"Hey! Come in." Her room is still completely bare aside from a colorful cord along the perimeter, her full pack leaning against the bed, a stack of paper and a pen on the desk along with a small icon face-up.

Ghassan eyes the cord approvingly, the icon curiously.

"Should we get right down to business?"

"So a basic trip-ward is very cheap for me if I have something to anchor it to, paint or thread or any kind of boundary line. I don't really know how you'd work the poison into it sensibly, though. First thing I'd try is mixing it with paint and then altering the incantation, but I'm worried if we mess that one up it might poison a person and not a mal." She's pulling her materials out of her pack as she talks, paintbrushes and little jars of powder and skeins of thread.

"Could we try with something safer first? What if you anchored it to another liquid? Saline solution?"

"I've never done that before. I have no idea how it'd even go wrong, usually the anchors need to be more permanent than that."

"I'd rather make a mistake with saline than with poison, if we have mal-killing backup options. What about a solid container of poison? Could you set it up to take the vial as the anchor?"

Ghassan takes out the two samples that he brought: one, which is confirmed to paralyze some mals, and the other, which is potentially fatal to them (though still untested).

"So if I want to anchor a trip ward by far the easiest thing to anchor it to is something that marks the line you want the ward to cover. I could make something that goes off if the vial is touched, that would be easy, but then you have the problem of getting your mal to touch the vial."

"Right."

Ghassan goes to examine the cord while he thinks.

"A poison that's harmless to us but can stop them, you could do it. If the poison could form a line for the ward without risking the people inside it, that would do it. What else?"

"Embedding the poison vial into the anchor might work, but I'm not sure how I'd get it to deploy the poison properly."

"Something besides a vial- you use darts, right? Do you think you could rig something up with that? A tripwire that throws a poison dart- hard to get the targeting right, and sinking more mana into this defeats the point. A poison that doesn't hurt humans, or a line of poison and a poison defense on anyone inside the ward. Neither of which we have yet. Any bright ideas before I work on making that happen?"

"'Throws' is nontrivial, I don't know how to do that off the top of my head, I'd have to ask the void for spells. Line of poison is interesting but I also don't know how to do a poison defense - oh, hmm, my hallmate Shannon has a healing affinity. I don't know her well yet but I could ask if it turns out we get along. Or maybe there are mundane ways to do that? Or at least mundane ways to make it way easier for the ward. This is almost certainly pointless but I want to ask the nurse if she knows anything about that, she should still be alive."

"It's worth trying. They say you should always list one hundred ideas- the first thirty will be the obvious things anyone could think of, and the last twenty will be the real treasures. I'll talk to the nurse, you talk to Shannon. We'll circle back tomorrow after dinner. Sound good?"

"I don't know if I'll have a good opening to talk to her about this that soon, we've barely met. I'll let you know when we've talked about it."

"You won't know if you get along until you try. But alright. We can focus on working the technical angle first. I'll work on my poisons, and ask the nurse about mundane solutions to poison, and you let me know if you make any breakthroughs with weird anchors."