- Annisa's tripwire pings her from fast asleep and she's on her feet with a dagger in her hand springing at the thing before she has time to think, because it's best to head these things off at the pass.

(The room is entirely dark; it has wards up, of an unfamiliar kind; it has a box in the corner practically glowing with mana, internally complex, looking to mage-sight like nothing so much as a very very tiny Heartstone). The dagger is very magic. The girl wielding it is not Gifted.

- all right, this is not what Leareth was expecting at all, but this Gate-method is still in the experimental phase and so the unexpected is not actually all that surprising. 

Leareth is wearing several shield-talismans, and within a fraction of a second he has them at full power and is throwing more mage-energy into his native personal shields as well. 

He casts a mage-light too, because that just seems useful, and he extends Thoughtsensing and tries to read the un-Gifted girl's mind. 

What the fuck that's a person which makes no sense but she rolls for her box, because even if it's a person and even if the person's not hostile (exceedingly unlikely) she's about to need it - is he trying to poach? A senior then probably who isn't ready to graduate fuckfuckfuckfuck because this fight is going to kill her too even if she wins it.

She touches the box and tugs all the mana in it into the best shield she can muster - it's a LOT, three years' worth, hot and bright and actively painful to handle like this even aside from the thing where doing it is, you know, condemning oneself to certain death - but not here not like this one more year the horse can learn to sing -

What. 

Leareth can sense the magic, but it's not at all like anything he's seen before. He tries to reach out with the communication spell, and it - doesn't work. Not because the distance is too great. It feels like it's failing earlier than that, in a way he can't quite parse. 

...In fact, his Othersenses are - mostly failing to pick up on anything at all more distant than a few feet? There's...another mind, maybe, outside of this room...but even that is hard to reach for. He has the deeply uncanny sense that he's suspended in nothingness. 

Focus. Orient. Which, first of all, means trying to open communications with - whoever this is, whose...bedroom? he's apparently landed in. 

:I am not going to hurt you: Leareth sends, or tries to. :...Where is this?: 

You have already killed me, you moron. 

She stands up, holds the shield - are they doing introductions now - what -

- where are her stimulants. They're in a neat case attached to the wall above her desk. She very swiftly opens it and takes a tab of cocaine and snorts it just in time for the first mal to ooze under the door. Oozes. Fucking oozes. She has a shaker of enchanted salt, much too small for this task; she throws it and shouts the spell in English that intensifies it, shrivels the ooze where it lies. The next thing is clawing at the door. She sets the shield in her shield-holder and reaches for her shortsword.

Apparently Leareth has a problem. 

...Several problems, actually, given that his first reaction is to try to Gate out and this doesn't work. The search-spell just - fails, in the same baffling way that the communication-spell did. 

He flings up a shield over both of them instead, and then attempts to put some additional shielding over the door–  ...what IS that on the other side, it's shredding the magic of his shield with really remarkable effectiveness. 

:Are we under attack?: he tries to ask the local girl.   

You really are a genius, aren't you. No, they just thought it sounded like we were having fun and they wanted to join. What time even is it - 3:23am. Okay. Two hours and forty minutes, that's not - categorically unsurvivable, especially not if lost moron is helping -

He is apparently stuck in here for the foreseeable future, so Leareth is obviously going to help! Efficiently. He's not sure why she has such a precise timeline in mind, for the attack, but he needs to pace himself for that. 

There's enough magic going on with her door that it's somewhat hard to reach past it without a better anchor. Leareth reaches into a pocket for his scrying-artifact - it's not far, but it'll still cost him less in reserves if he uses it - and tries to scry what's on the other side of the door. 

At least six different highly magical things none of which would be out of place in the Pelagirs and all of which look out of place in this - sort of institutional looking hallway. One is mostly fiercely clawed bony hands, scraping away at the spells on the door; one is mostly teeth, writhing and reforming and biting; two are flying, and battering the door with - acidic spit? And there's something vaguely like a vicious, twisted dog, and something swinging from its anchor in the hallway, hitting the door with a resounding bang every few swings. 

Casting through an apparently-warded door using a scry to aim isn't trivial, but Leareth has a lot of practice. He'll try levinbolts on them first, less risk of damaging the local infrastructure, then go to setting them on fire if that doesn't work, and if neither works he can try something subtler. 

This takes up most of his concentration, but he can still manage Mindspeech, even to someone without the Gift. 

:- I think I am missing context. Are we in the Pelagirs? What is this place?: 

Most of them are fryable; swinging one doesn't seem to mind at all. Some more are approaching the door, too, though they shy off slightly when they see the ones at the door getting fried, forming a horde a short distance down the hall so they can dash in all at once.

Annisa resents adult wizard immensely about her now-empty mana store and the fact they're in this situation in the first place, even though he's doing very impressive magic and the critters haven't even touched her shield yet. We're at school. You know, the Scholomance, the Sekolahir, it's got fifty other names but I'm not languages track...

Can the swinging one be trapped in a force-net instead? 

:- I do not recognize that name: Leareth sends, while he's attempting this. :Though possibly we should deal with the attack first and discuss this later: 

The horde charges the door. 

There's not gonna be a later, buddy, unless you can handle two hours and forty minutes of that. - Two hours thirty five.

The massed charge actually makes it much easier to hit them all at once; Leareth just needs to bring up a sheet of frozen mage-lightning, a yard short of the door, so they all run into it head-on. He can separately attack any that are tough enough to make it past. 

:- So far they are not that difficult to take down, but I am going to eventually be tired. Are there any nodes here to draw on?: He can't sense any. Just the - whatever it was that she drew on for her shield, the power now shimmering painfully-bright around her. 

The concept comes across as 'giant lakes of mana that no one lays claim to'. She hates this guy. 

No. No, there are not. 

Well, when he's too tired to fight she can slit his throat and will then no longer be breaking curfew so the mals will probably lay off, except the ones who're already here and have nothing better to do.

She is not going to like it if he asks her whether he can pull some mage-energy from that ridiculously overpowered shield she's still holding, is she. 

Oh well. Leareth will just try to be very very efficient here. This - probably isn't the worst fight he's ever been in? (Just the most unexpected and confusing.) He wraps the sheet-lightning into a half-cylinder around the door, and then checks back on whether his force-net is working at all to pin down the swinging monster-thing. 

:- At worst, I have redundancy on my personal shield-talismans and can give some to you: he offers. 

The force net is working fine. The only things braving the lightning so far are some ooze-things and some incorporeal things, visible to Thoughtsensing and mage-sight but not to ordinary vision except as a thin cloud. 

Why, though. 

I see, she thinks back, though probably if it's mind-reading it's not selective and that means probably he's reading all her opinions, oops, though they cannot possibly be surprising. She won't kill him if it looks like they have a realistic prospect of winning?

Leareth would not normally think that a random teenager had any chance whatsoever of killing him (even temporarily), except that this particular teenager, despite her apparent lack of any Gifts, seems to be able to wield an absurd quantity of mage-energy? 

He tries setting the ooze-things on fire. 

They don't seem to mind this! Now they are moving across the ground like moving flaming puddles of petroleum, slipping under the door.

"Dust of the sea, in you the tongue receives a kiss from ocean night." Very rapidly; the meaning is barely in her mind at all. They shrivel. 

- what. She - that was definitely magic - but Leareth can't tell how she did it at all. 

Also there are still the incorporeal things. Which do show up to Thoughtsensing, apparently, so - maybe Leareth can try throwing some compulsions at them to STOP and STAY OUTSIDE?