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toil blest by heaven
being orion lake is right up lucy's alley
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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. 

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"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."

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"--Did you--want to kill it? --Sorry about the door."

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"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 -'"

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"My bit is killing things, it seems like it not being ruined is part of the problem! D'you want some goo."

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"You're the alchemist, is goo useful for anything besides making my entire room stink to the point of my lunch threatening to join the goo party?"

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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." 

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"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."

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"--No, the goo already is healing salve," she clarifies. "My mom's recipe."

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"- ah, you didn't mean you were generously offering me some of the spoils currently seeping into my floor. There are so many kinds of goo, you see. - I don't have anything to put some of your much more useful goo in at the moment."

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...She gestures with the jar. "It comes with its own. It wouldn't be much of an offer, the goo in your floor!"

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"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.

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...Lucia observes this with a sort of reserved concern, and then starts fitting bits of the door back together to mend-and-make. 

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Well, that's very decent of her. El will not question this. She looks at her replacement cleaning charm and hurls it into the void too. "Not the bloody mortal flame spell! A cleaning charm!" she snaps at it.

It tries again, to no more avail. Fling.

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She turns around so fast she almost bangs her hands on the door bits she's holding. "You asked for a cleaning spell and the void gave you mortal flame?"

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"It's not very bright. And has a terrible memory, it gave me mortal flame last June." Skim. Fling.

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"I--"

beat

"That's so cool. --I bet mortal flame would work, actually, it doesn't hurt the infrastructure."

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"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.

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Lucy snorts. “How about mine? I’d do it myself but, uh, I tried to wheedle the void for mortal flame for like a week before an upperclassman told me it hadn’t been translated into a language I know.”

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"- how about your what, your - cleaning spell?" After all, last time she thought she knew what Lucia meant by something she was wrong.

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She holds out her hand. "I have spare mana."

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"- have you. Capital. And you're just thrilled to pieces to have a demo?" Could this be a weird trap. How could it possibly, really.

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"I wanna see mortal flame!"

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"Well then, it would be my pleasure." She holds out her hand, only slightly jumpy about the possibility that Lucia will decide that El is laying a trap and decide to attack her about it.

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Lucia does not attack El over it. Lucia passes over a chunk of mana that--isn't totally unreasonable, considering that the common knowledge about mortal flame doesn't have all that much about how much mana it costs besides, like, "a whole bunch."

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Well. El appreciates this but not enough to not keep the change.

"I got it in Varhadi - that's a Marathi dialect - if this means you reckon it should be seen and not heard," she warns, backing into the hall so she can flame the whole room.

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Lucy backs out with her, nodding and humming and putting her hands over her ears. 

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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

WHOOSH

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"That was awesome!" Lucia exclaims, throwing her hands in the air. "Even if the mal was already dead. I'm so gonna learn that spell. When it's almost time to graduate and I don't have to care what opinions the void has on what languages I know."

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El takes a little bow. "May you not toast your own face off in the process."

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"I'm good at aiming the boom in the right direction!" she protests. 

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"In languages you really do know, sure."

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She opens her mouth. 

She closes her mouth. 

She slumps. 

"Dammit." 

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"There, there, there's a fair bit of time left in this academic paradise, you can pick up something mortal flame's been translated to if it is your fondest ambition."

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"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.

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"I'd bet it's made the rounds through a fair few Hindi dialects but I don't have a cross-reference with the copy of the spell I got listing whether it's ever made it into Spanish or what have you."

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"Fair enough, I'm sure someone I ask will have a good answer."

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"And they'll give it to you, too, anything for Santa Lucia," El mutters.

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"--Hey, I pay people for things!" 

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"I bet you do, and you're everyone's favorite customer too. Not that I have any room to complain, I suppose," she shrugs, gesturing at her slowly cooling room, now pristine of vermin and soul-eater slime.

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"Okay, look, one time I found the chapel and I asked someone if there was an actual Santa Lucia and it turns out there is and she wasn't a monster slayer or anything, so, it's--not a good nickname."

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"I didn't have enough Anglican pablum forcefed me to know what she did do. Something saintly, I presume."

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"Ran around a catacomb with candles in her hair, apparently."

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"Gosh. They'll just make any lunatic a saint, I suppose."

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"I got the impression that this actually accomplished something but I mostly stopped listening after 'not a monster hunter.'"

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"Well, I suppose then I shan't call you Santa till you put on candles or a fluffy hat with a pompom, one or the other."

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"--Okay, that one's actually sort of appropriate, I do give people presents."

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"Thank you for my presents, Father Christmas," says El with a mock bow.

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"You're welcome," Lucy giggles, and fixes the last bit of door, and runs off to go murder another mal with a jaunty wave goodbye. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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 sign it, just leaves it out front of Lucia's door on her way to the bathroom for water.
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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.

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Thank you Santa, I've been a very good strict mana girl all year!

I will probably figure it out eventually but fortuitously there is no longer mal goop on my floor so it isn't urgent.
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Wait, are you actually strict mana or is that a joke

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All year, all my life, all actually.
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Good for you. 

My dad has a theory that the reason mals have gotten so much worse is that all the cheating adds up when the wizard population increases. So--thank you. For not being part of the problem

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Delighted to have spared you some work.
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Frankly the work I do is, like, the least troubling aspect of the situation.

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The notepaper is starting to run out of space. El draws a checkmark in the last blank corner and returns it, expecting that to be the end of it.

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The next day at breakfast Lucia does something that she is known to occasionally do, which is do a solo raid on the school supply closet and then bring a huge mal-free haul to the cafeteria for everyone else to pick over. 

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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.

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Lucia is more careful about looking at El, this time. She glances at her out of the corners of her eyes, doesn't stare at the group she's in. 

Does engineer an open space at the right moment for El to take advantage of it. 

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Oh, score. This is pencils, not ink, but beggars can't be -

- can't be not elbowed in the side by some tosser, apparently; she doesn't fall but she stumbles.

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Lucia smacks the tosser in the elbow. 

"Be nice," she warns him. 

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"I didn't see her," he protests.

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"Be careful, then. I don't want my deliveries devolving into a brawl."

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El grabs a couple pencils and makes her exit without further mishap.

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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.)

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El opens the door at his knock, saying, "Would it've -"

And then he stabs her.

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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.  

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"Tool chest," El gasps. "Down the left side. Packet. And some - goop - packet first."

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She opens the tool chest, fumbles for the packet, opens it and pulls out a thin square of cloth. 

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"Wipe up the blood with one side. Okay if it gets dirty. Take out the knife and put the other side on. Goop on top."

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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. 

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El is not conscious to critique any aspect of this performance at the moment.

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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. 

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El comes to after a few minutes. She gropes vaguely for her bed.

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"Should you be moving?" Lucia asks, mildly alarmed. 

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"Oh, good point, I should most likely lie on the floor so I'm easier for the little mals to reach."

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"I will kill anything that gets near you."

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"Curfew is in, what, ten minutes?" She manages with some effort to grab her mana crystal and put it back around her neck.

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"I sneak down to lab after curfew all the time. I've never tried being in someone else's room overnight and I bet it's exhausting but we'll both live through the night."

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"You - are you serious, you're a lunatic -"

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"It's been said." 

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"I'm already on a platter with an apple in my mouth so I suppose if you care to adjust my nutrition facts I have no reason to object."

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"Yes, you'll be the most delicious bait. Do you want anything before I get so busy killing things I can't grab your blanket off the bed, I still think you shouldn't move."

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"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."

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"--Yeah, sorry." 

She helps El up. 

"In my defense stomach wounds are bad business, I'd be much less of a drama queen if you had been stabbed in the chest and didn't immediately die." 

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El flops gingerly into bed. "I'm not going to get infected with the patch on. Unless you let one of those rot-rats that've been at the apple pie in, then who knows."

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"If I let one of those in you wouldn't be in much less trouble with a papercut."

 

 

I'm sorry I didn't kill Jack sooner." 

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"Well, the best time to kill Jack Westing is sometime before you ask a lot of questions about maleficers and put him on the defensive, and the second best time is today, I guess."

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"Yep. I hope I haven't put any other maleficers on the defensive, he was the only one I specifically suspected of killing someone, if I've missed anyone..."

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"He's the one who did for Luisa if that's what you mean."

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"I wasn't sure. But a maleficer was my best guess for what got her and he was the only one I knew of that had looped around to charming again. ...Maybe I should have been sure and the only reason I wasn't was because I didn't want to kill a human being."

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"Your moral dilemmas are fascinating beyond words," croaks El, and she closes her eyes.

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"Sorry." 

The curfew bell rings. She gets up off the bed and starts killing things. 

 

 

She is frighteningly good at it. 

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It makes it kind of hard to sleep. Not impossible, though! El catches as catch can in between commentary on how if she'd killed that thing this other way it would have been convenient.

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Making it harder to sleep is when Lucia starts glowing. 

"'Scuse me," she mutters, and darts over to the bed, leans into El's personal space to grab her crystal, and dumps a shitton of mana into it. Then it's back to murdering things. 

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"- cheers, there's more in the box," El says blearily.

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Lucia gives her a thumbs-up. 

(She absolutely goes for the box, before very long.)

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"Is your power sharer having a spigot problem, or what," El asks, after having blinked enough times to think she isn't dreaming which direction the mana's going.

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"When I kill mals, I get all their mana. Like when mals eat each other. Or us. 'S part of why I didn't want to kill Jack, I didn't want to know if I'd get his, too."

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"You know you're proper bullshit, right?"

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"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."

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"Isn't that a happy thought. My mum on the other hand is perfect and has never done anything wrong, ever, in her life, and if I sound like I'm one-upping you it's because you have no idea how annoying that is."

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"I do not. I can think of questions I could ask about it but most of them seem like they might land badly." 

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"Well, I don't know how much of this I'll recall come morning which might be any which way from your perspective." She breathes wrong and winces a bit. "You're a damn sight more useful than a quattria, any road."

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"Well, that's certainly true. And a damn sight happier about it. My utility doesn't come from not eating things. My dad might be a creepy maleficer, but at least he's competent at it." 

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"Veritable role model for anyone who might want to be a creepy maleficer, s'pose. Do you just tell everyone this?"

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Snort. "No. But most people I don't give a rat's ass what they think of me beyond if they'll cooperate if I ask them for things. I actually like you on a personal level."

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"You're joking."

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"I don't want fanboys!"

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"Nobody likes me! And furthermore I've been nothing but a snip to you!"

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"I like you being a snip to me, it's fun. What, nobody?"

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"My mum loves me, but likes, I wouldn't count on it, to say nothing of every other person I grew up around. Yi Liu'll sit with me. Aadhya doesn't rip me off. Nobody likes me. You're off your trolley."

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"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." 

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"I think some people manage snippy in a way less globally off-putting, but I suppose you are clearly extraterrestrial, what else is new."

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"I guess asking people why you're so universally disliked would be thoroughly unproductive. They'd just say you were a maleficer or something, because most people have the introspection of a gnat." 

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"Well, as long as we're oversharing in between spates of mortal danger, I'm a prophesied dark sorceress? Though I don't know for sure that my cousins have let on to everyone else as opposed to it just giving me a light patina of doom."

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"A prophesied dark sorceress? I don't think I've ever heard of a strict-mana dark sorcerer before, but I guess you learn something new every day."

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"Yes, well, it's like I was born an alcoholic, and worse than that, a mean civilization-razing drunk, and everyone around me is constantly spiking their punch and laughing at the idea of having to be quite so teetotal."

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"And also the fermentation process produces a byproduct that's killing everyone's children." 

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"Maybe if you torture the metaphor a little harder it'll give you mana."

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

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

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Brightly: "Thanks! I sincerely hate it!"

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

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"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.'"

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El mumbles vaguely in response and falls asleep again.

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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. 

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

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

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

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

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"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.

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Time to head down to breakfast, then. 

People stare and whisper, because of course they do. 

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People are so predictable.

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

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

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

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

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Shrug. "I was ruining the eggs anyway." 

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

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

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A few minutes later Lucia shows up. 

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

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"Of course, any time!"

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

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"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." 

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

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

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

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"I have not. I don't naively know how to do one without electricity, and I'm sure someone could artifice one up, somehow, but that sounds like a huge waste of time and effort that could be used making something that'll save someone's life." 

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"Well, if you'd like me to tell them that I've never had your knickers off I can do that but I would like to wait till I am less likely to need your spillover aura to get through the day."

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"I mean, I still like you, I didn't pick this table randomly, I bet you can get spillover aura without knickers being involved." 

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"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."

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"Oh." Snort. "That's...I dunno. Cute, almost." 

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"Is it really. I suppose, like a fluffy little bunny, it has some culinary value." She slams back her milk.

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"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."

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"What is it you want to do, then?"

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"I'm going to run around the world killing the biggest things I can hunt down, and anything else I find along the way, before it can get in to the Scholomance at all. Or, like, before it kills more indie kids than it probably already has."

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"Well, you'd be a feather in a cap even like so, or maybe they imagine you'll change your tune after you graduate."

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"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."

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El starts to shrug, thinks better of such reckless exercise, and finishes her food.

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"You're Aadhya, right," it would be rude to completely ignore her, "El tells me you're on the shortlist of people who tolerate her without the bonus chance to get closer to me." 

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"That's me, nice to more properly meet you!"

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"Do you know why people don't like her?"

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Aadhya considers this, starts to say something, looks at El, frowns, and finally says, "She feels like it's going to rain."

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"I what?"

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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."

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"This is ridiculous."

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"If you cheat a little too much it can mess up your vibe, a spirit cleanse might -"

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"I never cheat!"

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"- really?"

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Glower.

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"She's strict mana. Not even the littlest nibbles out of her headboard."

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"...good for... you?"

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"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."

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"I've seen enclave kids cheat, if the others were breathing down their necks about ratio."

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"Yeah, but that's worse than normal, not just the same." Sigh. "I shouldn't get up on my high horse about it. You could judge them all you liked, but I'm safer than the rest of New York combined, it's not my place to get snippy about what other people do to survive." 

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"Wonder why the rainstorm, if you're strict."

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"Not speaking to the side of the family that could tell me."

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"Okay, I don't want to assume, but have you been implying that you are estrangedly related to the Oracle of Mumbai."

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"My multiply great grandmother."

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"I like her less than I did yesterday. --Not, 'because I like you and she doesn't,' because I think 'by the way, you're going to be a dark sorceress, get out of here,' is a really shitty prophecy."

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"Well, she didn't have me chased down and infanticided."

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"I mean, yeah, but that's, like, barely an accomplishment by normal people standards, let alone, like, Oracle of Mumbai standards."

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"I hear they're lovely people. Strict mana, vegetarians, wouldn't join an enclave because the enclavers weren't strict too. I might or might not have rated as much consideration as the average farm animal if Mum hadn't hauled me out."

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Lucia puts her fork down very deliberately so as not to stab it into something that shouldn't be stabbed. 

"Sounds like you're not missing much. Aside from, you know, resources that might make the difference between life and death." 

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"Isn't that always the sticking point."

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"Isn't it fucking just." 

She sighs. 

"Want me to bus your trays? It definitely won't kill me."

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"Being definite about that sort of thing is risky," El remarks, but she pushes the tray over.

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"I have to go hunting in order to kill anything; last night aside, I don't get attacked." She collects the trays.

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El smiles at her slightly and sets about finding a gaggle of kids who are heading roughly her way for the next period.

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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.)

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"You're an alchemist, right?" El asks Lucia, next time they run into each other in the lav.

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"There isn't a murder track so I had to settle. What's up?"

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"Shop project. It's interdisciplinary. I figure Aadhya's a shoo-in if you'll brew."

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"I'll brew. What is it?" 

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"Magic mirror."

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"Oh, fun. --I originally meant that sincerely but, on reflection, I suspect it ought to be sarcastic instead."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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"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." 

