Lucia is not actually careful to look away when El is showering because, uh, mals, but she is, like, as not weird about it as she possibly can be. 

El is not going to be weird about it either, because, uh, mals, and also Lucia does not seem obviously high at this moment!

"Are we still on hugging terms," she asks, a little more than halfway to the cafeteria. 

"Yeah, 'course." Hug.

Hug!!!!!

It looks like Lucia did not fuck things up irreparably after all. The tension melts almost completely out of her. 

Pat pat.

The next day, during the culling, the killbox runs out of mals before Lucia slams the maintenance hatch shut. 

She retrieves a small mirror from her pocket, and angles it into the dark. Not seeing anything, she creates a small light and tosses it in, watching through the mirror as it falls into the darkness. 

"...I think something's stuck," she says finally. "Like the argonet, but without a recent grogler to use as lube."

"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.