"It is possible a honeytrap with not-mine blood would be more effective, but I definitely want to do a honeytrap even if it's with my blood and my blood wouldn't work as well, and I wasn't going to volunteer someone else's blood without consulting them."

"If you supply goo I don't mind donating a bit."

"Goo I can do. --Actually, if we're outsourcing stuff, I'm not actually the best alchemist there is, maybe we should bring someone better at it in to brew a whole bunch and, you know, also have it on hand for if El or I get hurt during a run." 

"Assuming they're on board to the point of not poisoning us, sure."

"There is that. --Aadhya, you're friendly with lots of people, is there someone you can recommend--"

"I mostly know people in our year, and we'd be looking for a senior for this, right? Since they're the ones standing to gain from you bleeding off the hall."

"I mean, we could, like, pay, a junior, I don't think we have enough mana storage to keep up with this project yet." 

"Okay, yeah, we can pay Shannon for healing goo in that case."

She flips through mental flashcards. "--She has a healing affinity, right? Good choice." 

"Yup. And she's alchemy track, we can probably just get her to make bigger batches of stuff she'd be making anyway."

"I mean, she probably doesn't have my mother's healing ointment recipe yet? I haven't been handing it out like candy. And it's a good recipe. She might well have something even better but it wouldn't be exactly the same thing as if we weren't outsourcing it..."

"Well, I can ask her. She might well trade us for the recipe itself."

"We'll see what happens. And if Clarita comes through on the homework thing you'll have more time to work on the beads, among other things..."

"Mm-hm! Great big string of bone beads."

"It's gonna be so cool. All your projects are really cool. --I realize it's kind of weird that I'm actively excited for this, but then, I am pretty weird." 

"It's weird but rather bracing! And it's nice that you're interested in hanging around the shop while I'm doing stuff."

"Do you think you'd have trouble working while the killbox was going on outside?"

"Probably and also if something gets away from you I'd rather not be cornered."

"That makes sense. El, do you have opinions about scheduling--" 

"I didn't have a timer on it last time, do you have a ballpark of how long you'll want to go at a stretch?"

"Well, longer than that, if there's someone with shields behind us so I don't have to freak out about the possibility of anything small getting through. I could go for hours at a time."

"Huh. What do you say after classes before dinner and then when we knock off we go eat?"

"Sounds good to me! --Probably a stop by the showers first." 

"All right, so leave fifteen minutes turnaround before dinner."

"Yeah, it won't necessarily always be messy but there's some non-overlap between the really juicy mals and the ones with, like, acid blood or poison or whatever, I assume we'll sometimes get horrible gunk on us." 

Lucia presents the proposed schedule to Clarita. Clarita looks like she would really like to push for something a little more intense, but she looks at Lucia and sucks on her teeth and doesn't say anything. 

Shannon is enlisted to brew healing goo. She is delighted to accept Lavinia Walsh's healing ointment recipe in exchange for being on-call to brew great heaps of it, but bargains them up to the-mana-it-takes-to-brew-it-plus-ten-percent per batch. 

Clarita recruits a handful of seniors to handle shielding the end of the killbox. None of them are enclavers, but they've all got enclaver-grade shield-holders; Lucia notes this to Clarita and Clarita gives her a sufficiently "hm yes that sure is a thing" answer that Lucia is sure something's going on, but she doesn't, actually, know what kind of deal it is that Clarita brokered or which enclave or enclaves she brokered it with. On reflection, she doesn't especially care. 

"Clarita," Lucia remarks to El at one point, "would really rather people remember that she pulled this off, than that she got saddled with Todd Quayle."