Lucy backs out with her, nodding and humming and putting her hands over her ears. 

It's so seldom El has the budget for things like this. It's spendy even on borrowed mana, except she doesn't want to stiff Lucia Walsh-Rhys of her lightshow, so actually it is perfectly economical in its way.

Incantation is incanted. Mortal flame goes up with a

WHOOSH

"That was awesome!" Lucia exclaims, throwing her hands in the air. "Even if the mal was already dead. I'm so gonna learn that spell. When it's almost time to graduate and I don't have to care what opinions the void has on what languages I know."

El takes a little bow. "May you not toast your own face off in the process."

"I'm good at aiming the boom in the right direction!" she protests. 

"In languages you really do know, sure."

She opens her mouth. 

She closes her mouth. 

She slumps. 

"Dammit." 

"There, there, there's a fair bit of time left in this academic paradise, you can pick up something mortal flame's been translated to if it is your fondest ambition."

"I don't know about fondest, but pretty fond. Do you have a recommendation. Besides, uh, Marathi? I'm not philosophically opposed to Marathi but--" it would be rude to say she's never heard of it before, even if it is true "--something more people here speak would be better," okay cool that one's probably only slightly rude.

"I'd bet it's made the rounds through a fair few Hindi dialects but I don't have a cross-reference with the copy of the spell I got listing whether it's ever made it into Spanish or what have you."

"Fair enough, I'm sure someone I ask will have a good answer."

"And they'll give it to you, too, anything for Santa Lucia," El mutters.

"--Hey, I pay people for things!" 

"I bet you do, and you're everyone's favorite customer too. Not that I have any room to complain, I suppose," she shrugs, gesturing at her slowly cooling room, now pristine of vermin and soul-eater slime.

"Okay, look, one time I found the chapel and I asked someone if there was an actual Santa Lucia and it turns out there is and she wasn't a monster slayer or anything, so, it's--not a good nickname."

"I didn't have enough Anglican pablum forcefed me to know what she did do. Something saintly, I presume."

"Ran around a catacomb with candles in her hair, apparently."

"Gosh. They'll just make any lunatic a saint, I suppose."

"I got the impression that this actually accomplished something but I mostly stopped listening after 'not a monster hunter.'"

"Well, I suppose then I shan't call you Santa till you put on candles or a fluffy hat with a pompom, one or the other."

"--Okay, that one's actually sort of appropriate, I do give people presents."

"Thank you for my presents, Father Christmas," says El with a mock bow.

"You're welcome," Lucy giggles, and fixes the last bit of door, and runs off to go murder another mal with a jaunty wave goodbye. 

What a bizarrely friendly interaction. El feels a little like she has bitten into something that tastes objectively delicious and also so unlike what she was expecting that it reflexively revolts her, like chomping into a tuna sandwich and getting a mouthful of chocolate mousse.

But her room is clean and she has a whole jar of the healing salve and she has a little spare mana to feed into a crystal even if she doesn't have a soul-eater husk for Aadhya. All is well, all things considered.

El is sitting in a more advantageous spot tonight than normal. 

Lucia hadn't paid particular attention to her before, but she tries to keep tabs on who, like, exists. (Someone ought to mourn the ones who stop, and as with so many other things, it's her who has the slack to do it.) She's friendly, but she doesn't have a lot of specific friends; the other New York kids are...they expect her to be New York, in a way she isn't and never will be, and everyone else is--well, yikes, El is the first person Lucia's dared to say please don't call me Santa Lucia to. 

Not that the ones who mean it sincerely say it to her face, generally, but she's overheard plenty. And--just being New York would be bad enough, would be this whole weight of privilege and power that would mean she had to step on eggshells not to step on everyone who wasn't. And instead of New York she's Lucia Walsh-Rhys, which is better in approximately every way but not actually less weighty. 

But El told her off for kill-stealing her. 

And El is shiny, in a way that mals are and poor Yi Liu isn't. 

So Lucia is paying a lot more attention to her than normal. 

She's quiet about it, though. The fact that El looks a little sturdier than an eggshell doesn't mean she wouldn't be inconvenienced by having a massive elephant-bulk of careless Lucia slung over her, and also El did not, in fact, act like she wanted Lucia around the last time they talked.