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

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"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." 

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"Anybody chop their foot off?"

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"Not yet! There's still time." 

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"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."

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

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

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

(Nothing comes out of the spigot.)

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What if she turns it on?

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Something comes out of the spigot, but only water! 

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"What a lucky shamrock you are. Apart from how you want the bloody things."

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"You also wouldn't get a bunch of amphisbaena trying to attack, say, a siren-spider or a chayena," she snorts. "I'm bigger and badder than them and they know it." 

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"I wonder how they know these things." Soap time!

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"Well, I don't know exactly what-all sensory modalities they all have, but at least for me, mals are sort of shiny--it's not exactly a visual shininess, it's sort of like it but it doesn't make it harder to see anything--and then stronger mals are shinier." 

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"Huh. If something were too shiny would you scarper?"

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"Maybe? It'd be more likely post-graduation, anyway, anything that's shiny enough to scare me isn't going to get put down by anyone else in here, and there's an awfully limited selection of places to run to." 

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"Running's still a fine plan A."

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"But if nobody kills it, it'll still be...around." 

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"Yeah, but it'll eat six people and hibernate or something, lots of kinds. Or you could go get backup, unless you can't benefit from a circle?"

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"Oh, I could probably benefit from a circle, there's a thought. Lots of kinds do that but lots don't, and like, maw-mouths don't, and they're the scariest kind I can think of."

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"What, is Patience impatient and gone walkabout? I think they do stay put so long as that's working for them."

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"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." 

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"I believe most people choose to go really fast between the maw-mouths, not through."

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"We'll see how shiny they are when the time comes." 

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"Maybe your dad will send a note." She is as clean as Scholomance soap can get her and pulls on her wet clothes.

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"...What, because he'd know how scary a mal I am? If he didn't come clean about the basic premise at any point up 'till now I don't see him disclosing anything more useful than that just in time for senior year." 

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"It could be cryptic advice! Or maybe he is waiting till you've come of age or pupated or whatever it is you do."

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"Aw, man, if I pupate into something genuinely awful as opposed to just philosophically disquieting I'm gonna be pissed at him." 

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"If you feel the urge to spin a cocoon assume a full lotus and box breathe."

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"I know what lotus position is but not box breathe." 

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"In, hold, out, hold, repeat, all the same length."

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"Okay, thanks. I hope it never comes up but if it does," shrug. "Better safe than sorry." 

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"It does for a little mana if I'm right mardy."

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"Oh, good, I'll try it next time someone from New York gets tetchy with me for not being a team player." 

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"Didn't care to wear the uniform?" ....they're just sort of standing in the loo now but El has no idea even after a mad sleepover how to suggest they have this conversation in a less stupid place.

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Lucia starts moving towards the exit. "They should've designed a better uniform if they wanted me to wear it. Not nearly enough pockets, what were they thinking." 

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"Designed for the catwalk, s'pose." Home to her room she goes.

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The next morning at breakfast, Lucia asks, "So, when d'you want to do the mirror?" 

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"Work period?"

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"Sounds good!"

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So at work period the three of them assemble in the shop and El magnanimously lets Lucia open her project locker in case Schroedinger's mal will still be there if it's not El opening the door (it isn't) and they can get underway on the mirror.

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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." 

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Aadhya climbs out from under the table. "- yes, they are - how badly is it ruined, El -"

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It's not. It's perfectly smooth. El whispers her last line of Latin and drops her hands to her sides.

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Lucia comes over and glances at it. "Oh, perfect. Hey, mister mirror, got any ominous bullshit to say yet?" 

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"Galadriel!" intones the mirror. "You will topple the -"

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"Yes, yes, bloody thank you," El mutters, stuffing the mirror into the wrappings that she had the frame in before.

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"Rude, it could at least have said some ominous bullshit to me, I'm the one who addressed it. So, siren-spider harvesting." 

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"- yes," says Aadhya, blinking away her startlement at the perfect mirror and setting about collecting bits.

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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. 

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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!" 

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Yep! That's her! She looks awful!

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"El, are you okay?" 

El has some of the horrible stuff on her, and it doesn't seem to be, like, eating through her clothes or anything, so Lucia will just drop to her knees in front of her and hug her. 

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El manages to adjust her weight to not fall over when hugged by a kneeling Lucia.

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Ohhhh boy. This isn't good. 

If El doesn't say anything for another minute, Lucia will try to help her to her feet, and if that doesn't work, she will pick her up and carry her

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El sort of halfheartedly makes a face at her about being picked up but does not actually object.

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Then Lucia will carry her back to her room, muttering a spell that causes the last of the awful to crisp up and crumble away before it can get on El's bed, and put her there and sit with her. 

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Lucia lets her rest, through the lunch bell and into the afternoon, and finally bullies her awake to go to dinner. 

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El, who has been having occasional crying jags off and on in between napping and staring into space, accepts the logic of this and will attend dinner. She is not really paying attention to what she puts on her tray or where she sits.

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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. 

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"Did she miscast something that rebounded?" Aadhya asks.

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"I don't think so...maybe? She killed something, I don't know what, she was surrounded by horrible slime when I found her." 

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"And she won't say?"

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"She hasn't spoken a word since then." 

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At least she's eating. Not very enthusiastically, but who does?

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"...You think it might be a miscast? Can you miscast something and still, uh, make something go splorch?"

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"Well, I don't know, but what else would it be?"

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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. 

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El stands up sharply, arms flailing, with a yelp, and projects some kind of magic out of her in all directions. Then she sits back down hard and glares at Lucia.

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What

What!?!?!?

"--Wha--what was that--"

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"That was you not asking first!" El snaps, looking down at her tray and picking up an apple to viciously bite into. "I'm fine."

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"Okay, great, glad to hear it," not gonna mention that she was previously MUCH LESS FINE, "but what was that thing you did, and can you teach me to do it." 

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"What, the spell? I learned it on the Simple Gifts song but you don't actually usually need an incantation. Or mana. You just - decide to put yourself right. You're all very lucky that was what came out of me when I was dodging mana poisoning."

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She contemplates the mortal flame spell, and says, "Yeah, okay, I am, uh, badly calibrated about how much a normal person can hold, I apologize for that." 

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"Well, I am abruptly and violently fine, so I suppose no harm done!"

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"I am also abruptly and violently fine! I mean, I was, uh, okay, before, but--I feel really good." 

She glances around at the table at the other recipients of El's Fineness Blast, lingers on Liu's fingernails for only a moment before skipping along to the next one. 

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"I assume it's less dramatic if you don't overpower it?"

(Liu is crying, but she's not doing it in a way that suggests she'd like attention drawn to that fact.)

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"Most things are. Admittedly, most things have worse consequences when you do." 

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"Yes, it is less dramatic if you don't overpower it." Apple. Apple in face.

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"Well, I for one am not complaining," she sighs happily. "El, have I mentioned lately that you're really cool?"

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"I don't know, I lose count of these things when sorting my vast drifts of fan mail," she murmurs, but her heart's not in it.

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When they've both finished dinner, Lucia follows El out of the cafeteria to quietly ask, "How bad is the loss of that crystal?"

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"I think there are more like it in my room," El says. "I came in with fifty."

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"More like it--what happened?"

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El gives a bit of a shudder and doesn't answer, continuing to their hall.

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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. 

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El doesn't shoo her. Just takes out her crystals to assess the damage. There's another cracked one in there, and nineteen of them are drained as opposed to merely unfilled; there are a few still full, though.

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Lucia does not ask "What the fuck did you kill!?!?!?!?!?!?"

She's thinking it very hard, though. 

She tries to keep that out of her voice when she asks, "These are networked?" 

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El nods.

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"Is the one you gave me still networked to the rest of them? Or, like, could you re-network it relatively easily." 

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"This one," she taps the cracked one that wasn't around her neck, "was the one that led from the necklace one to the others. They're toast. I have to set up another one to do that, and then get the drained ones looking alive before they croak too."

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She nods. 

"That would be a waste." 

She pulls hers--which is very, very low, but not quite drained--off the chain, and sets it down in the box, and picks up one of the drained ones. 

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"Thanks," says El tiredly, after a moment of blank silence.

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"Whatever happened, it's--really good that it was contained. I won't pry further, but--will you contradict me, if I say that I'm really glad you spent all that mana?" 

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El looks at her box of crystals. Shakes her head, very slowly.

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"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." 

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"I'm not mental enough to sneak out after curfew to go hunting."

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"--That's not my job, that's refuelling." 

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"Well, I'm also generally not mental enough to leap facefirst into melee."

El shakes her head and starts prepping a new crystal to network the batch. It involves singing in Welsh, which she disclaims first.

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She nods. 

 

"...And it is useful to have somewhere to put excess mana that's not my power-sharer. I've been limiting how much I put into the New York pool since sophomore year when I realized some of the other New Yorkers had stopped building mana entirely."

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"Did they. Tossers."

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"Yep! I still grind their noses in it when they object to me giving mana and stuff to people, like, some of the ones doing it were freshmen, who'll be here when I'm gone."

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"It's almost like the thing where some people come in deliberately out of condition to get more mileage out of their calisthenics, except for how it is not."

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Snort. "So completely not. My mom didn't do that thing when she was here, she said that even before Field Day it didn't seem like a good bet to be less capable of running away from things." 

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"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.

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Huh, a book? In her shirt? She got that from the library, probably...before fighting whatever-it-was?

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Yup.

She examines it, opens it up, gasps softly, starts cleaning it up of largely imaginary dust and whispering to it about how lovely it is.

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??? ???

It would be… very rude to crane her neck over El’s shoulder. So she will wait a little to see if El wants to exposit.

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El is communing with her book! It is the loveliest book and she is so glad to have it and can't wait to show it to everyone and she will make it its very own case!

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This does not make Lucia less curious!!!

She laces her fingers together tightly and doesn’t say anything. But she’s going to sit right here until El tells her to leave or what the book is. …Or the curfew bell rings.

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"Have you got Arabic, or Sanskrit?" El asks after tucking the book back in her shirt like she fully intends to sleep with it.

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“…I’m starting Sanskrit for the mortal flame? But I’m not good at it yet.”

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"Well, if you want to speed up a bit on that one," says El, "I've the Golden Stone sutras, with no library stamp."

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“The—the—“

She bolts to her feet, staring down at the book for a second before slamming her eyes shut.

”Should I start Arabic too, do you think—El, that’s—the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard—“

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"I think the spells will all be in Sanskrit, it's the scribe's notes that are in Arabic." Pet the book. Pet pet pet. "Isn't it the most beautiful book you ever saw?"

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“It is.” She eases down into a crouch to speak to the book: “El is the person I respect and trust most in this school. She’s really cool. She’s going to take really good care of you.”

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"You'll make me blush," she mutters, but she continues cossetting the book till the bell rings.

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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.

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"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." 

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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. 

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"What would he bloody need a better room for?" says El incredulously.

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"Let's find out." 

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"Good luck, Detective," snorts El, getting in the food line.

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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. 

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Hash browns. Scrambled eggs. Milk. Two apples, since Lucia's not obviously going to feed herself.

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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. 

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"I'm not the one you starved over it." She has the apple in her pocket and adds it to Lucia's tray.

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"Blesh you," she says, simultaneous with crunching into the apple. 

After she's gotten some food into her, she asks, "--Do you think he was right. That I'm making the graduation hall worse." 

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"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.

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"--Well. Yeah. I'm not wondering if I should stop, I'm wondering if next time I get into an argument about whether I should sneak down to the graduation hall early to thin the herd, I'll finally win." 

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"That's the kind of argument you have? You're a nutter, how would you get out again? Normally kids only escape because they proper vanish when they hit the gates."

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Shrug. "However I managed to get in? Mals bigger than me get into the school all the time." 

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"Yeah, and if ninety percent of them get eaten up on their way to trying it's no skin off our noses."

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She opens her mouth. 

She closes her mouth. 

She says, "Ugh, why do you have to keep being reasonable and right." 

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"It is my curse."

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"When I have the argument with anyone in New York it's always just 'I'll tell your mom.' Which, like, has worked so far, but it was wearing a bit thin." 

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"Well, I don't know her socially so you're safe from that from me."

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"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." 

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"Delighted to be of service, naturally."

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"That's 'cause you're the best!" 

She doesn't vanish again after lunch; not more than usual, anyway. Later she swings by El's room to exchange the (full) crystal on her person for another drained one. 

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"Cheers. Do you reckon your clavemates'll kill me a lot or only a little if they notice?"

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"Do you think I should kill Todd Quayle?"

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"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."

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"He has not. --Sorry. I shouldn't lean on you like that. I guess I was hoping that the answer would be obvious enough if you weren't me that you could just snap it at me without it being a whole thing."

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"Pretty sure the obvious answer is that you shouldn't kill people. Rather famous in its obviousness. I'm not mourning Jack, mind you, but since you've time to ask."

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"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."

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"Well, if they notice, please don't let them think I'm blackmailing you or some such nonsense. I wouldn't at all take this if you had to get it the normal way."

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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."

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"Well, definitely also don't let them think I'm doing that."

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"I'll try not to, but denying it in advance also doesn't look great." 

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"There is that. Now we know why no one goes about wearing shirts that say 'I am not mind controlled, ask me how'."

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"Well, nobody comes in with more than a few outfits. What would you do if you did get mind-controlled, go topless?"

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"Wear it inside-out, of course."

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"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. 

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El is studying her Arabic, absorbing bits of it from the surrounding kids while they mutter to each other, and totally missing the approach of a bit of malicious origami.

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"Excuse me," Lucia says politely, and then leaps up, drawing her sword and stabbing the origami dramatically before anyone has time to yell. 

She pokes at the edge of the paper with a pencil. 

"...This," she says coldly, "isn't a mal." 

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"- is it not? Have you skewered someone's algebra?"

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"More like someone's shop homework. I--"

 

"...I...think maybe Todd decided to--assassinate me?" 

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"- with that? Anyone who's survived four years in this place knows it would take at least a naga or three to take you out."

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She frowns. "You're right. It's not a mal, that's--an advantage--but not enough of one, and I don't talk about the shiny thing, mostly--maybe...someone was trying to kill someone else here? --Hey, Dubai kids, have any of you pissed anyone else off lately?" 

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They all shake their heads, eyes quite wide.

"Magnus walked by a bit ago," El remarks after they have determined that there is no obvious assassin to be after any of the Dubai kids.

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"...I don't know Magnus to have...anything...against...Dubai..." she says slowly, "--Oh, crap."

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"Probably after me, not you, as you lay the golden eggs."

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"--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?"

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"Suspect at the moment he might bear a strong resemblance to metaphorical beer."

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"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. 

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"I'd ask what shat in your porridge but you haven't got your sword out so it can't have been anything very juicy. You know, if you want to build an enclave together to teach orphaned mundane-born wizardlings the blade you have to tell me these things."

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"If I--wait, what?" 

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"The rumor mill is terribly excitable."

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"Okay, I, uh, may have said some things last night which were premature at best, but--absolutely none of them involved orphans? Or swords?"

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"Oh, the sword remark was just my noting you're in a mood."

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"I am in a mood, yes." 

Her sleeve rides up. Her power-sharer isn't where it usually is. 

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"- was the one about you formally renouncing New York true?"

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"Nnnnnnnno, not as such, not formally, I just, uh, took off my power sharer and threw it in Magnus's face while calling him a useless leech." 

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"But Lucia. Leeches have valid medical applications."

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"That's why I had to specify a useless one! I'd've gone for something parasitic but I didn't trust him to be smart enough to know that a tapeworm wasn't a kind of mimic." 

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"Fair enough. Then what?"

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"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."

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"Well, it's a pretty idea, isn't it, though again you do have to tell me these things."

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"...I'm telling you now?"

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"We'll see how long it takes me to translate, then, shall we, and hope neither of us dies before then."

