That's very helpful!

And when it is his prescribed bedtime, she keys her lullaby to the chords she can play, and sings, with "Vanya" swapped in for "Judy" and the rhymes adjusted to fit.

Vanya takes longer to fall asleep than her baby sister, and even once he's asleep he looks kind of tense and kind of miserable, curled up in a ball with his blanket. 

She lullabies him a third time in case that helps, and zips Gloria into its case and waits to be picked up.

It maybe helps? His breathing slows and his expression looks less like he's in pain. 

Larisa arrives shortly to walk her back to her room. She casts some sort of clearly-very-powerful spell that involves chanting in Latin and definitely contains the Latin words for 'watch over'. 

"How was it?" she asks, in a low voice, once the door is shut behind them. 

"He cried one time when I sang a song that made him sad? Otherwise it was great, and the lullaby worked but I think it took all the mana I got hurting my fingers on the guitar."

"- Oh, I'll spot you mana for the amount it took." Rebecca being a freshman, this will barely cost Larisa anything. "And...yeah. A lot of things upset him. It's not - personal, or about you." 

Rebecca nods. "I'm in room 303B."

Then Larisa will make sure she reaches her room safely! She's quiet on the walk, clearly preoccupied.

(Mostly she is mentally planning out her strategy for night shift duty. Last year was brutal, but she's stronger now, and she invested even more in warding Vanya's room. Her affinity leans toward defense, not offense, which is inconvenient when she gets jumped in the hallway but actually makes nighttime babysitting a lot less exhausting. Most of the mals that crawl or ooze or skitter or float up to Vanya's door are going to be turned away well before she has to take any actions about it. And she has the new, better spell for layered tripwire wards, which means she can afford to be paying less than 100% full attention to what's outside the door, trusting her systems and preparations to alert her. She might actually get some studying done, this time, though she's not holding her breath for it.) 

"What does mana storage look like when it's not a powersharer? I've mostly been hanging out with New York and they just have sharers."

"They've got a mana sink too! It's just kept somewhere safe and out of the way, and all the power-sharers feed to and from it. ...For standalone mana storage, you can use a pretty wide range of things. Gems or crystals or semiprecious stones are common, but some people use wood or metal. I knew a girl once whose affinity was liquids and she used a vial of fancy scented oil. The important part is mostly your own magical investment in something - the more you put in to building it, the better it tends to hold mana." 

"But Landon is going to make some for me?"

"It doesn't have to be made by you - in enclaves, usually the adult wizard with the best affinity makes storage for all the kids, since we can't do anything nearly that good at fourteen, and then we just have to...sort of get to know it? There's a wizard in Wales who makes mana storage crystals that're famous practically worldwide for how well they hold mana. And Landon's not that good, but his affinity is especially useful for - well, making artifacts that can be as well-suited to a person as though they'd put in all the love and care themselves, even when he did most of the work."  

"Okay. What's he going to make it out of?"

"He works best in wood, but you should talk it through with him again, if there's a material you might have a closer affinity with." 

"Wood will be fine! Probably. Since I don't have a material affinity. Where should I find him and when?"

Ugh. Scheduling. 

"- Come find us in the library tomorrow? Sacramento has a room there." 

"Okay! Thank you! How do I take the mana for the lullaby -"

"Have you ever exchanged mana with someone before?" 

"Nope!"

"Okay! Um -" Larisa has never, actually, had to demonstrate how to exchange mana with someone who didn't know what this was like, before. "...I'll send you some and you tell me when -?" 

"Okay!"

Larisa reaches out to touch her hand, and then it feels - 

- a bit like how it felt when the guitar-strings were hurting her fingers and the mana was slowly but surely building inside her. Except it's much more, much faster, than that. 

And it has a different flavor - metaphorically speaking - it's not like it's an actual taste she's ever tasted before with her literal tongue.

It's still flowing into her. Very fast. 

"Whoa I think that's about the amount."

“Great.” Larisa stops. “Well, there you go.”