It's lucky that hammers are pretty basic tools. Kind of up there as just about the most common and iconic tool, really. She only has to kick open a few chests to find one, and she doesn't find any mals. 

"Malak, you ready to check some more cabinets?"

"Mhm. Alhadiat is done modeling so no more babysitting needed."

Nothing happening here, then! Nico will go on his merry way. He considers drawing Teresa's attention to it, but no, she's already noticed, she can make her own decisions.

Annisa files down Julian's knife, pours Naima's, and then goes back to polishing Julian's, singing quietly. The magic is unfamiliar to the blade at first, but it won't be unfamiliar for long, soon they'll get to know each other and then the blade will want to soak in the mana, want to learn from it, want to understand it....

He probably shouldn't interrupt her, but – 

"Is there a reason you don't start incanting while it's still molten? I can imagine a knife absorbing mana more easily before it's set or something like that. ...Obviously you don't need to answer that right away." 

She waits for a good stopping point. "Mostly I don't know a good incantation for that because no one's invented one because usually metal is molten at no point in the knife making process. Also I find stuff harder to work with in that stage, I think because it's not really a weapon yet, and this spell uses a lot of mana normally, I'm sort of cheating at it because knives trust me and will listen to me..." She pats the knife. "You should trust Julian too, all right? He is clever and stubborn and needs a fierce defender like you."

"I'm going to listen and skip over any if I hear something, okay?" she says to Malak, moving her headscarf enough to be able to visibly tap her earrings. "We should still be ready to run."

Mhm, she is armed and ready to run at top speed.

Okay! Further away from the Group they go. She pauses before approaching cabinets but mostly doesn't hear anything suspicious; a few times she's unsure and skips the cabinet.

She finds:

A cabinet full of jars of sand and baskets and baskets of seashells.

A cabinet full of... blocks of some kind of white substance, maybe some kind of wax? Several jars of what honestly looks like slightly greenish dirt, a bunch of disks of wood, and a bunch of bundles of twigs.

A cabinet full of a bunch of fossilized fish and... nothing else, actually, maybe there was something else there before.

A cabinet full of lumber, a tin of rusted nails (which she takes), and a ton of itty bitty colored glass squares that might be useful for mosaics or something.

A cabinet full of a bunch of plastic containers of buttons, beads, rhinestones, sequins, and one box entirely full of tiny jingle bells. She grabs the jingle bells and one box of beads, one that looks like it might have some that are glass or raw crystal and not plastic. At that point she feels like they had probably better circle back and drop some stuff off with Annisa.

Annisa has retrieved Naima's knife from the mold too. She hasn't gotten any takers on using her mold yet, but she's expecting that some kids whose first knife went wrong are mentally doing the math about the cost of losing another knife's worth of materials versus the cost of using a mold proven to work on two already-almost-complete knives sitting here being competently polished. And some other kids look like they're not even at the stage of having a working mold yet. 

"Found some nails and a bunch of metal jingle bells. I dunno what kind of metal."

"Honestly scrap metal just keep in your locker and trade to a senior who can do proper ore-separating, it's mana-intensive and I'm at no advantage at it."

"Good to know." Probably she'll end up dumping the jingle bells, then, but might as well save them until she has something else that needs the space, she guesses. Probably she should figure out where her locker is.

Glass squares: Yes. Lumber: maybe. She looks through it for hardwoods. Iiiits's all pine. The scholomance keeps stocking the workshop with pine and she's not sure why, pine sucks. The disks have more variety though, she grabs those. Wax is good too.

Marcy and Kevin return, with a screwdriver. It's short enough to get to screws in weird crevices and thick-shafted and roughly the right amount of sharp.

"Do you want to go try chiseling now while we pop our molds or do you want to wait?"

Annisa doesn't really work in stone. She ignores this and pours her third knife.

"Yeah, I can try." It's close enough to the group that she doesn't even really need an escort, really, not with that area already pretty thoroughly explored. She can go over her Persian medical spells in her head while she tries to chisel the rock into pieces that are small enough to lift, at least long enough to get into lockers.

"What are you planning to use it for? I want some fist-sized pieces for sling stones." She has a bunch of experiments in mind for something that will hold magic and resist breakage--target-seeking, extra damage, if she works on one of the smaller ones long enough she might eventually be able to get it to orbit her and whack anything that comes close. 

"Gonna have to get good at carving something, eventually, if I want anything that holds mana, right?"

Oooops she really should have guessed that, stone is way better mana storage than wood. "Oh, yeah, marble's good for that. I'll be done filing in a sec and then I can help chisel." 

"Sounds good." She's gonna start out pretty gingerly and then increase the power behind the hammer as she gets a better idea of how the marble reacts to it.

It doesn't need more force than Naima can put into it fairly easily with one arm, but it does tend to send chips flying everywhere. After not too long Marcy and Kevin finish up and come help (and collect a bunch of the larger chips).

"I'm gonna grab some eye protection to do more of this, actually, do you guys want to borrow it if you're going to take a turn?"

"That would be great, yeah, I've got a shield spell that redirects things coming at me but there's a minimum mana cost per thing."

Then Marcy can borrow her splash goggles.