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"...Yeah." 

She looks like she's chewing on something and trying to decide whether to swallow it or spit it out. 

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El is chewing on a pancake. It should not really require this much chewing but them's the breaks.

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Lucia glances over at where Todd Quayle is slightly less shunned than yesterday, the freshmen starting to creep in at the edges. "It would be mean and not accomplish anything to chase them off." 

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"He probably doesn't make them less safe by his mere presence."

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"The point of chasing them off would be to emphasize to Todd that this isn't going to just blow over, even if his parents are powerful enough that it doesn't ruin his life." Sigh. "Unfortunately, he officially does not qualify as the biggest problem." 

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"Oh, what is?"

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"In the immediate term, hungry critters bullying their way up from the graduation hall." 

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"Well, that's no great complicated mystery, just feed each one a freshman or two and they'll calm right down."

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"Ah, but consider: I'm not going to do that." 

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"Well then, you do have a quandary."

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"So far my plan is to keep killing things and see how that goes. But I can only be in one place at a time, it's very annoying." 

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"Well, you should have taken Bilocation 101."

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"Couldn't fit it into my schedule around the Sanskrit, and I didn't want to compromise there." 

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"Heh."

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After breakfast, Lucia waits for El just outside the cafeteria. 

"I want to talk. Privately, without an immediate time crunch. Feel free to tell me to fuck off, but if not, is there a time and place that works for you?" 

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"Uh. Work... period?"

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"Yeah, sure." 

Time to FLEE. 

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El sits with her at lunch as usual and then hangs back afterwards.

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Lucia clasps her hands together, knuckles white. 

"Willyoubemygraduationally." 

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"I don't know if I can do it again."

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"Taking out Patience and Fortitude was a long shot anyway." 

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El chooses this moment to vomit into the nearest floor drain.

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You know what, that's totally fair. 

(...Hopefully she won't go unresponsive again? But if she does, Lucia has the setting-yourself-right spell, now, and enough mana to make it ranged.)

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She's done after she's retroactively deprived herself of lunch and relocated the conversation to the closest loo in order to get some water. "I don't want to go to New York," El continues, when she's talking again.

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"Good. I'm not planning to ask Magnus for the power-sharer back." 

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"I don't want to be murdered by dunces who can't read the subtext on that."

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"I think that I made it clear to him and the others that killing you is not a viable path to keeping me but I can spell it out in smaller words. --What do you want."

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"A golden enclave, s'pose."

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“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.”

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El is going to start crying, now, but eventually will mumble through her tears, "yesIwillbeyourgraduationally".

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Hug?

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Hug! Sobbing!

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“I want to say something helpful but I don’t know which thing you’re crying about,” she confesses eventually, once the crying has started to peter out but before it’s completely over. “Honestly I can think of, like, several candidates.”

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"You think I know?" mutters El into Lucia's shoulder.

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“—Fair enough.” Hug hug hug. 
Eventually the dinner bell rings. 
Lucia gets to her feet. “Come on, we can’t all go down to shop for late-night snacking.”

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"You eat in shop?" El mutters, following her to the cafeteria.

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“—Mals, I’m talking about crunchy mals with a juicy mana center.”

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"I suppose you can spend that on turning expired vending machine snacks into vindaloo if you like."

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“Wanting to kill mals does feel like being hungry.”

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"...you liable to starve if you get them all one day?"

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“Probably not? Killing mals feels satisfying, but afterwards I don’t actually feel less hungry. I felt really good after I killed all those mals in your room that night but, like, I felt good and also still hungry.”

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"Huh. I guess if it got to be a big deal you could have an agglo farm or humanely breed chayaenas or something."

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“I used to keep pet agglos at home in terraria after I found out that there were things that were tasty and hurt people.”

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"Aww."

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“When I was little and first managed to communicate my bloodthirst Mom brought me agglos. After I got picky about that she went outside the enclave to capture weaker mals and paralyze them so I could finish them off.“

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"...wow. Suppose you must've been harder to sidetrack with ice cream than I was."

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“I had such a one-track mind at that age. You’re lucky you met me after I developed more complex preferences.”

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"Or what, you'd've slain me?"

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“—Well, no, but I’d’ve been boring.”

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"Wasn't exactly spoiled for scintillating - graduation allies - when we were little."

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“…Rainy vibes affect the mundies too?”

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"Oh yeah. I grew up in a commune full of crunchy granola hippies and they tolerated me for Mum's sake alone. To say nothing of school."

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“Oof. Well, maybe if we had somehow met as children we’d have had loads of fun running around causing mischief.”

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"You'd have been right convenient to have about on so many levels."

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"Commune spread out enough that the mundanes didn't keep the mals off?" 

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"I got somewhat fewer at school but I was a very tasty child."

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"--Checks out. Well! I am very very glad you survived in my absence!" 

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"Cheers."

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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." 

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"I will stand in line and take credit for your ability to cut in line whenever you damn well please."

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"Perfect, thanks!" 

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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. 

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"Cinematic. Complete with the part where nobody else got to hear what the not-slander was." El has gotten past the fruit cups and snagged a spare for Lucia.

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"Oh, you already know it." Ooh, fruit cup. 

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"Ah, that one. Very juicy. Nuclear."

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"Plus bonus irony! I bet at least half of them think it's why I like you, even though I have already explained to them the reasons why that doesn't make sense." 

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"They all know, then? Huh, I sort of would've expected it to be quiet."

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"--I mean, I expect them to think that now," she clarifies, "assuming they believe me about it not being slander."

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"Ah, gotcha."

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"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. 

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"Buzz off! I'm saving that seat for - and that one too! - AADHYA, LIU. Yeah, hi, Nkoyo, you can sit there. - shoo! I mean it!"

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"You rang?"

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"I'm invoking you as a shield against the parasites."

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"Happy to oblige."

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"Hi Aadhya. How's the sirenspider shell treating you." 

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"Turning it into a harp, thank you."

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"Sweet." 

She closes her eyes, takes a slow breath, holds it, and lets it out again. 

"Liu! I'm not actually very good at tact, how's being cured of maleficer-ness treating you." 

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Liu looks a little taken aback. "It's - it's an adjustment," she murmurs.

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"I got the spell El used off of her and in the normal form it doesn't cost anything. It's amazing, I use it kind of a lot now." 

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Liu looks at her lunch and doesn't say anything.

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"--And we have now reached the point where my tactlessness ends and I shut up."

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"Well, don't look at me, I've the tact of a toe-eater."

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"I meant shut up about Liu specifically. Hey, Nkoyo, what do you do?"

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Nkoyo is more than capable of directing the table through a lunchful of pleasant light chat.

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Cool cool cool. 

Lucia quietly promises to meet up with El sooner rather than later and then FLEES THE MISCELLANEOUS ENCLAVERS CIRCLING HER LIKE SHARKS AROUND CHUM. 

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El looks almost - sheepish, next time Lucia encounters her, on their hall that afternoon.

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"Education goal number one: Learn Sanskrit. Education goal number two: stop being a coward around people I don't like but don't feel justified in telling off." 

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"New justifications or old ones?"

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"Depends how strong the old ones are. And how specific. I'd have to be, like, at least thirty percent more annoyed for just 'is an enclaver' to be sufficient justification." 

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"Oh, I meant did anyone specifically piss you off since lunchtime. - I have something to tell you."

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"No, I was specifically referring to getting mobbed by opportunistic enclaves at lunchtime and fleeing like a coward. What is it?" 

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"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."

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"--They invited you to an alliance too? Wow. How'd they take it when you said that?" Gosh I'm lucky I asked first. 

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"Oh, Aadhya said 'score' and Liu said something about having imagined you'd go solo."

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"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." 

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"Stop it, you'll make me cry again," says El, the resentful tone not quite drowning out the smile.

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She grins at her. 

"This is going to be great. Who's playing the harp, does Liu do that?" 

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"She'll have to learn how but that's the idea."

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"Awesome." Bounce bounce. "Oh, I should tell them--well, okay, they've probably figured out I get mana from killing mals, after the cafeteria, but I should tell them more about, like, the specifics of my skillset. Do they know you have mortal flame?" 

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"Didn't come up specifically, I - don't just have mortal flame, I am. Very, uh. Destructive."

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"Well, fair enough." The maw-mouth wasn't incinerated, after all. "It is in my defense very cool. ...Also there's, um, something I hadn't brought up yet that I really should, actually. It's...kind of embarrassing? But it's not strategically irrelevant." 

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"...okay? Do you want me to go get Aadhya and Liu so you only have to say it once, or...?"

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"No, I'd rather say it to you first." 

Deep breath. 

"My New York power-sharer? It had a block on it. Because if I have open access to a big pool of mana, I'll just drain the whole thing dry without even meaning to, the same way I pull mana out of a dead mal." 

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"They were agitating for you to take it back and you don't even get jack shit out of it?"

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"Yep! Lovely crew, aren't they." 

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"Their charm is fucking matchless. I hope they all have to do pushups till their arms fall off and then need to do a few more."

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"In their somewhat limited defense, when I say I'll drain the whole thing dry, we found that out empirically. By accident. With the New York enclave's own main pool of mana." 

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That startles a giggle out of her. "Bloody hell, you can hold all that?"

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"Apparently I can! I mean. I glow. But I don't...feel strained, or anything." 

 

 

"I, uh...I think I could probably hold a lot more than that, if I had to." 

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"I don't know how much your average quattria comes out to in lilims, or whatever..."

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"I dunno! I've never killed a quattria." Plus how much mana a mal has is...related to how well-fed it is, isn't that a depressing thought. 

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"- so I don't know if you should be planning for emergency mana venting protocol on graduation day."

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"--Ooh, hm, there's a thought. ...I wonder how much mana the put-yourself-right spell can hold in a pinch." 

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"- I don't know, but it had some remarkably surprising effects when you made me put a ceiling tile's worth of flingers into it!"

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"--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." 

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"Or maybe Aadhya can design you extremely leaky storage that dumps mana as fast as you put it in."

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"--Ooh, hm, that might work. I've never tried to make mana storage, I have no idea how leaky you can make it before it...isn't..."

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"And if you're with me I can probably burn through it fast."

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"There is that. --I think we've reached the point where we should loop them in, though." 

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"Bloody stereotypical. Alliance with our hallmates."

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She laughs. 

"I'll take it! It's a completely new thing for people to make baseless generalizations of us about!"

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"I just hope Chloe doesn't get ideas about it. I'll get Aadhya and Liu, where should we talk?"

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"My room?"

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So El brings Aadhya and Liu over to Lucia's room.

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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." 

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Aadhya permits this remark to distract her from weapon admiration.

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"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." 

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"- is that a thing? Couldn't you be magicked to hell and back without being some kind of hybrid?"

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"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." 

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"Why would your dad do -" Liu begins, and then she realizes that's kind of a silly question.

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"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."

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Liu winces a bit at the 'fingernails' thing.

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"--How hard should I be avoiding bringing that up. I meant it, about not having tact."

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Liu shakes her newly shorn head. "I - it's fine."

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"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." 

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"Wow. But you're filling up that crystal all right?" Aadhya indicates the one El gave her.

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"Yeah. I can not draw anything. What I can't do is draw only a little."

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"So you'd need storage with lots of discrete units?"

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"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." 

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"That one I can't help you with but I might be able to get somewhere on non-networked storage beads, especially since it's fine for it to leak."

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"Yeah! Ooh, they could be bone beads, lots of the things I kill have bones, and your affinity was--exotic materials, right?"

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"That's right! If you have any bones lying around that'll be peachy."

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"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." 

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"- yes, absolutely. Though I can often improvise with stuff I wasn't expecting."

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"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." 

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"Oooh, thank you!"

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Liu smiles and takes her jar with both hands, echoing "thank you".

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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. 

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"It... might be a good idea to have some line of communication? Maybe indirectly, if they'll talk to me or Liu once our names are on the wall."

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"I did ask him if there was a mal attack first. --I guess there might be something else worth listening to them about even if I'm not, like, immediately thinking of it." 

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"What, like if they're very stupid and need to be told five thousand times in small words I'm not mind-controlling you lest they try murdering me again?"

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"Hopefully the blackmail should be enough to deter murder attempts, I really don't want to have to explain that you're not mind-controlling me five thousand times in small words just because they're very stupid!"

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"Well, that's what delegating is for."

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"Fair." 

She opens the door again. New York guy is still loitering in the vicinity. 

"Aadhya is willing to talk to you. You can come in. I will be present but paying more attention to my Sanskrit than to you." 

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This is earlier than Aadhya was expecting, but she'll roll with it! "Evening," Aadhya tells the New Yorker.

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"Uh, hi," he says, glancing briefly at Lucia where she's settling cross-legged on the bed with her Sanskrit textbook. "You're Aadhya...Iyer, right?" 

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"That's right, and you're John Pratt, what can I do for you?"

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"Uh, um, I just came here to remind Lucia that...we understand that what Magnus did crossed the line, and we understand that she's mad, and we all still care about her, but also that if she doesn't come back before graduation we can't carry her letter to her parents this year?"

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"Gosh, okay, thanks for letting us know in time to make alternate arrangements, very decent of you!"

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"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. 

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"Anything else?" Aadhya asks.

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"Um," he glances furtively at El, flinches, and says, "not right now, thanks," and flees the room. 

"Tosser," Lucia says before El can. 

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Snort. "I haven't been to the vending machine in a while, anyone feel like making this a picnic?" she proposes.

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"Oh, that sounds excellent!" Lucia says brightly. She opens a different drawer in her desk, pulls out seven vending machine tokens, and puts them in one of her various pockets. 

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The others go retrieve their own stashes and they can troop down to the machine together.

On the way back up Liu ducks into her room to show them her mice. She has several left, and they look surprisingly healthy.

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"Oh, wow, you take such good care of them!" 

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Liu blushes a little. "I thought since - I'm not going to be, uh - we could each pick one."

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"For familiars?" 

She slowly reaches in to pet one with a finger. 

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The mouse sniffs her and puts a tiny paw on her fingertip to get leverage to sit up and sniff more of her.

"Yeah," says Liu.

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Oh noooo, it's cute. 

"Liu, may I hug you?" 

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"- yes?" says Liu.

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HUG. 

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Hug! Liu giggles softly.

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"They're so cute! I didn't know mice were this cute." 

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"These are very tame, too," says Liu, offering a mouse to Aadhya and letting El select one.

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The one Lucia first petted is still there after Aadhya and El both have one, so Lucia holds a hand for it to scurry onto, and then holds it up to her face. 

"You and I are going to be such good friends!" she coos to it. 

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"Aren't you precious," El coos to her mouse. "It's so soft - Liu have I got a boy or a girl mouse -"

"That one's a girl."

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"What about mine?" 

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"That one's a girl too - I have a boy and Aadhya does too."

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"Gotcha." 

She turns her attention back to the mouse. "You need a name," she coos to it, "but I should probably wait a bit to name you, because all the ideas I have right now are unbearably sappy." 

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Aadhya has let her mouse run up the inside of her sleeve out her neckline onto her shoulder. "...all I can think of is Pinky. I suppose it's not like he's going to care if it's silly."

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"Because that's what you call baby mice?"

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"Cartoon character, but plausibly that's where they got it. I like it better than Mickey, at any rate."

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"Hmm. I don't feel particularly tempted by Jerry. Or Minnie all by itself, but, like, backing that up, Minerva isn't terrible...except that Athena slash Minerva have this whole owl thing going on, which feels a little morbid for a mouse." 

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"Precious precious precious," El whispers to her mouse.

"Xiao Xing," says Liu, looking a little like she's had this name in mind for years and simply hasn't previously dared to apply it to any specific mouse.

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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." 

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"As opposed to the Nerf line of weaponry?" El asks, watching Precious rub her little face with her little paws.

