A blonde girl with a power-sharer on her wrist comes in with a couple of NPCs with the same power sharer. They start checking for mals. 

Basira walks in in the middle of a pack of kids who came down from the maleficaria hall (study) at the same pace.

Marcy is planning to slack off, relatively speaking, on alchemy in favor of languages and artificing; if she wants alchemical substances to put in grenades she can get them from Abigail and Kevin. But the first class is going to be important safety stuff they'll need to know for the rest of school, so she's going to full-ass this one.

Franklin loves artificing deeply but is not really an enjoyer of alchemy at all; the logic is subtly different from that of artificing in a way that feels vaguely wrong. Fortunately this mostly makes it hard to understand (what seem to him like) the bizzare swerves and leaps of logic in the theoretical explanations; he can follow a basic recipe just fine if he doesn't have to improvise.

"Hey Marcy. Franklin. I hear the assignments in this one are not all standardized."

"Yeah. Maybe because there are fewer total sets of dangerous equipment we have to learn to use or something."

"Yeah, maybe. You wanna check the cabinets together, I need - " hey, assignment paper - "lye, apparently, and a bunch of different kinds of oil."

"Lye? Are you making soap?" the blonde Atlanta girl asks. 

"Yes."

Basira finds her assignment sheet, for... slime.

Ingredients

• (4-ounce) bottles washable school glue (PVA)
• 1 to 2 drops. liquid food colouring (optional)
• glitter (optional)
• 1 teaspoon. baking soda.
• 2 to 3 tablespoons. saline solution (i.e., contact lens solution), divided.

Equipment

• Glass or plastic mixing bowl
• Mixing spoon
• Airtight container for storage

Instructions

1. Pour the glue into a medium bowl. Stir in the food colouring and glitter, if desired.
2. Add the baking soda to the glue mixture and stir until smooth.
3. Pour in 2 tablespoons of the contact lens solution and stir slowly. The mixture should begin to harden, becoming stringy.
4. Continue mixing slowly until a ball of slime forms.
5. Pick up the slime and work between your two hands, until smooth. If the slime is particularly slimy, work in another 1/2 tablespoon of contact lens solution as needed.

"...I'm going to skip the glitter," she announces to the room at large.

"Yeah, let's go through the cabinets. I'm making hand sanitizer, so I need ethanol, water, and glycerin."

(Also , why would that girl deliberately skip the glitter? Is she that confident that she won't be able to get any?)

Connie isn't even surprised half of Boston is in her lab section, at this point, it's the best spot available if you've got Tuesday shop.  Not talking has worked so far, no reason to switch it up now.

Her assignment is... spending the whole double class period heating baking soda to turn it into soda ash?  She flips the paper over- no, the actual assignment is laundry detergent, and that's the optional first step if she doesn't have soda ash, also known as washing soda, which probably makes more sense if you're a housewife in 1890 without the internet.  As it is, she'll probably have better luck looking for soda ash in the first place, since everyone with Monday and Tuesday shop will have nabbed the baking soda for cleaning and stuff.  Same for soap flakes, which step 3 calls for- she'll almost certainly have to swap for that, or if she's especially unlucky she won't find someone who took it and she'll have to wait for someone who got assigned soap to finish before she can swap them for it.  At least laundry detergent is useful, and this looks like it makes a lot- she should be able to find someone who wants the extra.

Jaromira's assignment is for scented hand lotion. Not as practical as the soap, given that just about any soft lipid will work for the purpose, but better than--is that slime? Did that girl get stuck with a recipe for slime? Yikes. Maybe there is some practical use for slime that Jaromira is not aware of.