Malak returns with a small pile of goodies, mostly unrelated to the current assignment, and tosses a snack token to Annisa.

"Help me figure out the thing you were talking about for taking a cast of my knife? Bronze is heavier than steel so I'll just cast it and then grind the bronze one a bit thinner."

She follows Annisa's lead and starts up her crucible before getting started on her frame and plaster.

She is just slightly late for shop, and comes in with a cluster of freshmen who got the same advice she did. She looks for Annisa - oh, there she is, with Malak and Naima and some Asian boy she doesn't recognize. Annisa's wearing a bright blue scarf, which seems like a strange thing for her to have wasted weight allowance on. Maybe it's enchanted, although why would you lay an enchantment for shop on a scarf, it'll inevitably get caught on something.

"Hey," she says, "is this seat taken?"

"Nope!" she slides some copper and tin over to the empty space indicated, "You'll still need to grab plaster and wood for the frame unless you're using Annisa's. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about Kiev? Maybe at lunch if we're too busy here."

"Thanks!" she tries not to look surprised at the offered metal. "Do you know which cabinets have the plaster and wood? We can talk about Kiev but maybe lunch, yeah, I want to get a good grade for my first couple assignments so I have slack to skip later if I need to."

"That one over there, there was nothing dangerous in there when I got mine." The metal is a bit of a big bribe but it's why she grabbed more than she needed, and the questions she's planning to ask are maybe sensitive ones, and it's better to overshoot and have an enclaver vaguely in her debt than to undershoot.

She smiles cheerfully at Daria but doesn't interrupt her in her going off to get materials; they can talk later. 

Della rollerblades into class, notices Anissa’s sign, and then rollerblades over to Annisa. 

“Hi! I know a few people who might struggle, should I send them to you? Or does the sign only apply to the one class.”

"Feel free to send them! Prices might be higher if I have to go to shop when I was planning to work in the library, but I figure lots of the people who need help didn't put themselves in Tuesdays before lunch."

“Great! And I know another person who might want a dueling knife, depending on how they work, do you have an example model?”

"Daria's holding it as collateral at the moment - hey Daria!"

She starts and looks over from where she's gingerly poking the leftover plaster with said knife.

"May I borrow my knife back for a minute to demonstrate its uselessness at stabbing humans? I'm selling that feature. You can have a cut of my growing pile of lunch tokens for it."

"How much is a cut?" She wraps up investigating the cabinet for particularly patient mals and collects her supplies.

Oh drat, looks like Connie is in her shop section, that's going to make pretending they've never met and can't perceive each other tricky. Doesn't mean she has to stop doing it right now, though. She scoops up supplies for herself and Kevin, including a coil of wire and a bag of rock salt that seem like they might come in handy later, and goes back to their bench.

"Hi Kevin! Hi Annisa and Malak and Julian and Naima."

"Hi Marcy! You probably won't like French poetry."

"Maybe that's why the grading is so inscrutable, it's secretly grading us on liking things," she jokes, handing over mold materials.

"Awww, does French poetry suck too? I have been disliking my English poetry class and was wondering where all the good poetry is hiding. You can have a lunch token for every dueling knife demo that results in a sale," she adds to Daria.

Julian returns to the table carrying lumps of beeswax and bits of wire, and – score! – a block of sandalwood, which is too soft for most artificing applications but could make a perfect stand for his big ungainly mana rock. 

Because Julian is a responsible person, he's decided to save his next panic attack for after his supply run. So, without that out of the way: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH. Naima is in a class with upperclassmen. Probably other people are in classes with upperclassmen. He's not in any classes with upperclassmen. This can only mean one thing, namely that the school has already evaluated him and concluded he's a normal dumb fourteen year old and has no chance of cracking the top ten and should just a long walk through an empty hallway on the shop level right now because he has nothing to offer to a graduation alliance. Okay, so he doesn't have to pass through the nine circles of medieval Arabic medicine hell, but it's not like he wasn't planning to work hard. Besides, Naima is smart and she has a superhuman capacity for work. Naima can handle it. Naima probably isn't even a little bit contemplating how she's too incompetent to live. 