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"As opposed to, like, blunted training daggers. I did actually have some Nerf weaponry, though, that and laser tag were sufficiently weapons-training-y to interest me and sufficiently Normal Childhood Activity to appease my dad."

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"I bet you were a terror at laser tag."

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"We played in teams that were me versus everyone else and I was still a terror." 

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"Adorable." This probably means Lucia but might mean Precious, who she is petting.

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Either one is valid!!! 

"Hi Penumbra. Little Penny," she coos to her own mouse, stroking it some more. "Oh, you're so soft and warm, aren't you." 

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"With such little paws!"

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"That is true, you do have itty bitty paws!" 

Theoretically it would be fine to put Penny in one of the larger of her gazillion pockets but she lets her perch on her shoulder instead when they finally make their way to the vending machine. 

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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.

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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. 

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"Okay, but why would you?"

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"Mana is mana. If I get a little bit by squishing some grubs or by doing balance exercises, it all spends the same. And if I do my balance exercises, I get better balance!" 

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"I guess that's true."

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"You guys are building mana, even though I'll share." 

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"Well, I still have to get these crystals all back in shape even if you're helping."

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"Also our names aren't actually up on the wall yet."

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"Good point. Do any of you have paint? I have some markers but I'd rather thicker lines." 

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"I have this weird puffy paint but honestly I think markers will look better."

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"Fair enough. Wanna go do it now?"

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Nod nod.

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Lucy pulls out her markers--she makes runs to the supply closets often enough, and there aren't usually really nice markers, but there occasionally are, so in addition to three black ones, she has a purple, a red, a green, and a metallic gold.

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"Ooh," Liu says of the gold. "- oh, you guys write your names first, I need to choose characters for all of you -"

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"--Oh, I have Mandarin, I use--" she leans in and murmurs the characters so as to not risk infecting Aadhya or El with a new language. 

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Liu nods, picks something for Aadhya and El, and then adds her transliteration to the Latin-characters side.

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Lucia picks the red marker to use, herself, and then beams and clasps her hands and bounces when all the names are up. 

 

"I've never been on a team I picked before." 

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"Happy to help."

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She looks up again at the names, all four of them in the different languages, and grins wide enough to hurt. 

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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." 

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"Way to put me off my waffles." She's eating them anyway, of course.

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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. 

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Aadhya sneaks nervous glances at seniors but applies herself to her French toast sticks and the lake of syrup she put on them.

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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." 

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"- if you want to spot us I can make it known that I'll take bribes for accepting the maintenance assignment," Aadhya says.

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"I'm seriously considering the possibility of just staying down there until the problem is solved and letting my homework join the party if it comes down to it." 

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"You will die of sleep deprivation and then where shall we be?"

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“I mean, I could take naps! I’m pretty sure if I was right there anything busting through would wake me up.”

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"Not if it's gaseous, sneaky, soporific -"

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“…I mean, if they break the walls, that’ll make noise regardless…”

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"Oh, I see, so it's perfectly safe to sleep in a stairwell in the Scholomance as long as the walls maintain their structural integrity, because mals travel exclusively by burrowing through solid metal."

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“…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…”

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"Phase change might help."

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“Ooh, it might. —There was a plan to auction that, right?” she looks between El and Aadhya. “To seniors, presumably, so it probably wouldn’t be safe to invite them to watch, but what a demonstration.”

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"My planned demo was liquefying the lignin in a piece of wood to make a book case, and then silver to inlay it, but if there's demand for more demos..."

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“Oh, perfect!” 
To the sutras: “El is making you such a cool chest.”

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Pet pet pet the sutras. (Pet pet pet the mouse, which she has convinced to stay in her pocket with a pizza crust.)

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"Anyway, priority one is getting the walls fixed before mals swarm the school, but if it's possible, priority two is to bleed off some of the mals in the graduation hall single-file so's they're easier to kill than all in a giant mob."

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"I guess this is rather what we signed up for when we agreed to be allies with you of all people."

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"Don't pretend you didn't know what you were getting into," Lucia says cheerfully. "Anyway, the more mals I kill, the more mana we'll have for graduation." 

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"Till you fill up all my crystals, which you will probably accomplish by November if not sooner."

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"Well, we have bones now, I'll do the beads thing."

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"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."

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"Just don't try to sleep in the hallway."

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"I won't." She considers following this up with 'cross my heart,' but the implicit second line would be, uh, stupid, in the Scholomance, so she doesn't. Instead she says, "You're thinking of doing the demo in shop, right? When?"

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Aadhya can answer this one; she selected a time wherein most of the Sanskrit-doing seniors could make it.

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"Perfect! I will be there, mostly in case of mals but, also, partly, I can't wait to see."

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And indeed on the day of, for an audience of interested parties, El liquefies the lignin in her piece of wood, curves it, clamps it in place, and then resolidifies it. When released from the clamp, the curve holds.

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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.)

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El responds to followup demo requests with a liquefying silver inlay.

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EeeeEeeeee. 
THIS IS SO COOL.

Someone is trying to fetch a canister of nitrogen for a third demo when the school gears start moving.

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Everybody hates it when that happens!

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Oh, crap—

The weak spot in the walls—

Lucia is the first one who bolts from the room, but not the first up the stairs.

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The problem with Lucia running for it is that either something is very very bad and everyone else should be hot on her heels, or the very bad thing is wherever she's running toward and no one should follow her.

El snarls and follows her.

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IT’S DEFINITELY THAT SECOND ONE.

Specifically there is a grogler! El gets there just as Lucia is figuring that out, her first sword-stroke having been worse than useless.

”I fucking hate things that are only weak to ice.”

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"Do you not have an ice spell??"

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“I have, like, one—“ she starts hissing it under her breath.

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"Oh for fuck's sake," growls El, and she solidifies a shell of nitrogen around the grogler, which doesn't look like much in itself but has dramatic effect on the grogler.

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Oh, fuck.

That’s so hot.

Lucia shatters the frozen grogler, scowling at it to hide the flush in her cheeks. “—Thanks. I’m bad at ice.”

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"Well then perhaps that is something you should work on in your copious spare time, you nutter, as it is entirely tractable unless you're planning to tell me you've some kind of anti-affinity."

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“Nnnno, it’s just not usually necessary and I can’t get mana from frozen mals. Sooo I slacked off after the one—I’ll ask the void for better ice spells tonight sorry.”

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"Miraculously, we seem to have survived! Next time you could do us the courtesy of explaining what has you taking off running when there have not been any audible shrieks of terror so as to spare me the trouble of guessing and checking."

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“—I didn’t want to alert the seniors who were there to bid on the spell abut the weak walls.”

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"Then say 'nobody follow me' or 'I need so and so for backup' or some such thing! You don't have to say 'attention all and sundry I am concerned about a hull breach'."

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"--Yeah, I'll do that next time. I'm not used to being on a team, I don't have the right habits built, but I need to learn fast."

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"Shall we go reassure the masses that you have not gotten yourself killed?"

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"Let's slap a quick patch on the wall, first." 

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"Ah yes, I'll just reach into my pocket for the sheet metal I carry on my person. We're going to need to go to the shop to get anything to use as a patch, Walsh."

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"I was--yeah, okay."

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Down into the shop again.

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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. 

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Aadhya grabs a few things as long as Lucia's cleared the cupboards, transfers them into her shop locker, and follows along.

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"Movements knocked loose a weak spot in the wall, we need to fix it," Lucia says in a low tone. "Everything but the sheet metal is camouflage."

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"Damn, I haven't scored the assignment yet. Alas."

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"This is just a patch job. We're going to need something much better before the problem can be considered solved."

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"Well, let's hope the next thing to squish up is smaller."

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"Yeah. What are we going to need for the version where we use the phase-change spell for the fix--"

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"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."

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"Phase control is cheap for what it does but that's really going to add up over a weak spot this size," El says to Lucia, assessing the hole in the wall the grogler left behind. "So you'll need to be full up, you and a few crystals on top of that."

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"Yeah. Maybe I should stick my head in and check for anything convenient and immediate before we patch the wall."

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"Not your head, genius."

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"But that's what I do my seeing with!"

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"It's dark in there and it won't get less dark if you stick your face in it. Plus even if all the mals avoid you if any have already been through they may've coated the whole thing in flesh-eating acid. Get a mirror and a light."

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"Yeah, okay. Time to find out if mals look shiny in a mirror, too." 

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"Shiny?" asks Aadhya, snipping a bit of the sheet metal off to polish up.

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"--Oh--mals look sort of--shiny--to me. Stronger mals look shinier. It's not exactly a visual thing, it doesn't interfere with seeing them normally and I've got a spell that lets me use it at range to find them." 

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"At range but I guess not through walls?"

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"I can use it through, like, library shelves, but the wards between us and what's on the other side of that wall don't let it through." 

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"There are wards left? That grogler was tearing through them like paper maché."

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"There aren't wards left on the wall, but there are wards left on the floor, and there isn't anything high enough up for the wards on the floor not to get in the way of the angle of view, unless it works through the mirror."

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"Well, here you go then," says Aadhya, handing over the shined bit of metal.

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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." 

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"Well, that doesn't call for ice, are you all set to go or do you require warmup exercises, grenade potions, a cheer squad?"

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"Nah, I just figured you guys would appreciate, you know, a warning." 

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"I do! Thank you! I will stand over there."

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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. 

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"- you feeling all right there?"

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"We might want to leave it there while we repair the wall but maybe I could get a few bits out laprascopically?"

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"I think what I want to do is leave it in until we're ready to fix the wall, and then when we take the wall down we can see what we can salvage from where we can reach it. I feel fine, just--conspicuous." 

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"We can swing by my room, pick up a few more crystals before too many people see you."

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"Awesome. Hey, El, does the Junior Prophesied Dark Sorceress Kit happen to contain any dark, concealing cloaks?"

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"...huh, let me think. Uh - no, I think that'll make you radioactive - hm - not sure I can avoid accidentally making a nightshroud if - okay, got it, top me off?"

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"--Well, I was joking, but sure!" 

Uhhh how much is too much--right the night they met--she passes over an approximately mortal flame sized amount.

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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.

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"What a fascinating life you lead."

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"Amazing. What happens in direct sunlight?" 

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"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."

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"You get the most amazing spells. Next time you need to clean a cut I have disinfectant." 

She starts moving towards the stairs. 

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"Was that the time you traded me three weeks of snack tokens for rubbing alcohol?"

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"Yep."

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"Am I going to be extra-sanitary when we take it down?"

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"Probably, yeah!"

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"Cool. Ooh, I bet this spell would be good for, like, sterilizing hospital rooms, or pest control--I'm sure the mana cost is too high for practical use. But I'm going to enjoy it while it's up." 

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"I'm sure there are better spells when all you want is to kill some bacteria."

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"Or cockroaches. --Man, I wonder if the Void would go even harder if you asked for spells to kill stuff. Probably best not to test it." 

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"I have studiously avoided taking creative writing classes after my first attempt."

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"Oh, no, what happened?"

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"Supervolcano."

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"--Wow. Setting off an existing one, or making one out of whole cloth?"

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"Oh, I'm sure it would have served for either."

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"Huh...could you prevent one from going off, if it were going to?"

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"Maybe direct it, not stop it."

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"Hm. Better than nothing, if it ever comes up. Which I'm sure it won't, not within our lifetimes, but...did you know that Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano caldera?"

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"Yeah. If I ever hear it's blowing up I will take one of the many passenger aircraft still offering service to Wyoming."

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"It's not going to come up. I'm just being silly. I think it's easier to just say things, in the dark like this."

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"A little-known side effect."

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They get to El's room. The shroud is taken down. Lucia fills several crystals and pulls a cloth out of yet another of her many pockets to clean argonet off her sword with. 

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Aadhya counts remaining unfilled crystals. "Beads. I'll get on that."

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"It would be sort of funny in a sad way if you eventually did have to take your sharer back because New York provided such a valuable parasitism service."

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"If it comes down to that, I will solicit sharers from several enclaves, so it at least gets spread around some. Plus it messes with the symbolism. Can't say a power-sharer means I'm part of a given enclave if I'm wearing ten!"

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"Is the block thing easy to put on one?"

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"...I don't actually know?"

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"It sounds like it'd be - not trivial, at least? I'm sure you could get some enclave to try, I don't know about ten of them."

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"Maybe. I could also tell them I'll give them mana but they have to let you guys wear the power-sharers."

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"That would be a pretty pickle to put them in."

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"I'd worry at all about them winding up very confused about what expectations they should be maintaining."

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"Sounds like the right attitude. --Another thing we could do with excess mana is bribe indie seniors--do either of you want to send letters to your families--"

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Nod.

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"Absolutely."

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"And Liu will too, I imagine--so we can do that, and probably wildly overpay." 

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"Don't go too wild, they'll figure you've discovered a way to poison mana."

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"Really? Santa Lucia? Can't say I'm complaining if cutting ties with New York brought me down to human in some people's eyes."

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"And associating with me."

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"--Okay, that one I'll judge them for thinking less of me for." 

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"Do you know a way to poison mana?" Aadhya asks El curiously.

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"Only the usual one."

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"I assume the usual one is 'malia?'"

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"Yep."

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With a straight face: "Well, if we want to do that, Aadhya will have to do it, since the two of us are strict mana and I don't think Liu wants to touch it again." 

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"I don't cheat constantly or anything, I've just snuck a little when I don't have enough to ward my room at night unless I dip into reserves!"

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"Sorry, I wasn't trying to poke at you for it."

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Shrug. "Let's not poison people."

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"--Agreed! I was joking!"

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"Yeah. But just to be perfectly clear on the matter."

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"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." 

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"...and you still had the sharer then and it went in the New York pool no problem? What are you, a malia laundromat?"

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"I fucking guess??? I mean, I don't know how to do it without killing people, which I really don't want to do again, so it's not that useful." 

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"But taken in conjunction with you getting clean mana out of mals themselves when they didn't do jumping jacks for it..."

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"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."

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"Yeah, it's squeaky clean by the time you're through with it, I'm just suddenly noticing that if the Void spat out a spellbook at me that told me how to slurp the mana out of an argonet I don't think it would be super good for me to try it."

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"I completely agree with you. I have no idea what's going on with me. Maybe when we graduate I will wring the answers out of my dad." 

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"Maybe all he ever wanted was for you to take all his malia and put it back so he can start over," says El, rolling her eyes.

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"Wouldn't work, his anima is completely fucked."

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"If it has been your whole life plus some dev time, he's plugging along longer than most people can with a completely fucked anima."

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"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." 

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"How does it work to pull malia off consenting colleagues?"

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"In practice? Fuck if I know. But the impression I get is that it's sort of like their passing him mana, except it gets turned into malia in the process?"

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"Which process he reverse-engineered to turn you into a laundromat, I suppose?"

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"Maybe? I feel like it can't be that simple." 

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"Well, obviously it would at least be very complicated to stick this process into a baby. I don't know how much research to suppose he did here beyond having the cursed idea in the first place."

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"I probably wasn't actually a baby yet at the time, I was an in-vitro fertilization." 

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"How does your mom feel about all this?"

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"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." 

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"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."

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"The thing I'm really concerned by is that if there isn't some giant hidden downside then why didn't he tell us." 

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"'Cause it would sound bad? I mean, there probably is some hidden downside! But, like, if there isn't one, you seem fine."

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"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." 

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"Let's not get our hopes up either."

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"I'm not." 

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"Understood."

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"Anyway, even if Dad did, uh, track down the Hands of Death and slorp all the malia out of them to make me, or whatever, I can't undo that, I can only use my abilities constructively going forward."

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"You are very on top of that." El pats her arm.

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"Thanks." 

The next time they're in a room with Liu, Lucia gives her a rundown of the entire incident, from the auction through the conversation about not getting their hopes up about Hyperpredator Wizard Fertility Clinic. 

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"...wow," says Liu. "I guess I... don't have a lot of space to judge?"

