Orion Lake bounces down the hall, leading a pack of New Yorkers behind him. "Good morning!" he says to Bobbie. "Is there something behind the door, or are you just...?" He waves vaguely.

"Hey. Waiting for everyone to get here before we head in. Anyone know anyone else in this section or is it just us?"

Orion shrugs and reaches for the doorknob.

"Hey, hold it a second? I hear you guys have some kind of mal-killing superhero?"

.........Orion waves.

Shit, vent kid is the mal-killing superhero? "Christ. OK, wonderboy, you know how to clear a room?"

"Do you mean besides... killing all the mals in it."

"I mean, how you sweep a room systematically to make sure there's nothing hiding and nobody gets jumped."

"I usually just go first."

"Of course you do. Usually you're supposed to go with a team or at least a partner so someone's watching your back. How about this, we open the door together, you sweep right, I sweep left, holler if there's anything real big, and once the open area is clear we'll check the vents and supply cabinets for this lesson. Then your buddies top me off for any mana spent securing the room for them."

Orion looks over his shoulder at Silas to see if this sounds weird to Silas. Silas seems like he might know.

"We're not supposed to share mana because there's a freshman maleficer going around and it could be anyone," says Silas. "If you manage to get to anything faster than Orion does you can have first shot at the supplies fair and clear, though.

Sweeping the room is - I guess it's a good habit to get into? So you can find and fight any mals right away instead of them jumping us in the middle of class," he adds helpfully to Orion.

"Fair enough, but once the seniors have caught him I'm going to want future mana expenditures covered, my uppers aren't going to be happy if I'm burning our mana to protect New York. Ready, wonderboy?"

"Yeah-huh," he says, and he opens the door and goes left.

God-damnit wonderboy. She'll just go right then.

- nothing out in the open in the right half of the room. "Clear!"

"O CALAMITY YOUR FATE IS RUIN," hollers Orion at the top of his lungs, and a digester explodes messily, blowing open the tool chest it was poking out of. He mutters something in French to get it off his clothes and then heaves the chest open to see if there's more, but he is disappointed.

What the fuck?

OK, wonderboy is probably good at killing mals but incredibly erratic and unreliable and she should've taken this into account.

"...OK now let's sweep the vents and cabinets, you - " she gestures at Silas and the rest of New York " - get in here and watch our backs while we do."

Orion is not sure how hollering when he saw it was helpful but at least that spell's in English. He trots over to the cabinets and starts opening them.

The rest of New York watches, unconcerned. Silas keeps an eye on Bobbie in case she needs shielding before Orion can go after something that jumps her.

Orion doesn't find anything in the cabinets. Well, he finds lots of things in the cabinets but not mals. He peers into drains and vents and comes up empty there too. Picks a seat, collects his assignment, bounces over to the cupboards for knife stuff.

Karen nervously peeks into the shop classroom and is surprised by the number of people already inside.

" - did all of you get stuck here, too?" This is not the most sensible question ever but it's at least in the neighborhood of whatever she means to ask.

One of the mundies slips in past Karen when she provides a distraction, trying to look uninteresting, having walked there a half hallway's distance behind the big Chicago troop just hoping they'd have cleared things enough following a minute behind is still safe - because joining them is out of the question, you don't just start walking with a gang or even ask if you can- Checks under her seat and workbench from a few feet away, checks the nearest cabinet with a knife out - picks a seat off to the side but not under a vent, sets down an ugly purple backpack feeling very very jumpy at the thought of this being a phenomenally dangerous time to have class.

“We’re doing a thingy, like, on purpose!” says Zeke to Karen. “- you’re, like, from Chicago, and you helped with Julia’s room and stuff, right, do you wanna sit with us?”

Ribo is still a bit subdued after yesterday and walks in cautiously. She offers a general wave to the room, gets her assignment and starts working.

Breakout thread for people sitting with Ribo

Orion starts carving his wax knife for the casting. He looks up and runs around a divider once when somebody shrieks but it's just a junior spilling something and setting herself back a week, not a mal, so he comes back and picks up the wax again.

