What? It's a great affinity. If Manchester doesn't see that then sucks to be Manchester when New York steals him. (Julia is aware you can't actually steal enclavers from other enclaves.)

"Hey, Orion, I want to go down to the lab, want to bodyguard?" He will; he's been jumping at any chance to accompany anyone on any errand that involves leaving the nice safe quiet library.

"Yeah, sure!" Up he hops. He's been studying Greek for like thirty consecutive minutes, awful.

Julia feels that Orion Lake is maybe a reincarnated puppy dog. Off she trots down the stairs.

They don't find ANYTHING on the stairs. What a bummer. Orion starts prowling the lab once they find the one Ennis is in.

Ennis looks up. "Oh - it's Julia, isn't it?"

"Yeah! Did you know that Manchester is undercutting their 'yeah, Ennis is really busy and has a lot of interest' with, like, 'for his weird affinity'? If it's on purpose as a strategy or something then whatever but I would absolutely put sand in my clavemates' beds if they were insensitively undercutting my market value like that!!! You want them to just go "yeah, he's in the lab, he's in very high demand'. Full stop. So then I know I'd better bid high. But if I'm missing something, okay, none of my business."

"That was probably Liam, his is fire and he puffs up a bit about its combat value." Stir stir. "What can I do for you today?"

"Combat value?? We're not soldiers, we're high school students! Having something everyone wants is having everything. I have the samples of the makeup I brought in, and I'll trade you those for a new batch - I didn't bring in any eyeshadow, so maybe that, or some blush? Or eyeliner but I'm not actually any good at applying it without a good mirror and I haven't got one yet."

"I have a compact. Is your eyeliner a pen or a pencil?"

"Pencil, it was lighter." Eyeroll. 

"Makes it harder to reuse the casing; Isla's making boxes for me, though, and that'll do for eyeshadow. Do you want nonmagical eyeshadow, or the alertness kind for which I'd want you to front the mana?"

"We're strictly forbidden from fronting mana till they catch the freshman murderer, not that I'm worried it's you but my sister's threatened to cut people off the powersharers for it. - she's on a bit of a trip right now, I swear she's super chill normally. So I guess just nonmagical for now?"

"All right. I'm seeing you in periwinkle, what do you reckon?"

"I'd try it? My favorite shadow back home was a turquoise, but it's hell to pair with outfits and now that I'm down to twelve outfits it'd be hopeless."

"Gold would also work on you if you want something more neutral."

She bites her lip consideringly. "I think I can swing periwinkle, just let me think - you know, I was hoping to arrange a clothing swap with someone here, double both our wardrobes, but I haven't found anyone to take me up on it?? I'm friends with Karen and Rebecca and Lisa who're all penniless, and then we have some support people who're all the very serious type, and then everyone else is boys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just, mostly they don't appreciate the necessity of having more stuff to pair with my makeup. I did meet one gay boy but he's the goth kind of gay boy not the well-dressed kind - is that homophobic -"

"I'm not a queer studies professor and I do not have a Tumblr. Have you looked for spells to change the colors of things?"

"You're a GENIUS is what you are! No! Why didn't I think of that! I've been combing through the library looking for something that'll let me do mocktails for therapy day and I didn't think that I could just CHANGE THE COLOR OF MY CLOTHES - you know, you are a genius, but that's actually more me being an idiot. Okay. Periwinkle."

"Periwinkle it is. Is your friend... looking for mals? Does he also do supply cupboards?"

"Sure!" Orion starts flinging open supply cupboards.

Wow that's really... something??

"Nothing," says Orion, having opened all the cupboards and then left them that way.

Well then. Ennis goes over to pick up some blue things of various sorts and anything else that looks good that he'll be able to fit into his project locker after making the eyeshadow.

Julia doesn't even have an alch supply locker yet but she has passed endless tests on what's scarce and what's tradeable, ugh, and once Ennis has grabbed everything he wants she'll go through and acquire various emulsions for putting other things in, and some bottles of oil and some cinnamon.

Ennis mixes up her nonmagical periwinkle eyeshadow quite cheerfully. At one point he wants to put a swatch near her eye so he can see how it does against her eye color and then add a pinch more of something.

If it's not too distracting Julia would like to watch his process and ask him questions about makeup! Not about his affinity really, just about what colors he likes best and if he prepared in any way for having such an international set of faces to dress and what his favorite skin tone is and whether they should have a prom.

"On myself I tend to go with natural-look tones for the most part, but on the occasions I've gone flashier I've done reddish purples, black and gold, blue and silver with some pink..."