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"--You absolutely have the space to judge my dad, he is way past the point where El's spell could do anything for him." 

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Liu fidgets.

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"Are you, like, concealing some other dark secret and worried we'll judge? I don't think we'll judge!"

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"- no, just the one, but you've saved a lot of people and I was just trying to - lay groundwork for my little cousins, there's only a couple of them."

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"--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." 

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"Yes, but I mean - if your dad knew you'd happen."

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"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."

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Liu pets Xiao Xing quietly.

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"You treat your mice well. I'm not, like, a vegetarian on the outside? And I can appreciate an ethical difference between, like, free-range meat and not that?"

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"Mm."

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"El, Aadhya, when do you guys want to try replacing the wall?" 

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"Ugh, I don't know. When are the fewest seniors down in that area, since you're worried about them?"

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"We should practice the steel thing in the shop first."

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"We could practice in the shop and then once you've got it down we move on the wall when there aren't a lot of seniors around?"

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"All right."

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"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. 

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El and Aadhya take several tries to get into the rhythm of the steel manufacture but then are giggling and doing it really smoothly.

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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. 

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Aadhya wants bones, eyeballs, horns, claws, this one gland, scales...

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"...Does it need to be a whole eyeball, or will vitreous fluid do?" she asks, inspecting the collapsed ruin of one of the argonet's eyes that some scavenger had been at. 

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"It has plenty of eyes, I only want the intact ones."

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"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."

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"Yeah, I know we might not be able to get everything. It's a great haul even if all we get is stuff off the head. Ooh, teeth, I want teeth."

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She sets the eyes she's cut out so far in a pile of orbs and trailing nerve and muscle, and then starts prying out teeth. "Man, these things are sharp," she says appreciatively, scoring one across a bit of flesh they don't need. 

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"I'm going to make a polearm!"

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"Ooh, what kind? I bet these would make a great sodegarami."

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"If I get enough teeth!"

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She pries teeth more energetically. "What are the eyes for?"

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"Going to crystallize them and sell them to Hyacinth Castle."

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"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." 

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"If you want an undead argonet I can probably get you one but I don't actually have a spell for it off the top of my head and I don't think that would make it less stuck than it currently is."

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"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." 

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El and Aadhya spring into action.

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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." 

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"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.

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Lucia stands back, and then throws her hands in the air victoriously. 

"El, I love your horrible spell repertoire." 

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"I'm glad someone does."

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Aadhya's going to take a few trips to get argonet bones to the shop.

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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." 

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"Well, someone had to write them. Sometimes I get them in books that are at least meant to look like they were bound in human skin."

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She makes a face. "I'm not in favor of that. But, like, it's not news that people sometimes do horrible things and write horrible spells." 

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"Your life is so concerning," Aadhya tells El.

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"Yeah-huh." Bones transported! Hide transported! It's good that the project lockers borrow space from each other and Aadhya's sneaking a few cubic inches off every other student who isn't putting much in theirs at the moment!

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They can stash some of the bones in Lucia's locker and Liu's and El's, too, even borrowing space you could not fit an entire argonet skeleton into one locker. 

"I think we're going to have to haul some of this up to our rooms, too." 

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"Yeah, you're not wrong. I think we can get it to the point of only needing one trip though."

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"Yeah..." 

Lucia does a quick poke through the cabinets, stabbing a few mals hiding there, and turns up a ball of sturdy twine that they can use to tie things together to make the one trip easier. 

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And they and their macabre haul can head up the stairs.

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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.) 

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Hopefully they are simply good Samaritans.

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"Good...for you?" 

"Yeah, see, I get better allies when I pick them. Shoo." 

The senior takes some more shooing before she leaves, but she does, eventually, shoo. 

"Sorry about that," she says to El. 

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"I blame you entirely. I will never forgive you."

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"Woe," she snorts, and then turns to Aadhya. "Do you think any of the argonet parts will be useful for the harp?"

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"Yeah, there's enough spare bones that I can use them for tuning pegs."

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"Excellent. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, between that and the beads I know you've got a pretty full workload." 

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"Remember you've probably been cut off from the New York homework minions."

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"--Okay, yeah, that's true, I will have less free time than I'm used to." 

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"Liu might not mind picking up some of your homework if you get swamped."

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"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. 

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Well, if they're understandable without opening the door, El won't propose going for a water run, even though it's hot in here with the forges going and they're all sweating.

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They aren't understandable from the bench they're sitting at. Lucia gets up and presses her ear to the door, her brows furrowing in frustrated annoyance. 

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"We could use more water, if you don't think they'll notice us eavesdropping."

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"I think they probably will. --They've bribed a maintenance kid, they want to open the shiny new wall with a maintenance hatch." 

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"- and what, just leave it like that? Somebody'll take the free maintenance hatch if it's not instantly swarmed, those things take months."

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"I'm not assuming their plan only has steps I happened to overhear." 

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"Point. Does that mean it's not wise to go swipe the hatch when they've gone?"

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"Not sure. I'd at least want to poke it with a nice long stick first." Pause. "I think I hear it going up." Pause. "I'm really glad that this is happening after the argonet incident." 

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"Well, it could be we just barely missed the top half of an argonet comically poking out of the hatch, unable to get its hips through."

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"May've done, but I'm not sure the hatches are that sturdy." 

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"They probably aren't." Sigh. "I wonder if seniors in previous years have had this idea. It's not solely a smart move if you're personally killing lots of mals, any thinning the herd by letting them into the rest of the school would still be valuable."

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“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.”

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"Well, that's only if they get caught. A hatch left behind could be a maintenance kid bolting from a mal, dying somewhere conveniently else, and never getting around to collecting the hatch on account of being dead."

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“Well, the problem with that plan is that it creates an obvious incentive to eliminate the accomplice who provided the hatch.”

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"Wouldn't put it past some people."

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“—Yeah, but because the incentive is obvious, it makes it harder to recruit a maintenance-track accomplice.”

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"Fair."

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"I get that we are on this because we are the team who has Lucia who is both very heroic and able to spot people helping with this, but should there be... more... people."

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"--You're not wrong. Do you have, like, ideas, for who to bring in--"

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"It depends on what we need help with."

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She presses her ear harder against the door. "Well, I think the immediate answer isn't dismantling traps, because the seniors haven't left." 

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"If we do need to dismantle traps we're going to want Maria Riviera - the tall one - and Sanjay Reddy."

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"We should probably also have a plan for if their plan is to just not leave until the mals start coming up." 

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"Well, then you sail in and kill the mals, probably?"

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"Well, yeah! But, like, I'm incredibly reckless and bad at normal-people precautions, so it seems totally likely that El is going to point out some obvious other feature to add to that plan to make it less stupid?"

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"I guess if it looks like they're going to do that you should post - Liu, she's least recognizable - in the place they'll have to run past, so she can see who they are. And then kill the mals so they don't eat Liu."

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"Would they have to run? They could have yankers. That would be safer, for waiting until the last possible moment to flee the ravening hordes." 

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"Oh, that would make sense too. In that case I have nothing to add to 'project kill the mals'."

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"Fair enough. --It'll probably make a lot of noise when it happens, do you think it would be weird to just go back to doing homework?"

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"A little bit but not enough that we shouldn't do it anyway, time is mana."

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"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. 

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El goes with her. She is also very good at destroying things, with Lucia taking point and supplying fuel.

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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." 

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"You could keep the hatch."

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"Yeah."

She rolls it up and tucks it under her arm. 

"Next time, though, we'll take time to prep, and do it at a time that's good for us, not just awkwardly do our homework right up 'till." 

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"Also we can share it around for our actual maintenance assignments."

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"Also that! I do also like that. Do you want to wait until dinner, then dramatically stalk into the cafeteria and lay down some ultimatums." 

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"Am I supposed to lay down the ultimatums? I thought that was your bag."

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"Well, okay, probably, yes, but, 'would you like to lay down some ultimatums with me' sounds better than 'would you like to play Worse Cop to my Bad Cop.'"

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"I am happy to stand ominously near you. Let's go tell Aadhya and Liu that the conquering hero has, though."

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"Yeah." 

They start trudging back towards the shop. 

"El? I don't say this enough. I'm really, really glad you're on my team." 

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"You'll rot my teeth, shut your mouth."

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She laughs and shoulder-bumps her affectionately. 

They get back to the shop. 

"Hi guys, everything's dead!" Lucia waves. "We're going to let them stew in how mals aren't flooding the school until dinner and then dramatically call them out." 

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"Please don't make me stand on a table."

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"I was considering glowing and floating, but not putting my feet on a table, let alone anyone else's." 

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"Wow. Okay, glow and float as long as you're sure you can manage anyone taking potshots at you when you denounce them."

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Snort. "A fight is the single thing I am most qualified to handle." 

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"With mals. If someone shoots you in the back what's stopping them from getting you like that?"

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"You." 

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"Thanks for the heads up."

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"You got it!" 

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And up the stairs they go.

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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.

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El watches her back. (Liu and Aadhya get in the food line, sticking close together.)

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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." 

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El aims an apparently sufficiently quelling hiss at somebody on Lucia's six who looked like they weren't already cowed.

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"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. 

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El follows her, turning on the ball of her foot at unpredictable intervals. She gets as far as raising her hand to point at somebody but no actual attacks in either direction fly.

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"You know, before I got to know you, I don't think I would have had any idea how to go off on people that effectively," Lucia muses, once they've collected their food and found a table with a better defensive position with respect to the other students than to mals. 

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"I think it goes nicely with the moral authority."

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"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." 

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El waves, a little parodical finger-wiggle.

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"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. 

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"Will your blood even work? Mals are scared of you."

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"Good question! I think so? Like, mals generally won't attack a mal that's bigger and scarier than them, but a smaller mal will absolutely scavenge off a bigger mal's corpse." 

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"I guess that might be what a honeytrap smells like."

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"It is possible a honeytrap with not-mine blood would be more effective, but I definitely want to do a honeytrap even if it's with my blood and my blood wouldn't work as well, and I wasn't going to volunteer someone else's blood without consulting them."

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"If you supply goo I don't mind donating a bit."

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"Goo I can do. --Actually, if we're outsourcing stuff, I'm not actually the best alchemist there is, maybe we should bring someone better at it in to brew a whole bunch and, you know, also have it on hand for if El or I get hurt during a run." 

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"Assuming they're on board to the point of not poisoning us, sure."

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"There is that. --Aadhya, you're friendly with lots of people, is there someone you can recommend--"

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"I mostly know people in our year, and we'd be looking for a senior for this, right? Since they're the ones standing to gain from you bleeding off the hall."

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"I mean, we could, like, pay, a junior, I don't think we have enough mana storage to keep up with this project yet." 

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"Okay, yeah, we can pay Shannon for healing goo in that case."

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She flips through mental flashcards. "--She has a healing affinity, right? Good choice." 

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"Yup. And she's alchemy track, we can probably just get her to make bigger batches of stuff she'd be making anyway."

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"I mean, she probably doesn't have my mother's healing ointment recipe yet? I haven't been handing it out like candy. And it's a good recipe. She might well have something even better but it wouldn't be exactly the same thing as if we weren't outsourcing it..."

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"Well, I can ask her. She might well trade us for the recipe itself."

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"We'll see what happens. And if Clarita comes through on the homework thing you'll have more time to work on the beads, among other things..."

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"Mm-hm! Great big string of bone beads."

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"It's gonna be so cool. All your projects are really cool. --I realize it's kind of weird that I'm actively excited for this, but then, I am pretty weird." 

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"It's weird but rather bracing! And it's nice that you're interested in hanging around the shop while I'm doing stuff."

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"Do you think you'd have trouble working while the killbox was going on outside?"

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"Probably and also if something gets away from you I'd rather not be cornered."

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"That makes sense. El, do you have opinions about scheduling--" 

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"I didn't have a timer on it last time, do you have a ballpark of how long you'll want to go at a stretch?"

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"Well, longer than that, if there's someone with shields behind us so I don't have to freak out about the possibility of anything small getting through. I could go for hours at a time."

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"Huh. What do you say after classes before dinner and then when we knock off we go eat?"

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"Sounds good to me! --Probably a stop by the showers first." 

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"All right, so leave fifteen minutes turnaround before dinner."

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"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."

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"Is she still on his team, then?"

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"Yep." 

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"I suppose it is a bit late to break stride."

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"I'm judging her less than the other New York seniors." 

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"They could give Todd your power sharer," snorts El. "But that would rather screw over Clarita."

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Snort. "I wish Clarita all the best. May she go live in New York and do whatever she wants there." She mimes washing her hands. "Not my circus, not my monkeys." 

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"No, your monkeys are swarming ravenously down below," snorts El. "Do you think if you carried multiple crystals and I drew on them more generously through the network while we were killing stuff we could avoid overloading anything?"

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“Worth trying. I keep thinking it would be really useful if we had power sharers, like, not connected to any enclave, just the four of us—they are useful. Pity they’re so entangled with the whole system.”

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"We'd need a really good power sink to hook them up to - no smaller than an enclave's, really, since you were powering New York by your lonesome. I don't think that's feasible in here...?" She looks over at Aadhya.

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"If you give me a diamond the size of my head and a kilo of moon dust and six months with no other responsibilities."

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"I'll keep my eyes peeled."

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“Would a diamond really be the thing, with your affinity?”

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"A diamond the size of my head would very much be an unusual material."

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“You know, that’s fair. Obviously this isn’t going to come to anything while we’re still in here, but I wonder if a mundane laboratory could synthesize one that big…”

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"They couldn't last time I heard, but who knows, maybe they've cracked it in the last couple years."

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“Well, we’ll see. —Actually come to think of it, El, I bet we could do something neat with that crushing spell you used for the mirror? Isn’t that how diamonds happen, with coal?”

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"...maybe but you'd need a ludicrous lake of mana we have nowhere to put."

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“And so the problem cycles. Ah well.”

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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. 

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El isn't glowing but she looks rather exhilarated! Like she went on the most intense roller coaster ever or something. She shakes her shoulders in a little mini dance as they give the all clear to take the shields down.

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Lucia hugs El impulsively because that is the kind of person she is. 

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El giggles and hugs her back. "You're a million watts, there, holding up all right?"

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"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. 

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They have a dinner. There are so many whispers and stares.

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The next morning Todd Quayle shows up to breakfast looking even more sulky than usual, wrist bare of power-sharer. 

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"- wonder what Clarita's plan is now."

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"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." 

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"If you wanted to we wouldn't drop you over it. If you get any brighter than you did yesterday you'll blind people."

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"I might dump some mana on them to positively reinforce dropping Todd; I'm not going back to them." 

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Nod nod.

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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."

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"Well, I'm sure the rest of Todd's former team would appreciate a dollop if you want to reinforce everyone who dropped Todd."

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"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." 

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"You know you can sell mana, right? You can buy maintenance shifts and stuff that way off anybody."

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"Yeah, but you see, I have now given New York mana for free. --You're right though, my pride isn't worth the price." 

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"To compensate them for the loss of that toerag."

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"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. 

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"I could probably hold a little more if you want some help with that." Thus telegraphed: tug tug.

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Lucia's eyes go wide, and she sways slightly. 

"Did you just--was that--you can--that easily?"

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"- I didn't take any but, yeah, that's out of the goodness of my shriveled blackened heart?"

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She kisses her. 

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El seizes her by the hair and pulls her off. "Have you lost your bloody mind?"

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"--Sorry! Sorry, sorry--"

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"Your bewildering maleficer kink is possibly not the strangest thing about you but it's up there," El grumbles.

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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."

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"I think you're high on excess mana."

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"I mean, maybe? I wasn't planning to tell you I liked you until after graduation." 

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"Mental," mutters El, and she gets up and stalks back to her own room.

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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." 

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"Oh, good. - oh that one's nice."

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She passes her the ivory donkey, and Liu a little marble statuette of a mouse. 

