El, who has been having occasional crying jags off and on in between napping and staring into space, accepts the logic of this and will attend dinner. She is not really paying attention to what she puts on her tray or where she sits.

Lucia makes sure both she and El have trays full of things that have not been horribly contaminated. She neglects to squish a little mal that slinks in through a drain, takes one look at her, and flees. Normally she'd pounce before it could get away, but she's seriously freaked out. 

"Did she miscast something that rebounded?" Aadhya asks.

"I don't think so...maybe? She killed something, I don't know what, she was surrounded by horrible slime when I found her." 

"And she won't say?"

"She hasn't spoken a word since then." 

At least she's eating. Not very enthusiastically, but who does?

"...You think it might be a miscast? Can you miscast something and still, uh, make something go splorch?"

"Well, I don't know, but what else would it be?"

Lucia carefully--moving slowly, so that El can slap her hand away and tell her to piss off, if she wants to be that lively--reach for the crystal around El's neck to check it. 

She hisses. 

"Watch her for a minute," she tells Aadhya, and stands up, and casts her tracking spell again, and strides over to a corner where a nest of flingers is hiding, and whacks the ceiling tile they were in with her sword until they come out. 

She strides back towards El, dead flingers in her wake, and shoves the mana into her. 

El stands up sharply, arms flailing, with a yelp, and projects some kind of magic out of her in all directions. Then she sits back down hard and glares at Lucia.

What

What!?!?!?

"--Wha--what was that--"

"That was you not asking first!" El snaps, looking down at her tray and picking up an apple to viciously bite into. "I'm fine."

"Okay, great, glad to hear it," not gonna mention that she was previously MUCH LESS FINE, "but what was that thing you did, and can you teach me to do it." 

"What, the spell? I learned it on the Simple Gifts song but you don't actually usually need an incantation. Or mana. You just - decide to put yourself right. You're all very lucky that was what came out of me when I was dodging mana poisoning."

She contemplates the mortal flame spell, and says, "Yeah, okay, I am, uh, badly calibrated about how much a normal person can hold, I apologize for that." 

"Well, I am abruptly and violently fine, so I suppose no harm done!"

"I am also abruptly and violently fine! I mean, I was, uh, okay, before, but--I feel really good." 

She glances around at the table at the other recipients of El's Fineness Blast, lingers on Liu's fingernails for only a moment before skipping along to the next one. 

"I assume it's less dramatic if you don't overpower it?"

(Liu is crying, but she's not doing it in a way that suggests she'd like attention drawn to that fact.)

"Most things are. Admittedly, most things have worse consequences when you do." 

"Yes, it is less dramatic if you don't overpower it." Apple. Apple in face.

"Well, I for one am not complaining," she sighs happily. "El, have I mentioned lately that you're really cool?"

"I don't know, I lose count of these things when sorting my vast drifts of fan mail," she murmurs, but her heart's not in it.

When they've both finished dinner, Lucia follows El out of the cafeteria to quietly ask, "How bad is the loss of that crystal?"

"I think there are more like it in my room," El says. "I came in with fifty."