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.
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."
"I do, actually! This will be rather horrible, if you want to stand back a bit." And she chants in Latin and the flesh melts, leaving a mostly intact argonet skeleton clean and dry on the floor with only a few tendons to keep the bones connected in place.
Lucia stands back, and then throws her hands in the air victoriously.
"El, I love your horrible spell repertoire."
Lucia helps. "I mean, I definitely also want you to have non-horrible spells, but the number of times you've repurposed a horrible spell to do something cool is just really excellent. I would be much less in favor of those spells in someone else's hands I'm quite sure."
"Well, someone had to write them. Sometimes I get them in books that are at least meant to look like they were bound in human skin."
She makes a face. "I'm not in favor of that. But, like, it's not news that people sometimes do horrible things and write horrible spells."
"Yeah-huh." Bones transported! Hide transported! It's good that the project lockers borrow space from each other and Aadhya's sneaking a few cubic inches off every other student who isn't putting much in theirs at the moment!
They can stash some of the bones in Lucia's locker and Liu's and El's, too, even borrowing space you could not fit an entire argonet skeleton into one locker.
"I think we're going to have to haul some of this up to our rooms, too."
"Yeah, you're not wrong. I think we can get it to the point of only needing one trip though."
"Yeah..."
Lucia does a quick poke through the cabinets, stabbing a few mals hiding there, and turns up a ball of sturdy twine that they can use to tie things together to make the one trip easier.
The fact that people definitely see them hauling big ol' bones up the stairs does not stop one of the New York seniors from coming over to their table at dinner and informing Lucia in a simultaneously concerned and outraged tone that El was seen with an incredibly ominous column of darkness, and also a zombie argonet.
Lucia stares at her until she starts looking uncomfortable.
"--Those were both me," she says, in the slow tones of someone talking to an idiot or a very small child. "I got some stuff on me when I killed the argonet, so El gave me a concealing cloud of darkness until we could get back up to the junior hall to deal with it," the "stuff" being mana and glowyness, but she doesn't need to know that, "and the argonet wasn't a zombie, I was just dragging it out of the maintenance shaft so we could harvest its body parts. Aadhya is going to make me a sodegarami out of its teeth."
"...Oh," the senior says awkwardly, attempting to pretend that this isn't incredibly embarrassing for her, "what...happened to the maintenance shaft?"
"El and Aadhya put the wall right back with the phase-change spell. Anyone who wants can go see the result."
(The conversation is happening loud enough that a small handful of Sanskrit-having seniors, including some but not all of the ones at the original demo, get up and leave, presumably to go look at the wall.)
"Good...for you?"
"Yeah, see, I get better allies when I pick them. Shoo."
The senior takes some more shooing before she leaves, but she does, eventually, shoo.
"Sorry about that," she says to El.
"Woe," she snorts, and then turns to Aadhya. "Do you think any of the argonet parts will be useful for the harp?"
"Excellent. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, between that and the beads I know you've got a pretty full workload."
"Worst case scenario I'm sure I'm in a better position to fight my homework than most people are, but, uh, let's not let it come to that. I'll talk to her if it becomes a problem."
Lucia has a harder time doing her own homework than she would have if she had been doing it all along, but she's reasonably good at bullshitting from extended exposure to New York, so she manages to muddle through.
The four of them end up spending a lot of time down in shop, Aadhya using tools less convenient to bring to someone's room than a drill, and all the space, to work on the harp and the beads and the sodegarami; the other three of them lend her an extra pair of hands when one is called for, and otherwise do their homework, although Lucia gets up every five minutes or so to double-check the area for mals using her shininess spell.
Lucia is between checks, and Aadhya is doing fine on her own, when a murmuring of voices becomes audible from the hallway outside.