Lucia Walsh-Rhys is many things. Impetuous, stupidly heroic, generous to the point where anyone else wouldn't survive it. From New York.
Busting down El's door to get at this soul-eater.
"I think in certain circles they call that 'kill-stealing'," El says, letting the spell she had ready settle back down into her throat like a mis-swallowed pill. "In addition to breaking down the door, even. Bravo. I'd write you a thank-you note but I'm afraid I'm fresh out of embossed stationery."
"I was terribly excited to kill it. I just love it when extremely powerful and violent things enter my room without permission, you see. More particularly Aadhya Iyer loves it when extremely powerful and violent things leave useful, not melted remnants available to use in her projects! - sorry, am I ruining your bit, let's see if I recall my lines. 'Luciiiiiia! Santa Lucia, my SAVIOR -'"
She pulls a jar of something vaguely pearlescent out of one of the giant pockets of her cargo pants. "Healing salve. How d'you even scavenge a soul-eater for parts, I've fobbed carapaces and stuff at artificer-track kids sometimes but I didn't know you could do anything with an insubstantial."
"I've a spell for disassembling one. Very niche. I will most likely now never cast it unless I have the fortune of a third powerful violent thing entering my room and it happening to be a soul-eater again, and also Aadhya will not be making a wisp patrol our hallway." A sigh, somewhat choked by the stink. "I haven't a recipe that uses goo to turn it into healing salve, but perhaps someone has and will trade me, or will trade Aadhya after she's had her cut at least."
"If soul-eater goo turned out to be useful -" This is a pointless argument. She will stop questioning the gift and take the jar, the whole blasted thing, which is really a very generous compensatory offer though she's heard Lucia brews the stuff by the barrel. It goes on her desk and is wrapped in old homework tied in place with a bit of string to give it a fighting chance should it fall to the ground. And then she will turn to her void and say, "I want a cleaning spell."
The void spits out something at her. She picks it up, looks at it, and hurls it back with unnecessary force. "Try again," she hisses.
"I will bear that in mind if ever I need to clean up soul eater residue with someone else's mana, shall I." The void coughs up another book. "- No! Just a spell to clean! My! Floor! And get rid of the smell! None of this nonsense!" she says to it, shoving the offending book into the void again.
It's so seldom El has the budget for things like this. It's spendy even on borrowed mana, except she doesn't want to stiff Lucia Walsh-Rhys of her lightshow, so actually it is perfectly economical in its way.
Incantation is incanted. Mortal flame goes up with a
"I don't know about fondest, but pretty fond. Do you have a recommendation. Besides, uh, Marathi? I'm not philosophically opposed to Marathi but--" it would be rude to say she's never heard of it before, even if it is true "--something more people here speak would be better," okay cool that one's probably only slightly rude.
What a bizarrely friendly interaction. El feels a little like she has bitten into something that tastes objectively delicious and also so unlike what she was expecting that it reflexively revolts her, like chomping into a tuna sandwich and getting a mouthful of chocolate mousse.
But her room is clean and she has a whole jar of the healing salve and she has a little spare mana to feed into a crystal even if she doesn't have a soul-eater husk for Aadhya. All is well, all things considered.
El is sitting in a more advantageous spot tonight than normal.
Lucia hadn't paid particular attention to her before, but she tries to keep tabs on who, like, exists. (Someone ought to mourn the ones who stop, and as with so many other things, it's her who has the slack to do it.) She's friendly, but she doesn't have a lot of specific friends; the other New York kids are...they expect her to be New York, in a way she isn't and never will be, and everyone else is--well, yikes, El is the first person Lucia's dared to say please don't call me Santa Lucia to.
Not that the ones who mean it sincerely say it to her face, generally, but she's overheard plenty. And--just being New York would be bad enough, would be this whole weight of privilege and power that would mean she had to step on eggshells not to step on everyone who wasn't. And instead of New York she's Lucia Walsh-Rhys, which is better in approximately every way but not actually less weighty.
But El told her off for kill-stealing her.
And El is shiny, in a way that mals are and poor Yi Liu isn't.
So Lucia is paying a lot more attention to her than normal.
She's quiet about it, though. The fact that El looks a little sturdier than an eggshell doesn't mean she wouldn't be inconvenienced by having a massive elephant-bulk of careless Lucia slung over her, and also El did not, in fact, act like she wanted Lucia around the last time they talked.
El is sitting with poor Yi Liu today! They don't have much conversation, but they have enough for other people to overhear. Soon the conversation is both more plentiful and - all about Lucia and how she ~*~saaaaved~*~ El's life, and fixed her door, and gave her mana, and El looks like she wants to faceplant into her macaroni.
Oh no. Poor El. Like, this is slightly hilarious, but definitely in a "poor El" way.
...On the other hand, this is plausibly related to El sitting in a better spot. You win some, you lose some?
One of the other New Yorkers catches Lucia glancing at El and tells her in hushed tones that El is a maleficer. Lucia does not roll her eyes, and extra special does not inform them that if El had been a maleficer she could have taken more mana than Lucia was willing to give when she gave it; New York has learned through necessity to tolerate Lucia giving things away to non-New Yorkers but it reduces the social friction if she doesn't rub it in their faces more than necessary.
Although...hm.
Since the people around her have decided to talk about El anyway, it probably won't hurt to ask a few questions?
That evening, when everyone else is in their rooms just before curfew, she leaves a note just outside El's door.
It has the incantation for a plain English cleaning spell she coaxed out of her maintenance kid, and the addendum:
Sorry about my fanboys. Do you know why people seem to think you're a maleficer?
-Santa
with a little doodle of a Santa hat on top of the S of the signature.
Dear Santa, this year I would like a belt and a shirt and a well behaved pair of scissors.
Is this spell supposed to be so fiddly? It's like a tongue twister and a Rubik's cube had a baby, which I suppose is reasonable if it's meant to more than pay for its own first fifty uses by the time it's learnt provided the wizard doesn't chip her teeth on it first.
I think it's just a convenient label to slap on people they don't like.
She doesn't ask why people don't like her; it's probably the same snippiness that's why Lucia does like her. Or something else, and either way, poking it is unlikely to help.
The next note is atop a bundle of fabric and leather with a pair of scissors that haven't gone bad buried in it.
I tried it and it doesn't seem fiddly at all to me, that's weird.
El has never gotten to the front of the pack at one of these things before but she does need ink and paper and might as well try. She has a haircut, done herself but in the mirror with the scissors; she hasn't found anything to use as a belt buckle yet, but she's gotten the fabric punctured and crocheted at the edges into a sort of sleeved poncho thing.
Good enough.
It's a long day. She's starting a new language, for mortal flame purposes, and she doesn't actively have trouble with languages, but they're neither effortless mal-slaughter nor something where she can just bribe someone else to do her homework, which means it's harder than most of the things she gets up to on a day-to-day basis, so as a bonus she also spends a few minutes berating herself for being annoyed by something that's still less stressful than the entire rest of the school has to deal with.
She goes on a nice, cleansing hunt through the freshmen dorms right before dinner, which leads to her eating by herself because everyone is so put off by the stink of something that emitted a lot of noxious but not, actually, toxic, goo when she killed it, and she picks the least safe spot in the entire cafeteria to do it because otherwise someone would take the opportunity of her sitting alone to try sitting next to her, and having someone she doesn't know pretend the smell doesn't bother them when it clearly does, in order to kiss up to her, is like, concentrated essence of what she doesn't like about interacting with everyone except El.
After dinner, Lucia has a very thorough shower, and grabs a bundle with another pencil and three pens and a notebook, and is lurking in the hall nearish El's room to drop it off, when she sees Jack Westing knock on El's door.
Lucia ducks out of sight.
Jack Westing is... a problem. Lucia is pretty sure he's a maleficer. If he is, he's gone straight past Liu's black fingernail stage and is down to the charming stage of a destroyed anima.
Lucia is pretty sure she hasn't caught every maleficer in their year, let alone the whole school; he isn't necessarily the one who got Luisa, if Luisa was even got by a student maleficer and not a particularly discreet mal.
She doesn't know what he wants with El, but it's probably not good.
The safe thing to do would be to bust in and demand to know what he was doing, but, uh--that would be pretty counter to her established policy of not publicly getting Santa Lucia all over El. Unless she kills him, but she's never killed a human being yet and doesn't really want to do it over probably not good.
She watches.
(The fact that she is upwind of them does not occur to her as relevant.)
What the fuck!?!?!?
Out of all the problems she'd thought Jack might be, randomly stabbing El was not, actually, on the list!
Who randomly stabs people in the stomach where they won't even die fast enough to not get off a retaliatory shot. What the fuck.
Her mind is busy being bewildered, but her body knows what to do; reflexes honed since she was old enough to walk have her dashing down the hall, school supplies abandoned on the floor.
When she reaches the room, the door is shut. She kicks it open--dammit, that is the second time she's broken El's door, this needs to not become a habit.
Jack is kneeling over El with blood smeared on his mouth, what the fuck?
Both of them look up when the door smashes in, Jack starting to turn and El's eyes rising--good, El isn't dead yet--
Lucia's favorite Boa-Zande sweeps through Jack's neck before he can finish turning. She doesn't look to see whether she severed his spinal cord or if the body is still in one piece; she drops down beside El to assess the damage.