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"Awww," says Liu. She shows the mouse to Xiao Xing, who sniffs it and then decides it is uninteresting.

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Aww. 

 

 

"I'm really sorry for kissing you without your permission. I don't--want you to think--that I only like you because of, of a kink."

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"You kissed her?"

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"She was high on excess mana."

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"That's no excuse for being inconsiderate." 

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"If you say so."

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"--I feel like I'm missing subtext? Am I missing subtext." 

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"I don't think so! I wasn't even there, I have nothing to subtext about."

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"Okay. You were making a face, though." 

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"I haven't heard of people being high on mana, but also, you can hold a ton more than anyone else, so." Shrug.

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"I mean, I think what I was actually high on was adrenaline, but it doesn't seem like it super matters?"

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"It does not! Congratulations on finding mana storage! Have you filled it all yet?"

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"Not all of it! In addition to buying these I also hired out our maintenance shifts, so a bunch of mana went into storage that I did not carry away with me." 

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"Oh good, I keep getting really grody bathroom cleanings."

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"Yeah. This stuff'll fill up pretty fast, though, I'd be surprised if it takes more than tomorrow." 

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"Maybe you should make like the Muslim kids and just set up a charity. With the storage, not direct, in case some kid is sketchy."

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"Maybe I should. It would make sense...maybe I could use this one for it." She plucks from the pile a piggybank-shaped piece of carved rose quartz. 

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"Disgustingly adorable," pronounces Aadhya, patting the piggy.

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"I had the same thought. I'm charmed, honestly." 

The next day through the end of classes goes by approximately as the past couple had, except that Lucia keeps failing to hide her fretting about how badly she had offended El. 

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El seems determined to ignore this.

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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.)

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"What do you lot want?" El asks them.

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"Nothing," one of them says, and flees. The rest percolate out pretty quickly. 

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"Rubberneckers," mutters El. Shower time.

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Lucia is not actually careful to look away when El is showering because, uh, mals, but she is, like, as not weird about it as she possibly can be. 

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El is not going to be weird about it either, because, uh, mals, and also Lucia does not seem obviously high at this moment!

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"Are we still on hugging terms," she asks, a little more than halfway to the cafeteria. 

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"Yeah, 'course." Hug.

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Hug!!!!!

It looks like Lucia did not fuck things up irreparably after all. The tension melts almost completely out of her. 

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Pat pat.

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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."

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"No idea what it is?"

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"Not with that little light..." She throws a fireball at it. "Oh, it's a death wyrm." 

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"...well, I can de-flesh it and then it might fall out or at least make room for stuff to go through it, if we want to keep going today, or we could put the hatch somewhere else?"

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"Would de-fleshing it be a lot less mana than crushing it? It wouldn't necessarily be better for the bones to be stuck."

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"I think that'd be harder to do without messing up any of the mechanisms in there and leaving some bathroom without plumbing or whatever."

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"Fair enough...let's just move the hatch, I don't think that thing's bones are enough less bulky without the flesh on to be worth the effort." 

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"Other side of the hall?"

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"Yeah." 

She shuts off the honeypot--no getting that out around the death wyrm, no point in attracting mals...unnecessarily...ohhhhhhh. 

She shuts the hatch and peels it off the wall. "I just had a great idea." 

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"Oh?"

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"Well, we're not getting that honeypot back out around the death wyrm--and until the death wyrm gets unstuck, nothing else is getting up this way. What if we turned it back on during graduation, to distract the mals from the seniors?"

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"Stuff'll eat through the death wyrm. I guess if you don't have the hatch on you could bet it'll take them half an hour to get past it and we can come out and kill them all after the mortal flame's run through the halls."

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"Stuff will definitely eat through the death wyrm, but it'll take a little time, and the wards, like, exist--actually it'd be neat if we could time it so the mortal flame killed anything that managed to get through--"

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"That's very optimistic, we can't be here when the mortal flame comes through ourselves."

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"Yeah, that's true. We could run it for, like, the first fifteen minutes, that would give us time to get back to our dorms." 

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"That might accomplish something but I'm not sure it would accomplish timing."

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"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." 

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El has no objection to talking to Clarita! Is Clarita handy right now?

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Clarita is handy right now! Clarita is very interested in this idea. As soon as Lucia has finished explaining it, Clarita immediately vanishes to talk to some senior artificers. 

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And now it is time for showering and dinner!

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Some time after dinner, Clarita tracks down the group, which is once again ensconced in the shop. She casts a reservedly impressed look at the in-progress harp, then says, "I've talked to several senior artificers and maintenance people, and we think we have a workable plan." 

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"All ears," says Aadhya.

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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. 

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"That's going to screw over anyone who needs the shop."

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Clarita shrugs, like, less than that roomful of mals would screw over the senior class. 

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"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!"

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She makes a face. “Fine. It will be harder, but we’ll create movable barricades, and put them up the day before. Everyone can deal with one less day.”

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"I hope for your sake you're not wrong about that! I guess as long as we're doing mana handouts we can prioritize anyone running late in shop."

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“If it is necessary,” Clarita grits out, “I will personally assist stragglers.”

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"See, that'll go over much better than screwing over other people. Well done."

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“I didn’t want to lead with ‘procrastinate on your project and the senior valedictorian will do it.’”

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"Mine's already done. Let's just not kill fifty freshmen with their own baskets."

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“Yes, I agree,” she says, not even slightly glancing at Lucia.

”Good,” Lucia says, “if you need backup for finishing projects, tell them to show up just before dinner while I’m glowing.”

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"Anything else to cover just now?"

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Clarita glances discreetly at the Golden Stone Sutras. “Not unless any of you have discovered anything else monumental in the last few days.”

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"Nothing new."

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“Good to know I can still keep up,” Clarita says, and leaves.

”She’s okay. She’ll improve the average quality of New York, at any rate.”

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"Much joy may it bring her."

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Shrug. ”As well her as anyone.”  

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A few days later, after class, Magnus Tebow and Chloe Rasmussen from New York approach El after class. After a moment’s pause, Chloe elbows Magnus.

”—I’m sorry,” he says with poorly-concealed reluctance. A little more sharply: “I wasn’t trying to kill you.”

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"- the hell you weren't!"

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“All the crawler had was a mana-siphon spell! It wasn’t going to do anything really awful to you unless you had gone as far down the path of maleficing as Lucia insists you haven’t.”

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"I'm strict mana, genius!"

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He gawps at her. “Like hell!” 
“Magnus,” Chloe hisses, elbowing him harder.

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"I have been my entire bloody life, so, congratulations, next time someone rhetorically asks why anyone would even whip up a mal in their shop in the first place, I can tell them to ask you!"

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“Even if you’re telling the truth, I didn’t know!”

”Magnus.”

”And if it did turn into a mal, Lucia was right there, it would have been—ow!”

Chloe has stepped on his foot, hard. “Magnus stop making things worse you are here to apologize.”

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"So you only wanted to give me the ague, which as we know never kills anyone here in our safe haven."

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“You’re Lu—ow!”

”What Magnus is trying to say” Chloe says, glaring at him, “is that it was stupidity and not malice,” she pauses, evaluating the plausibility of what she just said, “mostly not malice, and he is very sorry.”

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"I acknowledge that you are stupid. Was there anything else?"

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Chloe gives Magnus a warning look, and says, “Yeah. Two things. One, we promise to keep Magnus on a shorter leash from now on. Two, we’re offering you this year’s spot.”

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"I don't want it."

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Chloe takes a deep breath and nods. “Okay. Magnus? Go ahead to the library, I’ll catch up.” He frowns stubbornly. “Go, I mean it,” Chloe hisses at him. He goes, looking distinctly put-upon. 
“I’m sincerely sorry about him,” Chloe says.

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"It's amazing how easy it is to get to be sincerely sorry about something once it's inconvenienced you."

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She looks away. “Yeah. And easier to say it when everyone’s agreed that something else matters more than enclave solidarity.”

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"You don't need to shove Magnus into the Void to get me on side, it won't help. It's not about the company - not mostly. I don't want the slot."

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“…I didn’t think you would, I just have to offer anyway. I just want you and Lucia to graduate with as small a grudge against New York as possible.”

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"I'll tell her you said so."

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She holds up her hands defensively. “I said you and! Nobody who’s not stupider than Magnus still thinks she’s carrying you as dead weight, not since the two of you started bleeding off graduation mals together.”

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"Yes, well, I don't think she'll talk to you, so. I'll tell her."

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“…Thanks. I mean it.”

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"No doubt."

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She nods and walks away before Magnus can get too much closer to the library than her.

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El faithfully reports on the contents of this conversation to Lucia.

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"...Huh. Well. Do you want to, separate from everything else, end up Domina of a Radiant Mind enclave? Because she was totally talking to--in her mind--'Future Domina of the Blank Enclave.' And she wants a good relationship between that enclave and New York."

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"- I don't reckon I'll be slowing down on making new ones soon enough to settle in one myself anytime soon."

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"That's about what I was thinking, but it would, like, make any amount of sense to have one as a home base and, like, Aadhya and our moms could live there, and anyone else we wanted to onboard, and stuff." 

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"Mum's friends are all mundanes."

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"--Okay, valid, but the point about like Aadhya stands. I guess she could hang out with Liu's family probably? They've got to be relatively high up the list." 

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"Yeah. Liu's family are saving up for the enclave spells. We could build them one and Aadhya could move into it if she doesn't mind picking up Mandarin."

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"Picking up a language is going to be so much less fraught after graduation!"

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"Rather, yes!"

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"D'you think your mom would mind being a non-enclave home base?"

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"Depends what that means, I suppose, she likes the quiet life."

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"I think I mostly mean, if at any point we do manage to get mana storage good enough to attach power sharers with, could we leave it with her." 

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"Oh. Yeah, probably."

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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.

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El joins her in the hall, stepping lightly to avoid the hot floor melting her sneakers.

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The two of them manage to get in sooner than they would have if people didn't tend to get out of Lucia's way. She starts poking through cabinets, looking for things on Aadhya's wishlist that she hasn't managed to extract from a slain mal. 

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El takes down the hatch and honeypot.

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"Nothing seems to have made it through. That's some good fortune, at least." 

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"If anything did it was turtled up somewhere and probably did not choose the moment when you walked by to emerge."

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"Well, the really scary stuff would mostly be too big to hide."

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"Mostly, yeah." She sticks the hatch in her locker for later.

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Depressing!

But probably a maw-mouth did not come up. Or, if it did, the mortal flame got it. There really aren't that many in the graduation hall, after all. 

Oh, hey, that's not depressing-- "El! Look!" Lucia waves a strip of LEDs at her. 

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"Ooh, the sutras will love it."

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"Yeah! They deserve it, too, they're so lovely." 

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El tucks the lights into the case alongside the book and helps carry everything else.

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Lucia takes the other half of their haul. "You know, it occurs to me, we were still almost strangers when you asked Santa for a shirt, and now we are not, and I, uh, have spares." 

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"Oh, that would be great, I don't actually... have... a senior outfit."

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"Weight limitations or did something happen to it?" 

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"Sacrificed it early freshman year in an emergency."

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"Yikes. Let's get this settled and then I'll grab one." 

They get their haul to Lucia's room and she pulls out a dark blue shirt with lightning-like silver streaks. 

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"Magic, or just snazzy?"

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"Just snazzy." 

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El changes into it (and pats her homemade poncho shirt and promises to sew it into more of a shirt shape with this slack).

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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

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Induction is a sort of cheerful time, as times in the Scholomance go. Everybody comes together to give all the nauseated kids water and get their mail. El isn't expecting any mail but it's what they've got that passes for a holiday so she goes.

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The New York freshmen are in fact very unpleasantly surprised that Lucia has decided to quit! After some unpleasantly surprised milling-about, one of them decides to come over and give her her letter from her mother anyway, which she accepts gracefully. 

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El, quite to her surprise, gets a letter.

She reads it, and then promptly shreds it to illegible bits and gives out a piece to everyone who has ever been remotely decent to her including the kid who delivered it. "Eat it," she says.

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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. 

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Hug.

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They meet Liu's cousins, who are very cute, fresh-faced and tiny. 

The shadow stays over El's expression the rest of the day, and Lucia worries. 

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And then the next morning comes, with it homeroom assignments, and El is directed to a classroom with a handful of other seniors and a gaggle of freshmen, including a Bangkok enclaver and one of Liu's little cousins. 

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Well, that's bizarre, but, sure, hi Liu's little cousin, etcetera.

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Lucia swoops by to compare schedules, blinks at the odd classroom setup, waves at the little cousin, and then actually shows El her schedule. 

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El compares schedules with Lucia and leverages this to get a look in at the other seniors in the room's options.

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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." 

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"Are they in good shape?"

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"The ones I grabbed were! Several of the others were not." 

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"Well, maybe I can get credit for patching them up. They say senior year the school picks up more on what you're interested in working on."

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"I think some of them have already been scavenged for parts, but there are probably some left that are patch-up-able." 

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Liu comes and sits with them, looking pensive.

"Bangkok's gone," she says softly, after picking through her fruit salad to make sure it's all food.

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"--The enclave?"

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Liu nods. "A few weeks ago. My cousins told me. No one knows how."

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"Okay, wow, that's--maybe I should go over to the Shanghai table and make a gesture of good faith to show that I really sincerely cut ties with New York."

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"We should buy their power sharer."

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"Oh, man, we totally should--dangit, I left my flashcards in my room--" she starts looking around at tables to identify Bangkok. 

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"There," says El, inclining her head in a direction. "Those are the Bangkok seniors, but their juniors are sitting halfway across the cafeteria..."

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"Thaaaat's interesting--you think the seniors cut everyone else off?"

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"Maybe? If they can't offer slots or even interviews because their enclave doesn't exist any more they've got to be scrambling."

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"Yeah...let's go talk to them." 

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"All of us?"

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"Liu has Mandarin, Lucia needs to tell them she's renounced New York, if their power sink is hard to maintain I'm the artificer, I guess technically you could stay behind."

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"No, no, I'm coming."

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They make their way over to the Bangkok table. --The Bangkok seniors' table. 

The seniors are having a hushed but furious debate, which immediately quiets when the four of them approach, the ex-enclavers turning warily. 

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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?

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"If it were that we would be talking to Shanghai. I assume you're aware of what El and I spent the last few weeks of last term doing." 

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"Killing things, yes."

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"Are you aware that I pull the mana from the mals I kill." 

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"I have seen you glow."

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"We've filled all our mana storage and then some. We want to buy the Bangkok power sink." 

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"You could most likely keep using it, if there are enough power sharers to go 'round," Aadhya adds. "We'd have to work out how much of the mana you could take over what you put in, but we're only four."

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Lamai explains this to the other Bangkok seniors in soft Thai.

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There is a quiet susurrus of mixed suspicion and hope. 

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"What are you offering?" Lamai asks.

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"What do you need? The obvious answer is lots and lots of mana, but, you know, we can be more creative than that." 

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"A golden enclave," says El.

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There is a much louder flurry of discussion. One senior says, in Mandarin, "Under what terms? How soon?" 

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"Well, we have to live to do it, and I don't know yet how long it takes to make one, but you can be - let's say no later than the third one, probably second after Liu's family but could be first or third depending on how things shake out outside."

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"Will you swear to it, to any allies we make?" 

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El looks at Lucia.

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Lucia nods. 

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"Yeah. You can tell your alliances you'll have a golden enclave, if me and the sutras and Lucia make it, or just me and the book but you'll have to put in mana for it then."

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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 -

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"Don't be horrid, give us three and let her have one. We can slosh mana around amongst ourselves, we live on the same bloody hall." Plus Lucia can't wear an unmodified one.

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"We do have other mana storage. It's not enough to keep up, but it'll keep one person at a time fine." Thank you El for not mentioning Lucia's embarrassing mana control handicap. 

