"I bet!! Even the other New Yorkers are into it and I just dump all my mana into the sharer!"

...That certainly gives her a perspective on New York. 

"Wow, New York's been lucky for longer than the rest of the school."

"Yeah. It's still different now though. They do more spells for no reason."

"I do want people to be able to do as much magic as they like, for any reason or no reason at all." It's still...sad, that New York wasn't being more generous with their largesse, before she showed up. Like, seriously, Bella's neat, but El was the one who gave her mana storage, as a gift, without being asked, and no expectation of repayment above what Kareen was already handing out. Which might, come to think of it, be correlated with being the daughter of the sparkly goodness fairy, but Kareen's not stupid enough to ever say that out loud. 

Anyway, Orion already agreed that El was neat, so there's nothing Kareen needs to hammer home there. 

...Hm.

"Out of curiousity, do you have any thoughts on how to follow the trails of mals making it up from the graduation hall? I've been thinking about it and I really want to clear it out before this year's seniors have to deal with it."

"Huh. ....no idea, sorry."

"I figured probably not, but there was no harm in asking, and it seemed relevant to your interests."

"Yeah! It sounds like it might be a bit much for me by myself, I've only got two arms and one mouth, but with you along I bet we can clear the whole thing, maybe less the maw-mouths."

"Right, ideally we want to extract all the current victims instead of killing them."

"Well, I don't know how to do either of those things anyway so whatever you've got seems fine."

"Still working on that one. But I don't expect to figure out a way down in the next few days, so that's fine."

Okay back to using his words mostly for killing stuff!

They kill so much stuff. It sorta seems like it might be not quite as much as on previous nights, but that might just be confirmation bias propping up the thing where Kareen wants to be meaningfully reducing the mal population. 

Eventually it is morning. It occurs to Kareen that she doesn't know how long El actually ended up staying up and maybe she should offer her something caffeinated. 

El actually slept weirdly well last night but she will take a coffee with her breakfast.

It's good that she slept well! Kareen is going to refrain from thinking about why that might be while El is right there but like. Having an end in sight to a horror that's been omnipresent for presumably your whole life is the kind of thing that might do that. 

It has now been enough days that Kareen feels comfortable advertising for a volunteer to test the whole Orion mal-eating bit. 

Ohhhh that's so tempting but Aadhya is not going to do it EVEN THOUGH El appears to have stayed out past curfew and been fine.

When the line gets to the point where freshmen are coming through, the girl who had to apologize to El in French study group reads the sign, wide-eyed. 

"Orion Lake can--wow. That explains so much." 

"I won't lie, it was a touch enlightening." 

She bites her lip, and looks down at the sign, and back up at Kareen, and blurts out, "Iwouldliketotryitplease."

"I can't take these back after I give them out," Kareen warns, "it wouldn't just be trying." 

"I know! I know. But." She is practically vibrating in place.

Small giggle. "Alright. Oh, is it okay if I fill you up on mana first? Just to check if it bumps your capacity." 

"Yes???" Why would anyone ever say no to receiving mana.

Kareen passes her mana at a steady trickle until Aurélie says stop, and then boops her. 

...Aurélie is going to take her lovely breakfast and go sit down with the other freshmen, and eat. She is not going to immediately run off recklessly. She is going to eat actual food, and then she is going to run off recklessly. 

Huh, wonder where she's off to in such a hurry all by herself.