Lucia wipes up the existing blood with one hand, holds the other hand over the knife wound, hisses out a quick incantation to slow bleeding, then pulls the knife out, puts the fresh side of the bandage on the wound, pulls a small jar of goop out of her pocket and dumps like half of it over the whole thing.
Okay.
Cool.
In retrospect, asking a bunch of questions about maleficers, and paying extra attention to Jack after she saw him sitting with El the evening after the soul-eater incident, may have had consequences.
...
This is the first time she's killed a human being.
She thought it would be harder than killing a mal, thought she would hesitate at the last second, would at least try to physically remove Jack from his victim without killing him.
She is not going to cry about this while El is still maybe not stable. She is going to...use some of the mana she got from killing Jack (she is trying so hard not to think about the fact that she got mana from killing Jack) to fix the door.
It is, uh, more broken than it was last time. She's not going to be able to get it really usable without, like, raw materials, which she doesn't have.
She could run to the shop to get them but something would probably eat El while she was gone. She could send someone else to shop except nobody else would be guaranteed to come back alive; she could ask someone else to watch El while she went to shop except that people don't like El so she couldn't trust that El would still be alive when she came back.
Plus curfew is pretty soon and nobody in their right mind would agree to be in someone else's room at curfew even with Santa Lucia asking.
And even if she did, somehow, get raw materials Right Now, she probably wouldn't be able to fix the door before curfew. And even if she did, El might still be in too poor condition to leave alone.
"I should very much like to pass out again on a marginally softer surface than the floor and I think between the patch and the goop I ought to be able to make it to bed if you would help me instead of behaving like I've managed to break my neck instead of being simply stabbed."
"Oh, I'm well aware." Stab stab stab. "My dad? The one who's in line for Dominus?" Stab slice blast that thing that won't care if she lacerates it. "He's a maleficer." Very emphatic murder. "I've never asked him, 'hey dad, am I a mal in human form' because I'm pretty sure the answer is yes and I don't want to deal with that."
"I cannot be the only person who likes snippy. I mean, sure, people who aren't from enclaves don't have to worry that anything else is empty flattery, and most of the enclavers I know like the flattery, but--I mean," bitter laugh, "it's not like it's news that I'm nuts."
"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.'"
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.
"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.
"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."
"I'm not so sure of that, myself! The generous milk-distributor in the lunch line was from Manchester, if people are looking to poach you they aren't going to reckon you'll flip to them because of my sparkling wit and not my, I don't even know, unspecified siren charms."
"It's really interesting, how determined people are to fit me into a little box in their head shaped how they think I ought to be. Who sees the crazy lady running around killing mals as hard as she can and goes, 'ah, yes, I bet she'll settle right down to enclave gate guard duty when she graduates,' I wonder."
"My dad can have as much of my consequence as he likes for being Dominus with as long as he doesn't get in my way. But, like, actively going somewhere else, that would involve making some kind of actual commitment, probably, possibly unless I took my mom with me when I left and had a really big public falling-out with New York."
Aadhya is pleased with her analogy! "Like, you know the feeling when you've gotten miles from home and you're on foot in your nice shoes, and it was sunny when you left, not a cloud in the sky, but now you look up and it's overcast and it smells wet and any second now it's about to rain cats and dogs. When you show up that's what it feels like! And I can swap a screwdriver for a few snack tokens with a rainstorm but I guess most people can't."
"My dad thinks that all the little cheating adds up, that the population of wizards going up--wizards who aren't strict mana--is why the mal problem has gotten so much worse over the last few centuries."
I don't cheat either, but nobody with a power-sharer on their wrist ought to get credit for that."
Lucia skips most of her classes to hunt. She's not so philosophically opposed to the enclave-related hierarchies in the school that she doesn't recognize that most classwork is a waste of her time.
She goes to language lab, because you can't pay someone to understand a language for you, and she goes to shop and alch lab, because they're in the deepest parts of the school and she does a lot of hunting there anyway.
She kills things, and the things she kills won't kill anyone else, but they may have killed already. The thing in the eggs got that one senior. They call her a saint but she can't even save everyone.
Wandering around the world randomly murdering things isn't going to save everyone either.
Her fingers itch to pry a panel off the wall, to crawl down to the graduation hall and murder until she's the last thing left alive down there. She bets she could do it. But she isn't certain of it the way she's certain that bussing trays isn't going to kill her, and Mom would never forgive her if she died that stupidly.
She'll wait until her own graduation to clear the hall.
It won't last forever, of course. The mortal flame used to work in the graduation hall, and that didn't last very long at all.
She needs a plan.
Her dad has a plan, probably, but she doesn't trust that it's a good plan. It involved making her, sure, but even if he made her a half-mal hyperpredator, she doubts he had anything to do with her coming out herself. Coming out somebody who would quit killing agglos when she realized they were harmless and so many other things weren't. Coming out somebody who sneaks out of bed at night to brew healing salve to maybe save a few more lives, and the stimulants that let her get away with it.
If her dad had a good plan, he would have told her what it was; and if her dad had judgment she could trust, he would have been right there with Mom bringing her agglos and paralyzed amphisbaena when she was a small child who didn't understand preferences more complicated than killing things, instead of hoping she would spontaneously take an interest in the growing dusty piles of dolls and legos shoved into her closet.
The Oracle of Mumbai was someone who had crossed her mind before, but El's dark sorceress thing dents her hope that the Oracle has a great plan just waiting for someone with power and reasonable priorities to ask for it.
Which doesn't mean Lucia shouldn't go talk to her, at some point. If nothing else, it might be cathartic to yell at her. She could yell, at an adult who's already shown that she cares about other things more than enclaves--hm. Maybe El gets it from her. Well, that's one good thing, anyway...
She needs a plan. She can't just stay in a holding pattern forever. She refuses to accept a place as nothing more than a leaky dike to the bloodshed of wise-gifted children.
(She thinks about Aadhya, and El, and incentives, turning things over in the back of her mind as she hunts.)
"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 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 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."
"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."
"I have to graduate eventually. Can't run for backup then regardless, though, the only way out is through...it's not especially likely before then, but I've never met anything that looked even halfway to shiny enough to scare me off, so my imagination went straight to the top."
And Lucia has just finished her part when the sirenspiders show up, which is good, because she would absolutely have dropped everything to kill them regardless, and this way they don't have to redo the pour, probably.
"Hey, Aadhya, sirenspider bits are useful, right?" she asks once they're all dead and nothing is left but involuntary twitching. "I busted up the main carapaces a bunch but I think there's probably still loads of salvageable material."
Lucia cares a lot about wasting as little of the spider as possible and not very much at all about who gets how much of it. Once she's confident that Aadhya has the situation handled she does a perimeter check and then starts prowling for anything else that might be hanging around.
Lucia spends a lot of time hanging around El, at one point or another, but not all of it; not even all of it that she doesn't spend in actual classes.
She accompanies El on a couple of maintenance shifts--it gets done faster if two people do it, and maintenance shifts are kind of dangerous.
But she still spends a decent chunk of her time hunting on the lowest levels of the school.
She's doing that when her power-sharer starts screaming at her that a big ol' chunk of New York is imperiled in the library.
She makes for the stairwell and bolts, taking the stairs two at a time, muttering a spell to go faster--if New York is in trouble in the library, that's--that's really bad, the library is the safest place in the school, and New York is never the lowest-hanging fruit.
There were four of them. The good news was that they had, somehow, gone after New York first--Lucia didn't have time to work out why, she just needed to kill, kill, kill. One of them was an ooze, which was annoying because swords don't work on those. One of them was a manifestation, which swords work on even less.
She had to use up all the mana on her person, and everything in the crystal El had given her after the night of madness.
But nobody was dead.
Nobody in the main reading room, anyway. She had to bully it out of Magnus, but they had come in through the stacks--anyone who'd had a carrel between wherever they came into the library and the reading room was no doubt chunky salsa.
...Where was El?
It wasn't that Lucia expected her to be in the main reading room, or anything. El could've finagled an invitation if she wanted it, probably, on the strength of Lucia's attachment to her and the fact that she still hadn't tried to squash the rumors that they were lovers.
But that meant she could have been in the stacks, and even if it were more improbable than it was, it would have worried at Lucia until she found out for sure.
She had more mana, now, from killing the last of the four, and so she hissed under her breath, "Yes I love to see a tiger from the Congo or the Niger and especially when lashing of his tail."
(She didn't know why El was shiny the way mals were shiny, but it probably meant Lucia could use her favorite mal-tracking spell on her--)
There. A bright glow, in an area that Lucia was vaguely aware had south Asian languages. Lucia bolted.
El wasn't chunky salsa, but something was. Something horrible and rotting and slorping into the drains.
"El? El!"
Lucia makes sure both she and El have trays full of things that have not been horribly contaminated. She neglects to squish a little mal that slinks in through a drain, takes one look at her, and flees. Normally she'd pounce before it could get away, but she's seriously freaked out.
Lucia carefully--moving slowly, so that El can slap her hand away and tell her to piss off, if she wants to be that lively--reach for the crystal around El's neck to check it.
She hisses.
"Watch her for a minute," she tells Aadhya, and stands up, and casts her tracking spell again, and strides over to a corner where a nest of flingers is hiding, and whacks the ceiling tile they were in with her sword until they come out.
She strides back towards El, dead flingers in her wake, and shoves the mana into her.
