" - whew. Okay. I'm gonna need more mana by tonight, but I can figure that out after I figure this out."

The knife looks kind of mediocre - she figures anybody's first knife would - but it's not finished yet, it still needs to be shaved down and sharpened. Also it needs a handle, but there was lots of wood over in the cabinets and she can think about how to turn it into a handle once the blade is okay.

"You can get mana from doing yoga! And from doing homework, and from brushing your hair if it gets horribly tangled, which it probably will, the Scholomance hates people who want their hair to look nice."

"Good to know! I should have lots of homework to do by tonight, maybe that'll be enough. I heard exercising in general usually works?"

"Yeah! Just, yoga's exercise that doesn't make you all gross and sweaty past curfew when you can't shower."

"That makes sense. I think I'll probably try to practice karate by myself more often, if I'm not gonna be practicing it in a group from now on."

"Do you do karate? My parents tried to make me pick it up but Annaka was better at it - she's my sister, she's way better at, you know, Boy Scout stuff, so I got sick of it."

"Yeah, I think I've been doing it for six years now? I don't compete or anything, but I'm okay at it, and it seems like the sort of thing that's useful enough not to let it lapse in here. At least if I'm gonna be needing to exercise for mana reasons anyway."

"I've got a weekend sparring group if you know what you're doing and want to join."

She's done hammering out her incredibly out-of-spec knife and is on her way to pillage the supply cabinets while it cools.

"Oh! Uh, I don't know what the standards are for knowing what you're doing, but I'd be down to try?"

"Great, Saturday at 6:30, meet at the dorm stairs by 400 and we'll walk down to the gym from there."

"Careful while there's a murderer on the loose," Chloe says to Karen, glaring pointedly at Julia. 

"Annaka says New Zealand's cool," Silas says. "Specifically, she talked to like forty people and New Zealand's who she said was cool."

"Cool, in that case I'll see you then!"

She makes a note to herself. This seems positive for her long-term survival, at least if this girl is not in fact the person who killed four people, which it sounds like someone important - Julia's sister, right, that's who she said Annaka was - has decided that she is not.

When Julia's knife is of a quality that would get her tutor to frown at her and say 'this is probably B-quality work, but you should keep in mind, it's B-quality work because no one else will have any experience with the shop, and it took you almost an hour, so I think it's worth drilling this further - the faster you are in shop, the more time you have for other things -" 

- the guy literally never says 'yep, well done', even though she has ALSO been told not to get an A and not to rush, so B-quality work in an hour is completely fine -

- she sets it down on the assignment sheet and writes 'complete' - you don't actually have to write complete to submit something for grading in shop, but it helps with knowing you've done it, which is part of doing it -

- and goes back over to the wall with the cabinets full of supplies. Some older students have gone through them by now, but there are a lot of cabinets and the shop's still pretty sparse. 

There's a Chinese kid in the distance and Masozi's with him but Julia ignores them because AWKWARD, oh my god. What do you even say about 'sorry how you stalking us scared us so badly we ended up suspecting you of murder and you didn't do that but also it's still really sketch that Shanghai picked you up, what the hell'. Julia has ALSO been tutored on diplomacy and they did NOT cover that. 

The next cabinet has glue, glue guns, Gorilla Glue, and two neatly folded XXXL sized t-shirts that read "Los Angeles Rams, Super Bowl LIII Champions", along with thirty baseball hats that read the same and two Rams pennants.  Julia takes some of the glue for decorating her room and yells "hey, Chicago mundies!" to cover the fact she forgot the name of the one who isn't Karen.

Her knife is... Not done. She was too hasty de-crucibleing it and ended up with a blobby bit and a small singe, and decided to start over instead of trying to clean it up. Just needs the handle now really, though.

She startles up from waiting for the next attempt to cool, looks at the nearest vent, then looks at Julia. "Uh... Found more cloth?"

"Yeah! I hope you're a baseball fan, they're baseball shirts."

Karen's knife is also not done, but it's not done one the level that it needs more shaving and polishing, which means she can leave it alone for a bit. It looks a little wonky to her but she's pretty sure it's a knife, which is on the whole a very impressive thing to have made at all, if you ask her.

"Oh wow, those are great! They're all conveniently shirt-shaped and everything. Do you wanna each take one, or are your cloth needs really dire?" Probably they are the same amount of dire as hers, but - man, it's really very hard to gauge the appropriate amount of selfishness in this situation.

AAAAAH act cool. She walks over, hands in pockets and eyes alert.

"The Rams, huh. If it's not the Cubs it's just not the same. Wait, isn't that football? Anyway I'll stick with one and cross my fingers for something else. Probably make it into something else, it's awful big."

"Did you just say 'awful big shirt'? Because I came in in my birthday suit and could use an awful big shirt."

"Well, Karen already has that big cloth square and I was planning on using one of these as material. Maybe something else will appear and the things that are already shirts should go to - forgot your name if I ever learned it, sorry, the one they fit."

"Bobbie. I'll help you look for any more fabric. If you don't find any, I got a bit on an earlier run."

"They look like they'd probably be big even on you, but I guess not as big. I don't think that's so bad, though, if you tie a belt around it then it's basically just a tunic. Uh - a shirt would be convenient, but yeah, I guess if they fit you better then it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to take them and cut them up. Especially if you can help find anything else."

"There's always next week if there's no more cloth. Gosh, we're going to get to learn to make so many things."

"If we live!" says Karen, maybe excessively brightly. "Does anyone know if the knives are due in their totally completed forms at the end of this class period, mine still needs a handle."

"Shop assignments are due a week or several later, six for big ones" says Julia, going to the next cabinet. "You have at least next week and might have a third, it should say on the sheet somewhere."

The next cabinet contains a huge fossilized tree stump, a pile of shiny metal bars about an inch in diameter - "dibs, I bet that's on the list somewhere", pastel colored acrylic sheets, a huge wad of fishing-boat netting, and a jar of synthetic gemstones on which Julia also calls dibs.

Lots of dibs from the rich chick, not like she expected anything else. That bucket of gemstones would probably be worth a hundred thousand. If she was back in Chicago. And the pawn shops didn't blatantly gouge her. And she didn't get shanked for it. And the IRS and DEA didn't come after her mom when they're suddenly rich...

She'll. Fade back into the background a bit now with a slight sigh.