She puts her hands over her ears, though the chances of her actually picking anything up from even repeat exposure are pretty low.

And Annisa pumps a lot of mana into her father's spell for pest control, which tugs things out from whatever corners they're hiding in and mashes them into a paste in front of you. He'd do in in the mornings as Annisa got older, to show her - see, there's more coming, you're getting tastier. Though at home it'd also get a lot of fruit flies and mosquitos and cockroaches. Here the only thing it gets is the little fleeting thing behind the desk, which, mashed into paste, is barely recognizable; it looks like it had more than four legs and some beetlish wings?

And she's as drained as the moment she arrived here. She's going to have to get more efficient than that. "On the bright side," she says, "we can stop checking so closely, that gets the whole space when I do it."

"Well, that's useful. Let's make sure that they don't have anything to hide behind next time."

"Let's." And they can disassemble a second desk.

With the same size screws, even.

She hands one over. "We'll see who got the better end of that deal. I'm going to use the broken one as stray agglo bait."

"Well, if that works out for you I'll break one." She pokes it gently with the end of her screwdriver. "Shouldn't be hard, I'm not sure these are sturdy enough to hold up the reconstructed shelves I was planning on."

"Agglos only like authentically broken screws. They can taste the regret on them. Screws broken on purpose smell like a trap." Hopefully she's grinning broadly enough to be obviously kidding. "Shall we go to dinner?"

She nods and heads for the door. "I shall have to pass out my screws to particularly careless-looking freshmen and then ask for them back when they break." 

"Well, you only know one freshman with a demonstrated screw-breaking track record." And then she falls silent, even though this seems like camaraderie building, because in the hallways they should shut up and look for mals.

"Better tell that one you've got a fresh screw in your room," she says when they see an agglo scurrying away, but otherwise the trip back to the cafeteria is uneventful.