Well, she's not going to press El further, but also, this does not decrease her ambient level of what the fuck.
She filled two of those things, the night she stayed over, and she's had one 'round her neck since. She didn't need much more than that one to take out the four awful things in the library! What did El kill?
She follows El back to her room unless El tells her not to. Like, explicitly, not just being snippy about it.
"When I found out you get mortal flame when you ask for cleaning spells, I had the thought that you could do my job, if you had the mana for it. And--the job I do is--I'm not going to call it stupid, but being able to do it is very much a luxury. I wasn't going to try to push you into doing what I do, and I still won't. But if you did, at all, I want you to have the mana for it."
"I don't think it's popular, I've just seen it tried."
She gets herself a glass of water so she can sing to the crystal in additional Welsh.
When she's done with that, she reaches into her shirt, and pulls out the book she got in the library to have a closer look.
Lucia dashes out of the room when the bell rings, and goes straight back to her room, where a mostly-neglected Sanskrit textbook is lying on her desk.
For the first time in her Scholomance career, she stays up for hours past curfew studying instead of hunting mals.
When her eyes start swimming, she reluctantly closes the book and belly-flops onto her bed.
She hums Simple Gifts to herself and goes to sleep right with herself.
"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Lucia hisses to Chloe the next morning, on the way to breakfast, while everyone else is oohing appropriately over El's book. "You think I had something to do with this? You seriously think that if I had a line on the Golden Stone Sutras, I wouldn't have started Sanskrit freshman year?"
Chloe flounders. "I mean--it's not like you need them," she mutters. "Your dad is going to be Dominus. You could get your hands on the modern spells if you wanted to. "
"You must be joking. You think Dad would let me go that easily?"
Chloe looks away.
"Dad wants what the rest of you want. Me, as the shining jewel of New York's arsenal. So don't tell me what I don't need."
And then they get to the cafeteria, and Todd Quayle is sitting alone.
Todd Quayle, New York senior, is sitting alone. Seniors never sit alone; freshmen and sophomores will take the opportunity to cluster around them if they can't find other seniors to sit with. New Yorkers--and people from other big enclaves--never sit alone; somebody will always take the opportunity to get an in (unless you're Lucia and deliberately picking the worst possible spots).
Lucia taps the shoulder of a passing freshman. "Hey, quick question, what the fuck?" she asks, gesturing at Todd.
The freshman does not look happy. "He poached."
WHAT.
She marches over to his table and slams a fist on it so hard the whole thing rattles. Flecks of juice spatter up into Quayle's face.
He looks up at her, more out of reflex than volition.
"Explain," she hisses.
(She is trying not to think--no. She is thinking: I don't want to have to kill another human being.)
"Fuck you," he snarls back, which is awfully bold of him, in her opinion. "You think you get to push me around because you're such a big hero? The mals you've killed are nothing compared to what's waiting in the graduation hall, and they're hungry. The mals you kill don't go back with full bellies to feed the rest, and they're coming up. They've been crawling past my room so I can't sleep!"
She's seriously considering slapping him.
"A fucking maw-mouth went past my room yesterday!"
She stills. She wasn't especially moving before, but now all her muscles lock in place.
"Didn't get that one, did you, hero?"
Lucy jerks, starting to turn to the side to race out of the cafeteria, to find it and end it, but freezes again before she can so much as take a step, all the color draining from her face.
The layout of the school unfolds in her head. Supposing a maw-mouth oozed its way up the school, all the way to the library, where would it come out?
On the other side of where El had been from the main reading room.
The horrible blood and worse substances that she had found El surrounded by flash in her mind.
No. Lucia didn't get that one.
She bolts.
She doesn't know if El doesn't want anyone to know she killed a maw-mouth, or if she just doesn't want to talk about it, but if Lucia wasn't pretty sure that the maw-mouth was already dealt with, she would definitely bolt to try to go deal with it.
When she doesn't find it, people will probably assume Todd Quayle was lying, which serves him right, considering the poaching thing.
After the first couple of minutes running aimlessly through the halls, trying to find anything worth killing, she remembers her priorities and starts muttering lists of Sanskrit vocabulary under her breath.
She surfaces in time for lunch, which is good, because she's ravenous.
"Sorry for running off like that," she says, uncharacteristically subdued.
"Maybe, but to hell with him, he shoved a kid into the dark and told himself it was barely murder because Mika would have died in a week anyway, nothing gives Todd bloody Quayle more right to live than Mika or any of the kids you've saved." Hot dog. Chomp.
"And thus you are forced to resort to being sensible." Sigh. "I guess I have to be glad it came up, I don't think sensible is in their repertoires when the first argument fell through. And I wouldn't, actually, be better off for not having been warned of the problem."
"What am I, your pastor? If you have time to ask probably you shouldn't kill anyone. I guess you could lean on his alliance not to let him back in if you compensated for the mana they'd be out, but they must've promised the valedictorian a New York seat. I assume he's not been cut off the power sharer."
"But Jack could have killed you!"
Sigh.
"You're right! You're very right. It just sucks when, uh, being right does not solve all problems immediately, which is the entire human condition, so suck it up, Lucia. Anyway, I haven't told anyone in New York about your mana crystals."
Snort. "If I had to build mana the normal way, Operation: Santa Claus would never have gotten off the ground, and then where would we be? Anyway, everyone in New York believes I'm hopelessly gone on you, if anyone decides you're up to something it'd be, like, mind control."
"Oh, of course! Silly of me."
Lucia wanders into the library, that evening, where El is sitting with--Dubai?--and settles in with her Sanskrit studying. She was going to take a piece of floor, but calling back the sophomore that the senior sent away would have been awkward...oh well.
"--What? After you? Why would he go--after you--okay, what I thought was, if he managed to hurt someone from Dubai, then Dubai would look less safe, thus less appealing, thus less likely that you would, uh, lead me there by the 'nose,' buuuut yeah if that's what he's worried about I guess taking you out would be more direct! Great!" She presses her fingers together in a white-knuckled steeple. "Ugh. Okay, step one, I'm going to go tell him way the hell off. Would you care to join me?"
"That's so valid!"
Lucia storms off to confront Magnus.
The next morning there are all kinds of rumors about what happened in the library that night.
One rumor says that Lucia formally renounced her enclave membership after Todd Quayle tried to kill her to prevent the situation in the graduation hall from getting any worse. Another rumor says that Lucia sucked all the mana out of the New York pool and refused to put it back. A third and particularly buzz-inducing one says that she announced that she and El were graduation allies. A fourth says that she told Magnus that she prevented a war between New York and Dubai by promising to move to the Dubai enclave after graduation. A fifth says that she announced that she and El were going to found a new enclave together and use it to teach orphaned mundane-born wizard children how to be mal-killing machines like Lucia. A sixth claims that Lucia intends to graduate early. A seventh holds that El faked the attack in order to turn Lucia against New York.
Whatever the truth, when Lucia turns up at breakfast that morning, it's in a very bad mood. She stomps through the line, being less careful than usual to spoil as little food as possible while killing every nasty critter hiding in it, and sets her tray down on the table with a decidedly unhappy clack.
"Oh, then I stormed off. It was, uh, before that that most of the stuff happened. --I didn't announce plans but I did point out that, between my ability to gather mana and your Golden Stone Sutras, if the two of us wanted to, we could put up as many enclaves as we pleased. After Magnus accused me of not being a team player and I said I would be happy to play on a team if I found one worth playing on, and he wanted to know where I was going to find a team that met my sainted standards, and I said I could build my own. --I want to be really clear that I am not going to try to corner you into anything because my tongue got loose with my temper."
“My plan for after the Scholomance was always to wander the world, killing every mal I found. But over the course of this year it’s become increasingly clear that that’s not going to solve the problem. Not really going to make a difference, in the long run.”
A Golden Enclave might. Lots of Golden Enclaves might. This is more important than anything I could have dreamed.”
They enter the cafeteria. Lucia looks over at the New York table, sizing them up, trying to decide if she should do this now or later.
...
She hadn't realized what a relief it would be, looking at New York and being able to think them rather than us. She had never been planning to stay--but she hadn't been planning to burn her bridges behind her. It feels like shackles have been taken off her ankles.
She had probably better take the initiative, here.
"Save me a spot in line? I'm going to draw a line in the sand with New York now, get it over with."
She stalks over to the New York table.
Chloe rises to greet her. "Lucia! You left your powersharer in the--"
"Put that away," Lucia says, so coldly that Chloe can't help physically flinching. "It's a valuable piece of artifice; it would be a waste if I had to crush it underfoot to make a point."
"Lucia..." Chloe says, half-concerned and half-pleading.
"Don't Lucia me. Magnus tried. To kill. My friend. Because we were sitting with Dubai!"
"You've been--"
"Todd Quayle poached someone!"
"Don't act like the rest of us are mixed up in that!"
"Has he lost his graduation alliance."
"I don't know!" Chloe throws her hands up. "The seniors don't exactly put looping the juniors in at the top of their priority list!"
"Then guess."
"...Most of his alliance isn't from New York, anyway," Chloe said, instead of answering.
"It has the valedictorian in it. Which means New York's single guaranteed spot. The rest of the seniors could revoke it, say that being on Todd's alliance will not earn that spot. Or they can't, because Todd's parents are that powerful. Do you think either of those cases look good for New York, Chloe?"
