Confused Dani. "Okay."

Ugggghhhhhhhh. But, unfortunately for herself, Luthien is fundamentally incapable of letting awkward silences linger, so she instead veers back to, "What do you think I'm doing, if I'm not eating people?"

"Haven't figured it out yet."

Oh no. "Don't even try," Luthien says, forcefully. 

"...Sure."

Perhaps fortunately for both these two idiots, here is where El shows up again.

"Ready?"

"Have been," she says, then sends an evaluating look Daniella's way. "Do you do better first or middle?" she asks. (No way a girl they don't trust is getting to go last; Luthien wouldn't even be offering middle if she wasn't a very solid front-liner.)

"Either. I can do first if you've got the range."

How dare she keep being a minimally decent person. Very rude of her.

Unfortunately, Luthien is in fact best in front. (Or perhaps in an arrangement where she's darting in front of and then behind someone else's shield line; she invented a spell when she was a kid to bodily fling herself at El at high speeds, and it only took a little tweaking for bodily flinging herself at enemies with knives in her hands. It's mana-intensive if she's going more than a few steps, but it drops in cost if she strings together destructive or other movement-related spells with it, and it's perfect for darting in and out of cover.)

(That is not, in fact, an option here.)

"You take point," she says, grouchily, because she's not anywhere near stupid enough to not take that obvious line.

"Sure. Here we go." And down the stairs, a muttered incantation summoning a little barrier of fire to light the way.

...Useful, that. Both deadly and utility.

Especially useful when something nearly inevitably tries to lurk ominously on the ceiling of the stairwell landing. Probably intending to jump El - that's what most of these things try for - so it'll be a test of whether Luthien or Daniella's murderous reflexes are better. 

Daniella's pretty quick on the draw, with a fire whip shaped out of the little barrier snaking up and whapping up at the ceiling.

She swallows a spell again and redirects her effort to making sure the mal is definitely dead. It is. Most mals do not particularly like fire. So: time to keep moving onwards.

The hallway outside the lab is dark, the doors to assorted classrooms open very, very slightly - enough they won't get the warning of a turning knob, not enough they can actually see inside. And it's quiet, other than the constant background hum of gears. 

Daniella grows the fire barrier until it's more of a tower shield than a buckler, lashing tendrils around the edges ready to snap out.

Nothing else accosts them before reaching the workshop, which is dark and very, very quiet. Furniture looms barely visible in the gloom, the chairs especially - something about the darkness and the creeping unease makes it almost feel like there's too many. (Luthien eyes the room with tremendous suspicion, sniffing the air almost like a blood hound.)

Fuck, but she hates the lab after hours. "Spread that light around a little, huh? Can't see for shit in here."

"Uh, right. Sure." She splits up her fire into six orbs and spreads them out across the lab room.

Time to be systemetic about their sweeps before and while opening anything - and with three people, they can have El on lookout, Luthien poking things with her knives, and Daniella covering everyone with fire as needed. 

The very first thing Luthien pokes is those exceptionally suspicious chairs. She can't quite pinpoint which ones are definitely mimics or definitely not, but... She's got a good sense. 

Turns out the mimics don't appreciate her good sense! Chair with teeth would like to eat her arm! Rawr!

Poke with the knife becomes a stab - and the tiniest sliver of mana channels a spell through it, a particularly nasty disruption spell she built off a spell for tearing apart shields after wondering what happens if she stabs someone with it - 

'Their own mana tears them apart' seems to be the answer, at least if they're a mal.

Her other knife pulls back at the same time, dragging her with it, in a spell that makes her look like a film with over three-fourths of its frames stripped out, movements fast and jittering. She's too fast for most mals, like that, if they can even track her disorienting movement at all. 

Still, this one's agonizing death seems to act as a signal to all the other extra chairs that the jig is up and they should attack!

Daniella drops fireballs at the movement, but metal's harder to burn-

El starts chanting her chain lightning spell, point at each target in turn. (Luthien may want to get Daniella to back up a bit.)

She's used to working with El, so one of the knives she keeps strapped to her back will ground lightning she gets incidentally hit with, but still - she takes out the mimic nearest her and Daniella, throws a fourth knife at the mimic nearest El (the mimic tears into a spiral of shredded wood and the knife comes flying back at her; she catches it almost idly), as she moves out of the blast zone, shouting at Daniella: "Take cover! Away from metal!" She'll tackle the girl if Daniella doesn't move fast enough. 

Daniella's moving, but her lightning-related reflexes are maybe not so finely honed as Luthien's.