The Starks enter the room at the tail end of the New York contingent, because Basil had to physically hang onto Tony's sleeve to stop him from rushing in right after Orion. Now Tony is bouncing excitedly and infodumping about metallurgy to his brother while they get started on their knives. Whether nearby students find this edifying or distracting is up to them.

"Thank you, I'd love to sit with you guys," she tells Zeke, and if there's a seat nearish Julia still then she'll grab that one. Then she - sees if she can figure out making a knife out if bronze? This would honestly be very cool if not for the many different varieties of impending doom around her. It's still pretty cool.

"Hey! You're really lucky we're all in Monday morning shop, you're supposed to avoid first thing in the morning shop classes until the older kids have come in and trimmed the mals down. But we have Orion so it should be all right." Julia has attractive silk-looking gloves that are, judging off how she's handling that crucible, also magically temperature-insulated.

Riley plans to arrive early to study groups, and late to morning classes. It's the best way not to court disaster, while he's still a squishy freshman. He's- not really sure what to make of how relaxed the atmosphere is. He waves at Wendy- it costs nothing to be friendly with fellow indies. That girl is definitely an enclaver, although he's not sure of most of the students that he doesn't recognize. He'll have to remember to suck up to her and her friends later.

For now, Riley will thank his mother and God that his potion gives him something of a buffer against random mal attacks, and look for a spot near a larger cluster of students. Not too close to Enclave Girl, but maybe near the girl with the magical multi-tool.

He goes to sit near Ribo.

"Yeah, I didn't know we could switch out of classes until it was too late. I was planning on not attending the whole semester, but I was also expecting I'd be alone, so maybe it's okay if everyone else is here?"

Karen... does not have gloves and should probably look for some.

Wilbur slips in not-quite-late because he REALLY didn't want to risk getting there before Orion Lake. He starts investigating cabinets as soon as it looks like New York won't be offended by the presumption. Heeeeeere fiber fiber. 

When the room is clear Bobbie starts working on her knife. She does some quick checks in her principles of metallurgy text and starts smelting way more bronze than a knife will need - she can leave it to melt while she works on her mold and then maybe have enough left over to get started on a helmet or something.

Wilbur stuffs some cotton and wool in his bag and starts actually working on Baby's First Knife. He has some vague ideas about how to maybe get thread involved but probably that should wait until he has been confirmed to have any idea what he's doing, he's never done this before and shouldn't start improvising right off the bat. 

"Yeah," Julia says to Karen, nailing the wood frame that holds her mold's two pieces in place with a hammer retrieved from an Orion-checked tool chest. "You'll be safe enough as long as you come to class after Orion and don't go after anything he hasn't checked. And Monday morning's after the supply cabinets refresh - well, it's not like they have a consistent inventory, and they almost always have enough for freshman projects, but they're more likely to have really good stuff. We're supposed to look out for -" She consults her list - "para-aramid fabric, aka Kevlar, mulberry silk, cervalt, vicuña wool, aluminum, platinum, rhenium, palladium, synthetic gemstones, mercury, cocobolo wood, wild olive wood, ivory, and mopane."

"Okay! Not sure I can recognize all of that, but I'll let you know if I see anything promising. Uh, if you see any fabric, just any kind of fabric at all, I'm still working on a first change of clothes."

"Right, of course! There'll totally be some, do you wanna go check those storage lockers over there now?"

Zeke has taken on the role of pack mule in return for a very slightly larger power sharer allowance, and had already been rifling through a separate set of storage lockers; he returns to his seat carrying an absurd number of odds and ends, dumps them in a pile next to his seat, retrieves a Cool Rock from the pile and puts it in his pocket, and starts working on his knife. His knife is going to be BRONZE, which is sort of like being ORANGE, and he approves.

"Yeah, I'd love to!"