Chloe closes her eyes, a look of immense restrained discomfort on her face. "You could bring these things up privately, instead of airing New York's dirty laundry in public," she hisses.
"No, I can't," Lucia says coldly, "I'm not with New York anymore."
"Lucia--"
Lucia raises a finger quickly enough that Chloe jerks backwards, even though its path was only intersecting her personal space and not her person. "What part of Magnus tried to kill my friend do you not understand?"
Chloe sets her shoulders as a flush rises in her cheeks. "Magnus will face consequences."
"Yep. Magnus gets to explain to everyone who cares that he's the reason I left," Lucia says. "I mean, it's not true, not really, but people do love someone to blame, don't they? And they can't blame me, not really, because they can't punish me for it."
"Do you realize what leaving like this would do to New York?" Chloe snaps.
"Yep. I will be leaving you guys in a way better position than, oh, most of the other enclaves, let alone the independents," Lucia says flatly. "You think Todd deserves to live more than Mika? That Magnus deserves to live more than El? That you deserve to live more than Luisa?"
"...Lucia, you can't save everyone," Chloe says quietly.
"That." Lucia jabbed her finger at her ex-clavemate. "That's why I'm leaving New York. Because maybe I can't save everyone, but I can try, and I will never stop trying. Because I care, and I will never stop caring. And I know I can't tell you people not to try to talk me into coming back, because the overlap between things I think will actually deter you and things I trust myself to follow through on are pretty much nil. But if I find out that anyone's gotten hurt, or you've tried to hurt anyone, in the process of trying to get me back, I will tell everyone--" and then she leaned in closer to the New York table and says something in a low enough murmur that nobody outside New York hears it.
But people outside New York can see the way several of the New Yorkers drew back, eyes wide, and Chloe yelps, "That's slander!"
"It's only slander if it's not true," Lucia says flippantly, turning to leave. "Which that is! Food for thought, hmm?"
And then she joins El in the line.
"Honestly, I don't really care, as long as they're sufficiently sane and/or cowed by the threat to not do anything else especially awful."
They finish getting food and sit down.
Representatives of a large number of non-New York enclaves immediately attempt to sit with them.
Lucia puts her head in her hands.
"Um. Aadhya offered to run an auction for me, for the phase control spell. She said we could leave her cut up in the air till we see what I get. Uh, and Aadhya and I helped Liu cut her hair, and - Aadhya said maybe she'd use the hair to string her harp, and Liu's working on a mana amplifier that I reckon I can use, and -
- anyway, I told them -
- that I'd have to ask you."
"Well, that was my original plan, but plans change. --I'm alright with it. I'll want to, uh, talk to them more, obviously, I don't know Liu very well--I don't know Aadhya very well either but she seems alright. And," deep breath, "I do--want. To--build a team worth being on."
"--Yeah, that was pretty distracting, wasn't it. It'd be a bad thing if some other alliance got killed because their plans were disrupted by a sock full of okayness to the face. Liu's creative writing, right? Maybe she can write something designed to tolerate over-powering instead of to be efficient."
Lucia's room is less elaborate than most enclavers' would be. In addition to her standard-issue bed, desk, and cupboard, she has a lovingly-polished weapons rack with a number of fully functional artifice weapons on it, and a small wooden chest. On her desk are a number of Sanskrit books, and her notes and the flashcards she's made for studying.
"So. Hi! Uh, there are some things you guys should know about me, if we're going to do this. El already knows them, but I know her better."
"The first part is--remember the thing I told New York I'd tell everyone, if they hurt anyone trying to get to me? That does need to not get out, so I can continue holding it over them, but you guys should know."
Deep breath.
"My dad? Is a maleficer. I'm pretty sure the reason I'm, you know, the way I am, is that I'm part mal."
"I mean, in theory, sure, but generally when maleficers create weird magic organisms they're mals! Plus--I don't kill mals because I want to help people. I mean, I do, and I prioritise what mals to kill based on helping people, but when I was a little kid who didn't get any of that, I was hunting agglos and anything else that got in. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's a philosophical distinction--a chayena isn't technically a mal, but that doesn't change which side of the graduation hall either of us are on."
"Yeah. --The mal thing is just conjecture, though, and not actually part of what I'm blackmailing New York with, that part's just the one where the maybe-future-Dominus is a maleficer. And not the black fingernails kind, the kind that's come through to the other side so they look friendly again, like Jack Westing had."
"Okay. Cool. Uh, also, I, um--my power sharer had a block on it. I just pull power in if I have access to it," she says all in a rush, and before they can form reactions about this embarrassing fact, "turns out! My mana capacity! Is at least as big as all of the power that New York has at a time. I gave it right back but everyone freaked out a lot."
"Yeah! --Also, I'm pretty sure my storage is, like, at least significantly bigger than what I was holding during The Incident, but El is worried I still might get mana poisoning if I kill, like, everything in the graduation hall, so backup storage that's leaky enough that I can just use it as a vent might be useful. That was her idea, my idea was a deliberately inefficient spell built to tolerate way too much overcharging."
"Not right this minute but I will be sure to harvest some next time it comes up. --You should make me a wishlist. It wouldn't be practical to just drag every carcass I make up to your room, but, like, I wouldn't have expected the siren-spiders, if there's something in particular that'd be really useful you should let me know so I can keep an eye out."
"If I come across anything that looks interesting that you didn't think of I will definitely grab it. Oh--speaking of things people aren't expecting--" she goes to her desk, opens a drawer, and pulls out two large glass jars of healing ointment. "I don't know if either of you already have anything for injuries, but here."
Beam. "You're welcome.
There's a knock at her door.
She crosses warily over to open it.
It's someone from New York. Not Chloe or Magnus. Lucia scowls. "Are you here to tell me about a mal attack currently in progress."
"Well, no--"
"Then fuck off." She closes the door in his face abruptly.
"You'd, uh, need to find alternate arrangements that can get to her parents, I think? Most people aren't allowed into New York."
"It's fine," Lucia says from where she's still intently reading her book, "Mom has an e-mail address, they can just transcribe it."
"...I guess that works too," Pratt says, deflating slightly.
Awwww.
She pets her mouse, and thinks.
Something sentimental without being the kind of thing that would be embarrassing if she gave it as a nickname to a person... "Penumbra. Hey, little one, do you wanna be Pen?"
To the others: "...It's the name I gave my first real dagger, when I was a little kid."
With enough tokens, the hit-or-miss nature of the vending machine can still add up to a decent spread, and Aadhya knows a guy who'll buy the duds for what it's worth to haul them to his room because his transmutation affinity means it's less relatively extravagant for him to turn them into edibles. They can take their treats up the stairs to Lucia's room and share with their mice.
It's wonderful. Lucia eats vending machine treats and feeds bits to Penny and occasionally picks up her Sanskrit flashcards. When the others pick up mana-building exercises, Lucia starts doing trickybalance exercises.
"I can build mana the normal way, too," she says when they look at her.
The next day she comes up to breakfast late--not "the line is closed" late, but later than she usually would, since she likes to clear the mals out of the trays before anyone can get hurt.
"We have a problem," she says once everyone is sat down. She looks around, confirms that only juniors are in earshot, and continues, "a problem I would prefer to wait to discuss in its particulars until the seniors have left."
She pulls her current crystal out of her shirt.
She had picked it up last night, almost empty. It's completely full now. "Not as put off as I am, I bet," she says grimly, and starts devouring her breakfast with the kind of determination usually applied to particularly irksome mana-building.
Eventually the senior bell rings, and they all clear out.
Lucia says, "Remember what Todd Quayle said, about hungry mals coming up from the graduation hall that usually wouldn't? Some of the walls on the bottom level are getting battered in from the other side. Last night I was doing what was supposed to be a quick patrol after curfew, and one weak point caved in. I got a make-and-mend up on it, but it's not going to last forever."
As an aside, to Aadhya, "On the plus side, I got lots of bone to make beads and other things out of. Plus some other stuff on your wishlist, I'll bring it up to your room later."
“…Point.” Mals don’t attack her but they have ever been known to attack people she was guarding, which means it is absolutely possible something would step on her on its way to the freshmen.
”I wonder if we could—replace the walls in chunks? Make new sections of wall, take down the old ones in small chunks, I kill the things that come through until there’s enough of a break to put the new wall up…”
"Make lots and lots of beads. --Anyway--being in an alliance with me means dealing with my harebrained priorities. But me being in an alliance means that you guys get to veto any plans you aren't satisfied aren't stupid. Even if I don't actually go 'okay yeah' when you voice your objections."
Eeeeeee.
Lucia does not clap her hands like a mundane child presented with a magic trick, but she’s thinking about it.
(Following the spirit of El’s injunction and not just the letter, she’s cut down on after-curfew sojourns over the past few days, and has even more energy than usual.)
Lucia assures Aadhya and the bemused seniors that everything is fine, and then goes through the cupboards for as eclectic a selection of items as she can manage. One of them is a sheet of metal with which to patch the wall; the rest are there to make it look like the sheet of metal isn't her main objective. She stacks them on it like a tray and carries them out into the hall.
"We can get some carbon, burn some scraps or something, and then I have a spell for infusing that into iron to make steel, and we can do that a little bit at a time, progressively like El was doing with the silver. That ought to cover for the weaknesses the make-and-mend will have left behind."
She angles the mirror in, and murmurs a small, cheap light spell.