...he's not dead yet, though, so he's going to turn to Annisa and Marcy and say, as brightly as he can manage, "I can trade help with poetry for tips in shop." 

"Hi Marcy! Are you planning on making a normal knife or - I'm making a copy of Alhadiat that Annisa's going to put a safety enchantment on for practice - "

" - Don't worry darling," she croons to the knife in Arabic, "I'm never going to replace you, but I need something else to practice with so that you can stay dangerous."

" - Anyways, I see you have a dagger, I was wondering if you're planning to do the same."

"Deal," she says to Annisa. She hands the knife over the Annisa with a bit of a pang - it's a very nice knife - and starts setting up her crucible.

It is a very nice knife. They couldn't afford the kind of knife enclaves buy, but Annisa's father is an artificer and spent the last two years making it, showing her every step, letting her sing along with all the incantations.

She slits her wrist with it. Or tries; it skims the surface almost like it is actually a butter knife, leaving an angry red mark but no cut. She smiles at Della and hands it back to Daria.

"I'm going to make mine balanced as a throwing knife but otherwise pretty normal, yeah. Safety enchantment could be useful, I didn't bring anything to spar with."

She sets the knife carefully by her crucible, in grabbing range. "I've been using it for a couple days, it's really an excellent knife," she says to Annisa's potential customer.

“Thank you for the demonstration! I’ll let her know about it, I bet she’d love one.“

"I'd ideally like safety enchantments paid in mana, but no one's paying mana these days; I will also take rare materials or spells, though they'd better be good spells."

The safety enchantment is nothing any random junior or talented sophomore couldn't do, but Annisa's major edge is that it'd take them about ten hours each knife and a sophomore or junior's time is quite expensive. She can do it in five or six and her time is somewhat less so. On the other hand the very limited mana requirement is going to eat her alive, whereas they'd barely notice.

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."

"I have a screwdriver we can try using as a chisel if someone has a hammer. Not with me, though, I'd have to go upstairs for it or come back here later." He gets his plaster done as he says this, so theoretically he could go upstairs while it dries.

Malak is thinking over how they might move or reduce some stone blocks when she notices a familiar weight at her hip.

" - Uh, sorry, Naima, we should head back, apparently Alhadiat needs babysitting."

"All right," she says, not that she entirely understands what that means. 

When she gets back to the table with her stuff, she takes out her flash card wallet and starts going over what she has. She doesn't have any Avicenna flash cards yet, but if she's going to have to learn Avicenna's medicines then that's less time in which to learn the medical spells, which she also has to learn in a timely manner, so she figures she'd better not slack off there, either.

When they get back she takes Alhadiyat off her hip and puts her back into the open half-mold.

Marcy is briefly tempted to creepily shouldersurf Naima's flashcards, which is both rude and impractical and clearly a bad habit picked up in childhood from when everyone was studying most of the same things. She focuses on finishing her mold, which isn't built around Dagger but around a wax duplicate with matching measurements. It won't be as nicely balanced as an exact copy, but Dagger prefers to come back by traversing the intervening space and she does not need a wad of plaster trying to shove itself into her hand or her belt holster.

Crucible is still heating. "So Julian, I hear you're offering poetry help? Am I wrong to have the impression of the English romantic poets that they're all the kind of people who'd be dead if they were wizards, writing dumb frippery about how dying isn't so bad as long as you have very passionate deep experiences in the meantime? ....also Lord Byron thinks that the horrible part about the Prometheus story is that Prometheus is alive! That's the one good part about the Prometheus story! If he's alive then someday the mortals he empowered can make nukes and fight the gods and free him!"

"I don't think the Greeks or the romantics were really counting on nukes," says Naima, idly.

"Right but if you have the simple principle 'being alive is good' then you will be alive to take advantage of any unexpected things, such as nukes, that happen later, unlike if you decide that the real victory is death, in which case you'll die and not be around to learn that the real victory is nukes."

"I wonder if dead gods get an afterlife."

Oh no THAT sounds like a possibly fraught conversation, she'll turn back to Julian and hope he rescues her with insight into the Romantics.

"They're not real gods," she doesn't say, because, like, half the people here don't even believe in God.