Julia sets down her hammer and bounds over to the supply cabinets, talking the whole way. "There's actually been so much drama about this shop section? Like, first we got chewed out by the seniors, who were like, 'just because you have Orion and are safe doesn't mean you shouldn't be traumatized and miserable like everyone else!' and then it turned out Masozi - uh, the kid who tried to follow us down to the senior dorms the first day - had transferred into this shop too and so then everyone was like 'oh no is he stalking Orion?' and then that's how we figured out there's a freshman murderer which I guess means it's good that they were so worried!! But now, like, fuck, there's a freshman murderer! That's not normal, school usually has, like, monsters but it doesn't have crazy serial killer kids. We try to only give slots to kids who will be responsible!!"

"Oh yeah, the kid on the table said - four murders? That's, like, a murder a day. They don't have any idea who's doing it?"

"Well, it's not smelly kid? I think they're planning to scan every freshman shop class and so they should know by the end of the week, but still, scary stuff." She opens the cabinets. They contain: 

nine sheets of drywall 

a thick, smooth wooden board taller than both the girls and about three inches thick

a spool of barbed wire

six large burlap sacks that appear to have formerly contained rice

30 feet of interlinked chain

a pallet of copy paper

40 cardboard boxes, flattened and crisp.

"This place is the worst," she says cheerfully.

"Well... you could make clothes out of burlap, at least outerwear, but maybe we should check a couple more cabinets just to see if there are any other options?"

She'll grab some copy paper, anyway. All of her paper is lined and she's pretty sure she'll find a use for non-lined paper at some point in the next four years. ...maybe she should also grab the burlap, while she's here, Vernon seemed to think that fabric was actually pretty scarce.

"Yeah! Maybe it's like my rug, I had to wade through a lot of crap to find my rug."

Next cabinet is glass flasks of every conceivable shape and size including some that would not hold liquid. 

Third cabinet is thread, wire, and rope. 

"Well... thread is good? I don't actually know how to make cloth from thread, but you need some thread for sewing cloth together, so that's... still a step in the right direction, I guess." She will take some thread.

It is SO INCONVENIENT how you are not allowed to just approach groups containing enclavers because he is qualified to solve her problem. Maybe she will at some point be not talking to Julia and he can approach her. 

"Wire trades well," says Julia, taking it. "I don't see why there can't just be, you know, some stores in here. Normal high schools have stores. They sell school memorabilia and stuff. Sweatshirts. We could go to the sweatshirt store and buy sweatshirts, like normal people who live in the year 2020."

Fourth cabinet has a bunch of skittering little things eating the digester Orion blasted against its door. 

"Ewwwwww defendenosinproelio!" shrieks Julia and then she has a glimmery shield up, though the skittering things seem to find the two of them distinctly uninteresting next to digester-corpse.

She hides behind Julia. She sort of halfway tries to be moderately dignified about it.

..........does the fourth cabinet have anything in it besides the mals?

Ribo had looked over at the mention of wire and stands at the other declarations. She would go to help but she expects Orion will beat her to it and will do a better job.

Orion vaults over a desk to reach the things preying on the digester, sets them all on fire, and thumbs-ups at Julia.

Riley looks up, sits on the urge to go over and punch the mals (an urge which will inevitably get him killed if he indulges it, no matter how much he could definitely take these ones), and registers that none of the kids over there even seem surprised that a kid jumped over a desk to set some mals on fire. The blond guy is one to watch.

"Thank you Orion!!!" Julia tries the thing to salvage mana from that shield when you put it away but it's finicky and she fails at it. Whatever. The fourth cabinet contains cardstock and plaster and sand. The cardstock is now all singed and gooey and the whole thing smells horrid. She closes the door on it, holding her nose.

"Plaster and sand!" Orion calls out helpfully, in case anyone wants those, and he lopes back over to his wax knife.

The next cabinet has two foot by two foot by four foot blocks of marble and twelve-gallon bottles of epoxy resin and a ball of raw wool sheared from some kind of animal. The one after that has a large block of beeswax, identifiable because there is a single squished bee in it, and a bunch of pieces of bamboo, and four wine barrel lids, smelling faintly of wine.

