"More like it--what happened?"

El gives a bit of a shudder and doesn't answer, continuing to their hall.

Well, she's not going to press El further, but also, this does not decrease her ambient level of what the fuck. 

She filled two of those things, the night she stayed over, and she's had one 'round her neck since. She didn't need much more than that one to take out the four awful things in the library! What did El kill? 

She follows El back to her room unless El tells her not to. Like, explicitly, not just being snippy about it. 

El doesn't shoo her. Just takes out her crystals to assess the damage. There's another cracked one in there, and nineteen of them are drained as opposed to merely unfilled; there are a few still full, though.

Lucia does not ask "What the fuck did you kill!?!?!?!?!?!?"

She's thinking it very hard, though. 

She tries to keep that out of her voice when she asks, "These are networked?" 

El nods.

"Is the one you gave me still networked to the rest of them? Or, like, could you re-network it relatively easily." 

"This one," she taps the cracked one that wasn't around her neck, "was the one that led from the necklace one to the others. They're toast. I have to set up another one to do that, and then get the drained ones looking alive before they croak too."

She nods. 

"That would be a waste." 

She pulls hers--which is very, very low, but not quite drained--off the chain, and sets it down in the box, and picks up one of the drained ones. 

"Thanks," says El tiredly, after a moment of blank silence.

"Whatever happened, it's--really good that it was contained. I won't pry further, but--will you contradict me, if I say that I'm really glad you spent all that mana?" 

El looks at her box of crystals. Shakes her head, very slowly.

"When I found out you get mortal flame when you ask for cleaning spells, I had the thought that you could do my job, if you had the mana for it. And--the job I do is--I'm not going to call it stupid, but being able to do it is very much a luxury. I wasn't going to try to push you into doing what I do, and I still won't. But if you did, at all, I want you to have the mana for it." 

"I'm not mental enough to sneak out after curfew to go hunting."

"--That's not my job, that's refuelling." 

"Well, I'm also generally not mental enough to leap facefirst into melee."

El shakes her head and starts prepping a new crystal to network the batch. It involves singing in Welsh, which she disclaims first.

She nods. 

"...And it is useful to have somewhere to put excess mana that's not my power-sharer. I've been limiting how much I put into the New York pool since sophomore year when I realized some of the other New Yorkers had stopped building mana entirely."

"Did they. Tossers."

"Yep! I still grind their noses in it when they object to me giving mana and stuff to people, like, some of the ones doing it were freshmen, who'll be here when I'm gone."

"It's almost like the thing where some people come in deliberately out of condition to get more mileage out of their calisthenics, except for how it is not."

Snort. "So completely not. My mom didn't do that thing when she was here, she said that even before Field Day it didn't seem like a good bet to be less capable of running away from things." 

"I don't think it's popular, I've just seen it tried."

She gets herself a glass of water so she can sing to the crystal in additional Welsh.

When she's done with that, she reaches into her shirt, and pulls out the book she got in the library to have a closer look.

Huh, a book? In her shirt? She got that from the library, probably...before fighting whatever-it-was?

Yup.

She examines it, opens it up, gasps softly, starts cleaning it up of largely imaginary dust and whispering to it about how lovely it is.

??? ???

It would be… very rude to crane her neck over El’s shoulder. So she will wait a little to see if El wants to exposit.