"No idea what it is?"

"Not with that little light..." She throws a fireball at it. "Oh, it's a death wyrm." 

"...well, I can de-flesh it and then it might fall out or at least make room for stuff to go through it, if we want to keep going today, or we could put the hatch somewhere else?"

"Would de-fleshing it be a lot less mana than crushing it? It wouldn't necessarily be better for the bones to be stuck."

"I think that'd be harder to do without messing up any of the mechanisms in there and leaving some bathroom without plumbing or whatever."

"Fair enough...let's just move the hatch, I don't think that thing's bones are enough less bulky without the flesh on to be worth the effort." 

"Other side of the hall?"

"Yeah." 

She shuts off the honeypot--no getting that out around the death wyrm, no point in attracting mals...unnecessarily...ohhhhhhh. 

She shuts the hatch and peels it off the wall. "I just had a great idea." 

"Oh?"

"Well, we're not getting that honeypot back out around the death wyrm--and until the death wyrm gets unstuck, nothing else is getting up this way. What if we turned it back on during graduation, to distract the mals from the seniors?"

"Stuff'll eat through the death wyrm. I guess if you don't have the hatch on you could bet it'll take them half an hour to get past it and we can come out and kill them all after the mortal flame's run through the halls."

"Stuff will definitely eat through the death wyrm, but it'll take a little time, and the wards, like, exist--actually it'd be neat if we could time it so the mortal flame killed anything that managed to get through--"

"That's very optimistic, we can't be here when the mortal flame comes through ourselves."

"Yeah, that's true. We could run it for, like, the first fifteen minutes, that would give us time to get back to our dorms." 

"That might accomplish something but I'm not sure it would accomplish timing."

"Yeah...if we could set up, like, two honeypots, one on either side of the hall, maximally far away from the route from the entrance to the exit, and turn them on before graduation--have it set up so the main body of the artifice is on this side of the wall, and the mortal flame would take it out, but, like, also fortify the area as much as possible...we should talk to Clarita about this." 

El has no objection to talking to Clarita! Is Clarita handy right now?

Clarita is handy right now! Clarita is very interested in this idea. As soon as Lucia has finished explaining it, Clarita immediately vanishes to talk to some senior artificers. 

And now it is time for showering and dinner!

Some time after dinner, Clarita tracks down the group, which is once again ensconced in the shop. She casts a reservedly impressed look at the in-progress harp, then says, "I've talked to several senior artificers and maintenance people, and we think we have a workable plan." 

"All ears," says Aadhya.

She describes it. 

Over the course of the last week before graduation, the seniors are going to close off every exit from the shop floor to the rest of the school--including the air vents, so it's not going to be a great place to be for non-mal-related reasons, sorry--as thoroughly as possible, except for the stairs. On the day of graduation, a senior is going to go down to the shop level in the early morning, setting up an artifice that one of the artificers had had as a class assignment earlier in the year and then mostly disregarded--a sort of mana fuse, which, assuming they get the amount to use and how fast it burns through calculated correctly, and lay the correct amount--should activate the honeypot setups less than a minute before the seniors are dumped into the hall. Once that's set up, the senior retreats back upstairs and the door into the stairwell is barricaded. 

The idea is that when the mortal flame sweeps through, it should take out any mals which had successfully broken into the shop level, and also the honeypot artifices. Then the juniors can unbarricade the stairwell, and Lucia and El can sweep the shop level for remaining mals. 

"That's going to screw over anyone who needs the shop."

Clarita shrugs, like, less than that roomful of mals would screw over the senior class. 

"Shop finals are nastier than math tests, if people can't get theirs in because you blocked off the floor for a week. Leaving aside whether you care if fifty freshmen die to their basketweaving projects strangling them, they're going to have every reason to sabotage your barricade!"