"I guess wool... can also be turned into thread, which can be turned into cloth." She kind of feels like they're going backwards, at this point, and idly wonders if the next cabinet will have a whole live sheep in it, even though this is ridiculous. But she takes the wool anyway.

"If you know how to spin wool, yeah. Do you know how to spin wool? I don't know how to spin wool. We were supposed to pick an easy useful mana-building activity but we all picked drawing, except Orion, who picked 'killing mals'."

The next cabinet is overflowing with pine cones. Beneath the mountain of pine cones it has acrylic containers of fine black dust, unlabelled, and 12 "Michigan Gems Discovery Buckets", with price tags still on them.

"I miss Amazon," Julia says. "Someone should've seduced Jeff Bezos. I bet if his kid was a wizard he wouldn't put up with all these terrible supply cabinets."

"I don't know how to spin wool. It seems like the kind of thing one might be able to learn around here, though? Maybe? - uh, are there any particular uses for unidentified rough cut gemstones?"

"Trading to someone who knows how to cut them? Gemstones are useful for various stuff. They're on our list, though I won't take all of them."

She empties eight of the Michigan Gem Discovery Buckets into her backpack.

Okay HE CAN'T STAND IT ANYMORE. And he thinks the Chicagoite might have approached Julia first?

"I know how to spin wool," he says. "Among other things. I think we met on Thursday, I was with my sister, you had a cool room," he adds to Julia, "and I don't think I got your name," to Karen. 

Karen is in the middle of taking two buckets of unidentified gems. Including the bucket part of the buckets, she doesn't have any good-sized containers and they might be useful for storing water or something. 

"Oh, that would be cool. I'm Karen. It seems like spinning wool into an entire outfit would take a really long time, but I guess if the only other option is burlap it might be worth it eventually? And it does sound like it would build mana."

"My affinity is thread. It'll take a while, but the end result will be good. I mean, for a freshman." 

He's probably not the MURDER MALEFICER but he might be. He does have a kind of murderous vibe, now that she thinks about it. Julia resolves not to let her guard down. When her backpack is full of rocks she stacks the eight containers and picks up those too, without turning her back on that kid. - what's his name.

"You haven't introduced yourself," she says.

"Sorry. Wilbur. I thought I remembered Lucy introducing me on Thursday, I'm the one who's making your pillowcase and made your slippers. Although probably you don't want to accept a pillowcase enchanted for better sleep from an indie until they catch the murderer."

"Uh, I'd love a second outfit but I don't really have that much stuff to trade for it, yet?"

"Don't trade anyone until we catch the murderer!" she says brightly. She doesn't remember thinking he had a creepy vibe on Thursday, so maybe he doesn't actually.

        "Julia," says Silas, looking at the backpack full of rocks, "do you want me to try to sort through them for the valuable ones now before you lug them all upstairs?"

"I'm going to use the ones that aren't valuable to make a zen rock garden! On my desk!"

        "Right, okay then. Just don't throw out your back."

"Okay Mom."

The next cabinet has ...a lot of stuff. Animal hides, in big heaps on the upper shelves; 34" strands of uncut amethyst beads coiled around vats of tanning solution; corks; paperclips; staples; polished ivory; grey alpaca fleece, lumps of unidentifiable metal.

"Okay, leather it is at least possible to make clothes out of in fewer than a thousand hours." She takes the animal hides and the alpaca fleece. ...she will look up how to tan animal hides in the library after Latin practice, maybe. - she should really think about the possibility that Leander is the murderer, but also if Leander were the murderer wouldn't he have murdered her already? Was she ever actually alone with him without Val? Ugh.

"Ivory is on your list, right?"

"Yup! Hey Chloe you should fill your pack with whatever you want before I stick you with all this ivory."

-Riley doesn't know what he can do with plaster, but the whole point of coming over here is to find supplies. He takes some of that and the sand in case he finds a use for it later. He'll just embarrass himself if he trails behind the enclavers- Americans, which means New York, given how many of them there are. He'll take whatever they don't want, though, it's not worth saving face during the first week. This is probably his best chance to use shop time without getting himself killed. Enclave girl seems like the type to appreciate obsequiousness. It's obvious what he can offer- he moves close enough that she'll be able to hear him but not anywhere near enough to threaten her orbit.

