Good for you. 

My dad has a theory that the reason mals have gotten so much worse is that all the cheating adds up when the wizard population increases. So--thank you. For not being part of the problem

Delighted to have spared you some work.

Frankly the work I do is, like, the least troubling aspect of the situation.

The notepaper is starting to run out of space. El draws a checkmark in the last blank corner and returns it, expecting that to be the end of it.

The next day at breakfast Lucia does something that she is known to occasionally do, which is do a solo raid on the school supply closet and then bring a huge mal-free haul to the cafeteria for everyone else to pick over. 

El has never gotten to the front of the pack at one of these things before but she does need ink and paper and might as well try. She has a haircut, done herself but in the mirror with the scissors; she hasn't found anything to use as a belt buckle yet, but she's gotten the fabric punctured and crocheted at the edges into a sort of sleeved poncho thing.

Lucia is more careful about looking at El, this time. She glances at her out of the corners of her eyes, doesn't stare at the group she's in. 

Does engineer an open space at the right moment for El to take advantage of it. 

Oh, score. This is pencils, not ink, but beggars can't be -

- can't be not elbowed in the side by some tosser, apparently; she doesn't fall but she stumbles.

Lucia smacks the tosser in the elbow. 

"Be nice," she warns him. 

"I didn't see her," he protests.

"Be careful, then. I don't want my deliveries devolving into a brawl."

El grabs a couple pencils and makes her exit without further mishap.

Good enough. 

It's a long day. She's starting a new language, for mortal flame purposes, and she doesn't actively have trouble with languages, but they're neither effortless mal-slaughter nor something where she can just bribe someone else to do her homework, which means it's harder than most of the things she gets up to on a day-to-day basis, so as a bonus she also spends a few minutes berating herself for being annoyed by something that's still less stressful than the entire rest of the school has to deal with. 

She goes on a nice, cleansing hunt through the freshmen dorms right before dinner, which leads to her eating by herself because everyone is so put off by the stink of something that emitted a lot of noxious but not, actually, toxic, goo when she killed it, and she picks the least safe spot in the entire cafeteria to do it because otherwise someone would take the opportunity of her sitting alone to try sitting next to her, and having someone she doesn't know pretend the smell doesn't bother them when it clearly does, in order to kiss up to her, is like, concentrated essence of what she doesn't like about interacting with everyone except El. 

After dinner, Lucia has a very thorough shower, and grabs a bundle with another pencil and three pens and a notebook, and is lurking in the hall nearish El's room to drop it off, when she sees Jack Westing knock on El's door. 

Lucia ducks out of sight. 

Jack Westing is... a problem. Lucia is pretty sure he's a maleficer. If he is, he's gone straight past Liu's black fingernail stage and is down to the charming stage of a destroyed anima. 

Lucia is pretty sure she hasn't caught every maleficer in their year, let alone the whole school; he isn't necessarily the one who got Luisa, if Luisa was even got by a student maleficer and not a particularly discreet mal. 

She doesn't know what he wants with El, but it's probably not good. 

The safe thing to do would be to bust in and demand to know what he was doing, but, uh--that would be pretty counter to her established policy of not publicly getting Santa Lucia all over El. Unless she kills him, but she's never killed a human being yet and doesn't really want to do it over probably not good. 

She watches. 

(The fact that she is upwind of them does not occur to her as relevant.)

El opens the door at his knock, saying, "Would it've -"

And then he stabs her.

What the fuck!?!?!?

Out of all the problems she'd thought Jack might be, randomly stabbing El was not, actually, on the list! 

Who randomly stabs people in the stomach where they won't even die fast enough to not get off a retaliatory shot. What the fuck. 

Her mind is busy being bewildered, but her body knows what to do; reflexes honed since she was old enough to walk have her dashing down the hall, school supplies abandoned on the floor. 

When she reaches the room, the door is shut. She kicks it open--dammit, that is the second time she's broken El's door, this needs to not become a habit.

Jack is kneeling over El with blood smeared on his mouth, what the fuck?

Both of them look up when the door smashes in, Jack starting to turn and El's eyes rising--good, El isn't dead yet--

Lucia's favorite Boa-Zande sweeps through Jack's neck before he can finish turning. She doesn't look to see whether she severed his spinal cord or if the body is still in one piece; she drops down beside El to assess the damage.  

"Tool chest," El gasps. "Down the left side. Packet. And some - goop - packet first."

She opens the tool chest, fumbles for the packet, opens it and pulls out a thin square of cloth. 

"Wipe up the blood with one side. Okay if it gets dirty. Take out the knife and put the other side on. Goop on top."

Lucia wipes up the existing blood with one hand, holds the other hand over the knife wound, hisses out a quick incantation to slow bleeding, then pulls the knife out, puts the fresh side of the bandage on the wound, pulls a small jar of goop out of her pocket and dumps like half of it over the whole thing. 

El is not conscious to critique any aspect of this performance at the moment.

Okay. 

Cool. 

In retrospect, asking a bunch of questions about maleficers, and paying extra attention to Jack after she saw him sitting with El the evening after the soul-eater incident, may have had consequences. 

...

This is the first time she's killed a human being. 

She thought it would be harder than killing a mal, thought she would hesitate at the last second, would at least try to physically remove Jack from his victim without killing him. 

She is not going to cry about this while El is still maybe not stable. She is going to...use some of the mana she got from killing Jack (she is trying so hard not to think about the fact that she got mana from killing Jack) to fix the door. 

It is, uh, more broken than it was last time. She's not going to be able to get it really usable without, like, raw materials, which she doesn't have. 

She could run to the shop to get them but something would probably eat El while she was gone. She could send someone else to shop except nobody else would be guaranteed to come back alive; she could ask someone else to watch El while she went to shop except that people don't like El so she couldn't trust that El would still be alive when she came back. 

Plus curfew is pretty soon and nobody in their right mind would agree to be in someone else's room at curfew even with Santa Lucia asking. 

And even if she did, somehow, get raw materials Right Now, she probably wouldn't be able to fix the door before curfew. And even if she did, El might still be in too poor condition to leave alone. 

El comes to after a few minutes. She gropes vaguely for her bed.

"Should you be moving?" Lucia asks, mildly alarmed. 

"Oh, good point, I should most likely lie on the floor so I'm easier for the little mals to reach."

"I will kill anything that gets near you."