"There is always that." 

The bad news is that the Bangkok power sharers do not identify the object of a given peril; the good news is that the most frequent Peril Recipient is Sudarat, who is small, cute, and inoffensive. 

That's not good at all! El doesn't want to get attached to a freshman who has a decent chance of not seeing New Year's power sharer or no power sharer! But even when she's pretty sure that the sharer is directing her away from the probable locations of Liu and Aadhya she keeps showing up. For some reason.

Lucia does not comment on this at all when it comes up. 

Instead she gets Aadhya sorted with the remaining banged-up portable fortifications, and they can do the killbox again! Definitely just for mana reasons and not to bleed off more graduation mals. 

They have lots of room for all the mana now! And it's much more fun than pushups, though El does sometimes drop and give herself fifty just to stay in the habit.

Incredibly valid of her. 

And then a couple weeks into term, the very tip of something indescribably awful peeks out of the hatch. 

"- LUCIA -"

Shitshitshit--

She surges forward, mortal flame at her fingertips--her Sanskrit isn't so great she'd do this normally, but this isn't normal--

The fire hits the maw-mouth, and--

Her mana touches it, and--

She loses control of the spell, incinerating half a dozen not-maw-mouth mals as she starts screaming--

Setyourselfright, she remembers distantly, and pulls the spell through trained reflex, and she is not okay but this thing has to die--

More mortal flame, more mortal flame, more mortal flame--

She runs out of mana in all the storage she has on her, and falls to her knees, weeping. 

El steps in front of her. A shield springs up over both of them.

"A la mort. A la mort. A la mort -" She's flicking her fingers at it like she's trying to get water off them.

There is at least somewhat less of it to kill than before the genuinely excessive amount of mortal flame. 

(It dies, and a horrible crushed fetal shape is visible before that, too, melts away.)

Lucia does not appreciably decrease in Crying when all that's left is horrible goo. 

Well, El can wrench the hatch off the wall and turn off the honeypot and hug her.

Hug hug hug cry. 

"I was wrong, I'm sorry." 

Hug hug hug. "Shhh, it's gone. I got what was left of it." She tries to put some mana in her, as long as they're touching anyway.

The mana slides in, easy as anything; it does not seem to improve her state. "No you don't understand--El you don't understand--that's not, the problem--" 

"Is the problem something else I need to kill or should it maybe wait ten minutes!"

Set yourself right. Set yourself right. 

"...Ten minutes," she says, instead of the other thing she wants to say. 

Good. They can sit here on the gooey floor for ten minutes, hugging. El holds the shield for the first three or so and then lets it drop when nothing comes at them.

El is so good, El is so so good and Lucia loves her so much. 

After ten minutes and repeated applications of set yourself right Lucia has mostly managed to calm down. 

"Better?" El asks her, when it's been... probably more like fifteen.

Swallow. "Yeah. I mean--yeah. But--El. El, do you remember when, when I said, that wanting to kill mals was like being hungry--and no matter how much I ate, I was never satisfied." 

"Everyone wants mana constantly! Do you think I'm not wrestling with the temptation to slurp up everything in the sink?"

"Not like this! El, when I--when my mana touched the maw-mouth, it was--it was like a tug-of-war, which of us could slurp the other up first."

"Well, you both lost, because you collapsed and I killed it the rest of the way. So?"

"So me not winning was the point, I wasn't trying to win, I was trying not to win, because then all those people would be screaming inside me." 

"Well, you know what, today I've learned I can do it twice and I can probably do it three times if it comes up. So don't do anything evil, and... let me handle them, s'pose."

Shudder. "Yeah. I was--when I said, if I was a maw-mouth, then I would just let people line up to try to kill me--I haven't--I kill what I eat. As long as I kill what I eat, it's--not fine. I think--I think my dad had to, to kill a lot of--the Hands of Death, maybe he just slorped all the malia off the Hands of Death--I don't know. But. But, actually, my philosophical implications getting way, way worse, is not, actually? The worst thing I learned in there."