Valiant drops off all his lab supplies in his desk drawers, belatedly realizes having desk drawers might be a questionable life choice, chooses to instead have lidless boxes on the floor to store stuff in, and then makes another supply run as quickly as he can with people who will not be named in this continuity.

He comes back with... maybe enough stuff to put together another outfit. But to make it look nice, and not incredibly amateurish or even desperate, would be the work of... well, more time than he has.

So he addresses the void, speaking barely louder than a whisper. "I'm told you have resources, and might mean well, and you seem like you might know more than I do but you might also not, I don't know. I think what I need are some spells that will give me new clothes, or make me seem really put-together, or maybe just do my laundry for me, but then I also need something really impressive that I can use to trade Shannon for her magic stuff - but I don't know much about spells, and if you do know better, you should just give me the spells that'll be better at achieving my goals than any other spells. Please."

He's already seen this work for the nurse but it's still startling when this results in a spellbook. Or... more of a spell magazine. A thick magazine like you'd find at a grocery store checkout stand - do wizards have grocery stores, with checkout stands? Do they ring up their magic stuff at checkout lane nine-and-three-quarters that you can only find if you believe in it? Valiant has no idea. At any rate, it's - not even paperback, the cover's not even that stiff, and the front cover is bent crisply in two places so it zig-zags. It doesn't open with a spell; it opens with a couple paragraphs of introduction, and then an upbeat page and a half of chipper parenting advice and encouragement.

The spells are quick and not in a language he needs to puzzle over. With as little time as he has, that matters a lot. He learns one that makes him smell less like he's been running around sweaty and unwashed for days, and gets part of the way through learning one that stirs soup or beverages, before taking a break to build mana to actually cast any of these. They're not bad - they're cheaper than his shield, which he has only just today realized is magic at all and not just another thing no one will talk about - actually, are there any things people don't talk about that they know are true, or are mundanes just unaware of almost everything?

That's really not the point. The point is, he doesn't need that much mana, but he needs some. You get it by doing shit that sucks, Jian said. So he leans in close to the void, caresses its yielding boundary, and confesses his deadname.

It works, sort of. He gets some mana for it. It seems like a bad mana to misery ratio, though, and he's pretty sure (now that he knows what mana is and how it feels to have it) that he's gotten it from less terrible things before. He's gotten it from running, but only once he's already tired and panting and wants to stop. He got some from just standing around, and from going through the dinner line, last night, once he'd been up for nearly an entire day and just staying vertical took effort. He's gotten mana from doing homework before, he thinks. He tries push-ups, and that also works. He casts his new spell.

He would love to spend the rest of the time before dinner taking notes, but he still has no paper. He sets a few more facts to rhyme and hopes he'll have some room left in his brain for Latin later.