El stares at the mirror, tells it, "Thank you," and then turns to Lucia with near-panic in her eyes.

"Don't like that, no I don't," she hisses. "The good news is if one of those two tries to come up the maintenance shaft we can just char off the bit that pokes through and slam the hatch shut. The bad news is fucking graduation. Fuck! That's--I guess we're not worse off for knowing--but--fuck!"

"We can't leave it there. We'll have to - we'll have to graduate everyone early, that's all, we'll have to get the entire school out at once and blow it to kingdom come on the way out."

"Yeah. We--I don't think we can do that, without telling everyone, what's going on--how do we keep Patience off while everyone is graduating---"

"- you and me go in first. Maybe with some backup for shielding and anything that needs frozen and lookouts and such, but us first, and you kill everything else and I focus on those. It doesn't take me days. It'll cut it a bit close but if we have enough mana, and you're putting out more the whole time, I will have the worst day of my life, again, but -

- and then everyone else will be turtled up in senior rooms and they'll just walk out."

"Okay. Yeah. We should make plans for the not unlikely case that Bangkok decides they hate us and the power sharer deal is off--maybe if we're extra-diligent about harvesting we can put off telling everyone a couple weeks, get the mana to make Aadhya a bigass diamond before then--hey Aadhya do you think the diamond would work even better if the carbon we compressed to form it came from charred mal." 

It takes Aadhya a moment, but only one, to realize that the conversation has come around to practicalities she is relevant for. She leaves off staring at the mirror. "It wouldn't hurt. I'll ask my void about it tonight."

"Awesome. We can start saving carbonized remnants from killboxes. --I think we have reached a point where it's worth paying people off to deal with our classes for us and start doing the killbox more than just in the afternoons." 

"We should look at what our assignments are in case they're anything relevant, but yeah."

"Excellent point. --Should we tell the enclavers, before everyone else. So they don't get blindsided, if everyone believes us and people turn on them--"

"We don't know what Fortitude matches up to, so, no, let's not tell any of the people whose homes we're planning to destroy with everyone inside!"

"Fair. Ugh." 

She pauses. 

"Man, I have complicated feelings about if something we kill turns out to have been holding up New York. Like, objectively my mom does not deserve to live more than anyone else's mom, but like, at the same time, my mom." 

Hug.

Hug. 

"The mirror might tell us what enclave Fortitude is, but one, I don't think we know nearly enough about most of 'em to figure out any clues as oblique as learning and two, it sorta doesn't matter on account of how many littler ones they've each eaten over the years." 

"- yeah, they could each be holding up a dozen enclaves by now." Shudder.

“What I would like to do is evacuate everyone else before touching either of them, so the enclave kids can warn everyone else to evacuate.”

"And I'd like a pony, but do you have a way to pull that off?"

“Well, not yet, but we might be able to come up with one if the idea’s out in the open.”

"It does have the drawback that telling enclave kids 'we plan to destroy your homes' might not go over well, but I suppose they would be slightly less murderous over it given time to sound the alarm. Your ex-clavemates, though, might be able to act on the Scholomance from the outside, while we're still in, if they don't like the notion."

“—Ugh, that’s true.”

She starts pacing.

”We could graduate approximately like normal, do some experiments in the outside—see if it’s possible to replace a maw-mouth foundation stone with a Golden one—and bully our way in through the gates before next year’s graduation, deal with Patience and Fortitude then…”

"Your plan is to leave the Scholomance and then come back?"

“It’s possible! There’s a real entrance. That’s how most of the mals get in.”

"It's not very appealing but I will give it 'possible'."

“…I wasn’t thinking of going farther in than the graduation hall? We won’t have spent loads of time there to get sick of it?”

"I don't know about you but I became sick of it in here immediately, I just usually try not to think about it."