Kevin approves of Annisa's approval of nukes and taking unexpected advantages. He's not at all clear on what happened to Prometheus but if it's being debated whether it's worse than being dead he's probably not being unreasonable to want to nuke some gods about it. 

She turns back to her flashcards, when no one answers that, instead of getting caught up in the question of what the Greeks or Lord Byron may have believed about Prometheus's alternatives, since Prometheus is not, in fact, real, and even if he were real he would be too busy getting his liver pecked out to help her pass her Avicenna course.

Dasha has been paying attention to her knife but there's enough mental space there to muse about that for a bit. "They're probably like angels, and I think those can't die?" And then she shuts her mouth before any more inadvisable commentary can escape, because that's almost definitely heresey of some sort and - she glances up at Naima, Annisa, and Malak - probably heresey of the wrong religion. Do Muslims have angels? - not the point.

Oh, whoops, looks like she can't focus on her flashcards if we're discussing this. " - yeah, but okay, within Greek mythology the gods can die, right, Zeus slew Cronus or something? Maybe a bunch of the titans died at some point? So then do they just cease to exist, or do they live on in the underworld, or what? Because I feel like that affects the specifics of how we ought to understand Prometheus's punishment."

Right, Russia is religious.

She is still not going to say anything because "That's right, angels can't die, but also Promethus isn't real." is even worse than just asserting the falsity of the greek gods as far as making things awkward with the atheists goes.

Marcy is pretty sure nobody actually believes in the Greek gods and they're just discussing this hypothetically the same way she had discussions with her tutors about the social contract the characters in the Iliad were operating under, so she can probably say stuff without having to explicitly disclaim that she's an atheist. "I think there are stories where demigods die and go to the underworld? So maybe gods would too."

Everything she's learned about Greek mythology she learned while wikiwalking when she was bored at night and couldn't sleep. Zeus is the thunder god, like Perun, and then Cronus is... someone. Oh! There's that story about why winter exists, she can say something about that without sounding stupid. "There's a myth where a goddess gets kidnapped into the underworld, right? And I don't think she's dead."

WHY are we ARGUING RELIGION was nobody here TAUGHT ANY MANNERS, "I guess that it makes more sense to think Prometheus would be better off dead if dead means 'in the Greek afterlife doing more cool stuff'? That's not how I read Byron but I guess it'd make the poem ...loads better, actually - it's a good poem if it's just like, 'hey, would-be tyrants, we have a hell of a BATNA' -"

'hell of a BATNA' is actually a pretty good joke. She laughs to acknowledge it, because that's what you do with jokes.

Okay but this conversation is stressing people out, let's not have that. "Hey Kevin, you never said what was wrong with French poetry, is it also full of death and dismemberment and despair?"

(Annisa is not 100% sure what was funny but she'll grin at Malak as if the joke is shared. - oh, now she gets it. Yep, that was definitely on purpose.)

"Some of the death and despair but less dismemberment so far. Which is worse, because if there was dismemberment that would probably mean good combat spells."

"So much despair. And it's in French." She smiles at Marcy now because she appreciates the topic change.

"I have not gotten a single spell for having birds devour anyone's liver but if I do I'll trade it on."

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. 

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.

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."

She nods jerkily and vanishes off into the crowd again.

Marcy is not currently doing anything and the thing to do when you are not doing anything is to either study or build mana. She sticks the hammer back in her pocket for the moment and does a handstand.

"...So, extra work period, we can't use the shop, library anyone?"

"Sounds good. While we have this nice teachable moment, everyone knows how to tell zinc from tin, right?" Annisa sets off up the stairs.

"I'll catch up with you after I drop off the hammer."

Kevin will stick around so Marcy's not alone in the hallway.

"Tell us how you tell zinc from tin, Annisa."

"Zinc won't shine if it's been stored exposed to air; if it's shining it's tin. If it's not, and it's not soft enough to be lead, and you don't have time to polish it and watch it oxidize, you can lick it; zinc will taste very strongly of blood, in your mouth, and tin won't taste like much of anything. I also think they file to slightly different internal colors but the textbook says 'silvery grey' for both of them so probably that distinction is subtle enough you have to learn it through practice."