"Need any help lifting things?"

"Oh, that'd be great!! Yeah, I overfilled this backpack and now it's super heavy." She's adding ivory to it. "I'm Julia, you?"

"Riley."

He waits until it she's done filling it and then lifts it more easily than someone of his size and build should be able to.

"Just tell me where you want it."

" - wow, cool, do you have a spell for that? That's so useful! Next to my stuff on the table for now, probably?"

(Zeke has wandered away from his existing pile of stuff, so as to add more stuff to it; he takes a handful of paperclips and three strings of amethyst beads, and returns to his desk to turn them into bracelets and a necklace for Rebecca, knifemaking process forgotten.)

"Potion. I'm going for alchemy. Stronger, faster, and all around better than the other guys."

Next to her stuff it is. Riley will not linger if she doesn't seem to want to talk about the potion, but as long as she does he'll read her enclavemates to find out what they think of her. Spoiled brat with connections back home? Useful affinity but not much going on upstairs? "Face" of the freshmen? He focuses on the blond kid and the guy she was telling about her zen rock garden.

Silas is watching Riley with mild suspicion on the principle that he ought to watch everyone with mild suspicion until the murderer is caught. 

Orion's opinion of Julia is that she is not a mal.

"That's so useful!" Julia is saying. "Can you make it for other people, or only yourself?"

"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.

" - 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.

A significantly more frustrated Riley makes his way over to the supply cabinets. Copper and tin, copper and tin...right. Enclavers have dibs. Riley waits for them to be done.

The sheets of acrylic are pretty, and probably even useful for someone, but she can't think what that someone is going to use them for, so she feels like she'd better leave them for someone who has a better idea of their value.

"I guess netting isn't gonna be very good for clothes," she sighs.

"Yeah, maybe thread guy - THREAD GUY! WILBUR! will want it."

Next cabinet!! Top shelves are full of metal disks and have already been picked over pretty thoroughly, though there's some iron and some graphite and some unrecognizable silvery stuff. Lower shelves contain a cylinder of titanium damascus with a cool wave pattern on it, several sheets of glass, and white birch plywood.

"I bet Tony'll help you on your knife if you're stuck," she says helpfully to cute kid.

-oh, that is helpful. Riley smiles at her.

"Thanks. Where can I find Tony?"

Oooooh, pretty cylinder. She is - also not sure what you'd do with the cylinder, but at least it's smaller than the sheets of acrylic?

If Julia doesn't call dibs she's gonna take that one. And - also wasn't there some glue somewhere? Gorilla glue seems like the kind of thing you're gonna need at some point, she should take a bottle of that.

Julia rather than just answering Riley teaches him to identify all of New York, in a conspiratorial sort of voice. "Chloe's the girl with brown hair. Fiona's the girl who's half Asian. Magnus is the boy who's half Asian. Zeke's the tall one with a bit of that Disney Channel teen heartthrob vibe. Silas is the one with sort of pronounced cheekbones and a weird shape of face. Orion's the blonde. Tony and Basil are the twins, and no one knows how to tell them apart but Tony's in the brown jacket today."

Wilbur one hundred percent wants the netting! And he'll scoop the acrylic sheets too if nobody else is taking them. 

"I think this is pewter," She says of the silvery stuff. "I recognize it, my mom had some old pewter things. If I'm right it's not super useful. There's lead in it? Used to be more common. It might have some sort of metaphorical magical use."

She grabs some anyway. Pewter totems of protection feels like A Thing enough to be worth it.

That's weirdly helpful of enclave girl- Julia- so Riley smiles and nods and thanks her:

"Thanks for the tip. Call me if you need a hand!"

He scampers off to find Tony (and/or Sherlock).

Julia has decided that Riley should carry her stuff all the time, he's very friendly and helpful!!

