Snort. "Nah. I kill what I eat; whatever kind of mal I am at least isn't a maw-mouth." 

"Thank God, imagine digesting Jack Westing for eternity."

Brightly: "Thanks! I sincerely hate it!"

"Not as much as hypothetical Jack does, I'm sure!"

"If I were a maw-mouth I would be a lot less 'well, I try not to think too hard about the philosophical implications, but at least fewer people are dead and I've got lots of mana,' and a lot more 'maybe if I hold still and let people try to kill me a lot one of them will succeed, and then we will know how to kill maw-mouths without being literally Li Shanfeng.'"

El mumbles vaguely in response and falls asleep again.

Oh, excellent, she needs the rest with that wound. Even if--totally perfect mom, box full of Radiant Mind crystals, named Higgins--even if that patch was made by literally Gwen Higgins, and isn't that a thought, El will still need rest. 

Lucia ends up entirely filling two more crystals in the box by the time the end-of-curfew bell rings. 

"Would you like one of these as a token of my appreciation," El says in a monotone, sitting up very gradually and holding out one of the full crystals, like she memorized it in between the alphabet and the numbers one to ten.

"Okay," she says, accepting it gingerly. "How are you doing? It looked like you managed a little sleep, at least."

"I will be taking all of my sick days," says El solemnly. She make-and-mends the rent in her ponchoshirt. The stain is unavoidable but at least it's dried and no longer actively attracting mals.

"All of them, huh. Well, I'd offer to ask the teacher to give me your homework for you if we were in the same classes, but oh well."

"He's such a stickler." She sleeps in her clothes, of course, so there's not a lot else to do to get ready for the day. Runs her hands through her hair as a lockleech check; one might have been beneath Lucia's notice. Collects her accumulated homework assignments into her bag.

Time to head down to breakfast, then. 

People stare and whisper, because of course they do. 

People are so predictable.

El sails into the food line, for a value of "sails" that implies choppy weather and a leaking hull. Someone offers her a milk carton, as the good ones are all far enough back to need leaning; she takes it.

Lucia deftly scoops a couple of servings of eggs and then super murders the mal that was hiding in them. She passes one of the servings to El and then starts investigating the raisins. 

The raisins are fine today, except for the ones that aren't raisins, but those are keeping all their venom to themselves till disturbed.

"Thanks ever so," says El, tartly but not acidly.

Shrug. "I was ruining the eggs anyway." 

She sorts the not-raisins out from the raisins, deftly avoiding their attempts to envenom her, and then squashes them. 

El sits across a reasonably quality table from Aadhya, who is noticeably friendlier than usual, which is annoying and useful.

A few minutes later Lucia shows up. 

"Can I sit here, New York is being annoying," she asks quietly. 

"Of course, any time!"

The social rumbles about this eventuality are IRKSOME but El is not in a position to complain.

"The amount of 'you can't date her, she's a maleficer,' made it really awkward to explain that I am not in fact dating you, considering that I first had to establish that they can't tell me who I can't date and also you're not a maleficer," Lucia comments, setting down her tray. "I'm still baffled that people decided to draw sex-related conclusions from my spending the night in your room." 

"Well, if it's taken them this long to realize you might do insane heroism without it particularly fanning your fanny to do so they'll never learn."

"This particular thing has not come up before, that I'm aware, and I overhear people talk about me a lot while I'm stealthily hunting mals." 

"Oh, then perhaps there's hope yet, have you tried a slideshow?"