"I didn't have a Tumblr but I did have an Instagram and look at Youtube a lot, and looked into how to manage different skin tones, yes. I didn't get nearly as deep into - diverse hair products - as I'd wanted, though, so I will need to study up if someone from Africa wants hair gel."

"Skin tones in general are all really interesting but the most striking canvases are either really dark or really light; however, if you mean me to get hyperspecific, there was a Thai woman on Youtube whose skin would pick up whatever she was wearing as an undertone, it was really something, and then she could put any color she wanted on top..."

"A prom doesn't sound practical. Maybe people could take turns standing guard for date nights or something, lower-key."

"I guess. A date night is a lot more pressure, though, it's much less complicated to go to a dance with someone than out on an entire date! If a prom were right after graduation it'd probably be safe. Wouldn't work for the freshmen but freshmen don't go to prom anyway, it's something to look forward to for when you're older. At mundie high schools."

"I'm not sure people are in the mood immediately after graduation."

"This school," says Julia emphatically, "has a morale problem. Maybe group therapy will help."

"I wasn't aware group therapy was one of its services."

"It was the nurse's idea!! See, she can get stuff from the void if it's for a therapeutic purpose. And she was really sad about that Toronto girl who, you know, had a breakdown and walked into the void, and she was like, 'Julia, I heard you have a therapy rug, do you think we should do group therapy'? And I was like - if the Void will give you scented candles, and snacks, and maybe boxes of tissues, and chocolate....I feel like that'd be really good for peoples' mood, you know?"

"...huh. I guess if the void will produce those things given a therapeutic purpose for them it's worth following through on the purpose to make subsequent requests convincing."

"Yeah! We don't know for sure but she told it that kids weren't getting enough to eat and it gave her like pallets and pallets of shelf-stable nutrient slurry, and it's not that much mana to make it good, and it's great to have for emergencies. So I think it likes her. And maybe we can get lots of scented candles and snacks as long as we do some therapy. I'm not thinking anything hardcore, like, we'll do yoga together and talk about what's going on emotionally for us."

"Who's invited?" asks Isla.

"You guys can come! I was planning to drag Rebecca and Karen along so even if no one else shows up I don't feel stupid but also the nurse was gonna tell the boy who announces things to announce it, we might get lots of interest. Wednesday after lunch. If people suck I won't invite them back and if there's way too many of them then maybe we'll segregate by birth months or something. Zodiac signs? Are those Buddhist? My rug is Buddhist so I'm going for a Buddhist vibe."

"The Zodiac signs which are maybe Buddhist are the ones that go by year, not month, so it might not work that well."

" - huh, fair enough. Well, if we get a big crowd we'll figure out what to do. Probably it'll mostly be people who know us, the first day, because everyone else is going to be like 'what's New York playing at', but if it works word'll get out pretty fast that what we're playing at is chocolate. Do you suppose it's good or bad for the therapeutic purpose of group therapy if everyone's like 'I'M ONLY BEING EMOTIONALLY VULNERABLE FOR THE CHOCOLATE', seems like it could be bad but also like, maybe it's safer to have feelings if you get something out of it so everyone will definitely go 'wow, feelings, that was strategic and clever of you'."

"Huh, I haven't got a good guess either way there."

"I have a long list of things to say if I'm the only person who wants to talk but hopefully other people will think of things too! I like the nurse, I hope she doesn't get eaten, she's very practical. Traded us the shelf-stable nutrient slurry for wards and bodyguards."

"She must be very quick on the uptake."

"I guess! Maybe she lived in a horrible dystopia before she came here."

"I couldn't say." Ennis tests another swatch and is satisfied with this one. "Your eyeshadow. Do you want me to put some on you now and you'll owe me a favor?"

"Ooooooh!! ....I dunno that having someone else do my eyeshadow's worth that much of a favor. A small favor."

"Yes, I'm not going to ask anything much for it. Something on the order of letting me cut in the cafeteria line or finding me another pair of hands for some particularly irritating shop project."

"All right, deal."

On goes the periwinkle. Ennis presents the compact mirror when finished.

"Nice!!!! You're a genius, Ennis, fire boy's just jealous."

"Thank you."

"Maybe he'd be less jealous if he had some nice makeup. I feel like he's got, you know, classic Scholomance problem even though he just got here, kinda colorless skin like he's never seen the sun? If I had that complexion I'd go for, like, blush, interesting contouring, you could make even a very pale eyeshadow striking..."

