Malak has less need to stand out and, not really being an artificing genius herself, does not expect today to be her best opportunity for that. She is wearing the exact same clothes she wears every day.

"Do you need to put the safety enchantments on the knives as you are making them, or can you do it later?"

"The casting part goes by too fast to lay much on them - you mostly don't cast artifice for that reason as well as boring metalworking reasons - but I'll lay it while sharpening and polishing them. Sharpening is the right step for safety enchantments anyway, it's the most closely related."

"OK - I think I'm going to try to cast my own, then, I want to match dimensions with my existing knife, and then give it to you for sharpening?"

"Yep, that should work! If you have your other knife on hand you can use it for the mold, get a pretty exact match, though I suspect your good knife isn't bronze so the weight will be off -" Oh look, a textbook. 

" - Well my knife isn't made of wax, so getting it out of the mold might be hard... And yeah I was planning to look up the densities of bronze and steel and thicken or thin the bronze one appropriately." Textbook! Time to learn algebra?

"My mold is in two parts so I can reuse it to cast as many knives as people will pay me to, you can do that. You make the lower half and then coat the surface of the mold where the knife isn't with wax and then make the upper half, and then you can open and close it repeatedly -" she demonstrates. "It's technically within specs for the assignment - well, it's within specs for the assignment as it was four years ago and I don't have reason to think it's changed - and it takes longer but you get a better mold out of it."

- and right, they should learn math. The textbook wants them to review manipulating simple equations that have a variable in them, like x + 5 = 8 or 2x +`1 = 3x - 1 or x^2 = x + 6. They should practice different strategies for isolating the x. 

Annisa hasn't studied much math coming in; if you do that, the school just puts you in advanced math classes which are harder. She is a little bit out of her depths but it's a pretty decent textbook.

Pen has not said a single word to anyone in five days and doesn't see why she should expect today to be any different.

She knows how to do one-step solving for x. She is a little unclear on what it means for a variable to be right next to a number with no sign in between them, and hunts around a bit in the text for anything that seems like it might be relevant to that.

Lissa can manipulate the x around like it's another number easily enough, though she falters a bit when it comes to powers. It takes a bit of double-checking to notice that apparently they're not required to solve the equations yet, just isolate x. She breathes a sigh of relief at that.