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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.

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"I do love a good positive-sum exchange." Even if the seniors were being total jerks about the idea of not supplying Sudarat. 

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"See you later!" chirps Aadhya, accompanying the Bangkok kids to their hiding place for their sink.

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"--Okay, now that that's accomplished, I think I am in fact going to try to talk to Shanghai." 

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"D'you want me along for that?"

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"Yes, please, I'm only mostly sure they won't try to kill me." 

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El accompanies her.

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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. 

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El didn't understand any of that because it was in Chinese, so she is tragically unable to have unmanageable amounts of fuzzy feelings about the words "best friend".

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"Well, that went better than it could've." 

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"They're not going to start doing murders?"

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"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." 

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"Huh. Well, I guess 'unimpressed but not calling bullshit' is relatively safe as a place to start from."

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"He wanted to know if I'd take out New York if that was the only way to stop a war." 

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"How would you even know a thing like 'that's the only way to stop a war' to begin with?"

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"Good question. I think what he actually said was, like, if New York were unambiguously pursuing a war of aggression." 

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"Then you could assassinate the council, you don't have to kick the whole enclave off into the void about it."

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"Yeah that was approximately what I said." 

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"I think the school's going to stick me with Mandarin next and I'm still painfully slow at Sanskrit," sighs El.

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"Sorry about the Mandarin." 

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"It's not you in particular, just little things that keep coming up."

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"Do any of the languages you have use tones? Mandarin uses tones and that's supposed to be really obnoxious if you're not used to it."

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"Not a one of them, so that'll be a delight."

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"Mom was really strict about Mandarin immersion lessons when I was little because she was positive the school would try to stick me with it if I didn't already have it, what with half the students speaking it. One of her brothers got spellblocked." 

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"Yikes. I don't think most Anglo kids wind up with it but it's a good one to have, I guess."

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"I got pretty into it once I realized it would let me safely yell 'get out of the way' to twice as many kids!" 

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"I guess that would be the use case." Snort.

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Snort. "Maybe I'll get a little more benefit of the doubt from Shanghai now, since I've been saving Sino kids as well as Anglo all along." 

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When they get the three power-sharers from Bangkok, Lucia looks at one and goes, "Oh, neat, they have the peril detectors." 

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"Then shouldn't they be going off at all times?"

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She waves a hand dismissively. "Acute peril, not chronic peril. At least if they work anything like New York." 

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"Are we going to be getting shrieked at every time one of the Bangkok kids has something come through their vent at night or leap at them from a supply cupboard?"

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"Depends how sensitively they're set? And how big a thing is jumping at them out of a cupboard. But, like, those things do happen less to enclavers, mine didn't go off more often than once or twice a week." 

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"Grand. We'll discover empirically if they are in some important technical sense 'enclavers'."

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"The mals don't care where we live when we're at home, they care who's powerful, and with power sharers, we are."

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"And the bare fact of having backup helps, too." 

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"Will it tell us who's in it? Where they are? How bad it is?"

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"Well, these might not work exactly the same as the New York ones, but if they do, then you get direction, distance, and, if applicable, number--when, uh, the library happened, I could tell that several New Yorkers were in trouble, but not actually which ones." 

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"Well, that'll have us and the Bangkok kids showing up to one another's perilousnesses. Charming."

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"Well, it'll also let you know if Aadhya or Liu encounter especial peril." 

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"Yeah. Just imagining thinking it's one of them and running to the rescue and it's some bloke whose name I can't recall who I share no languages with and who vaguely hates me."

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"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."

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"It's inconvenient but it's not like I don't spend most of my time around at least one of you, and anyway, you need that time to work on the harp." 

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"And my cool spiky pikey."

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"It's gonna be so cool!!!!!"

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"Are you gonna want it, when it's done?"

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Bounce bounce. "I mean, I shouldn't hog all of the sharp objects? But yes." 

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"You can sell off your least favorite sword or something."

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"There is always that." 

 

The bad news is that the Bangkok power sharers do not identify the object of a given peril; the good news is that the most frequent Peril Recipient is Sudarat, who is small, cute, and inoffensive. 

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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.

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Lucia does not comment on this at all when it comes up. 

Instead she gets Aadhya sorted with the remaining banged-up portable fortifications, and they can do the killbox again! Definitely just for mana reasons and not to bleed off more graduation mals. 

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They have lots of room for all the mana now! And it's much more fun than pushups, though El does sometimes drop and give herself fifty just to stay in the habit.

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Incredibly valid of her. 

 

And then a couple weeks into term, the very tip of something indescribably awful peeks out of the hatch. 

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"- LUCIA -"

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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. 

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El steps in front of her. A shield springs up over both of them.

"A la mort. A la mort. A la mort -" She's flicking her fingers at it like she's trying to get water off them.

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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. 

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Well, El can wrench the hatch off the wall and turn off the honeypot and hug her.

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Hug hug hug cry. 

 

 

"I was wrong, I'm sorry." 

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Hug hug hug. "Shhh, it's gone. I got what was left of it." She tries to put some mana in her, as long as they're touching anyway.

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The mana slides in, easy as anything; it does not seem to improve her state. "No you don't understand--El you don't understand--that's not, the problem--" 

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"Is the problem something else I need to kill or should it maybe wait ten minutes!"

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Set yourself right. Set yourself right. 

"...Ten minutes," she says, instead of the other thing she wants to say. 

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Good. They can sit here on the gooey floor for ten minutes, hugging. El holds the shield for the first three or so and then lets it drop when nothing comes at them.

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El is so good, El is so so good and Lucia loves her so much. 

After ten minutes and repeated applications of set yourself right Lucia has mostly managed to calm down. 

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"Better?" El asks her, when it's been... probably more like fifteen.

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Swallow. "Yeah. I mean--yeah. But--El. El, do you remember when, when I said, that wanting to kill mals was like being hungry--and no matter how much I ate, I was never satisfied." 

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"Everyone wants mana constantly! Do you think I'm not wrestling with the temptation to slurp up everything in the sink?"

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"Not like this! El, when I--when my mana touched the maw-mouth, it was--it was like a tug-of-war, which of us could slurp the other up first."

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"Well, you both lost, because you collapsed and I killed it the rest of the way. So?"

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"So me not winning was the point, I wasn't trying to win, I was trying not to win, because then all those people would be screaming inside me." 

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"Well, you know what, today I've learned I can do it twice and I can probably do it three times if it comes up. So don't do anything evil, and... let me handle them, s'pose."

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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." 

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"In there, it never surrounded us, you burnt off the outer few meters and the rest of it wouldn't have been able to stretch far enough if it tried. What else is on the buffet of horrid revelations?"

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"I could see in there, even if it wasn't surrounding me--not, like, physically see, more like--the way I see mals as shiny--anyway. Did you see--either time--the, um, the core." 

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"The, rotisserie chicken looking thing?"

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"Yeah, that was a person. And then they crushed whatever poor soul that was to death. As--under--" 

Deep breath. 

"The foundation stone of an enclave." 

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"How the bloody hell can you have seen that in its shininess??"

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"It's--it was--still connected. The maw-mouth, itself, was holding it up. It was like--seeing the way the bones of your hand connect to your wrist under a bright light." 

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El takes a minute to digest that, and then, perhaps because of it being so unpalatable, vomits directly into the floor drain after the dribbling goo of the maw-mouth.

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That's so valid of her!!!!! Hug hug hug hug.

Bitter, despairing laugh. "I guess I was wrong about whether I can destroy an enclave to stop an atrocity." 

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"If the Bangkok kids find out -"

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"Oh, fuck, I hadn't thought of that--" 

She puts her head between her knees and screams quietly for a little bit. 

 

"You know, if we just sit here in the muck forever, we'll definitely die before we have to deal with any of this." 

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"Sign me right up." She digs the heels of her hands into her eyes as though trying to rub away a bad dream.

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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--"

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"I wasn't going to charge people! I was going to saunter around being - constructive and benevolent and sticking it to my prophetic bloody grandma, and - she said I was going to be the ruin of enclaves -"

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"I mean I bet that happens if we successfully publicize this. I know you weren't going to charge for it, and you know you weren't going to charge for it, but who'd fucking believe that? People barely believe I exist, and I've been existing at them for three years!"

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"I'm already the ruin of enclaves! This was the second one! I don't even know who I just cast off into the bloody Void!" El shakes her head furiously. "Is there an enclave sitting on you?"

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"...I don't...think so? I think...the thing sitting on me...is me." 

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"Well, maybe if we have lead time before the next occasion of running into one of these we can see if we can balance its charge on your head before slaying all its component tormented souls." El shudders.

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She makes a face. "Worth a shot. Maybe if you, I dunno, cast the not-evil foundation stone spell on me?" She blinks, and leans backwards, laughing despairingly. "This is such bullshit! Listen to us!" 

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"There is one stupid sense in which this is sort of good news!"

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"Oh?"

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"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."

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"--Oh huh. Well. Yeah, maw-mouth vibes would pretty soundly justify that. I suppose I shall have to explain to her that I am a very weird maw-mouth. And also that the set-yourself-right spell is so useful, like wow." 

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"My problem with it is that I usually don't want to be right when I'm not."

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"That makes so much sense. But, like, the kind of not-right you tend to be is, like, pissed off at people, who have legitimately done things wrong, which sounds a lot more appealing to not discard than 'oh fuck, I'm a maw-mouth.'"

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"Yeah. I know a lot of ways to quit being angry and not a one to want to."

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

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"I have a fair number of near misses."

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

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"Cheers." Sigh.

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Sigh. 

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

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"Your dad, who else?"

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

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

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

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

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"Oh, I will." 

 

She laces her fingers together. 

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

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"- did he before? Before school?"

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

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

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She opens her mouth and then stops, thoughtfully. 

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

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

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"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."

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

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

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

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

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"Augh."

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"I really do not like this situation." 

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

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"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!"

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"That's so random, I've never heard anyone advise that people should ice themselves if they meet a maw-mouth."

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"I have no idea how or why it works. But, like, I'm not surprised it's not generally known, people aren't usually stupid enough to try to interact with maw-mouths enough to do science to them." 

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"True enough." Hug.

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Hug hug hug. 

Eventually Lucia drags herself to her feet. Sitting in the muck until they die is appealing, but not actually going to, like, accomplish anything. 

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"We're probably going to miss dinner if we actually take showers. Have you got a cleaning spell that isn't a stupidly inefficient Old English charm?"

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"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. 

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"Thanks."

And off they go, slightly late to dinner to get whatever nobody else in the line took.

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Lucia fries a couple of things hiding in mostly-untouched trays and does not eat anything but their mana. 

When they find Aadhya and Liu to sit down with, Lucia says quietly, "My dad is not going to open a fertility clinic and you do not want one of me." 

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"...damn. I'm sorry to hear, uh, whatever that implies."

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"You will be sorrier when we have some privacy and I share the full details." She stabs a Food Object more firmly than necessary and starts eating. At least this kind of hunger isn't hazardous to feed. 

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Aadhya is capable of Not Asking during dinner.

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After dinner, in Lucia's room, she sits on the bed and hugs her knees. 

Deep breath. 

"A maw-mouth came into the killbox this afternoon." 

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"- well - you're here - but, uh, shit?"

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"El killed it. While I was busy freaking out. Because it--I--it--" 

She takes a deep breath. 

"I. Recognized it. And its eternal hunger. In myself." 

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"What does that... mean."

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"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." 

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"Wow! I appreciate that you learned this before I tried to have one of you!"

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"Yeah! And! For bonus points! It wasn't even the worst thing I figured out while I was having a deep heart-to-heart with the maw-mouth's magical structure!" 

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"What in the fuck was."

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"There were--two things. One was the core of the maw-mouth, and one was--a connection, to something, elsewhere. The core was a person that had been crushed to death, and I'm 98% certain that the connection was to the foundation stone of an enclave." 

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"But -" says Liu, and then she trails off.

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"--Your family is going to be fine, El has the Golden Stone Sutras and you guys are at the top of the list." 

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"I hope I can cast the bloody thing. They must have switched away from them for some reason. Was it just to make the enclaves bigger? They felt a bit cramped, so -?"

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"You're enough better than me at Sanskrit that if there's an answer in the sutras I bet you find it first. My dad might know but it's not in my top five things to ask him." 

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"Yeah-huh. Uh, graduation day Aadhya'll pop out closest to you, but still not on your doorstep..."

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"Still probably a more logistically viable first stop than Wales...oh well, Wales can always be a not-first stop." 

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"I meant if you need backup pronto."

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"Backup for what?"

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"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."

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"I'd been imagining our graduation plan would be more 'mass slaughter' than 'timespear', but I guess a timespear would give us more opportunity to massively slaughter."

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"I was thinking if I held onto enough mana from the massive slaughter I could cast it right before going through the gates." 

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"Oh, that'd work too... if it'll survive exduction..."

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"Using it as a general strategy doesn't not have that problem. Man, does exduction eat all your mana like induction does? Somehow I do not know this." 

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"I don't think it does or you'd hear more about new graduates being ambushed and eaten as soon as they pop out."

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"That is such a good point. --I wonder if set-yourself-right would do for mind control. Or some types of mind control, anyway." 

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"I don't think it's that heavy-duty, but I guess maybe if you overpowered it enough and it was pretty milquetoast mind control."

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Snort. "If my dad does anything to me, it won't be milquetoast." 

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"Could be if he's trying to be subtle to other people about it and doesn't expect you to be quite as hostile as you are."

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"--He might go for something that optimizes for subtlety over power," she acknowledges. "But I don't want to bet on it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if he manages to round up a posse to greet me who think I deserve it for trying to quit."

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"Guess that's a drawback of that tidbit having gotten out before you did."

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"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." 

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El shivers. "We can't tell them, but -"

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"Tell them what?"

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"The timing matches my little incident in the library."

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"Fuuuuuuuck."

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"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." 

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"So we don't tell them, what's the issue?"

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"We're on their power sharer network! I'm running out of my Myrddin seminar or whatever on a routine basis saving Sudarat from things!"

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"Probably they, personally, would not be better off if the maw-mouth hadn't died. It would've gone for the now-sophomores first, but I bet it wouldn't've stayed in their dorms forever." 

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"It probably wouldn't have gotten everyone before it sat still to digest for a while."

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"Yeah. But--I don't know, I do think it matters that they wouldn't all have been fine if El hadn't killed it. Like, it was the seniors we were negotiating with, but ethically speaking, they don't actually have more of a claim on the stuff than the sophomores do."

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"They had possession and the knowhow to maintain the sink. I guess you can say that's not ethics but it matters."

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"Ugh. You're not wrong. I don't suppose there was any chance of not sucking, in this situation." 

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Aadhya looks at El. "You didn't know. Even if you had it might not have changed anything but you didn't."

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"Thank you, that solves all of my problems forever."

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"Unfortunately, this is real life, and making the best possible choices does not prevent those choices from having consequences." 

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"If someone looks jumpy in a bad direction you can fess up? It being an accident isn't great but it's better than it being an opening shot in a war."

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"I don't think I'm immune to being assassinated."

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"...If we tell everyone the truth, you could get assassinated even if nobody did figure out Bangkok."

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"Yep."

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"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." 

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El digs her magic mirror out of where she's got it muffled and pulls it out to see if it has anything to say.

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"Hail, Galadriel! Bringer of death and slayer of Busarakham and Michael Lang!" 

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"Who are they?" El asks blankly, sort of at the mirror but mostly at the room in general.

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"Busarakham sounds like a Thai name." 

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"And Michael Lang sounds Anglo enough, but that doesn't narrow it down much." Sigh.

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"No, I mean--Bangkok." 

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"Yes, presumably that was the first rotisserie unfortunate. But Michael Lang doesn't exactly sound like a famous missing person who disappeared circa the establishment of Tampa or anything."

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"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?"