She hastily withdraws the mirror and snuffs the light.
"Okay! Good news and bad news. They're the same news. There is absolutely a mal in there I can kill for lots of mana, and the conditions are cramped enough that I can almost certainly kill it before it manages to wiggle its way out even if we take the whole wall down. Because it's a fucking enormous argonet."
There are some extremely unpleasant noises, as the argonet makes its way up with great difficulty and a not-insignificant quantity of grogler slime.
Lucia briefly entertains thoughts of the argonet's eye appearing at the aperture, and immediately putting her sword through it, but actually the argonet can navigate pretty well without looking directly at things, so when it does get close enough, she has to choose a much less dramatic weak point in its skull.
There are some more unpleasant noises; Lucia didn't have a good angle for a fast kill.
By the time she draws her sword back, dripping with argonet blood and cerebrospinal fluid, she's glowing brighter than she had the night Jack stabbed El.
El whispers in ominous Kauravi and Lucia is engulfed in a pillar of blackness. It gives Lucia a kind of HUD, like a low-saturation video game except for all the apertures and people in her field of view popping up in red. "You don't want to do that in direct sunlight but we're not so much as swinging through the caf," El remarks lightly.
"Oh, the spell absorbs light and turns it into a low grade sterilization field, I got it when I wanted to disinfect a cut but the original fellow wanted to both look ominous and kill anyone who got in his personal space while withering all the grass where he walked. It's related to the one that would've made you radioactive but in this light it won't even give us sunburns."
"Yeah. No poisoning people. Although, you, uh, should probably be aware, one of the things that tipped me over into really thinking the 'I am part mal' hypothesis was true, was...I also got mana from killing Jack Westing. --Which is related because he was a maleficer but I wasn't poisoned! Not because I think we should kill people for mana."
"Yeah, there is that too. I don't know what to think about it, honestly, except that a lot of what the mals have was originally generated by some kid doing jumping jacks, who then got eaten. I don't know if mals eating things technically counts as maleficing--I mean, it's what I do, basically, and your crystals hold the power just fine."
"He's very--I have no idea what he was like before, how he was damaged, but he's very calculating. He doesn't have the whole supernatural beauty thing going on, and he hasn't withered, he just looks like a dad. He pulls malia off of consenting colleagues, not hapless victims, and he doesn't do stupid maleficer things. Maybe he had this great well of compassion before and he lost it, I don't know, but he didn't lose being smart."
"Uh, she doesn't know all of this. Dad gave her some other reason for why he wanted to do in-vitro, and I'm sure she's figured out it has something to do with why I'm weird, but I never actually shared the 'I'm a mal' hypothesis with her because I didn't want her to worry. So from her perspective there isn't actually anything wrong with the way I'm weird--I had a very unusual childhood, but not an unhappy one--and so her plan to have a kid who wasn't going to die by marrying an enclaver succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. I'm going to have to sit her down and explain all the philosophically disquieting stuff when I graduate, and I expect at that point she'll want to divorce my dad and leave with me? But I haven't tested it yet."
"I have no idea what he'd have had to do to make you the way you are but I think that you being the way you are is - awesome? Like, if your dad didn't have to slay a dozen people at the witching hour for it or whatever I would consider having a whatever you are whenever I got around to having kids. If you're technically a mal that's just the word 'mal' doing a weird thing in a weird situation."
"If it turns out that I'm the prototype of a new race of wizards higher than mals on the food chain, and the only reason Dad didn't tell anybody was because he didn't want to get everyone's hopes up before I graduated, then I will hug him and apologize and encourage him to open a fertility clinic."
"--Liu, my powers are complete bullshit, of course I was saving more people with them! I could afford to! Mals recognize me as scarier than I am and don't attack me at all! I get mana from killing them! If you tried to sneak down to the lab after curfew and brew healing ointment to hand out like Christmas presents you would just die."
"Even if my dad knew how my powers would come out I don't think he could possibly have anticipated my personality. I mean, you're right that you shouldn't judge him in the unlikely fertility clinic scenario, but like, if he did, in fact, do something super evil to make me, that's bad."
"Cool."
Lucia goes down with them to the shop; she doesn't have a role in the actual wall-making, but she alternates prowling for mals (and seniors) with flipping through her Sanskrit flashcards.
Plan A is that once the wall comes down she'll try to harvest as much argonet as she can; plan B, if it comes to it, is to fend off any seniors who would like for the new wall not to go up.
Aaaaaaa the phase-change spell is so cool. Lucia bounces in enthusiasm.
When the wall comes down, the argonet's head is even more gruesome than it was in life. Scavenger mals scurry away and out of sight when the light of the corridor illuminates their feast, but the ragged holes they left in the flesh of the dead creature give it an extra layer of the macabre.
Also it smells bad.
"Yeah, fair enough." She starts cutting out intact eyes. "What I'm planning to do is to harvest as much as I can reach from here, and then try to see if it's possible to drag this any farther out--it's possible dislodging it at all will make it fall back down, so I'm not going to do that straight off, but I can't get at any claws from here."
"Nice." She's not sure what Hyacinth Castle is going to use them for but she bets that will be cool, too.
Once she has all the teeth out that she can reach from the argonet's current angle she starts pulling scales, keeping an eye out for any eyes she missed the first time.
Once she has the head more-or-less stripped of externally appealing objects, she says, "Okay, I'm going to try to pull it out now. Unless you have a spell to temporarily reanimate it or something that'd use less mana, El."
"Well, it climbed all this way somehow. Anyway, I was just checking."
She makes sure the piles of useful stuff have been shoved out of the way, and then cups her hands over her mouth to muffle the words from Aadhya and El's hearing, and starts incanting in Mandarin.
She stumbles, and has to hang onto a doorway, but the argonet slowly, and with a horrible slurping noise, starts oozing out of the shaft and into the hallway.
Someone pokes their head out of shop to see what the noise is, then pales and runs up the stairs. Lucia ignores him, too busy focusing on ensuring that the argonet gets yanked out of the wall instead of her getting yanked into it.
She gets most of the (extremely horrible) corpse out, but one of the legs and part of the tail drop away into the shaft, too gnawed on by scavengers to hold on through that much jostling. Once the place where the wall should be is clear, Lucia releases the spell and says, "Okay, put the new wall up, hurry."
Lucia gets to work butchering the corpse.
It ends up taking longer than putting the new wall up, which is hardly surprising, given the size of the corpse. But once she's got the hide and therefore scales off, she wonders aloud (wiping sweat off with an only mildly horrible forearm, "I don't suppose you happen to have something to get rid of the flesh but leave the bones clean and intact."
"I do, actually! This will be rather horrible, if you want to stand back a bit." And she chants in Latin and the flesh melts, leaving a mostly intact argonet skeleton clean and dry on the floor with only a few tendons to keep the bones connected in place.
Lucia helps. "I mean, I definitely also want you to have non-horrible spells, but the number of times you've repurposed a horrible spell to do something cool is just really excellent. I would be much less in favor of those spells in someone else's hands I'm quite sure."
The fact that people definitely see them hauling big ol' bones up the stairs does not stop one of the New York seniors from coming over to their table at dinner and informing Lucia in a simultaneously concerned and outraged tone that El was seen with an incredibly ominous column of darkness, and also a zombie argonet.
Lucia stares at her until she starts looking uncomfortable.
"--Those were both me," she says, in the slow tones of someone talking to an idiot or a very small child. "I got some stuff on me when I killed the argonet, so El gave me a concealing cloud of darkness until we could get back up to the junior hall to deal with it," the "stuff" being mana and glowyness, but she doesn't need to know that, "and the argonet wasn't a zombie, I was just dragging it out of the maintenance shaft so we could harvest its body parts. Aadhya is going to make me a sodegarami out of its teeth."
"...Oh," the senior says awkwardly, attempting to pretend that this isn't incredibly embarrassing for her, "what...happened to the maintenance shaft?"
"El and Aadhya put the wall right back with the phase-change spell. Anyone who wants can go see the result."
(The conversation is happening loud enough that a small handful of Sanskrit-having seniors, including some but not all of the ones at the original demo, get up and leave, presumably to go look at the wall.)
"Worst case scenario I'm sure I'm in a better position to fight my homework than most people are, but, uh, let's not let it come to that. I'll talk to her if it becomes a problem."
Lucia has a harder time doing her own homework than she would have if she had been doing it all along, but she's reasonably good at bullshitting from extended exposure to New York, so she manages to muddle through.
The four of them end up spending a lot of time down in shop, Aadhya using tools less convenient to bring to someone's room than a drill, and all the space, to work on the harp and the beads and the sodegarami; the other three of them lend her an extra pair of hands when one is called for, and otherwise do their homework, although Lucia gets up every five minutes or so to double-check the area for mals using her shininess spell.
Lucia is between checks, and Aadhya is doing fine on her own, when a murmuring of voices becomes audible from the hallway outside.
“I think probably it’s only a good idea if you can be confident that most of the senior class is on your side. And if you’re not desperate—or only a normal amount of desperate—it’s only a good idea if you don’t have any younger siblings.” Snort. “Or an enclave. I don’t have many fond feelings for New York, but if the seniors destroy the school, the New York seniors are going to be in so much trouble.”
"Yep."
It takes a little more than half an hour before the sharp cry of a shrike could be heard, echoing through the maintenance shaft, and then out into the hallway. Then there;s a loud zapping noise, and a thud, and one senior says to another, loud enough to be audible inside the shop, "What'd you do that for?"
