Lucia Walsh-Rhys is many things. Impetuous, stupidly heroic, generous to the point where anyone else wouldn't survive it. From New York.
Busting down El's door to get at this soul-eater.
Lucia Walsh-Rhys is many things. Impetuous, stupidly heroic, generous to the point where anyone else wouldn't survive it. From New York.
Busting down El's door to get at this soul-eater.
"Ugh, I don't know. When are the fewest seniors down in that area, since you're worried about them?"
"We could practice in the shop and then once you've got it down we move on the wall when there aren't a lot of seniors around?"
"Cool."
Lucia goes down with them to the shop; she doesn't have a role in the actual wall-making, but she alternates prowling for mals (and seniors) with flipping through her Sanskrit flashcards.
Plan A is that once the wall comes down she'll try to harvest as much argonet as she can; plan B, if it comes to it, is to fend off any seniors who would like for the new wall not to go up.
El and Aadhya take several tries to get into the rhythm of the steel manufacture but then are giggling and doing it really smoothly.
Aaaaaaa the phase-change spell is so cool. Lucia bounces in enthusiasm.
When the wall comes down, the argonet's head is even more gruesome than it was in life. Scavenger mals scurry away and out of sight when the light of the corridor illuminates their feast, but the ragged holes they left in the flesh of the dead creature give it an extra layer of the macabre.
Also it smells bad.
"...Does it need to be a whole eyeball, or will vitreous fluid do?" she asks, inspecting the collapsed ruin of one of the argonet's eyes that some scavenger had been at.
"Yeah, fair enough." She starts cutting out intact eyes. "What I'm planning to do is to harvest as much as I can reach from here, and then try to see if it's possible to drag this any farther out--it's possible dislodging it at all will make it fall back down, so I'm not going to do that straight off, but I can't get at any claws from here."
"Yeah, I know we might not be able to get everything. It's a great haul even if all we get is stuff off the head. Ooh, teeth, I want teeth."
She sets the eyes she's cut out so far in a pile of orbs and trailing nerve and muscle, and then starts prying out teeth. "Man, these things are sharp," she says appreciatively, scoring one across a bit of flesh they don't need.
"Nice." She's not sure what Hyacinth Castle is going to use them for but she bets that will be cool, too.
Once she has all the teeth out that she can reach from the argonet's current angle she starts pulling scales, keeping an eye out for any eyes she missed the first time.
Once she has the head more-or-less stripped of externally appealing objects, she says, "Okay, I'm going to try to pull it out now. Unless you have a spell to temporarily reanimate it or something that'd use less mana, El."
"If you want an undead argonet I can probably get you one but I don't actually have a spell for it off the top of my head and I don't think that would make it less stuck than it currently is."
"Well, it climbed all this way somehow. Anyway, I was just checking."
She makes sure the piles of useful stuff have been shoved out of the way, and then cups her hands over her mouth to muffle the words from Aadhya and El's hearing, and starts incanting in Mandarin.
She stumbles, and has to hang onto a doorway, but the argonet slowly, and with a horrible slurping noise, starts oozing out of the shaft and into the hallway.
Someone pokes their head out of shop to see what the noise is, then pales and runs up the stairs. Lucia ignores him, too busy focusing on ensuring that the argonet gets yanked out of the wall instead of her getting yanked into it.
She gets most of the (extremely horrible) corpse out, but one of the legs and part of the tail drop away into the shaft, too gnawed on by scavengers to hold on through that much jostling. Once the place where the wall should be is clear, Lucia releases the spell and says, "Okay, put the new wall up, hurry."
Lucia gets to work butchering the corpse.
It ends up taking longer than putting the new wall up, which is hardly surprising, given the size of the corpse. But once she's got the hide and therefore scales off, she wonders aloud (wiping sweat off with an only mildly horrible forearm, "I don't suppose you happen to have something to get rid of the flesh but leave the bones clean and intact."