"- Aadhya, Liu, if you guys wanted to ditch, I'd get it -"

Liu shakes her head emphatically.

"Yeah, no, what?" says Aadhya. "I don't want to be standing next to anybody else when whatever you're going to do goes down, that's going to be the best place."

"Unless people start trying to assassinate us."

"If people decide to try holding your allies hostage we might have to talk. But everyone knows me and Liu don't go in the killbox with you guys."

"That's fair." 

One round of box breathing. Set-yourself-right. 

"I wonder if it would be better to check the mirror for further awful revelations now, before we get too attached to any plans, or later, when we've had a little time to recover from this one." 

El knocks peevishly on the mirror. "Don't want to get attached to one stupid plan only to have to jettison it for another stupider plan."

"Hail Galadriel, bringer of death!" 

"Oh, come on, at least tell me I'm going to gruesomely murder my father and bring the news home to my grieving mum."

"You will gruesomely murder your father and bring the news home to your grieving mother." 

Um!?

"A maw-mouth got him," El clarifies. "Mum was a few weeks gone with me already at the time."

"Man I was gonna say that I wanna kick the guy who built the Scholomance, but then I remembered that Patience got him, too, or maybe it was Fortitude, and anyway there isn't anything about this situation that doesn't suck??? I would like to replace this situation with one that doesn't suck but unfortunately I'm mostly just good at killing things." 

"You should check that it doesn't just say anything you ask it to say, El."

"Yeah, fair point. Hey, tell me I'm going to... lay waste to... Mount Everest."

The mirror is silent. 

"Fucking grand."

She flops backwards. "Okay. Graduate, do a lot of Golden Masonry experiments, kill a shitton of things, come back in, kill Patience and Fortitude one way or another, maybe take a vacation and yell at Li Shanfeng. Or something. Details variable depending on the outcome of the experiments. I think that this is the least terrible plan so far."

"We should have a plan for if Patience or Fortitude grabs one of us on our way out and we have to kill it right then."

"--Yeah, there's a thought. Umm. I mean, we wouldn't have to kill the whole thing, necessarily--oh, hang on, the ice thing, that could be useful." 

"Yeah, I guess we could just take off a few layers."

"Ice thing?"

"I can't get mana out of frozen things--there was a grogler, El had to kill it and then she scolded me and I learned better ice spells. It seems like maybe this generalizes to normal maw-mouths? It doesn't seem like the most useful thing ever but, like, if there's a spell to freeze yourself without dying, that seems like it could help, in this specific situation? I'm just spitballing, 'flense the maw-mouth' is unambiguously more practical. For her and me specifically."

"I assume people have tried freezing maw-mouths. Before getting eaten."

"--I mean, I don't think me getting frozen would stop me from eating things that were not themselves frozen? This is a very weird limitation and I would have so many questions if there were anyone it seemed like a good idea to ask them of!" 

"Anyway. Flense the maw-mouths a bit, come back to polish them off later." Sigh.