"Well, I don't know if the brewing part will be fun, it might be, but getting the materials together wasn't."

"What I meant is that a magic mirror seems like a neat thing to have, however, given your current relationship with prophecy, one imagines it won't come out as well as might be hoped."

"Oh, yeah, I imagine it'll be nonstop fun about how I'm destined to level cities and topple empires and dreck like that. But if I don't make it it will eat me."

"I'll definitely help. For a magic mirror you need...silver...?"

"Mostly that, yeah, I've the whole recipe in my project locker and copied to my binder."

"Cool. Do I even want to know what else you got offered?"

"Well, I don't know, do you?"

"I guess it depends on how well it would translate to murdering mals." 

"My assignments tend not to be discriminating like that."

"I mean, neither is mortal flame? So, like, something that would yank people's bones out of their body would be interesting because you could do that to a mal, but something that would enslave people to you wouldn't be interesting because attempting to control mals instead of kill them is a) less appealing, and b) a bad idea."

"I'm planning to do a repurposing like that to make the silver lie flat by brute force, actually. But no, my other shop project options were strictly man's inhumanity to man."

"Terrible. I mostly just get swords, which are at least useful." 

"Just swords? Not even one suit of shining armor?"

Snort. "I get offered those occasionally, but I'm not artificer track and knocking out another sword is easier." 

"If I can get help for a shop project you absolutely can too."

"I mostly don't offload shop stuff because the shop is a good place to hunt anyway. And the thing that makes chainmail tricky, for example, isn't that you have to do lots of different things, it's that you have to do the same thing lots of times. --But if you think armor would be more useful in general circulation at this point than more swords, then, uh, fair." 

"Oh, I don't know either way, it would just be terribly aesthetic. Personally I have to stay away from the hooded black robes and the cackling and all that lest I fall off my wagon but I don't believe you have this problem."

"Oh, I mostly don't keep the stuff I make anyway. Bought this off a valedictorian candidate," she gestures at the sword on her hip. "The stuff I make is less good, so it mostly goes to people who can sure use a little extra self-defense, but don't have 'sword' as their first response to a mal." 

"Anybody chop their foot off?"

"Not yet! There's still time." 

"Huh, maybe untrained teenagers waving swords around aren't as much a danger to themselves as I thought." Her laundry's rinsed out now. "Spot me in the shower? It's been an age and as far as I know no mals have the courtesy to be repelled in this fashion."

"Sure. Maybe it does, and the school throws 'em at you extra to make up for it, like with the rooms thing." 

"Rooms thing? Upperclassmen being lower?" El has been doing laundry and putting things back on as they come clean but now hangs everything up on the least questionable shower stall wall and gives the spigot a few thumps to see if anything comes out.

"No, I mean how they deliberately told the school to punish people sharing rooms, on account of what was going on before that. Graduates coming out too ripe is a much lesser problem, but I was joking anyways." 

(Nothing comes out of the spigot.)

What if she turns it on?