This something has two legs and a mesh laundry bag in addition to his backpack, and the mesh bag is full of collected materials from the supplies and contains leather scraps and pieces of colored glass, including an entire green bottle that looks like it was in the ocean for a while. He has left his knife cooling on the bench cattycorner to hers. "Hey," he says, "what would your brother want for getting me stuff for making shelves with - I'm not picky about what, I can do it with bricks and boards, I can do it with cardboard boxes of different sizes if they're sturdy boxes..."

"That sounds pretty straightforward--actually he already grabbed something that might do for that, a couple big sheets of clear acrylic--what kinds of things do you have to offer?"

"Uh, not going to pay in mana but I can trade a spell for straightening up stacks of things - mostly not that useful but if he's going to be rummaging in the cupboards first thing every Monday it's good for spooking mimics from a ways back - "

"--That does sound pretty useful yeah. We wouldn't ask anyone to trade in mana right now for sure, I just meant, like, everyone has comparative advantages and disadvantages, I'd rather trade people for something they're good at than just quote a flat price in snack tokens or whatever." 

"I can do snack tokens too, somebody was selling around tons of coconut oil over the weekend and I came in with vitamins so I have emergency nutrition."

"Coconut oil? I didn't hear about that." She considers pointing out that she can probably just ask the void for a spell that does basically the same thing as the spell he just offered her, and decides against it. She doesn't really understand why spell-trading is such a big thing in the Scholomance, the void has basically given her everything she's asked for short of, like, the Golden Sutras. "Two snack tokens or the spell for both sheets of acrylic." 

"Does the acrylic come with anything else that'll turn it into shelves? Blocks of wood all the same height or something?"