"Not doing regrettable things while mad seems like the more important skill, there, and you're good at that one." 

"I have a fair number of near misses."

Shrug. "But no hits at all, which is genuinely really impressive." 

"Cheers." Sigh.

Sigh. 

"Man, I really want to scream at a lot of people, and absolutely none of them are in here." 

"Your dad, who else?"

"Li Shanfeng and, like, everyone else who knew what the modern spells were and decided that building enclaves with them was a good idea anyway." 

"Maybe they reckoned the numbers worked out." She spits, maybe to get the pukey taste out of her mouth or maybe because she holds this motive in contempt.

"The numbers could only possibly work out if maw-mouths just killed people. And Li Shanfeng, at least, knows that." 

"Well. Put yelling at him on the to-do list."

"Oh, I will." 

She laces her fingers together. 

"I'm really scared of graduation," she blurts. "I'll come back out in New York, and--what if--there's no way my dad would have done something like this without, without some way of controlling me--" 

"- did he before? Before school?"

"Even before I found this out everybody was low-key expecting New York to use me as a weapon and nobody was surprised he hadn't done that before school. --So, no, but--maybe I'm overreacting--but I'm scared." 

"Can you reflect spells? I know it doesn't work for most people but you and me aren't most people."

She opens her mouth and then stops, thoughtfully. 

"I don't know if I can or not, but I wonder...if I could learn to eat them." 

"Eat the spells? Huh, maybe. We could try it with little stuff."

"Yeah, makes sense. I think now I could..." 

She frowns, and looks around, and reaches into a pile of muck and char and some bits of mal that died before the maw-mouth, and pulls out a squirming, many-legged scavenger. She twists its head off, and drops it on the ground to crush underfoot, and holds up the still-squirming body, and looks at it--

--and it vanishes. 

"Hm. Yeah. I can do that now. Don't love it."

"Where... did it go. Do you... have it."

"Yeah that would be the reason I picked something that could live without its brain for a bit and then destroyed its brain, it's not...suffering...but..."

"Well that's horrific! I guess if it's not bothering you it'll be very efficient on graduation day! Can you get it out if you want??"

"I don't think so! --Also it's not, like, providing me with a constant trickle of mana, or anything, I think it would in fact have to be suffering to do that--"

"Augh."

"I really do not like this situation." 

"You don't keep the ones you stab with a sword or anything, right? So you can - go on doing that. And keep me around if there might be maw-mouths too big for you to mortal flame into ashes with what you have on you."

"I am definitely, one hundred percent, going to keep stabbing things. ...And I'm actually glad that grogler happened because now I have more ice spells and apparently I can't eat frozen things? I am a lot more in favor of being unable to eat things than I was an hour ago!"