Bella arrives at lab promptly after breakfast and lingers outside the door waiting for other students to go in with. Once she knows who's in the class hopefully she can walk with some of them.
Ribo takes a seat near Nia and gets her assignment.... her lips thin out and she just stares at it. It's a potion for rehydration, something that, well it might not have saved Sophie but it would have helped. A few tears run down her cheek, then she blinks them away and gets to work.
Alexius pops in on time and waves. "Hi Nia, hi Bella." Hi crazy enclaver from Mal Studies. He's had time to catch a rumor or two about Crazy Enclaver and has mixed feelings. He understands wanting to help but you have to stay alive unless you only want to offer it briefly...is this kid just drawing down New York's mana to kill mals? Is that somehow worth it for them? Maybe if his affinity makes the spells really really cheap?
Alexius is making...hand sanitizer, apparently. Well, that's not bad, he can maybe even coax it into his affinity if he applies it when he's done.
An anti-potion potion, that's metamagic for you. "Hand sanitizer! I'm Great, of course," he adds to Nia, smiling. He does in fact look considerably healthier than on Thursday. And his hair is...a bit longer than is strictly natural given a pre-induction head-shave. "How are those school supplies treating you?"
He waves back.
"That, and grilles break, and wire mesh has smaller gaps. Also it can go just about anywhere, needn't be limited to vents. I have a full seal for when I'm not in the room to make it harder for mals to sneak in, but, uh, have not yet come up with a spell to not asphyxiate." Wards: not remotely his specialty. "Barbed wire sounds very ward-friendly indeed."
"It's mostly just a rubber cover that's enchanted to be very discouraging to mals. I'll probably trade it to a freshman enclaver once I've got enough magic to be confident of killing most mals that would reasonably sneak through a vent grille. Got a nice little under-door seal too." They were a significant fraction of his weight allowance, but the mana savings in room wards are huge.
"That's the thing I'm most likely to trade for tutoring on at the moment. I'm trying to pick it up as quickly as possible because I need it for a class. I spent a good chunk of my weekend reading part of an intro textbook. The other thing is if you have any experience with spell translation. I have a lot of spells that are too expensive for me to cast in a language almost nobody knows and someone I expect to be willing to trade for anything I can translate since they're healing spells."
"I can absolutely do Russian tutoring! I can maybe do spell translation if the spells are caster-only, but, uh, recent experience suggests my affinity likes tweaking things so they work really well on me and not so well for others. If I tried to translate a spell, ah, unselfishly, it might turn out subtly problematic. I would totally trade for them though."
"Eh, if they're upperclassman-level spells they'll still be good to have when I'm an upperclassman. Offer stands. For tutoring - probably shop materials, alchemical ingredients, or mana depending on what I need in a given week. Mana is the simplest of those." He will cheerfully haggle to a mutually agreeable price while he starts laying out ingredients.
(Ghassan shows up fashionably late- it looks like there's at least been some attempt to clear out the room. He makes a beeline for Lysander, happy to see a familiar face. And there's Orion Lake again, like some kind of mal-sniffing dog clearing the room for everyone else. He wonders what kind of parents would turn out a kid that recklessly stupid, no matter how convenient his affinity. Eventually, it'll catch up to him. Until then, though, he's a great help to those in the class who want to get their work done without constant mal interruption.)