"Liam? I might be able to sell him on chapstick but I think he'd be pretty resistant to anything else."

"Then he's an idiot. Though I bet once everyone's doing it he'll start too."

"Maybe it'll start a trend. Unisex makeup use."

"Yeah - that's clearly the way to go here, right? Like, objectively, alertness or whatever else you're going to learn to do is a good deal, if you were selling potions at the same price all the kids who can afford it would get it, and a bunch of them are missing out because they don't want to seem weird! Which is normal! We're fourteen! We're in the middle of the identity formation process and we're very sensitive to the approval of our peers!" Julia read that in a book and doesn't understand it well enough to attempt rephrasing it. "But if everyone's doing it, then the case for it is overwhelming, and eventually it's - a status signal, right, eyeshadow communicates that you can afford to invest in your own safety and alertness and attentiveness - honestly my advice once you've met existing demand might be to give out samples super cheap, so people experience it and know they want it and know it's worth it and see everyone else wearing it. Maybe even give it out to upperclassmen basically for free, or for the price of supervising in the lab while you make it, because if all the upperclassmen have it then the freshmen will think of it as aspirational, right?"

"Not bad ideas," remarks Isla.

"Once I have the concealer working to prevent mals from smelling injuries I'm planning to make that in huge batches but it's not as conspicuous since it's, well, concealer," says Ennis.

"I'd make it conspicuous. I'd make giant batches of glittery gold eyeshadow that does something really good. So everyone knows that other people have it. Especially if it does something like make the wearer less tasty, I don't know how doable that is, maybe it's not a freshman year thing even with mana donations, but something like that, if everyone around you has it then you really gotta have it, right?"

"I don't think I can do less tasty as a glittery gold eyeshadow, but maybe something along those lines'll work."

"Like poison frogs!!! They're really brightly colored to tell predators, don't go for it, I'll give you indigestion. We should all be poison frogs. - sorry. I'm sure your tutors have been on you about this endlessly."

"- actually, they did not have the poison frogs idea. That could work."

"If you want a model poison frog I will be a model poison frog, I brought some neutral outfits in the probably-vain hope I'd be able to accessorize them in here."

"You would make a lovely model poison frog," he assures her, "though it would probably wind up more avant-garde - larger blockier markings, bright contrasts."

Nodnod. "I can pull that off. And everyone'll be talking about it, which is great for your sales."

"I'll look forward to it."

"Hey Orion, do you want some of my periwinkle?"

"Some of your periwinkle what?" says Orion, pulling his head out from the fume hood.

"Eyeshadow!"

"What does it do?"

"This batch, nothing - except make you look nicer."

"I don't really think that's... important?"

"No, but it's fun!"

"I don't know how to put on eyeshadow."

"I can do it for you if you like."

"...okay."

Ennis periwinkles him.

"Once we're allowed to pay in mana he'll do a batch that makes us more alert!" Julia says cheerfully. "I know you're pretty alert already but more can't hurt!"

"Oh, that does sound good! I bet some things get away from me if they hear me coming before I see them escaping or whatever."

" - oh, there's an idea, maybe you want stealth, too, so you can be a stealth predator! Because pretty soon word will get around among the mals and they'll all run away from you and then you won't get to kill them."

"Sure? This would be a magic eyeshadow too?"

"Possibly not an eyeshadow in particular, but a magic makeup, yes."

"Sure! Maybe the guy who was spotting mals for me in shop before would want some. He was cool."

"I think we should try to get the whole school wearing magic makeup. Most of us should be poison frogs that the mals don't want to eat, and then you and whoever else likes killing them can be stealthy, so you can sneak up on them. It'll be great. It'll give everyone the opportunity to explore their aesthetics without people judging them for not being enough of a Serious Person. And Ennis will get really rich.  - and if it works you should give me free batches, for having the idea," she adds to Ennis.

"I'm expecting to find materials a little dear if I'm making vats of everything for thousands of people but I will at least let you pick some colorways and so on."

"I'm so excited!"

"I am delighted to find such a receptive audience, I was expecting to have to work out of affinity a lot!"

"You have the best affinity in the school - except Orion's, I guess - and you should use it to make this place nicer!!"

Ennis takes a small bow.

Isla hands over the wooden box she's been carving, and he packs eyeshadow into it for Julia and cleans up the workspace into his project locker.

"See you Wednesday! If I don't see you sooner!" Julia says cheerfully, and waltzes off with Orion and her bag full of random alchemy supplies.

"See you!"

Once everything's squared away he and Isla go on up the stairs too.