Whack whack whack whack whack. The groove in the stone keeps getting deeper. It also has to be kept wide enough for the hammer and the screwdriver handle, which fact Marcy takes advantage of to end up with a couple of larger jagged chunks.

Well, sitting here staring isn't helping her or anybody else, so if Marcy's taking her turn then Naima figures she might as well grab her stuff and find her locker. She'll bring her backpack, too, and see which things she can stash in it around the safety equipment and the books.

Across the room, a girl is frowning at her crucible. Other peoples' crucibles aren't giving off white smoke, but hers is!

" - hey, lookitthat, that's our cue to hold our breath and go to lunch," Annisa says hurriedly to Julian and Daria. There's a spell for clearing air, of course, but she is flat out of mana and it'd really only buy an extra minute in which to stuff their things in lockers and leave. 

Yikes? Whatever that is it seems bad.

- she manages to hear that from all the way across the room, which means the earrings amplified it because they think it was important. Naima peeks out from around the lockers and yeah, okay, big white clouds of smoke, she has no idea what that particular smoke means or how bad it is but Annisa seems pretty concerned.

Damn it, she left two fifths of the canon on Annisa's table, and they're the two fifths she needs for the next class.

Okay. She can handle this. 

"Hold your breath!" she yells at the girl, and kind of at everyone else, because that's free, and then busies herself with putting on her respirator mask and her backpack so that she can run past and grab the books and maybe a chunk of the marble, depending on what's happening with that by the time she gets there.

Kevin grabs both knives and runs over and pokes Marcy in the shoulder. 

Marcy is paying attention to her immediate surroundings and their lack of mals but not to the other tables. Whack whack whack orient "Fuck." She shoves the mallet into one pocket and the screwdriver into another, spots the pair of knives in Kevin's hand, and books it without inhaling.

Annisa can hold her breath for two minutes, which is plenty of time to pack the possessions she's responsible for into bookbags and lug them out but not enough time to find her locker, which is annoying, she'll have to carry the mold up to her room. She heads for the door, mold in one hand, sign in the other, knives stuffed into her bag - oh good, Naima's coming to grab her books, Annisa doesn't have enough hands for that -

"How do I make it stop?" the girl who put zinc in her crucible because of being an idiot asks frantically. She's backed up well away from it but not far enough. Annisa does not waste breath telling her to leave the goddamned room.

Why isn't she running? Everyone else is running. One of their tutors always said, 'A guy at a dead run outranks everybody.' And more than one of them said, 'If you see something you don't understand happen to your shop or lab project, clear out first and ask questions later.'

Malak has already bagged her shop plunder, so she can just grab her mold and walk off quickly. She does not quite trust herself to run while holding a mold still full of molten metal, that seems like a way to get injured.

Outside the door Annisa's going to stop and take advantage of the safety of forty or so evacuees milling around to repack her fresh-out-of-the-mold knives, they're thrown inelegantly in on top of her bookbag. 

Trying to figure out how to make it stop does not sound free, especially when she doesn't actually know what the smoke does, so Naima's not going to spend anything on it. She shuts her locker, zips up her backpack, runs past the marble and grabs an unfortunately pretty sad-sized little chunk of it, grabs her books, and runs out the door after Annisa. She can get her goggles back from Marcy later, or at least she'd better be able to.

Kevin and Marcy stop running once they're far enough down the hall that any gas will have been sucked up by vents before it gets here.

Kevin is definitely going to tease Marcy about saving her ass next time they're in private.

Kevin is totally going to tease her about saving her ass next time they're in private and she is going to high five him about it.

"...So, extra work period before lunch I guess?"

"Guess so! Decent timing for it, we've got the knives. Sorry you didn't get your enormous marble block, Naima. Maybe the sign needed to also read "will tell you whether a metal is zinc or tin, FREE"."

"Eh, there's always next week. Maybe we can salvage it before anyone else does if we come back after lunch, do we have any idea how long it'll take the vents to clear it?"

"No clue, but it's a big block and still attached; I bet it'll be there after lunch if we don't feel like risking it. Oh, hey, I'm still wearing your goggles and this is arguably your hammer." She holds them both out. 

" - oh, right. I want the goggles, thanks, but we're not supposed to take tools out of the shop during class time, right?"

"Yeah, it hasn't run off yet but it hasn't had long . . . maybe I'll stick around until right before lunch and go drop it on a table."

     The girl who melted the zinc spots the scarf and comes over. She's coughing, which has got to be psychosomatic. "Am - I going to die?" she asks Annisa, just barely not tearfully. 

"Not of this!" Annisa says, which is maybe too candid; the girl sniffles. Annisa's father would have beaten her for having that little composure when she was seven. But not everyone gets lucky with their parents, any more than everyone gets lucky with where they're born. "It's supposed to be flulike symptoms, over in a couple of days, spend your snack tokens and make sure you've got enough water in your room, 's not worth wasting your healing on."

"I think I'd rather not claim ownership of the hammer right now. Thanks," she says again, and takes her goggles back.

- oh hey there's a kid here who might need healing. "If you get a fever, I'll trade you something to bring it down. I do healing spells, I can probably help with something flulike enough to let you study. Do you want me to come by your room tomorrow?"

- the girl turns to look at Naima, savvy enough at least to realize "you're not going to die, what's your room number?" might be suspicious in combination. "I'll find you," she says.

"All right, just let me know."