The response isn't clear, but the following noises make a fairly coherent picture of someone hoisting the shrike's corpse through the shaft, and it falling a very long way down.
Lucia gestures for Liu and Aadhya to retreat to the farthest part of the shop. In only a few moments, there is a rumbling and a growling, both increasing in volume, and then the noise of a lot of yankers being activated at the same time.
And then Lucia slams through the doors of the shop barely slowly enough not to damage them.
Lucia will provide lots of fuel.
Usually she prefers to kill things with her sword. Usually there are fewer mals requiring her to dispatch them as efficiently as possible, and one sword is not efficient for this many mals. But even mostly using spells instead of her pre-enchanted blade, she is still accumulating mana at quite a clip.
Eventually the two of them fight their way to the maintenance hatch, and manage to slam it shut, and Lucia gets the tip of her sword under one edge to peel it off before anything can break through.
"Well, that was exciting."
Ultimately, Lucia opts for neither floating nor glowing on the way up to the cafeteria. Instead, she simply storms through the doors, El by her side, holds up the rolled-up maintenance hatch, and says loudly, "Somebody left this behind on the shop level."
This does not produce instant silence. Even most of the seniors weren't in on the plan. Lucia takes careful note of where the ripples of silent staring begin.
Lucia watches them out of the corner of her eye to make sure that nobody targets them for being her and El's allies. "The next time somebody wants to try to open up a great mucking hole in the school for mals to come flooding in and make the seniors the least tasty thing on the menu, I suggest checking where I am first. You imbeciles."
There is muttering and shifting among the seniors.
"It has come to my attention," Lucia says, folding her arms coolly, "that certain elements of the senior class--no, I'll be honest, uncertain elements, I don't actually know anybody's name or face--have decided that it would be better for the school to be flooded with mals. The logic being that, if the graduation mals have access to everyone, then the seniors go from being the entire menu to the toughest, least interesting bits." She raises a finger. "There's one flaw in that logic: I'm even less tasty than you are, and there would still be more than a week until graduation for me to make sure that nobody profits off that scheme."
A ripple of alarm passes through the senior class, ranging from mild unease to serious concern.
"In case that wasn't clear, that was, in fact, a death threat. I don't like killing people. But I have done it, and I will do it again if I don't have a better option. Do. Not. Corner. Me."
"I'm going to make one thing clear: I am aware of how bad the situation is in the graduation hall. I am not planning to simply let the senior class all die. But I will be doing that in a way that doesn't sacrifice every junior, sophomore, and freshman in the school, as well as everyone who's going to be a freshman next year, and everyone who would die of the Scholomance not being available anymore. You people could, you know, try something other than murder first! Do you know how hard I have worked to protect you for three years, and you were going to turn around and kill HOW MANY OTHER PEOPLE--"
She cuts herself off, does a single round of box breath, and sets-herself-right.
"I'm keeping this," she says, holding up the maintenance hatch. "My team and I are going to use it to do a controlled release of graduation mals, not into the entire school, but into one small corridor that I can turn into a killbox. Anybody who would like to contribute something positive to this project can try to improve the senior class's odds of survival that way. You have used up your warnings for any other method."
She turns and stalks towards the food line, performatively trusting El to watch her back.
"I completely agree."
A senior approaches the table. Lucia glances up sharply, but she holds her hands up peacably; it's not the same thing as the mundane version of the gesture, none of them are ever unarmed when they're awake, but it at least claims peaceful intent.
"Clarita Acevedo-Cruz," Lucia says neutrally, making cool eye contact with the senior valedictorian.
"Lucia Walsh-Rhys," Clarita responds with, if not Lucia's borderline hostility, a composure to equal hers. "I want to help."
"Hm." Lucia stirs something on her tray with a fork. "Do you. Well, I didn't happen to notice you in particular when I was looking out for suspicious reactions to the maintenance hatch."
"I won't pretend I like the idea of buying everyone else's lives with ours," Clarita says, "but I don't like the idea of buying our lives with everyone else's, either." Lucia is pretty sure she'd say that regardless of whether or not it was true, so she doesn't so much as blink. "If I had been involved with whatever happened on the shop level, I assure you, I would not have neglected to find out where you were, first." Alright, that one Lucia would buy.
"Good for you," Lucia says, taking a bite of something without breaking eye contact. She already checked everything for poison in the line, it's fine.
Clarita doesn't flinch. "How many mals did you kill?"
"Hm," Lucia says. "I don't know, exactly. I guess you could probably get some kind of estimate by measuring the amount of ash and horrible goo left behind, and then estimating what fraction of a given mal's biomass we obliterated, but honestly, I don't think you're going to get very precise numbers that way. Trying to figure out how fast the maintenance shaft can bleed off the graduation hall?"
Clarita nods.
Lucia drums her fingers on the table. "I know it was enough to fill the volume of the killbox completely at least once. Twice wouldn't surprise me. Admittedly, the killbox wasn't very large, but honestly, we were not, at that point, trying to optimize for number of mals killed, we were just trying to take down the damn maintenance hatch."
"I can understand that," Clarita says neutrally.
"Don't give me that look. We will, in fact, try to optimize for bleeding off the graduation hall, once we have time to optimize for that. Time to, you know, set up precautions and backup plans--I don't, actually, know if any seniors are going to want to help--besides you--" she lifts an eyebrow "--but I'm sure I can find juniors who'll be interested in helping." Her lip curls into a parody of a smile. "If nothing else. Some of us have siblings in your year, and won't want to leave you out to hang."
Clarita doesn't look away. Lucia is a little impressed despite herself.
"We?" she asks neutrally after a moment. Lucia takes a moment to parse that.
She snorts. "You people really think I only joined a team--this team--because El and I are supposed to be boinking--"
"Are you not?" Clarita asks interestedly.
"Mind your own damn business. Because El and I are supposed to be boinking, and I'm falling aaallll over myself to take on dead weight to do my girlfriend favors. None of them are dead weight, but I admit, it was only El and me in the killbox."
Clarita shifts her gaze to El. "Really."
"Hm." She shifts her gaze back to Lucia. "Have you thought much about what kind of precautions you want to take?"
"I was thinking of maybe setting up a honeypot," Lucia chirps, "so next time, if the mals haven't figured out by now that just 'cause the wall's real sturdy now doesn't mean it won't open up again, it won't take so much waiting until they start spilling out. And I want some people with shields at the end of the hall so El and I don't have to worry quite so hard about something small sneaking past us while we're frying something big."
"Hm," Clarita says, "those are both good ideas. How much time are you planning to spend doing this?"
Lucia props her chin on one hand. "Depends on how much time we have to spend doing other things. Why, are you going to offer to do our homework for us?"
"--You've been doing your own homework?"
"I meant it when I said I'm not with New York anymore."
"I'll find someone to do your homework."
"All four of us."
Clarita makes a face like she's biting into a sour lemon. "Fine."
"And let me know if you find someone with a syringe or something, I'm not afraid to use my own blood for the honeypot but I'd rather not just slice my arm open."
Clarita purses her lips, nods sharply, turns on her heel and walks away.
"Yeah, it won't necessarily always be messy but there's some non-overlap between the really juicy mals and the ones with, like, acid blood or poison or whatever, I assume we'll sometimes get horrible gunk on us."
Lucia presents the proposed schedule to Clarita. Clarita looks like she would really like to push for something a little more intense, but she looks at Lucia and sucks on her teeth and doesn't say anything.
Shannon is enlisted to brew healing goo. She is delighted to accept Lavinia Walsh's healing ointment recipe in exchange for being on-call to brew great heaps of it, but bargains them up to the-mana-it-takes-to-brew-it-plus-ten-percent per batch.
Clarita recruits a handful of seniors to handle shielding the end of the killbox. None of them are enclavers, but they've all got enclaver-grade shield-holders; Lucia notes this to Clarita and Clarita gives her a sufficiently "hm yes that sure is a thing" answer that Lucia is sure something's going on, but she doesn't, actually, know what kind of deal it is that Clarita brokered or which enclave or enclaves she brokered it with. On reflection, she doesn't especially care.
"Clarita," Lucia remarks to El at one point, "would really rather people remember that she pulled this off, than that she got saddled with Todd Quayle."
The first time they do the killbox properly, on purpose, Clarita alone of those not directly involved shows up.
She stands behind the three seniors wearing shield holders holding up the rear, watching as Lucia and El put up the maintenance hatch, as Lucia lowers the honeypot into the darkness and activates it.
Watches without flinching as the mals come roaring up the maintenance shaft, ravenous and desperate and bloodthirsty.
Watches as El crushes a chayena to paste against the side of the wall, as Lucia bisects a suckerworm the long way, as mals pause to attempt to devour the bodies of their fallen kin and are incinerated by mortal flame.
Lucia feeds as much mana as she can into the crystals without overloading them, dripping in more whenever El pulls for some beautifully terrifying spell of destruction, but it's still not more than fifteen minutes before she's glowing, nor as much as twenty minutes after that that her chin-length silver hair is rising from her head like she was clinging to a van der graaf generator for dear life.