The next cabinet has candlesticks, including some that look to be gold though they're probably just gilded; Julia calls dibs on them anyway, the upperclassmen will be able to melt them down. It also has candles, which she calls dibs on "for group therapy on Wednesday, you're all invited", steel and copper shavings annoyingly intermixed, unfinished wood half-spheres a couple of inches in diameter, string, and....Pyrex casserole pans?

"Anybody need some Pyrex casserole pans?" she calls, because she sure doesn't, but it seems like someone might have some idea what to do with them.

"Can you keep food for later or does that also kill you somehow?" She asks the room at large.

"You can keep food for later! Some of the freshmen have keep-cool artifice, I don't but Annaka's supposed to leave me hers when she graduates at the end of the year. You have to check for, like, mold and stuff, and it can attract mals, but not if you have good keep-cool artifice that keeps mals out too."

About twenty minutes before the end of class, the door swings open. It's Olivia and Frank; they don't introduce themselves, but start systematically looking at all of the students. 

"Did anyone leave early?" Olivia asks.

Julia's found a cabinet with sheet metal and Silas is helping her bundle it so someone can carry it.  "No one left early. No one murdered anyone else either."

"Hi Olivia! Hi Frank!"

"Great," says Olivia curtly. Glare at Riley. Glare at Ribo. Glare at Wendy. Glare at Karen. Glare at Wilbur. Glare at six Indian kids at a different table but in the same class, supervised by a bored Indian upperclassman who's working on his own shop project at the same time. Glare across the room at Masozi and the Chinese kid he's with. 

Another girl is following Olivia and Frank, who probably no one here knows, but some people might recognize as from Pisa. She makes a circuit of the room, looking at everyone but not pausing much.

Oria covers the room relatively quickly and approaches Olivia.

"English side looks clean to me. I'm going to look a little closer at the kid who kicked this off. Not that I particularly doubt your investigation."

Eeep???

"Sure thing," Olivia says. 

"Do you suppose the seniors will help us carry stuff?" Julia asks Silas quietly while all the glaring is ongoing. 

        " - yeah, probably." He moves on to another cabinet, which has an enormous fifty-pound roll of wax paper, twelve canisters of compressed air, tins of caulk, and a 10ft*48inch reflective roll of insulation. "We should be more systematic about this, have four kids on searching right at the start of class."

"We have a good haul, though!"

        "I think we could have optimized it a lot harder."

"Okay, Mom."

Oria circles back and nods to Olivia and Frank.

"Checked the kid. He definitely hasn't murdered anyone in the last couple years. And it would be - unprecedented, probably impossible - for him to be strong enough to rip a mundane for malia younger than that. He'll take a while to recover, but if they're good for their word, he will."

"It's good to have confirmation of that," Olivia says. 

Frank rolls his eyes. "I'm sure they're good for their word. Sometimes. When they feel like it. If it's Tuesday. If there's nothing stressful going on."

"All right New York, we're leaving the hardwood and any precious metals in my locker!" Olivia says loudly.  "This way, please."

Julia is despairingly regarding a cabinet that someone else got to first; all that remains in it are thousands and thousands of individual staples.

"Maybe someone can melt them down," says Silas, who is packing Chloe's backpack now. "Why don't you go help carry the hardwood to Olivia's locker - I suggest as your mother," he adds, before Julia opens her mouth to say it.

She snorts. "Yeah, okay."

Zeke’s absurd pile of stuff has at this point mostly been shoved into a very large duffel bag; some of it becomes un-shoved and relocated into Olivia’s locker. He has made approximately zero actual progress on his knife but that’s fine, probably, or whatever, he has a few weeks to do it and he finished making the bracelets and the necklace for Rebecca.

Silas raises an eyebrow about Zeke's lack of knife progress but doesn't say anything in favor of repacking scrap metal and fabric into the newly available space in Zeke's duffle bag.

"Do you want to carry my bag up to my room?" Julia asks Riley brightly.

He had been really worried about this class, but it looks like it was a stroke of good luck rather than bad. Riley reminds himself not to get complacent.

"Like I said, I'm good for carrying."

Riley will pick up whatever Julia wants him to and take it wherever she wants it.