Kevin and Marcy get both their crucibles set up. "I'd pay mana if you're willing to take it now in front of this pile of witnesses."

“Noted!” says Della to Annisa. “How should I tell them to find you?”

Gesture at the scarf. "I have invested in visibility this week. Seemed safer than counting on everyone's ability to tell bald South Asians apart from one another."

And to Marcy - "great! I promise not to suicidally murder you in front of hundreds of witnesses. Have you learned mend-and-make, yet, it's about as much mana as that for a knife of this size, I can tell you when."

"Yeah, I know mend-and-make." She sticks out a hand and transfers the appropriate amount. "Mind if I watch, if I promise not to resell? Unless it's in Javanese."

"It's in English. You are welcome to watch but it's going to take me five hours for each knife, knives find it very confusing not cutting things. My plan is to do it while I polish the handles by hand, one each evening."

"Will you be sparring with the rest of Boston, or are knives not their thing?"

"Oh, wow, that's neat but I don't know if I'll have time what with all the language practice I'm in for. Maybe if I did something mana-building at the same time."

To Malak, "We all got some training but I'm the most knife-obsessed one."

That is an extremely ambiguous response, which is reasonable because obviously Marcy would not want to close off any options or commit to anything yet, especially if she wasn't expecting to even have a knife for sparring with before just now.

"Does she have a name?" she asks, glancing at Marcy's dagger as she starts covering her own in wax.

("Shh, don't worry darling, I know this is weird but it's just so you don't get stuck to the plaster, I'm going to clean you off later")

". . . Yes but the name is Dagger. In my defense, I was six. How about yours?"

"Alhadiat Alnihayiya, Alhadiat for short, it means 'The Final Gift'. I get no credit for it, though, I didn't name her."

Bit of a morbid name but it's a knife, a little morbidity is allowed. "Elegant; is she enchanted? Dagger comes back to my hand." Pet pet what a good and reliable dagger.

"Mostly just for sharpness, but she has a couple other quirks too. She comes back to me sometimes, but not reliably, and really doesn't want to be safe. I'd thought that was going to be inconvenient coming in, since I couldn't do any practice with her, but then I met a weaponsmith and learned that there's a human serial killer on the loose, so no complaints any more."

Malak has also been told that Alhadiat makes it easier to pull malia from things she's stabbed but that's not the sort of thing you advertise and will hopefully never have to be relevant.

Naima comes back with a slightly broken plastic bucket; it still holds stuff, but the handle has snapped off, leaving some ugly sharp bits at the top. Inside it, she has twenty fake flowers (which are made of fabric, if deeply inconveniently sized and cut fabric), four rams baseball caps (also made of fabric, if mostly inconvenient kinds), some glass flasks, several of them filled with different piles of metal shavings that Naima’s not even going to try to identify (but they’re probably not that good, if they’re still here), some wood and ceramic bowls that the shavings originally came in, a bunch of sticks that will hopefully be more convenient to turn into spindles than one of her boards would be (and it’d be kind of a waste of the boards, really), a bunch of lumps of soft white rocky stuff that she thinks might be raw chalk, and a big jar of maybe a thousand plastic push-pins.

She slides the metal-filled flasks and the push-pins towards Annisa. Technically the push-pins have metal in them, at the tips.

"Slim pickings? I guess New York probably ran off with whatever they could carry." She's not bitter. She's a little bitter. She's extremely bitter.

Her and almost every artificer in the school. It would be a terrible idea to try to find out where New York is keeping it all and burgle them and she is not going to do it but she's going to maybe fantasize about it a tiny bit first.

Marcy is aware that half the reason she's mad at New York is that Boston would have done the same thing in their shoes--maybe with a little more concern for not making everyone mad--but that doesn't make her less resentful. "No wonder there's a class in materials identification."

"I can look again, but if I get much farther out I don't think I want to do it alone. There are also some giant marble blocks, if anyone wants giant marble blocks." 

Honestly she wants giant marble blocks, but she wouldn't be able to carry them under the best conditions, and she's already overburdened by her books.

Annisa tries a magnet on the shavings in the flasks. "Poor grades of impure iron, fun. I nipped down here during work period yesterday, to do my mold in advance, and there was a decent selection; maybe we want to make a habit of that as a group, given that New York's actively clearing the place out and not just surviving it."

"I'd come with you if you did."

"I want marble blocks but - how giant, I am guessing it's going to be hard to move them - Here, I'll go with you while my metal melts and plaster sets."

To Alhadiat, "I'm going to go get some more materials while the plaster sets, you just stay there and wait patiently, OK?"

Hmmm, what's the ideal balance between asking permission and inviting herself along that makes her look confident but like she respects them but like she's very socially adept--

"I'd come during work period too."

See, this is why it's great to have multiple people with different strategies, she can get stuff communicated without having to put her own mouth where her money is.

"Maybe we could break the blocks up somehow?" she says, leading them back to the cabinet full of two foot by two foot by four foot marble blocks. "I'd like something to practice stonecutting on, but I don't think any of us can safely carry these up the stairs alone."

"Perfect," Annisa says to Kevin, "the more the merrier. As long as I remain the one who's fastest at metal identification, at least. There are also a couple of mundies in New York's shop class - they didn't know to switch out - who'll take trade requests, though they're picking behind New York."