At half an hour until the dinner bell, Lucia turns off the honeypot; at a little more than twenty minutes 'till, El dispatches the last mal between them and the hatch, and Lucia slams it shut and yanks it off the wall before anything else can take advantage. There are some mildly alarming impact noises, as disappointed mals attempt to disagree with the shiny new wall about whether it is allowed to stop them, but the wall holds up fine.
"A little bit floaty, but fine!"
She fills the remaining empty crystals--a couple that El has on her, the rest in her room--and that brings her down a handful of lumens, but she's still very dramatic when they enter the cafeteria. People stare and whisper. New York looks like they collectively bit a lemon.
"Good question."
She managed to dump enough mana overnight, mostly into the remaining space in Liu and Aadhya's mana storage but a little bit into Aadhya's artifice projects, that her luminescence has decreased to a level where you can look at her directly enough to make out her facial features without hurting your eyes. Which means that there is no chance of anyone not seeing when she goes over to talk to Clarita and then returns to her table, but whatever.
"The rest of the alliance is intact, Clarita still gets the spot, they're scrambling a little bit to fill the Todd-shaped hole in their strategy but apparently the entire rest of New York closed ranks--they want me back very badly."
Near the end of breakfast Lucia sucks it up and goes over to the New York table.
The conversation isn't entirely audible, but Lucia's posture and tone are more civil than they've been while talking to New York since she left. Chloe is at first hopeful, then disappointed, but she holds her wrist out; Lucia puts her hand on the power-sharer, and her brilliance drops to a dull glow, not totally obvious if you don't notice the fact that she isn't casting any shadows.
She heads back to their table.
"I'm not doing that every time."
"I don't know off the top of my head if there was anyone not New York but Clarita. I'll ask her. --Maybe tonight at dinner I should pick a handful of other enclaves to dump mana on so it doesn't look too much like I'm still associated with New York even if I won't wear a power-sharer."
"I don't think I knew that epithet but I like it, it's evocative."
Lucia asks Clarita about other teammates that afternoon before they start the next killbox. Clarita gives her names.
And then they get to perform again.
(A couple of non-Clarita people dare to poke their heads in to briefly gawk, but disappear before either El or Lucia has a chance to notice.)
Lucy is back up to a (metaphorical) million watts by the time they're through--brighter than the last time, even, because they're completely out of empty crystals.
"Time to go shopping," she says, looking at her arm.
It's a little hard to tell through all the light, but she's looking at El like men sometimes look at El's mother. "It's not a maleficer thing!" she protests. "Jack Westing couldn't have done squat to me even if I hadn't got the drop on him. And it wouldn't be the least bit appealing if he could, because he would. The goodness of your shriveled black heart is the difference between terrible and beautiful."
Lucia meets up with her and the others at dinner, no longer glowing and with a bunch of miscellaneous objects in her arms.
"It turns out that there are--or, rather, were--as many as several seniors at the bottom of the pecking order low on mana, willing to trade part of their mana storage for filling the rest."
Valid of her. Lucia's mistake is Lucia's problem, and does not constitute an obligation on El's part to reassure her.
Lucia decides to take her frustrations out on the mals.
(There are more watchers, this time, and some of them linger to the end, when Lucia is taking the maintenance hatch down.)
The next day, during the culling, the killbox runs out of mals before Lucia slams the maintenance hatch shut.
She retrieves a small mirror from her pocket, and angles it into the dark. Not seeing anything, she creates a small light and tosses it in, watching through the mirror as it falls into the darkness.
"...I think something's stuck," she says finally. "Like the argonet, but without a recent grogler to use as lube."
"Yeah...if we could set up, like, two honeypots, one on either side of the hall, maximally far away from the route from the entrance to the exit, and turn them on before graduation--have it set up so the main body of the artifice is on this side of the wall, and the mortal flame would take it out, but, like, also fortify the area as much as possible...we should talk to Clarita about this."
She describes it.
Over the course of the last week before graduation, the seniors are going to close off every exit from the shop floor to the rest of the school--including the air vents, so it's not going to be a great place to be for non-mal-related reasons, sorry--as thoroughly as possible, except for the stairs. On the day of graduation, a senior is going to go down to the shop level in the early morning, setting up an artifice that one of the artificers had had as a class assignment earlier in the year and then mostly disregarded--a sort of mana fuse, which, assuming they get the amount to use and how fast it burns through calculated correctly, and lay the correct amount--should activate the honeypot setups less than a minute before the seniors are dumped into the hall. Once that's set up, the senior retreats back upstairs and the door into the stairwell is barricaded.
The idea is that when the mortal flame sweeps through, it should take out any mals which had successfully broken into the shop level, and also the honeypot artifices. Then the juniors can unbarricade the stairwell, and Lucia and El can sweep the shop level for remaining mals.
"Shop finals are nastier than math tests, if people can't get theirs in because you blocked off the floor for a week. Leaving aside whether you care if fifty freshmen die to their basketweaving projects strangling them, they're going to have every reason to sabotage your barricade!"
Graduation day approaches.
Lucia spends much of the day before supervising seniors fortifying the shop level as hard as physically possible, helping where needed but mostly just making sure nobody does any especially stupid sabotage.
She makes sure to hole up in her room well before graduation--well before the mortal flame is scheduled to come through. She stares at the floor and wishes the wards would let her mal-seeing spell through, even though she knows perfectly well why it doesn't.
And then the flame is done and the doors unlock and she, along with everyone else, spills out.
She heads for the shop; she's technically an alchemist but Aadhya is a much better artificer than she is an alchemist.
Lucia starts organizing their haul. LEDs over there, the stuff for Aadhya by place on the list...
And eventually it is time to head to the cafeteria to welcome the incoming freshmen.
Boy are the incoming New York freshmen in for an unpleasant surprise, if the New York seniors didn't explain things quickly enough
Lucia accepts her shred and puts it on her tongue and--
It's not like the put-yourself-right spell. It's good in a completely different way, something external to the self instead of internal to it.
El does not look great, despite this Really Nice Thing that has just happened, which probably means there was something upsetting written on the message? Lucia knows this one! Do not: pry. Do: hug.
They don't mostly end up in the same classes, because, seniors, but they can rearrange a few things usefully. Lucia swoops off again to see Aadhya and Liu.
At breakfast, she says, "So, if you want to try doing the killbox thing again once we've got more mana storage, I salvaged a whole bunch of the movable barricades."
Liu introduces them all; they can tell that's what she's saying because she mentions their names and doesn't pitch her voice as low when that's what she's saying. She mentions New York.
One of the Thai seniors proves to have some English. She introduces herself as Lamai and asks what they want, is it just to tell them that Lucia's not a New Yorker any more?
This is an extremely sweet deal. They set about figuring out how many power sharers they have; the new kids usually bring in their own, and their only freshman to make it in didn't have hers, so they just have one per living Bangkok upperclassman plus one they took off a kid when he died sophomore year and three spare for alliances. Which is enough to give Lucia et all each one, if they don't give the freshman one -
This is obviously an even better deal than it would be if they had to cough up four. Someone runs off to find Sudarat and give her the good news; another couple seniors peel off to retrieve the spare sharers; the artificer of the group offers to take Liu and Aadhya to see the power sink and learn to operate it.
The Shanghai table gets quieter fast as the two approach.
"Hello," Lucy says.
"Hello," says Hu Zixuan, with perhaps a hair less coldness than Lucia tends to turn on New Yorkers who are blatantly fishing to get her back.
"I'm not going to let New York use me as a weapon," she says abruptly, lifting her chin. "That's part of why I left."
"You left because Todd Quayle and Magnus Tebow were behaving badly," he says neutrally.
"That's why I left now. I was planning to wait until after graduation. I was never going to stay."
"And what would you have done, after leaving New York, before the Golden Sutras," he nods politely to El, "came along?"
"The same thing I do in here: kill things."
"And do what with the mana?"
"You know it's not a good idea to make too many plans for the future, in here."
He doesn't look impressed.
She sighs. "I don't know, give it to random indies trying to keep their kids safe? I certainly wasn't going to keep my New York power-sharer, if that's what you're asking."
"I wasn't thinking of anything specific," he says mildly. She gives him a flat, unimpressed look, which actually has the corners of his mouth turning slightly upwards.
But only for a moment.
"And if New York does start--has started--a war of aggression," he says mildly, "will you stand by, then? Attempt to stay neutral?"
"I don't like it when people die," she says quietly. "I've killed one person, ever, and he was in the middle of attempting to kill my best friend, and I still didn't like it. If killing the Dominus of New York--the current one, or my father--I could probably do that. If defeating New York meant doing something to the enclave itself--to all the innocents inside, children and non-participants and all--I can't. Not won't, can't."
"Not even to save another enclave, also full of innocents?"
"Can't," she repeats. "Not without--I don't know what it would make me into. I don't know that the world would be less safe, with a power-mad New York in it, than with me if I killed children. There are too many things I don't understand about what I am and how I work. It's not about what would be better, it's not about whether it's ethical to pull the lever in the trolley problem. It's just a bad idea for me, personally, to pull that lever."
He stares at her for a long minute, unblinking. Eventually he breaks her gaze, and says, "Let us all hope it does not come to that."
"Agreed."
And then she motions to El and turns and walks away.
"I guess they didn't technically promise not to but I didn't get the most murder-y vibe off them. They were about as impressed with me as I am with New York, which I can't say is unfair...Hu Zixuan in particular was, uh, he seemed...sort of skeptical but not all the way to calling bullshit? I was seriously concerned that he would call bullshit and have done with it."
