, check. It's not in his interest to offer anything but goodwill in exchange. He does anyway. "You got any comparative advantage in the malbait department? If not, I can trade some spells that might help. Shielding, toughness, reflexes, self-healing, that sort of thing. At least a couple are really quick to learn and cast." If she plans to make a habit of opening cupboards for enclavers, she's gonna need at least one. 

Liath smiles politely at Stasia and queues up behind her in the crowd.

She hesitates. Her blind spot doesn't really work for this. It protects her okay, but then someone else is just going to lose fingers and she'll get blamed for it.

She's also — not sure if she can learn a non-affinity spell in five minutes, no matter how trivial they are for enclavers. If she asks for it and then needs half an hour she is going to look so incredibly dumb and useless. But she can't be a coward all the time.

"Sure! What do you want for the fastest to learn? Don't wanna hold up the class."

"Got a skin-toughening spell that costs a chunk of mana but is only two words in Latin. Handy if you get jumped. I can give it to you now while people are filtering in and we can figure out the swap after class? I'll take a similar value personal spell or an hour's worth of mana, or something roughly equivalent, and later today or tomorrow is fine." This in a low voice - he's holding out the option of upcharging enclavers, who typically have more to trade. 

"Yeah okay. Hit me."

He writes down cutis crocodili and a couple notes on mindset and pronunciation on a bit of paper and hands it over. 

She mutters pronunciations under her breath for the better part of ten minutes. Slight variations, lifting and lowering pitch. The mindset is a really hard one for her. Strength and assuredness and indomitability comes contrary. She wishes she had music to listen to to help with the mood, but there's just the slight hum of a heater somewhere. The chant stops sounding like words — she bullies it into being words again and keeps going.

Eventually, one of the castings takes a grip on her mana and runs away with it aaaannd she thinks that worked?? There's no other sensation, just a modest diminishment of her modest stores. She's going to be so disappointed if she was shoving her mana at it so hard that the path of least resistance was eating it and giving nothing back. Her skin feels like it's prickling all over but that could totally be placebo.

She pokes a pencil into the back of her hand.

She barely even feels it, and it leaves no mark afterwards. "It lasts about ten minutes, which is long enough to get some good scrounging done," Alexius offers. He's been poking about in some of the less shadowy cupboards in the meantime. 

'Kay cool. When there are some people standing behind her, she starts tugging cupboards open and giving all their contents a sharp bop with her pencil.

Do any of these cupboards have Things to Which She Is Edible.

Liath watches with a slight smile on her face and conjures a fireball above her palm just in case.

They lose some mana and time — it's five minutes into the class proper now and no one's done anything yet — but every single finger is retained.

They now have materials. Stasia takes her assignment-mandated share and tries to follow the assignment-mandated method.

Ennis assembles Baby's First Knife, with the make-and-mend that is at least legitimately useful and taught as part of the assignment. There's some freedom to vary color and shape and ornament but nothing you get to in the first week; an hour and a half isn't that much, especially since it allows time to build mana for the make-and-mend.

Alexius struggles more than most. He may actually not finish the assembly today, what with how long the @#$%@^@#$ make-and-mend takes him. 

Liath throws together her knife fairly quickly once she has materials. She's been training for this for years, after all. 

Towards the end of the class, she walks up to Stasia. 

"Hey, what's your name?"

Stasia is sitting with her head on her desk, looking at a barely touched but diligently stacked set of steel bars. She's toying over the idea that doing a knife on their first day is because knives are good homework to kill people, weed out a couple of losers.

Someone's standing by her desk, talking to someone over her head.

She touches Stasia's shoulder. "Hey."

She looks up. It's the enclaver girl who did the little fire from — Massachusetts maybe? She looks more like a movie lead than an actual person who could walk up and talk to you.

Why is she being singled out, who did she offend, and how badly is she going to be hurt for it.

"Hi??"

"Brave of you to check the cabinets like that. Liath. Santa Barbara." She is in fact wearing a power sharer. "I wondered if you'd be interested in taking my maintenance shift?"

Oh hey, she was planning on going around collecting those!

Maybe people will just realize that she's not a real student like the rest of them and they can all give her their manual labor and she can play in the guts of the school until it decides to nibble her up. That would be so convenient and require no action from her.

"Sure."

It occurs to her that she might ask for something in return a moment after the word leaves her mouth.