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"Yeah, I guess it's geopolitically, uh, promising." She taps the mirror like it's a reptile tank at the zoo.

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"Hail Galadriel, first slayer of a maw-mouth in centuries!" 

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"The hell you say, you mad bit of tinfoil -"

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"- unless Dominus Li was having everyone on? There were witnesses, though, his whole circle - I suppose they'd have been in a pickle if they wouldn't have lied for him -"

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"There definitely was a maw-mouth in the Shanghai enclave before he went in, and wasn't one afterwards--I guess if he, like, teleported it away, maybe nobody could tell the difference?"

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"They don't wear nametags, do they." Shudder. "He took days about it! What was he doing taking days about it if he was teleporting it?"

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"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. 

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"You hear that, you stupid Coke can?" El tells the mirror. "It was San Diego's and San Diego is no more."

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The mirror has no response to this.

"Mmmmmmaybe you...count and Li Shanfeng doesn't, because he had a circle backing him up, and you did it basically by yourself? Like, I helped the second time, but not the first time." 

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"Well, I suppose that's not too much more misleading than 'ruin of enclaves' was." El taps the mirror again to see if it will say anything else.

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"Overlook not patience among the virtues, for patience is the fundament of learning."

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El stares at the mirror, tells it, "Thank you," and then turns to Lucia with near-panic in her eyes.

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"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!"

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"We can't leave it there. We'll have to - we'll have to graduate everyone early, that's all, we'll have to get the entire school out at once and blow it to kingdom come on the way out."

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"Yeah. We--I don't think we can do that, without telling everyone, what's going on--how do we keep Patience off while everyone is graduating---"

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"- 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."

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"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." 

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It takes Aadhya a moment, but only one, to realize that the conversation has come around to practicalities she is relevant for. She leaves off staring at the mirror. "It wouldn't hurt. I'll ask my void about it tonight."

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"Awesome. We can start saving carbonized remnants from killboxes. --I think we have reached a point where it's worth paying people off to deal with our classes for us and start doing the killbox more than just in the afternoons." 

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"We should look at what our assignments are in case they're anything relevant, but yeah."

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"Excellent point. --Should we tell the enclavers, before everyone else. So they don't get blindsided, if everyone believes us and people turn on them--"

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"We don't know what Fortitude matches up to, so, no, let's not tell any of the people whose homes we're planning to destroy with everyone inside!"

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"Fair. Ugh." 

She pauses. 

"Man, I have complicated feelings about if something we kill turns out to have been holding up New York. Like, objectively my mom does not deserve to live more than anyone else's mom, but like, at the same time, my mom." 

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Hug.

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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." 

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"- yeah, they could each be holding up a dozen enclaves by now." Shudder.

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“What I would like to do is evacuate everyone else before touching either of them, so the enclave kids can warn everyone else to evacuate.”

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"And I'd like a pony, but do you have a way to pull that off?"

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“Well, not yet, but we might be able to come up with one if the idea’s out in the open.”

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"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."

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“—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…”

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"Your plan is to leave the Scholomance and then come back?"

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“It’s possible! There’s a real entrance. That’s how most of the mals get in.”

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"It's not very appealing but I will give it 'possible'."

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“…I wasn’t thinking of going farther in than the graduation hall? We won’t have spent loads of time there to get sick of it?”

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"I don't know about you but I became sick of it in here immediately, I just usually try not to think about it."

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“Oh. Huh. Because…the air is bad? Because you can’t leave? —I, uh, haven’t got sick of it even now. There are loads of mals to kill and apparently the maw-mouth hindbrain is stronger than the human hindbrain.”

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"You should possibly not be in the habit of referring to yourself that way in casual conversation."

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"For those of us with human hindbrains there's really nothing to recommend the place. I guess the library's fairly good. Other than that though."

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“I mean, there’s a difference between ‘nothing to recommend it’ and ‘going back in would be hard’—I think? I wouldn’t say most of this in public but I wasn’t normal even before I dug up my own deep dark secrets and I like not pretending to be normal.”

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"I mean, the idea that you're a mal in human form is less bad to slip in the wrong company? If you were like a quattria or something that'd be, you know. Different."

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"I don't ever want to come back. I want to supervolcano the place into smithereens so no one ever has to go here again. But I acknowledge that coming back is, in fact, possible."

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“You can supervolcano the scholomance later after we’ve killed all the maw-mouths without incidentally doing some genocide.”

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"That's probably the sensible thing to do, on a scale where any of these ideas qualify as sensible."

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“I’ve been aggressively failing to be sensible my whole life and I’m fine!”

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Snort.

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“Anyway, the status quo is worse.”

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"The Scholomance is safer than the rest of the world. Is the plan that between lots of you personally killing things and you personally putting up Golden Enclaves it will no longer be necessary?"

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"If we can't pull it off Shanghai will build another one. With, you know, another maw-mouth, but."

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"Probably spellbooks get mad if you try to scan them and put them on the internet, or photocopy them or whatever, but we probably should spend some time copying out the spells so they don't get lost again." 

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"I'm still working my way through the book, but, yeah, that's on the to-do list."

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"Yeah, I don't mean now--I'm still not spell-competent at Sanskrit yet at all--"

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"I hope to have a copy of the essentials made before we graduate and then I can give it to whoever seems like they'd be a good custodian."

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"That's a good plan." 

She exhales slowly. 

"This is incredibly stressful but it is not objectively worse than not knowing things and not having any kind of plan." 

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"I fucking guess."

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"I was telling myself as much as anyone. This fucking sucks!"

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

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Liu shakes her head emphatically.

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

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"Unless people start trying to assassinate us."

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

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"That's fair." 

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

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

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

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"Hail Galadriel, bringer of death!" 

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

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

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Um!?

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

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"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." 

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

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

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The mirror is silent. 

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"Fucking grand."

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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."

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

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

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

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"Ice thing?"

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"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."

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

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

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

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Sigh. "Hey El, has the void saddled you with any horrible flensing spells that might actually be useful here." 

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"Sure has. Wouldn't usually be my first go-to for a maw-mouth but under the circumstances. Latin?"

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"Latin I've got, aside from my still-novice Sanskrit I've got--well, English, obviously--and Mandarin and Spanish and Latin."

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El flips through her spell binder for a flaying spell in Latin.

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Lucia peers at it, then pulls out a notebook to copy it down. 

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"So, my priority should still be my spikey pikey and the harp, yes? And a blocked power sharer for Lucia."

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"Yeah, that much hasn't changed. If we're not planning to tell Bangkok what's up immediately then the diamond thing is lower-priority."

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"I can ask for spells for making a diamond, and just not use them right off."

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"Right, and find out if the carbon coming from mal ash would help." 

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"Exactly. Spikey pikey's going to be glorious though."

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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. 

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Maw-mouths aren't terribly common. "If we do see another one," El remarks, "if they get hungry enough or whatever, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell an oozy end of one of the big ones from a small one. Would you?"

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"Yeah. Not, like, on sight, but if I hit it with any kinda spell, yeah." 

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"Mkay. I guess maybe we don't want to completely kill any of them if we can avoid it."

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"Yep," she snorts. "What a position to be in." 

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"The irony is delicious."

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"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." 

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"I have an old alchemy assignment, a paralytic," says Liu. "I've - used a bit on mice, it wears off if you can't do it."

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"Sounds like a plan." 

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Liu goes and gets it. "Do you want to spray it on yourself or should I?"

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"--I'll do it." She's pretty sure she won't accidentally eat Liu but she wants more than pretty sure, for this. 

She spritzes some on her wrist. She does not manage to eat it on the first try. 

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It stiffens her up - that arm is totally immobile and the rest of her is distinctly disinclined to bend, though she's bigger than a mouse and it's not completely overpowering her diagonally opposite toes or anything.

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She doesn't growl, because that would be a motion and she isn't that invested in making it happen, but she thinks growly thoughts, and she forces the finger on the spritzer to twitch again, and--

The container is much lighter. 

"Hm," she manages. 

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"Did it work?" Liu asks.

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"...Ish." 

She jerks her arm a bit to demonstrate how the thing is not making a sloshy noise. 

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"Can you move where you sprayed, or did it only work the second time?"

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"Second thing." She awkwardly flops her arm a little bit. 

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"That's still pretty cool."

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"I ate all the rest of the stuff by accident, so it's a good proof of concept but not very promising for not accidentally eating people. I'll probably brew a huge batch of something cheap and pointless and keep practicing." 

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"I wound up making a prototype bead back when that was still on the table, it was rather off the mark and now it's too leaky to sell and not leaky enough to help you even if you still wanted that, do you want to try eating it next time we're in the shop?"

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"Might as well." 

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Aadhya takes this down in her planner.

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The next time they're in shop, Lucia spends almost forty-five minutes focusing on the bead in her hand, before relaxing. 

"Proof of concept," she says, holding the de-magicked bead. 

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"Whoa. You definitely needed another way to be totally ridiculous, way to go."

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"I see a lot less call for disenchanting things than for my usual wheelhouse but it is nice to expand my repertoire past murder!"

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"Could be handy in case of assassins."

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"I still want to do a lot more practicing before trying this in a live-fire situation involving people but if I get good enough to confidently eat spells out of the air without also eating a person that would be great, yeah."

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"Preach."

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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. 

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Aadhya favors relay races and has the strongest opinion of any of them in this matter.

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Lucia is fine with relay races! 

Relay races are kind of fun. 

Lucia is just passing the baton to El when there are some ominous rumbling noises on the opposite side of the nearest doorway. 

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The fuck is making that noise. (El accepts the baton, but is somewhat distracted from running by trying to see.)

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The doors burst open, and--

It's not like what comes out into the killbox. These are the kinds of ordinary mals that infest the school under ordinary circumstances, not graduation mals like groglers and siren-spiders. 

But there are a whole fucking lot of them. 

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"What the fuck? I took down the - why," mutters El, flinging the baton away from herself and grabbing Lucia's hand so they aren't separated by the stampede in the other direction.

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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." 

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"Or if they were there's something big in the hall with very specific dietary habits that ate everything else! But it was just a bloody tidal wave, that doesn't happen..."

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"It does not! I'm very spooked by things that do not happen, happening." 

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There are a few mals from within the gym that weren't part of the initial wave and are sneaking over to try to scavenge; El goes around stepping on or zapping them since she doesn't have much healing stuff on her person.

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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.  

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"I think I stunned that one but it might not be dead," El says, aiming a gesture at a comatose heap of feathery cow-elephant-seasquirt thing.

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Lucia stabs it a lot, and also harvests some feathers for Aadhya. 

"I'm going to see if I can tell anything about where they all came from." 

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"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.

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Lucia dumps a whole lot of mana on her, incremented in chunks sized for El to be able to handle. 

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And when the sharer's filled up and Liu and Aadhya have been notified of their role in the matter they can go follow the trail of architectural damage and slime and mal ichor.

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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!" 

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"- 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..."

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"May...be? Set up by whom, for what purpose--nobody with half a brain would try to assassinate us like that--"

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"Not the foggiest about motive. It would have made slightly more sense before graduation when there were seniors agitating to throw a few younger kids to the hordes to appease them."

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"...I wonder if there was, like, anyone we just happened to be sort of near, who could have been the target of an assassination." 

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"It'd be a bloody stupid time to assassinate anyone. Everyone shows up on Field Day, it'd make more sense to honeypot their room or a class."

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"I'm not saying it makes sense but explanations that make sense are a bit thin on the ground."

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"Maybe someone... dropped a honeypot? By accident?"

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"I don't...think they go off when you drop them? Maybe someone dropped something that wasn't intended as a honeypot but ended up having a similar effect?"

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"Seems like the best notion we've got so far."

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"And, of course, all evidence was destroyed." Sigh. "I'm going to find Shannon and bribe her to help fix people up some more with some of the mana I at least scrounged up from that little stunt." 

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"I guess I will... go... climb ropes. Anything you fancy out of the automat if you're not back by the time we're collecting brunch?"

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"I'm not picky, get me whatever anyone else wants the least." 

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"See if I don't." Off she goes to climb ropes.

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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. 

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Liu, Aadhya, and El between them have scored a respectable brunch of egg-in-a-hole and baked beans and cran-apple juice. El has gone out of her way to specifically get Lucia a haggis with neeps.

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Well, that'll successfully distract Lucia, at least for a moment. 

"So...I'm not complaining...but, uh, what is this?" she asks, poking at it with mild suspicion. 

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"Sheep organs and oatmeal and onions and suet," chirps El. "And the side dish is turnips. Some poor sod ought to be very grateful you have left them something else to eat, just as you requested."

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"Sheep organs, huh." She starts eating it. "I have never had anything quite like this before," she decides after several bites. "There's something to not having the real version to compare it to." 

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"If I had never had haggis before perhaps this would have motivated me to keep it to myself, but alas."

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"--Oh, haggis, this is haggis? I have heard of haggis. As being...Scottish? I think?"

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"Yep. But it turns out you can buy the ingredients in Wales as well and some people choose to do this. I'm a vegetarian when I'm at home, which you'd think would help, but I didn't know what it was."

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"Compared to the ambient risk of death here I suppose that doesn't really rate, but ugh." 

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"Well, I didn't care for it much so I didn't finish it. Ah, luxury, throwing away food that won't literally poison you." Beans om nom.

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"I suppose. I've always been such an omnivore, it never really came up." 

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"If you're about to tell us that you have tried eating poached maleficaria in a balsamic reduction please save it till we've all had a moment to digest."

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Snort. "No, before I was old enough to grasp that physically ingesting mals was a bad idea Mom was very on the ball in terms of prying things out of my hands before I could put them in my mouth." 

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"Oh thank goodness."

When they have brunched they can return to their enriching phys ed.

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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. 

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"Did we kill a substantial fraction of the mals in the entire residential chunk of the school? I confess I didn't count them."

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"May...be? I mean, that'd definitely be a good thing, but--man, if that was whoever's plan, and they could make it work, why drop it on field day with no warning, why not talk to us about it."

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"Yeah, we could've replaced a killbox with whatever the fuck that was no problem. Whatever the fuck it was."

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"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." 

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"Yeah, seems like a way to die while going 'oh so that's what that was about'. Don't fancy it. Maybe we should ask Aadhya to dig up a diviner."

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"I feel like it can't be that easy but I also feel like not doing that would be unforgiveable negligence." 

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When asked, Aadhya says, "I don't know about the Sinos but there's nobody on the Anglo side at the moment who can do like you have in mind. Magic mirror turn up squat?"

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"Well, I don't know how much to trust it." She uncovers the magic mirror. "Mirror mirror which I hate, please explain our Field Day fate."

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It is quiet for a moment, and then in a soft voice: 

"To offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world." 

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"What in the bloody fuck could it be on about protecting us with that torrent."

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...Lucia chews on her lip. "Not us." 

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"I believe I am a wise-gifted child of the world, but, sure, most everyone else came out of it all right."

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Snort. "We had a rather nasty shock, but we're both alive." 

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"Yes. So the mirror blames the school, and the school did it because......"

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"Because mal attacks have been way down since." 

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"But why Field Day? Why not - assign us a class together and target that?"

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"Prrrrobably we would have both transferred out of any really small class it set up for the purpose?"

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"Would you actually?"

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"Well, not if I knew what it was for, but the school doesn't really use words." 

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"I suppose if you were sitting by yourself you'd get left quite alone and have no fun at all."

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"Exactly! Man, this is--I guess I can't exactly disagree with the school, about whether this was a good idea, but I do not like weird things happening without our input." 

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"It should have a suggestion box. Do you reckon it would notice if we wrote in the margins of essays?"

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"Probably not, but it seems unlikely to hurt anything, either, so why not," she snorts. 

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"Might get us marked down for digression."

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"We can try it once and if it gets us marked down enough to be inconvenient not do it again." 

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Sigh. Nod.