Okay, Julian can stop contemplating how he is DOOMED and try to come up with some intelligent opinions on how counterfactually doomed various English romantic poets would have been in the Scholomance.

He's not an expert on English romantic poetry at all, actually – it's the kind of thing he had do recreationally while cramming more useful subjects – but he does know Byron's Prometheus. He ran across it in a poetry anthology a few months before his exams and it lodged in his mind in a way it really had no right to with all the Classical Chinese he was trying to fit in there. Like his brain's ever been anything other than wildly inconvenient, ha. He's honestly not sure what Byron was trying to say about death and victory, though, because those aren't the lines that stuck with him. 

"I don't think Byron is saying that death is a good thing." Or maybe he is, whatever, it's not the point. "It's not a tragedy, right, the point isn't that he's suffering, it's that he's still himself even though this bird's constantly going at his organs – I guess mundies are pretty limited with the torture metaphors, imagine if it was a maw-mouth or something. Prometheus knew what was going to happen to him if he gave humans fire and he did it anyway and nothing Zeus does can make him the kind of person who regrets it. Actually now that I say that it's like he's extra immortal, this whole other level of immortal, because nothing can make him any less the person he is. And even if he did die, he'd have won, but not because him dying is good, because his enemies lost. ...obviously it would be better if humans got their shit together and nuked Olympus but we don't always get everything we want." 

That's only the half of it, but Julian isn't going to mention the lines that played in his head on repeat during those awful weeks when he studied as hard as he possibly could so that some other kid could die instead of him. Annisa would think it's pathetic, and she's probably right. 

(Thy Godlike crime was to be kind / To render with thy precepts less / the sum of human wretchedness). 

He thinks Byron-the-wizard would have done just fine. 

But if you die, then you do lose, even if your enemies lose too. Even if you stayed who you are. Because who you are doesn't exist anymore.

She doesn't argue the point.

"I think....Byron's saying that he won, that torture can't take away what he won, that death can't take away what he won, but - but he's thinking of it as a story that is over and concluded, a story that happened long ago, which is an odd fit for a story where one inevitably mentions each stanza that it's still happening, and where one contrasts eternal bird-eating and death, because - the entire difference between life and death is that as long as you're living the story isn't over, and Byron wanted to tell a story that was over about someone who wasn't dead."

Everything she can think of to say boils down to "The story is over because Prometheus doesn't exist outside of stories and nobody has written a sequel," so: knife.

Knife knife knife. When her plaster is set she can open up her two-part mold along the wax seal and take Alhadiat out and start cleaning off the wax coating apologetically. She peeks in her crucible - "Annisa does this look hot enough yet?"

Glance. "I'd give it another ten minutes - see how mine looks more consistent across the whole surface -" Hers, though, is probably ready to pour. She clears her workspace and a generous amount of surroundings , takes the metal tongs, and grasps the crucible in them; she's added a little funnel to her mold, so pouring is easy. 

She would let her liver be picked out eternally in order to give mankind fire, assuming for some reason that they weren't going to invent it on their own eventually. Mankind having fire is really important. 

(Focus, Annisa.)

She pours.

She would not die in the sense where you don't exist anymore to give mankind fire. What would it even mean to do something knowing you wouldn't exist in any worlds where it came to fruition.

She finishes going through her cards and then that's - all she can do, really, if she's not going to dive into the medicine list or make flash cards for it in here. Which she could do, but it seems a waste of shop time.

She isn't going to need mana storage any less, really, just because she's also being threatened by the Canon of Medicine. And for that she will need to learn to carve things that can hold mana. This ambition doesn't even really conflict with memorization, which will be the bulk of the work in this class, since she can work on crafting things while she memorizes, once she has a system down.

"If you get your screwdriver, then we will look for a hammer down here," she says to Kevin.

"Isn't it over, though? We have fire. Prometheus did what he set out to do, and he's facing the consequences, and he will be, forever. We can argue about the mythology, but it's the conceit of the poem that nothing's going to change anymore, for him – I think that's a Greek thing, not a Romantic thing, they're really into fate and inevitability and all that. And you can tell that Bryon isn't totally comfortable with it." 

Julian wonders what kind of person he'd be if his clear and obvious path towards rendering with his precepts less the sum of human wretchedness didn't line up so neatly with his own desire to live. If he'd been born with some really useless affinity, would he give up his Scholomance slot for some hypothetical future enclave-builder? He knows he wouldn't. He doesn't want to die. Would he let his liver be pecked out eternally to give mankind fire? He hopes he would, but forever is a long time. Would he dive into a maw-mouth? No. Is it a difference of kind or only of degree?

