"I can make it for other people. It'll take me a while to get everything set up on the inside- for now, I'm just going to make enough for myself. Can't really afford more until I know what my Intro to Lab is like."

And there's some kind of serial killer on the loose- he really doesn't want to find out that he guessed wrong about this girl being with New York- could be Boston, or Atlanta, or Sacramento, or any of the other enclaves that would hate to be lumped in together even though they're all the same to people on the other coasts.

"Yeah, fair, if I had a potion to be the strongest coolest boy around I wouldn't necessarily go around sharing it. If you want to walk with us, heavy lifting powers are going to be super useful what with how we're paying for this shop class in having to lug tons of stuff up for the upperclassmen."

She opens the next cabinet. It contains - several hundred pounds of driftwood, and also a single carved emerald, and also a 10' by 2" raw copper roll - "oh good, I think we need this for the assignment -" and jars of sawdust. 

....she takes the emerald? It's a pretty emerald.

"Okay, maybe just one more to see if we get lucky? And then - I should really figure out how to start working on the knife, if it's gonna be graded. Although I guess I also don't know if we have everything we need to make the knife, yet."

(Wendy is following along behind the cabinet crawl and grabbing some interesting looking things that the others don't take, and not talking to the gang enclavers. Like the weird lumps of metal. Seems like a good idea to have weird lumps of metal, if she has a metal affinity? She can figure out what they are later.)

"We don't have bronze yet," Julia says. "We can make it from copper and tin but that just puts us in the situation of not having tin."

          "I have tin," Silas says. "It was on the storage racks over there. You can have some, you only need about a seventh part tin for bronze."

"All right," says Julia reluctantly. "One more and then we can do our assignment and then the rest of the exploring after we've done it."

"Lugging stuff I can do," he affirms. Riley collects some sawdust (apparently he's committing to the powder theme today) and whatever copper and tin the enclavers don't want. Lugging stuff is really nice; he can just turn his thinking brain off. It's just him, his instincts for things moving in his peripheral, and the stuff. Nice and simple.

Julia beams at him. He's very short but if not for that the superman thing would be really cute! 

The next cabinet has blocks of quartzite, pearls, and - a 10' by 10' cotton sheet. "Oh Karen!" she squeals delightedly. "You're a genius. Of course it'd be the last one before we were about to give up."

"Oh hey!" She is gonna make herself a SHIRT and probably also UNDERWEAR and this will help with avoiding HORRIBLY EMBARRASSING PROBLEMS. She gingerly folds the cotton sheet and tucks it into her backpack. "I guess that is how it works, a lot of the time."

(Zeke ALSO has a thingy for being stronger! It’s barely going to do anything until he’s cast it hundreds of times with the other seventeen spells in the set, but it exists! He sulks slightly about how he’s ‘not supposed to do any unsupervised alchemy’ and about how this would interfere with learning how to make a strength potion, and is then once again distracted by making bracelet fasteners out of paperclips.)

(She's been wearing the same clothes for four days, including the crinkly green raincoat that she loves and wears almost everywhere. She's kind of used to it. The cleaning poem she begged off a neighbor during a bathroom run is handy. Uses mana, though.)

(Speak up, or don't? They'll glare at her but they're glaring at everyone, it's what they do. And 'harmless' isn't much worse than 'invisible'.)

(She'll need pads soon. Damn. That cinches it.)

"If there's any more fabric," she says quietly, mostly in Karen's sphere of hearing, "I could also use new clothes."

"Oh, I'm sorry, there's just the one sheet in here? There's, uh, the burlap we found earlier, I guess, but it's admittedly not great for clothes." 

She is - honestly managing not to feel too bad about keeping the cotton sheet because in fact she actually really needs more clothes.

"We've got the rest of the cabinets to go through after we're done with the assignment", Julia says encouragingly to sad skittish girl. "I bet there'll be some more fabric in there. You just have to believe in yourself."