"Well, we can all share around our schedules so you'll know where to expect us to be, directionally, any given time of day, and not trouble yourself if it's not one of us. Pity we don't have a spare for Lucia, though, seems like it would make her life easier and I'm sure I could figure out the block now that I'm not desperately mass-producing beads."
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.
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.
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.
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."
Box breathing. Very deliberate box breathing. "Part of me is tempted to just--dismiss everything I figured out as, as trauma-related delirium--except, uh, Bangkok and the library incident do, in fact, line up. --Golden Stone enclaves don't do this, if we try to publicize it everyone will think it's a power slash business ploy--"
"Well, it completely explains why my mum told me to keep away from you! - I didn't! Obviously! But she said to and if she got mawmouth vibes off you somehow that's probably why. She probably can't know very much, what with us being inside the Scholomance."
"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."
"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!"
"Yeah." And then she quietly murmurs a Mandarin spell that sends cool flames running down their bodies, leaving their skin untouched but burning away the Horrible into a fine grey dust that is then flung off of them and into a light dusting on the piles of Horrible around them.
"As an experiment I found a little scavenger mal that could survive for a bit without its head, destroyed its brain, and tried to--absorb it. It worked. Not, like, a physical absorption, my body stayed the same, but it--vanished--and I had its mana as surely as if I had finished killing it a normal way--when my mana touched the maw-mouth's, it was, like a tug of war, except I couldn't afford to win or lose because if I won then all the people in it would be screaming forever inside me."
"If my dad turns out to be planning something to--not let me out of the enclave, or worst case scenario to force me to act as a weapon for New York against my will. Mind-affecting spells do exist, so...anyway, I was thinking about that, but my Plan A was to just hit the ground running, possibly with a timespear still up, and be out of the enclave before anyone could do anything about it. ...Assuming they didn't close all the exits pre-emptively."
"Yup. If I'd known--well. I dunno. My dad mind-controlling me is still only hypothetical, and pretending to be a good little New York girl after finding an alternative would be revolting. But it'd only have been for a few weeks, I suppose." Sigh. "And not having already cut ties with New York when Bangkok happened would have complicated things."
"I don't think most people will figure out that there was a maw-mouth in the library that day--no, wait, Todd Quayle said he heard one, they might not figure out you killed it but the obvious conclusion to draw instead is that I killed it. And then kept my mouth shut about it. Which I might have done, even, it's not stupid--except if I had done that why didn't I figure shit out then--and everyone knows you're scary now--okay, yeah, people would probably put two and two together. Ugh."
"I'm suspicious of the conclusion that we should just not tell anyone the thing that would be really inconvenient for people to know, but, it might actually be right...I don't want a war either, but if one starts on the outside then there's nothing we can do about that."
"Oh. Yeah, I dunno. But, like, 'someone Anglo' does give us relevant political information? Like, that's one apparent shot fired at each side, not two shots fired at the Sino side? Which, like, might make things worse, but also might not make things worse, because New York knows they didn't do for Bangkok and Shanghai knows they didn't do for Probably Not Tampa?"
"I don't know--actually, hang on, there's a good way to check if the maw-mouth died--" she turns to the void, and asks, "can I have a publication from about the time that Li Shanfeng retook Shanghai, that would say if anything happened to another enclave around that time--"
The void pauses, and then spits out a copy of the Journal for Maleficaria Studies, which does have an article about the San Diego enclave going down. Nobody was nervous about the Sinos because they weren't a power yet, but nobody knew why, either; San Diego hadn't been feuding with anyone, that anyone knew about.
"Don't like that, no I don't," she hisses. "The good news is if one of those two tries to come up the maintenance shaft we can just char off the bit that pokes through and slam the hatch shut. The bad news is fucking graduation. Fuck! That's--I guess we're not worse off for knowing--but--fuck!"
"- you and me go in first. Maybe with some backup for shielding and anything that needs frozen and lookouts and such, but us first, and you kill everything else and I focus on those. It doesn't take me days. It'll cut it a bit close but if we have enough mana, and you're putting out more the whole time, I will have the worst day of my life, again, but -
- and then everyone else will be turtled up in senior rooms and they'll just walk out."
"Okay. Yeah. We should make plans for the not unlikely case that Bangkok decides they hate us and the power sharer deal is off--maybe if we're extra-diligent about harvesting we can put off telling everyone a couple weeks, get the mana to make Aadhya a bigass diamond before then--hey Aadhya do you think the diamond would work even better if the carbon we compressed to form it came from charred mal."
Hug.
"The mirror might tell us what enclave Fortitude is, but one, I don't think we know nearly enough about most of 'em to figure out any clues as oblique as learning and two, it sorta doesn't matter on account of how many littler ones they've each eaten over the years."
"It does have the drawback that telling enclave kids 'we plan to destroy your homes' might not go over well, but I suppose they would be slightly less murderous over it given time to sound the alarm. Your ex-clavemates, though, might be able to act on the Scholomance from the outside, while we're still in, if they don't like the notion."
“—Ugh, that’s true.”
She starts pacing.
”We could graduate approximately like normal, do some experiments in the outside—see if it’s possible to replace a maw-mouth foundation stone with a Golden one—and bully our way in through the gates before next year’s graduation, deal with Patience and Fortitude then…”
"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."
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."
"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."
She wiggles a little. "I bet it is."
(Just because things are mostly terrible doesn't mean she can't enjoy the little things!)
Lucia is a little anxious, the next time they set up the killbox, but no maw-mouths come through. Not that time, or the next, or the next, all the way up through Field Day.
"And yet we do not find ourselves less hungry." Sigh. "I've been thinking about trying to learn to eat spells, and I think it would be safer to try to eat a potion or an artifice or something first. Something that's not still attached to a caster so there's no risk of, uh, overreaching."
Lucia quickly discovers that instead of brewing vast swathes of low-potency somethingorother herself, it's more efficient to buy junk projects off of underclassmen. Usually freshmen; the decreased potency of junk doesn't matter for her purposes and they're cheaper to buy off.
She practices.
She doesn't practice all the time; she has other things to do. But she does spend a lot of time practicing.
And then Field Day rolls around, and she heads down to the gymnasium with her team, only occasionally darting away to kill something that was about to devour a hapless underclassman.
Lucia holds onto El's hand firmly, raising the other one to cast.
There are casualties, afterwards; the blood and body parts make that obvious, even if Lucia can't identify most of them.
There are also injured survivors. Lucia hauls a roll of not actually magical bandages out of one pocket and a jar of healing goo out of another and gets to work as soon as she can't find another mal to kill, and starts trying to ensure that the number of dead doesn't go up.
"Those weren't from the graduation hall."
Lucia harangues some of the walking wounded into helping her triage and perform first aid on other people in exchange for her help. It is really annoying that her comparative advantage isn't killing mals right now! She is actually not great at healing! Fuck the incentives and social structures within the Scholomance that mean that somebody with a healing affinity who's dedicated their career to honing it didn't step up to handle this instead.
Eventually, everyone is either dead or stable, and Lucia has dispensed all the healing on her person. She checks on El and to see if any straggling mals are available for stabbing.
"We didn't get any tokens," El notes, watching the rest of the students in the gym creeping back to the various activities they were distracted from. "I'll go with you but first you should dump a bunch of mana in the sharer so Aadhya and Liu can cheat and earn enough for all of us." She holds out a hand.
Lucia has some tracking spells; they aren't as solidly in her wheelhouse as spells to kill things are, but they're useful for what she does. And she has mundane tracking skills, developed in the streets of New York and developed over three years in this tin can.
The results...
"...They just came from everywhere," she says, frustrated, after the umpteenth not-quite-a-dead-end. "It's like someone set up a honeypot right in front of that door, or like the school decided that that corner of the gym specifically was out past curfew!"
"- okay, its timekeeping isn't completely busted, Field Day is on schedule, but its clock could still be partially bollocksed up. Could there have been a honeypot? Maybe one that would be edible to the mals, so they would have eaten the evidence on the way in? I have not the foggiest about motive, mind, but..."
Lucia locates Shannon and does some bribery.
...Nobody is going to die of their wounds, who hasn't already. Not directly. Lucia is still pretty worried about them in terms of being obvious low-hanging fruit, but--there isn't really anything she can do about that that she wasn't doing already. And it...probably helps their individual chances that it happened to a bunch of people at once? Instead of any one of them by themself?
This is not super reassuring but, like, when is anything ever.
Lucia tries to put it out of her mind. Worrying isn't going to improve the situation, and she has her own allies now, who deserve better than for her to be pointlessly distracted.
She rejoins them after less than fifteen minutes, there being little for her to do after Shannon has been paid unless she wants to stand over her making sure she doesn't renege, which would be pretty stupid of her.
Lucia keeps a sharp eye out for any kind of, uh, anything, while they are physing their ed.
Nothing happens.
Over the next several days, the number of alerts from the power-sharers drop off precipitously; the only alert that comes up (responded to by actual Bangkok kids before El can get there) was a sophomore accidentally getting between a senior and their neglected homework.
"For an afternoon at least, yeah. It's not like people don't, like, know, we're still doing the killbox, we've got the whole section of corridor shut off and stuff. --Sometimes knowing stuff is more unpleasant than not knowing stuff but knowing that you don't know stuff just seems like the worst combination."