....he should really watch Annisa making his knife. 

Niccolo pauses for a minute to look at the batch of freshmen busily... debating poetry? There are enough people close together that he does want to take a closer look than his casual scan, though they all look clean at first glance.

This girl has never maleficed in her life though she did read a book about how, once, just in case, and think about who she'd kill to graduate if she needed to kill someone to graduate. (An indie freshman with a lousy affinity and no friends; that's kind of equivalent to murdering someone with a terminal illness). 

The liquid metal rolls across the surface of her mold where she spilled a little. There are big, demonstrative flames at the bleeding edge but they burn out fast, not much there for them to catch on and the metal's cooling quickly. The blade is very thin; it saves her on materials and means it'll cool faster. She sets the crucible back on its stand and adds more copper and tin for Naima's knife, smiling to herself.

"We do have fire," she says cheerfully to Julian. "And a good invention, too. - it should cool fast, three minutes or so."

...oh, good, that sounds like an end to this weirdly upsetting topic. 

"This isn't how people normally make knives, right? I can't possibly be, starting with sheet metal would be so much more efficient." 

This one is cleaning a knife purpose-made for maleficing, but she hasn't killed so much as a baby mouse and will never feel the need to, inshallah.

Her own metal is hot enough now, so she'll do the pour and then, when nothing explodes, get back to cleaning her knife.

"Forging knives is much better than casting them. You want metal to be strong and hammering it repeatedly is a very good way to do that, gets all the internal grains of it aligned, and if you cast it you're giving up on that. People mostly cast bronze statuary, on the outside, and here I think people mostly cast nuts, bolts, metal parts. Forging is also way more fun, but I see why we cast first - forging is hard, and the first eight times you forge a knife it'll be horribly asymmetrical and you won't know why."

Julian is starting to understand why the school found it necessary to put him in a metallurgy class. 

"I'm not looking forward to learning how to forge. I've never been near one before." And he really doesn't like being bad at things. 

"You might not have to do it after whatever the intro forging project is. If you pick other shop projects, it's not like you're Annisa who doesn't really have a choice about learning to forge. Builds strength and mana, though."

"I can sew and I'm halfway decent at woodcarving, at least. I need to make a base for my mana storage anyway –" hefts the sandalwood – "and I'm hoping I can get it to count for shop credit."

"Yeah, if you hate metalworking you can pay me for one-offs when the school tries to corner you, and mostly do other stuff." Annisa did not like the forge at all when she was twelve but she has since gotten over that and at this point honestly feels vaguely homesick at the smell of it.

Marcy and Kevin cheat occasionally, no more than the next person--less, if anything, with the power-sharers right there--but they've never killed so much as a sparrow and they never will. They're safer living in an enclave where no-one would ever malefice than they would be in a world of deadly escalation, so they're safer being the sort of person who can't consider it even if in some unlikely possible future that would get them killed. This is a known conclusion, thought through long ago. It's not a difficult question, not like wondering if you'd die or be tortured to give mankind fire, where it's a hypothetical with no rules and you have to figure out what you want most.

Kevin finishes his pour and finally has attention available for things other than watching his surroundings and the crucible. He's is a fan of forging, because you get to hit things with a hammer as hard as possible. Welding is even better, in terms of being able to do useful in-affinity stuff, but much worse on the equipment front.

"I bet you'll pick it up quick; it's not hard except for the arm muscles. Anyway, you wanted to try chiseling with the screwdriver? I can go get it."

"Wait two minutes until I do my pour and then I can go with you."

"Cool."

(This one has devoted a normal amount of time to considering maleficing as a long-term strategy and concluded pretty quickly than he doesn't have any of the unique advantages that would let him swing it. He's possibly just a tiny bit bitter that apparently pulling malia is enough to get one adopted by Shanghai on day three, but them's the breaks). 

This kid has never maleficed in her life, hasn't cheated in at least the last several months, and doesn't waste time thinking about this stuff when she could instead spend her time thinking about how to actually get stronger, which you can pretty much always be thinking about. 

Right now, she's got a piddly little pocket knife in one hand and is repeatedly kicking open tool chests with her steel-toed boots. 

Marcy gets her pour done--molten metal is beautiful--and she and Kevin can ask Annisa to make sure nothing messes with their knives and head out to snag the screwdriver. 

Annisa can watch their knives for them! She opens her mold and fishes out Julian's knife, which is presently misshapen only in the expected ways; she sets it aside and fixes up the mold with a very small easy mend-and-make so she can pour Naima's in a couple of minutes. Then she snaps the spurs off Julian's knife and starts filing down the stub where they snapped, singing softly to the knife in English as she does.