And now they should go back to work; having gotten their reward it would be silly to keep searching. They might find mals that way, never mind that Orion checked for them. They have to make the mold and heat the copper and tin and then pour; the New York students are all using a spell, after that, to cool it instantly so they can take it out, shave it down, and polish it. Tony looks to be done already. 

Julia has done this exact assignment TWICE already because adults are incredibly worried that all the New York freshmen will get to school and then be totally incompetent even though this has never happened before. Her knife is not going to be a work of art like Tony's but she'll put the mold together correctly and heat the crucible correctly and pour the bronze correctly.

(After lifting and lugging, Riley will smile at Julia and say "Happy to be of service" before returning to his spot with Ribo and Wendy.)

(Aww he's cute!!)

She watches Julia a fair bit; Julia seems to know what she's doing. She can make the mold and heat the copper and tin, and then - "I didn't find gloves yet, do you mind if I borrow yours for a second?"

Wilbur has not done this exact project for practice before but he doesn't super care if he does a kind of crappy job on it as long as it passes, he isn't going for valedictorian here. But he does want to be very sure of passing, and also of not offending New York, so he pays careful attention to what he's doing and doesn't just rush through it to go back to scouring cabinets for fiber-based objects. 

Bobbie's knife doesn't come out of the mold particularly finished, because casting a knife barely lets you do any work on it. She doesn't wait for it to cool all the way, just to harden, then takes it out with a glove and hammers away while singing in Maori. She's not going for a good grade, she's going for something useful.

It turns out her spell for making her left hand as tough as iron can serve as a replacement glove! It makes it heat resistant! Handy! Heh. Handy. But only her left hand and it's still costing her mana, which is less handy. Maybe she can trade metal for gloves with someone. Maybe she can modify the spell??

But it's amazingly cool to be casting freaking bronze, like a movie character or something. It's a lot harder than it looks when Iron Man does it, though.

Orion has done this project before just like Julia, though not twice, he did okay the first time so he was allowed to skip the second and do guard duty. Wax is adequately knifelike; he makes the mold and sticks the wax in plus the thing that you pour the metal through and melts the metal like so and pours it and while that's setting he goes and rummages for something to make a handle out of. Bamboo looks fine? Yeah. He grabs some bamboo pieces and starts assembling them into a handle sufficient to plop the knife into later. Hurries along the cooling with a spell and removes his knife in progress from the mold. It's okay. It'll need honing, of course.

Julia's knife is a little bit unbalanced but she's heard the grading on baby's first knife isn't really that harsh. "Yeah, you can borrow the gloves!" she tells Karen.

"Thank you!" And then she can pour! And - does it look too needy to - oh, it's not like Julia doesn't know she learned about magic four days ago. She hands the gloves back. "How's the cooling spell go?"

"You might wanna write it down, it's -

Hear the sledges with the bells—
                 Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
        How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
           In the icy air of night!
        While the stars that oversprinkle
        All the heavens, seem to twinkle
           With a crystalline delight;
         Keeping time, time, time,
         In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
       From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells—
  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

- and it does actually matter that it's seven bells, the last time, or it'll cool too abruptly and you'll get cracks."

Riley is not having nearly as much luck as some of his neighbors. Getting the materials to the right heat isn't the problem- fashioning them into something usable is giving him a headache. He can handle a bit more heat than someone unaugmented, but not enough to survive a forge.

He doesn't have a cooling spell. Hopefully this knife doesn't have to be done in their first class...he takes his first two failures back to his seat, trying to re-think his approach.

She writes the spell down on her copy paper and reads it over a couple times, mouthing some of the words. "Okay. Here goes."

She says it slowly but evenly, focusing on the knife and the idea of letting the icy air cool it into perfect solid even metal at juuust the right speed.

It's - draining? Like it's dragging something out of her that she can't quite supply it, and grasping around for something to take instead. 

It goes through, though.